Grief Through Motherhood

On today's episode I welcome Jessica Tomich Sorci to the podcast. She's a therapist, perinatal mental health specialist, and creator of the Mom Parts Method. She's spent 15 years working with moms and noticed the same parts showing up, so she began naming them, then created a methodology and a new book.

Her Mom Parts Method is a five-step IFS-based process specifically for mothers. It starts with a meditation to connect with a triggering experience, then moves through naming which parts showed up, speaking truths on their behalf, noticing underlying shame or grief, and identifying what those parts actually need.

She identified 29 mom parts that kept appearing across 15 years of practice--things like anger, resentment, anxiety, destroyer, blame--and named them so moms could recognize themselves without feeling alone in it. Her Mom Parts cards are a physical tool to support the process.

Takeaways

• The parts that make us such attuned mothers are the same parts that make it hard to let go as kids grow
• Grief is a through line in motherhood, from the 12-month clothes replacing the 6-month ones all the way to high school graduation. We don't talk about it enough.
• The good mom/bad mom flip is parts thinking, not Self. It's black and white, and it's exhausting.
• Motherhood is as much your developmental journey as your child's.
• You have every right to grow, struggle, fail, and try again too
• Twenty percent of moms are diagnosed with a perinatal mood or anxiety disorder. Jessica's take: that's a cultural failure rate
• "I've never heard anyone say they're screwed up because their mom took such good care of herself"
• Team Kid and Team What About Mom are both in your system. Both are trying to help.

Catch my extended interview with Jessica over on Substack. And while you're there, be sure to try one of our new Audio Guides meditations.

About Jessica

Jessica Tomich Sorci, LMFT is a Level 3 Certified Internal Family Systems Therapist, Certified Perinatal Mental Health Professional, and creator of the groundbreaking Mothercentered approach. She developed the innovative Mom Parts Method—a revolutionary application of IFS to motherhood that helps moms transform guilt, anxiety, and anger into self-compassion and confidence.

Jessica's book When Good Moms Feel Bad: An Empowering Guide for Transforming Guilt, Anxiety and Anger into Compassion, Confidence and Connectedness presents her paradigm-shifting vision that reframes maternal mental health struggles not as disorders, but as natural responses to the profound transformation of matrescence, in a world that provides insufficient support. Through her training programs, she empowers therapists to understand mothers through a non-pathologizing lens that normalizes the full spectrum of maternal experience while accessing every mom's own Inner Mom wisdom.

Connect with Jessica at momparts.com

She is also a singer-songwriter, and you can listen to her music here.

This episode is sponsored by Souliology.

Souliology offers retreats and immersive learning experiences for IFS professionals, many led by IFS Senior Lead Trainers and eligible for continuing education credits.

Their programs support deep professional and personal growth, offering space to step away from the demands of daily life so you can return to your practice more present and resourced for the clients you serve.

Souliology: Where growth meets depth. Learn more at souliology.com

I started this podcast to help spread IFS out into the world and make the model more accessible to everyone. Seven years later, that's still at the heart of all we do.

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