There Is Nothing Wrong With You: Jessica Sorci on Mom Parts, Ketamine, and Why Good Moms Feel So Bad

Interview by Heather Anderson

Jessica Tomich Sorci is a psychotherapist, author, and the creator of the Mom Parts Method, which brings Internal Family Systems into the very specific terrain of motherhood. Her book When Good Moms Feel Bad is out now. She runs ketamine-assisted intensives and groups for moms, teaches her Mothercentered curriculum to therapists and other practitioners who work with mothers, hosts the Mothercentered podcast, and, as of this year, has an album out. We talked about what a "mom part" actually is, why she named 29 of them, and what happens when a mom stops trying to fix herself and starts getting curious instead.

Your new book is called When Good Moms Feel Bad. That title alone is going to stop a lot of women in their tracks. What does it mean, and what do you want a mom to feel when she finishes it?

It means that pretty much all moms are good moms, and that it's all of our intense efforting to be great moms  that makes us suffer and feel really bad.

And it’s true - we do have to be really good, because for those of us living in America, we are on our own in a lot of ways. Our culture is not supportive of motherhood. So we're doing an enormous amount of work and holding multiple nervous systems inside our own, depending on how many kids we have. To do that well, meaning in a way that matches our own values and integrity, we're going to be burdened and depleted. We're going to be triggered and activated. We're going to want to be more than we're able to be, and we're going to feel like we're failing in one way or another.

My hope with this book is to open up some new ways for moms to appreciate themselves and to understand their "bad" feelings not as evidence of their own badness or failure, but as a reflection of inadequate support and really high hopes. Those hopes are often fed by our own unmet childhood needs. We came into motherhood wanting certain things fulfilled or healed and didn't realize motherhood isn't designed for that. Kids aren't here to meet our needs. There's some grief in that, and moms don't really want to feel grief. But if we can let ourselves grieve, and help each other grieve, we can let go of some of the guilt and some of the perfectionism and settle into what's actually here in a way that's a lot more humane – healthier for us, and probably for our kids too.

So the bad news is we're a bit on our own. The good news is we can do a lot with what we've got inside. We can mother ourselves in ways we didn't know we could, and we can take a lot of the pathology out of the "bad mom" experience once we understand where it comes from and the good intentions that are driving the whole machine.

“There is nothing wrong with you, and all the parts of you, even the ones that scare you or feel unlikable, are here trying to help you.”
— Jessica Sorci

You're a therapist, an author, and the creator of the Mom Parts Method. Let's start with the basics. What is a mom part, and why did moms need their own named set of them?

If you know anything about Internal Family Systems, you know all people have lots of parts. There's a part of me that's excited to do this interview, another part that's tired, another that's maybe a little anxious. We have all these different facets, and depending on what the moment requires, different parts come forward.

In motherhood, the parts that come forward are often very managerial. They show up to get the job done. And then there are the parts that show up when we've been managing so much that we're completely spent and depleted, or resentful, or we haven't gotten any care for ourselves in so long. Those parts show up to reclaim some soothing or comfort, and they're not as well liked as the managerial ones.

I took the liberty of naming 29 mom parts, because I kept seeing the same ones over and over. Angry parts, anxious parts, depressed parts, mama bear parts, responsible parts. Moms were, in a lot of ways, predictable. And I started this work with moms of very young babies, where a session is a harried 50 minutes peppered with breastfeeding and interruptions and getting there late or leaving early. We just didn't have the kind of time you expect to have with clients when you come out of therapy school. So pre-naming these common parts gave moms a menu. It gave them permission and a prompt, and it helped cut to the chase.

The whole point of naming a part, though, is what comes next. Once you notice and name it, you get to understand what it's there for and how it's trying to help you, and you get to build a relationship with it. That's the most important thing IFS brings into the world: we can unblend from our parts, separate from them a little, and relate to them. Most people don't know they can build a relationship with the aspects of themselves that are troubled or causing trouble. But we can, and we can do it in a respectful, even loving, or at the very least, curious way. You can create a much friendlier culture inside. Mom Parts gives moms direct access to their inner world, and some real dominion alongside the aspects of themselves that have been problematic. It's a super empowering experience.

For a mom who has never heard of Internal Family Systems, what is it, and what does it change about how we understand our own reactions?

IFS introduces the idea that we are all multiple minds. We're not one unitary consciousness, one Jessica or one Heather. We have many facets, and that's actually adaptive and natural. It's not pathology. It's not the same as having multiple personalities or a disorder.

