Therapist Shares How She Went From 'I Hate Being A Mother' To Grateful For Every Day Of Her Life
The journal exercise that led Nicole Sachs from pain and misery to joy and relief.
PeopleImages by Yuri A via Shutterstock After the birth of her children, Nicole Sachs found herself in desperate daily pain. She finally had the life of her dreams, and some days she could barely even walk. She wondered how it could've gotten so bad and why doctors could no longer treat her degenerative spine pain effectively.
Out of desperation, Nicole turned to mind-body healing, saying she "collapsed through the door" looking for answers. She discovered the work of Dr. John E. Sarno, MD, who has since passed away, and finally found answers. As soon as she started the JournalSpeak technique, sometimes known as "rage on the page", she discovered her darkest, scariest thought: She hated being a mom.
Fortunately, her story doesn't end there.
How she moved from 'I hate being a mom' and chronic pain to gratitude and comfort
During a recent episode of Getting Open with Andrea Miller, Nicole expressed gratitude for how widespread the understanding of how disease, pain, and trauma or other emotional experiences connect in the mind-body system. But, she warns, most people are not offering solutions.
It's great to have an understanding of how our inner wounds are "stored" in the body, as expressed in the pioneering book The Body Remembers by Babette Rothschild (2000) or the popular book The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk (2014). But what next?
Journaling to understand her own mind
When Nicole was told she needed to understand how she felt about her own life, she laughed. Of course she knew what she felt! She was in desperate pain, how would writing down stuff she already knew help?
Her doctor told her she wasn't going to write stuff she knew. As she told Miller, he said, "I want you to rewrite your neural pathways, I want you to understand what's going on in your brain."
Nicole thought this was too simple to be true, but she was desperate to feel better. And so she tried it. She sat down and inventoried her childhood, her daily life, her personality, and how it felt being tired with two babies in cribs and two babies in diapers.
She was just tired. She was just overwhelmed.
Then a voice — her own voice — came into her consciousness, saying, "You're lying!"
"I'm not lying! This is true!" she responded. She did love being a mom, she had dreamed of it even after doctors told her she might not get to carry children.
Pushing through the darkness to find the truth
Nicole tried to fight the instinct to follow what felt like a dark path. This couldn't possibly be how she felt, right? But if something inside of her was causing her such excruciating pain, she needed to try to figure it on.
Then the thought came across, clear as day:
If it is true that there is a mind-body connection that is so strong, if there is a protective mechanism of the nervous system that so strong it literally informs the brain that it's time to send pain signals into your body — that stop you in your tracks — it is not hiding from the fact that you are tired, it is not hiding from the fact that you are overwhelmed...
It had to be something more. So she pushed past those seemingly dark thoughts, writing, "What is it then? What is it!!!" She was enraged.
Finally, she wrote, "I hate being a mother."
"That sentence alone was like bile rising in my throat," she told Miller. "Because first of all I didn't understand it. I had wanted to be a mom since I was ten."
And so she replied to the thought: What is it then?
I started writing, "I am bad at this. I am failing. I don't like it. It's not what I expected. They don't look like me... I'm not getting anything out of this and I'm stuck in it for the rest of my life and I've ruined everything ... and it's the worst feeling I can possibly have."
Nicole Sachs
"I was gutted," she told Miller. "I went at my parents and at myself and I went and I went and I went and finally arrived at this place that was soft, very wrung-out." She started reflecting on what it was like being an only child and feeling like her parents were making a lot of mistakes.
"I made a pact with myself that one day I would grow up and I would have power and I would have agency and I would create my own perfect, beautiful family," she admitted to Miller. "And it would heal the wounds of my childhood. It would rescue me from all of those dark moments."
The problem? It wasn't working.
Facing the truth means it doesn't stay true forever
In her brain and nervous system's estimation, the fact her well-hatched (though subconscious) plan to heal herself wasn't working caused a sense of desperation she couldn't consciously admit. After all, it was all what she wanted, right? It was supposed to work. In response, her body starting throwing pain signals to try to force her to slow down.
I said to myself, "Wow, I didn't die. I said those things and I didn't die."
The good thing is, this journaling process keeps you from getting stuck in the dark moment.
"I don't hate my children," Nicole shared. It was just a process she needed to experience in order to start healing. And it worked.
"After that first JournalSpeak session — and this doesn't happen for everyone— I woke up the next morning and my back pain was 80% gone, never to return."
It wasn't magic, there are still incidents and episodes of pain. It's not a miracle cure, after all. But being able to address how she was over-correcting for the problems of her childhood and stop feeling the pressure to be perfect started the ball rolling on a happier, healthier life with less chronic pain — and a future helping others feel better, too!
Joanna Schroeder is a parenting writer, editor, and media critic with bylines in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Esquire, and more. Her forthcoming book Talk To Your Boys: 16 Crucial Conversations To Have With Your Tween & Teenage Sons will be available September 2025.