Rupture Isn’t Failure: It’s the Path to Healing

**You can also listen to this in audio format only on The Regulated Mother Podcast on Apple or Spotify.

**Below is the podcast turned into a blog article for easy reading.

Rupture Isn’t Failure: It’s the Path to Healing

When a Hard Day Lingers

I woke up this morning with a heavy feeling in my heart and body. It’s a feeling I’ve come to know very well after a tough day with my son that ended in rupture. I yelled at him and then later cried because I felt so depleted—like I could not meet my needs in this relationship with him. I was sleep-deprived again. My stomach hurt from something I ate, and deeper wounds were getting triggered underneath, creating the perfect storm. I lost tolerance for his activation and his intense need for me to be OK, at a time when I just wasn’t feeling OK in either my mind or my body.

Hours after—or even a day or two later—following a big rupture where I had raged, yelled, screamed, said mean things, and even made threats, I always end up with a kind of emotional hangover. A pit of shame, grief, despair, and this feeling of hopelessness that I’m never going to be able to change this pattern. That I’ll never be able to meet my needs while meeting my son’s.

It’s a double hit: first, the hopelessness about how to care for myself and still be able to care for him. And second, the intense shame and grief that I feel for not being able to control the rupture—how it all got so out of hand.

Why This Feels So Big for Parents Like Us

This is one of the hardest challenges I face as a mother of a hypersensitive, high-needs child—especially one with PDA autism. A child who activates so much throughout the day, needs constant attention, and pushes your nervous system to its edge, all while triggering past traumas.

But because I’ve done work around understanding the nervous system and the different parts of me that react, I turned inward. I decided to work with what was getting triggered inside me—the part of me that was holding this intense grief, shame, and failure energy.

As I connected with the Mom part of me who carried all this, I noticed she was angry at the other parts of me that had gotten so extreme and reactive, causing the rupture. I always try to understand what meaning my nervous system is making from these experiences. And by being with the part that held the grief and shame, I was able to have a conversation with her about what she believed.

Her core belief was this: as a mother, I should be able to meet my child’s needs—even when they’re extreme. I should be able to stay calm. I should be the safe place for my child to land. So when a rupture happens, the Mom part of me takes on all the shame and grief. She believes it’s her fault that she couldn’t hold the space or stay steady, and that she let the other parts take over. To her, rupture means failure.

The Shared Shame of Rupture

I see this same belief in so many of the moms I work with. They come to me desperate to feel more regulated, to show up calm and in control, to handle challenges with more ease. They just want to heal what’s getting triggered so they can meet their child’s needs.

There’s a survival energy that says, “please, please, please just fix me.” And I understand it deeply—because I have those parts too. That part of us that wants to fix the reactive behavior that leaves us in a spiral of shame, grief, and despair, and makes us feel like we’re failing as a mother.

These moms (and I include myself here) are filled with truckloads of shame for not being able to hold it together—for reacting, for creating rupture once again. Even when we’ve learned to repair with our child afterward, we still carry the deeper belief that rupture is bad, and that rupture means we’ve failed.

A New Meaning of Rupture

But what if rupture didn’t mean we were failing?

As I worked more with my Mom part, I offered a new perspective: what if rupture was a necessary part of healing? What if it’s actually the ruptures that give us the clearest openings to see what needs our attention? What if it’s all part of the design?

Ruptures expose our wounds—the unmet needs, the expectations from our conditioning, the limiting beliefs we hold about ourselves and our children. Being triggered and entering a rupture might actually be the necessary process that helps us become more awake to where our pain is stored—and what’s ready to be healed.

From a soul level, I truly believe rupture is not a mistake. It creates an energetic opening that brings our protective patterns, wounds, and outdated beliefs to the surface. It gives the nervous system the chance to lift forward what is finally ready to be transformed.

Relationships as Teachers

My Mom part really resonated with this reframe. It felt more compassionate. It felt more aligned with the deeper truth of relationships—that others trigger and test us so we can look inward and heal. In this way, rupture becomes a gift. It becomes the path toward becoming our most authentic, regulated, and grounded self.

Rupture often gets a bad rap, and it’s understandable. From the human lens, it feels like we should never be reacting so strongly, or letting so much messy energy pour out. And yes, ruptures can be damaging. But I invite you to consider the soul lens alongside the human one.

Why We Are Really Here

I believe we came to this earth for the full human experience. Part of that includes learning how we’ve become conditioned to react based on early messages about what makes us safe, loveable, or successful.

We’re not here just to feel good all the time. We’re here to grow. To transform. To shed the programming and discover who we truly are beneath it all. Especially in the face of challenge.

And if your child challenges you to your edge, that child may be your greatest teacher. They’re showing you where you still carry pain—and where you still have healing to do. And it’s only by healing that you uncover the real you—the one who can feel fulfillment and regulation even in hard moments.

Healing the Shame Wound

A big part of my path is to heal the shame wound I took on in this lifetime. And I want to talk more about how that shame and this feeling of failure don’t begin with our children—they often begin in our early life experiences.

For me, the shame wound became embedded intergenerationally. I was born a girl into a Muslim Pakistani family that held the belief that males were superior to females. That females were not as worthy as males. That was wound number one.

I’ve asked my mother before, “Were you upset that I was a girl?” She always said, “No, of course not.” And I believe her. She already had her boy—my brother—so maybe there wasn’t any pressure around my gender. But I still held this deep feeling that something about my being a girl brought a sense of disappointment or burden. That belief took root early.

In my pre- and perinatal trauma training, I learned that if a parent wasn’t expecting you—or didn’t want you when they got pregnant—it could leave a shame imprint in the developing fetus. When I asked my mother about how I was conceived, she told me she was surprised she got pregnant with me so soon after my brother was born—she was still breastfeeding him and didn’t think it was possible.

So, there she was: three months postpartum, still breastfeeding, in a challenging arranged marriage, with in-laws who were treating her poorly. She wasn’t ready for another baby. My felt sense, through my trauma work, was that I wasn’t wanted—and this left a shame imprint from a very early age.

When Early Shame Shapes Your World

Another way I took on shame was through how my mom related differently to my brother than to me. He was the sweet, compliant, easygoing one. I was colicky. More challenging. More emotional. More “too much.” And in our culture, boys were often seen and revered. But for my mom, I think it was more than cultural—he simply didn’t challenge her nervous system as much.

There’s this deeply conditioned belief many of us carry: that compliant children are easier to love. And that belief shows up in how we’re parented, even if it’s subtle. My mother didn’t think she treated us differently. And I believe she did her best. But my nervous system still picked up on a difference—and that’s the point. It’s not always about what actually happened. It’s about how our nervous system perceived and made meaning of those experiences.

When you already carry a shame wound, your whole world starts to orient around the belief that something is wrong with you. Every experience becomes further evidence. And then, as mothers, we carry that old shame right into our parenting.

Shame and Childhood Trauma

There’s another way shame takes hold: through abuse. Especially if it happened at the hands of your caregiver.

When that’s the case, your nervous system can’t risk believing that your caregiver is unsafe—because your survival depends on them. So the only option is to believe the abuse happened because something is wrong with you. You internalize it. You abandon yourself in order to stay attached. That’s how we end up taking on the story: I am wrong. I am bad. I am failing.

And we carry those stories—until something like parenting, with all its pressures and challenges, brings them roaring back to the surface.

A Shift in the Mom Part

Back to my Mom part.

As we stayed with this new perspective together, she began to soften. She started to open up to the idea that rupture doesn’t mean failure. That it could be part of a greater path—a necessary path of learning, growing, evolving, and becoming more regulated and authentic.

And she realized something else too: if rupture is going to be part of the path, then so must self-compassion and self-forgiveness.

Because the grief and shame that follow rupture are very real. And they need healing too. One of the most powerful ways to heal that grief and shame is through the practice of forgiving yourself.

From a Nervous System Lens

From a nervous system perspective, rupture is actually essential. To build greater resilience, we need rupture. It’s through rupture and repair that our nervous system expands its capacity and learns: I can survive this. I can come back.

So this idea that rupture is soul-designed isn’t just philosophical—it’s biological. It’s a nervous system truth.

But for repair to really be effective, it has to include you. You have to repair with yourself, not just your child. And that requires forgiveness. It requires holding the bigger picture and believing that rupture has a purpose.

Even When It Keeps Happening…

Even if rupture keeps happening.

Even if your child doesn’t seem to receive your repair.

Even if you think, “What’s the point?”

There’s still something here for you.

Sometimes, the lesson is deeper self-compassion. Sometimes, it’s recognizing how much your nervous system has held. Sometimes, it’s about forgiving yourself again and again until that forgiveness begins to land.

Because when you can repair—not just perform the words of repair, but feel it, embody it, believe it—your child can feel it too. And that kind of repair? It’s deeply healing.

Four Invitations

So, I want to leave you with four invitations.

1. Rupture doesn’t mean failure. It can be your greatest teacher. A catalyst for deeper awareness, growth, and the return to your truest, most regulated self.
2. Rupture reveals your shame wounds. It’s not about being a bad mom. It’s about showing you where you carry old pain that’s asking to be healed.
3. Self-compassion and forgiveness are part of the path. You are worthy of your own love. Forgiveness doesn’t excuse what happened—but it does free you from carrying the story that you are not enough.
4. Rupture builds resilience. It’s how your nervous system learns to expand and grow stronger. If you’ve had a rupture, know that repair can still grow something beautiful—within you and within your child.

Rupture Doesn’t Define You

Rupture gets a bad rap. But the truth is, if you're raising a child who is highly sensitive, constantly activated, and regularly testing the limits of your nervous system—rupture is going to happen. Not because you're doing it wrong, but because this is the reality of what it means to show up in the fire of this kind of parenting.

So instead of letting rupture define you, I invite you to let it refine you.

You can step into the path of the true, authentic you—the one who is wise and compassionate, the one who knows deep down that you're doing the best you can, and the one who is willing to learn and grow through it all.

You are not failing.

You are becoming.