There is a particular woman who breaks in silence. She is competent, capable, organized, and praised for her strength. She is the one people rely on, the one who holds the household together, the one who seems to navigate motherhood with discipline and grace. She looks steady on the outside. Inside, she feels like a thin wall holding back a flood.
Dr. Amber Curtis knows this woman well because she was her. She shared her story on the podcast with a honesty that catches your breath: the years of striving, the infertility that shook her identity, the prestigious career that arrived the same week she learned she was expecting her first child, and the soft unraveling that began the moment she tried to do all of it without asking for help .
Motherhood changed her. Not because she was unprepared or incapable, but because it touched the oldest wounds she had carried from childhood. She had been taught to outrun her needs. To keep the peace. To perform. To never show weakness. To be the dependable one. Her nervous system learned to survive by controlling everything. Her identity was built on proving her worth.
A baby does not care about your coping strategies. A baby requires the real you. The one with needs. The one with limits. The one who cannot control the outcomes. And that is often where a high-capacity woman begins to break.
Dr. Curtis describes the moment she realized she could not continue: the exhaustion, the insomnia, the over-functioning, the inability to admit she needed help, and the collapse into postpartum depression and suicidal despair. Her body had been screaming for years. She had been trained to ignore it.
Yet God met her there. He revealed the deeper story: her stress responses were not moral failings but survival strategies. Her perfectionism was protection. Her productivity was a shield. Her inability to rest was a sign that her nervous system had never been shown safety. And her faith, though sincere, had been shaped by the belief that she must do everything “right” before she was worthy of God’s love.
Many mothers will recognize themselves in her words. The moments when your child’s behavior triggers something ancient inside you. The sharp guilt after reacting from anger instead of intention. The suspicion that your reactions do not match the moment. The exhaustion that no amount of sleep seems to fix.
These are not personality flaws. They are unhealed stories written into the body.
Dr. Curtis reminds us that healing does not begin with trying harder. It begins with allowing God into the places you keep so fiercely guarded. It begins with acknowledging that the body remembers what the mind tries to forget. It begins with recognizing the invisible trauma that shaped the woman you became.
Identity work, nervous system healing, and spiritual restoration create a new foundation. Not the frantic stability of over-functioning, but the deep steadiness that lets you mother with clarity instead of fear. This is the work that frees you to love without conditions and receive love without earning it.
A healed mother heals a generation and that is the invitation.
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