When we get interested in these different aspects of ourselves from the perspective that it's healthy and natural, we can get really curious about the ways we react in certain moments, and why we protect and defend the way humans are so inclined to. And when we bring that curiosity to our parts and start getting to know them, we have this experience of inquiring and noticing from a separate location. That separate location is what IFS calls Self, and it's who you are in your essence - the energy you rest in when you aren’t feeling threatened. Then you've got these parts that get angry or scared, that yell or shut down, all in a protective, adaptive way that's trying to help you survive and thrive. While they're doing all that, you still have this core Self that's separate, sustaining, and abiding. IFS describes it as our true nature that cannot be harmed. We experience Self as calmness, curiosity, courage, connection, creativity, compassion, confidence, and clarity. Feeling any of those eight C words is a sign you're inhabiting your capital S Self.

You're never fully in or out of Self. But when you've got a foot in there, or even a toe, you can show up in the world in a really present way that doesn't cause harm and is true to who you are. When we're threatened or don't feel safe, we slip right into the parts of us that are there to guard whatever we perceive as vulnerable. IFS calls our vulnerable, wounded parts exiles and the parts that guard them, protectors. Seeing your system as parts plus Self gives you a whole new set of tools. You can start asking: Who's showing up right now? Who just said that? What part of me was that, and did it have a big agenda? Or was that coming from calmness and confidence?

You believe moms are innately whole and unbroken beneath their suffering parts. That's a very different message than most of what mothers hear. What does it look like when a mom starts to experience herself that way?

My goal, whether I'm working with one mom or writing for many, is to support mothers in learning how to trust themselves. When we get to know our parts as well as we know our kids, we learn that every part has good intentions and is trying to help in some kind of way. 

Our lack of connection to our Self, as well as the intense reactivity of our parts  makes us feel untrustworthy, and even crazy sometimes.  When we start befriending our angry, wounded and controlling parts, they start to make sense to us, and we can actually become friends with them and start supporting them in new ways. And this sense of knowing and trusting how our systems work, and why they work the way they do is something we start to own. We kind of get the owner's manual for our own being.

Motherhood invites so much reactivity and such huge upswells of anxiety and grief and shame. If we can move closer to all of that with some support and courage, and start to get to know it and make friends with it, we really own ourselves. We become the ones who define our own mental health and our own integrity. That's the basis of self-trust, and that's what I want moms to walk away with.

Who tends to find their way to you for one-on-one work, and what are they usually showing up with when they do?

These days, the moms who come to me have usually tried a lot of other things. They've been in therapy, they've read the books, they've given it time, and they're still chewing on something. A traumatic birth. Rage that keeps erupting out of them and they can't get on top of. The feeling that they're repeating a pattern they got from their own mom or their own childhood, and here it is again with their kids, when they wanted more than anything for that not to happen. It's usually a big ticket item they want deeper support with.

What I'm offering now is intensives for moms—whether you're a new mom, a stepmom, a grandmother, or navigating an empty nest. This is concentrated, meaningful work using ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, where we really dig into those parts, unblend from them, and begin the process of befriending them. What are they holding? What might they want to let go of? How can we help this system understand itself and become more self-supporting? Moms get so full of inner criticism, so convinced they're not good enough, and that voice inside sets up an internal conflict that eats a ton of energy and creates a ton of friction. We can cut way down on that just by introducing a friendly, curious tone toward the parts.

I like this format because I want to do deep work with moms without asking them to sign up for years of therapy. You might do six or ten sessions, and they're really meaningful and concentrated.

You're also a ketamine-assisted psychotherapist, which is still new and unfamiliar for a lot of people. What does ketamine-assisted therapy actually involve, and what makes it so useful for the things moms carry?

This is what I'm most excited about right now.

Ketamine has been shown to be powerfully effective for depression and anxiety, offering relief that can feel out of reach with other approaches. It's legal for licensed providers to use in this way, and has a strong safety profile when administered with proper screening and support. Those factors alone make it appealing and accessible to moms.It's also inexpensive, and the investment of time and energy is very reasonable compared to other psychedelic medicines. It's short acting. You're through the whole experience in a matter of hours, and at a low dose it might be one to two hours before you're back to feeling like yourself. You don't have to go away on a four day retreat to have what can be a life changing experience with a non-ordinary state. It can happen quickly, even online, using teletherapy. So a mom can get an incredible journey, with all kinds of new clarity and courage emerging, within a couple of hours, and it doesn't take days out of her busy life the way an MDMA or psilocybin journey would.

