Becky Selbie is a London-based psychotherapist who specialises in motherhood and maternal mental health — and she has a gift for taking the frameworks she uses in her therapy room and translating them into language that actually lands in everyday life.

In this conversation, Ashley and Becky cover a lot of ground: matrescence and why the word matters so much, the rule book that high-achieving women carry into motherhood that starts working against them the moment they get there, the mums who look like they’re coping but feel like they’re failing, the difference between motherhood and mothering, and why the inner critic telling you you’re not good enough isn’t your voice — it’s the noise of a culture that has never held mothers in the regard they deserve.

It’s one of those conversations that leaves you seeing yourself differently.

In This Episode

• How Becky came to specialise in maternal mental health — giving birth and thinking “how has nobody prepared me for this?”
• Matrescence — why the word matters, where it came from, and why it took 50 years to reach mainstream language
• The moment Becky heard it for the first time and ran downstairs to tell her husband
• Sharing the concept with her mother — who had her first child in the 1960s and was prescribed tranquilizers for what was actually matrescence
• Why high-achieving women struggle in motherhood more than others — and the rule book that explains why
• Mums who look like they’re coping but feel like they’re failing — and what the swan metaphor gets exactly right
• The “tab open” metaphor — why you never feel fully disconnected from your children even when you’re away from them
• Not loving every chapter — and why that has nothing to do with how much you love your kids
• The problem with parenting content on social media — theory without context, and who pays the price
• Why Becky’s clinical supervisor said “well, she will” when a client was terrified of messing up her kids — and why that was the most freeing thing she’d ever heard
• Motherhood vs. mothering — the doing versus the being, and why we’re graded on the wrong one
• The inner critic is the patriarchy — and why turning down its volume is the whole point
• What fills Becky’s bucket: creativity, building community, and the retreat she’s planning for mums

Quotes From This Episode

“Not loving motherhood doesn’t mean that you don’t love mothering. Just because you don’t enjoy bits of motherhood, there is no connection to how you feel about your kids.”

— Becky Selbie

“The inner critic is wrong. The inner critic is the patriarchy — it’s society, it’s all those messages about what motherhood should look like. And it’s nonsense.”

— Becky Selbie

“Motherhood is the doing. Mothering is the being — the relationship, the love, the knowing them inside out. But we’re graded on the doing.”

— Becky Selbie

“Even when you’re away, there’s a tab open all the time in your head. It’s just that as they get older, the tab gets smaller.”

— Becky Selbie

“Don’t compare the back end of your business to the front end of somebody else’s.”

— Ashley Blackington

Connect with Becky:

• Instagram: @_motherway_
• Website: motherway.co.uk

Connect with Ashley:

Website: https://www.ashleyblackington.com

Podcast website: https://www.andbothpodcast.com/

Dovetail® App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dovetail-app/id6744341822

Instagram: @mydovetail.app

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleyblackington/