We cannot Heal our children

A client once looked at me with that particular kind of desperation only a mother knows.

She said,

“Sneha, I want to heal my children. I want to erase certain memories from their mind.”

And I felt something inside me drop,

because I knew that place.

I had lived in that same plea.

I remember nights when I wished my children had seen less,

felt less,

absorbed less of the woman I used to be—

the one who stayed too long,

explained too much,

broke quietly in corners they still noticed.

So when she said those words,

I knew exactly what she was asking for:

a chance to rewrite their childhood,

to remove the parts where she wasn’t who she wanted to be.

But no mother gets that power.

This is the truth nobody wants to say out loud:

We cannot heal our children.

We can only stop wounding them.

And sometimes that is the harder sentence.

We forget that our children have their own nervous system,

their own memories,

their own invisible bruises that do not belong to us.

We forget they’re shaped by two people,

and healing ourselves does not erase the other half of their story.

My client cried when I told her this.

Not because I denied her hope,

but because I pulled her out of a fantasy she had been drowning in.

I told her,

“You cannot heal them.

But you can heal yourself so they don’t have to heal from you later.”

And something in her broke—

and then softened—

the way truth sometimes does.

This is the part people don’t like hearing:

Our healing doesn’t undo their past.

It only shapes their future.

And that has to be enough.

If this stings,

if you’ve wished the same impossible wish for your children—

I know how to sit with you in that place

without offering false hope

or pretending we can turn back time.