Here's what the medicine actually does: helps our protective parts relax. They take a deep breath and shift back, especially because we've prepped the system in advance through working with protective parts that are scared or maybe don’t want to give up control. And when the protectors relax, we get to connect with that capital S Self. I call it your Inner Mom. People feel it in all different ways, but it's a sense of internal support, of being connected and at ease, of confidence and courage and calm and clarity and compassion. All the C words. Ketamine-assisted therapy can offer a quick, efficient way to plug a mom back into her own internal resources. There's all this juicy energy that exists around us, and when we're busy and burdened we can't find it. Ketamine offers a kind of shortcut to helping the protectors relax so you can plug back in and emerge with a full tank.

Then the Mom Parts work comes in. We take that good energy and bring it directly to the parts of you that have been tired or hurting, and we mother them. That TLC reaches deep and  beyond the journey. Moms move forward with new perspectives, new appreciation for themselves, and a more abiding sense of confidence and self-compassion.

I think of it as a therapy enhancer, and I work with it gently. It's not the big ego-dissolution people talk about with psychedelics. Maybe it can be at higher doses, but the way I work with moms tends to be lower dose, as a tool for going deeper and more directly into the healing work they're already doing.

Can you walk us through what a session actually looks like?

First you get a prescription from a prescriber, an MD, a physician's assistant, or a nurse practitioner. There's an online provider  called Journey Clinical that can help with prescriptions simply, inexpensively, and legally. Once you have your medicine, we set up a preparation session or three  so we're really clear about the territory you want to spend time in, the question you're holding, or the injury you're tending.

Then we do the journey. Ketamine can be administered in several ways—including intramuscular injection, intranasal spray, and oral lozenges—but Journey Clinical prescribes RDTs (rapid dissolve tablets), which dissolve under the tongue or against the cheek. You swish the tablet in your mouth for about twelve minutes, spit it out, close your eyes, and listen to music I provide. You go inside and follow the journey the medicine provides, and it usually lasts somewhere in the realm of 30 to 60 minutes. As you come out, or even while you're still in it, you start processing and talking about what you saw and how it connects to the intentions you set going in.

The integration piece happens at the end of that session and in another session or two or three afterward, depending on how much you want to integrate. That's where we make sense of the deeper, clearer truth the medicine helped you connect with. It's a little like pulling the veil back and having access to more of who you really are. It takes away the need for quite as much therapy. It's just efficient, and now that I've been working in this medium, I really appreciate the way it helps people get where they’ve been needing to go.

Do you only do this one-on-one, or do you work with groups too?

I definitely do groups, online and in person. I love working with groups of women. Women who are on healing journeys are very supportive of each other, and they create an incredible chemistry that I think exponentiates the healing power of the medicine. Moms see each other getting to have this experience. They watch the confidence and compassion grow in each other, and there's something collectively so impactful about moms helping each other heal that way. It's deeply moving.

I run Mom Parts KAP Labs with a dear colleague,  using the five step Mom Parts Method my book is based on, along with my Mom Parts cards. We guide everyone into a meditation, and prompt them to start pulling cards to reflect what they’re experiencing inside, until everyone has a map of their parts laid out in front of them.Then we work through a structure: identifying the parts, exploring what truths those parts need to have witnessed, moving into the pain they're trying to protect against, which I think of as grief or shame, and then, maybe most important of all, what remedies those parts are needing. The remedies are represented by nine cards that correspond to the IFS qualities of Self energy: compassion, calm, clarity, creativity, connectedness, courage, curiosity. Moms leave with that whole map, and they can use it going forward as a recipe for how to tend to and understand these parts of themselves that they hopefully feel a lot more connected to and compassionate toward.

I'll say this too, because if I'm going to talk about ketamine this much it needs to be said. The game changing piece - the thing that keeps it from being a drug and turns it into medicine, is doing it with someone who is holding you in a skilled and present way, with a lot of intentionality and even ritual behind it, so the sacredness and the meaning of that kind of deep dive into yourself is protected.

And if there's a therapist, coach, doula, or healer reading this who wants to bring Mom Parts into her own work with mothers, you teach and certify practitioners in your Mothercentered curriculum. What does that look like, and what can someone do afterward that she couldn't before?

The Mothercentered curriculum is designed for any practitioner who is curious about IFS, or is a mother, or works with mothers. Usually people come because of some combination of those things, and the combination of being a mom, working with moms, and then learning about Mom Parts is really magical.

The foundational curriculum is 16 hours, three or four days together, and there's a ton of experiential work in it. By the time we're done, the people who participated have really gotten to know their own systems. They're usually super curious for more. They've had this brand new feeling of - wow -  my inner critic might actually be an ally, and now I want to get to know it better instead of shutting it up. And they come away with a deep appreciation for what motherhood does to a woman's body, her psychology, and her spirit. It's a healing experience for people to see themselves through such a nonpathologizing lens. Honestly, I think personal healing is the most potent factor, ahead of the know-how.

As we become more educated and more healed, we feel a lot more confidence working with mothers. Whether they're physical therapists, acupuncturists, doulas, or therapists, all practitioners benefit from exploring motherhood in this way.  They leave emboldened and impassioned to go offer this liberating lens: there is nothing inherently wrong with the moms who are showing up. Their pain makes sense—even when a diagnosis is part of the picture, it doesn't mean something is broken. They're experiencing a confluence of lack of support and their own childhood trauma being stirred up by the intensity of caring for dependent, often nonverbal, dysregulated creatures all day. Helping practitioners work with that in terms of parts, in a way that's curious and hopeful and even playful, gives them a lot of new energy and confidence.

If someone moves through the whole program and gets certified, she can offer Mom Parts Sessions and run Mom Parts Salons using the five step method. Certified folks are bringing all kinds of novel ways of using the card into their work. We're building a program for people struggling with fertility. We're building one for LGBTQ+ parents, with language that's right and embracing for that community. And we’ve got Dad Parts card coming soon! I ask certified practitioners to bring their specialties and their areas of wisdom that I don't have, and take this tool to a larger group of people in whatever way actually meets the need.

For a mom who isn't ready for one-on-one work but wants to go deeper, you have the Mom Parts Community and the Mothercentered podcast. What are those spaces like?

The Mom Parts Community is a storehouse. I've been collecting a lot of conversations with different practitioners specific to Mom Parts , plus exercises, ideas, and options to connect. There are live events for members and a place to talk to other moms and start to understand your particular configuration of Mom Parts as not weird, but actually shared by a lot of people.

The Mothercentered podcast most often explores one specific Mom Part per episode. So any mom who relates to the 29 Mom Parts can listen and learn more about the part of her choosing, and hear a conversation with a practitioner who is usually also a mom, so you get personal stories and clinical knowledge together.

You have another book taking shape. What's pulling at you right now, and how does it connect back to the women you're working with?

I'm still formulating it, but here's what's emerging: I think perimenopausal women are the next cohort I'll be writing for and creating curriculum for. What I'm learning in my own perimenopause is that there's a way to take in the wisdom of the women who've come before us, in our families, in the world around us, even archetypally, and get the support we need to shed a lot of the BS we've had to hold earlier in life around being pleasing, being accommodating, being caregivers. And in that shedding process, I'm learning how incredibly helpful psychedelics can be.

The theme I landed on this morning, as I was writing a little, was trusting more and trying less. I don't know yet if that's the title or a chapter. But that's what it's about.

Before all of this, you were a singer-songwriter, and you have an album out right now. So many moms quietly mourn the creative parts of themselves they've set aside. What has it been like to keep that part of you alive while running a practice, writing books, and doing all the things?

Honestly, it was stagnant and on the back burner for many, many years. But I revitalized it at the beginning of 2026 and put out the album. It's called Sticks and Stones, the band is Red Letter, and I'm super proud of it. Every one of those songs is very much about my own journey from hurt to healed. It's a documentary of my own life. It's been fantastic to get that music out into the world.

If a mom is reading this and something is clicking, whether she's exhausted, overwhelmed, feeling like she's failing, or just quietly wondering if there's a better way to understand herself, what's the best first step?

Take some encouragement from the work I've done. There is nothing wrong with you, and all the parts of you, even the ones that scare you or feel unlikable, are here trying to help you. My work and my life are an invitation to get curious about those parts. Grab my hand, move closer, get to know them with an open heart or an open mind, and befriend yourself. You'll start to discover that you can trust yourself, and that you're not crazy.

Practically speaking, a fun place to start is the quiz on my website. It's ten questions and it shows you your most prominent Mom Parts. And you can always reach out to me through the site to chat and tell me what you're looking for.

Connect with Jessica Tomich Sorci on Facebook or Instagram.

You can also find her on The M List, The Mamahood's searchable database of mom-recommended resources, or connect and collaborate with Jessica inside The Club membership for women Founders.

Heather Anderson