ABOUT THE EPISODE:
Maya Kruger grew up knowing, in a way children simply know things, that mothers die. Her own mother had lost her mother suddenly at 26, and the shadow of that loss shaped everything, including the fierce, almost desperate closeness Maya and her mother shared. She was so convinced that by leaving nothing unsaid, she could somehow protect what they had. Then, the evening after a morning hike together, her mother was killed in a car accident. Maya was 18, not yet fully formed, and suddenly on her own in a way she had spent her whole childhood bracing for and still could not have prepared for.
What followed was not a clean grief. It was the kind that gets woven into everything, into the acting conservatory she attended in Tel Aviv, into the plays she wrote for the national theater, into a one-woman show called Hand Me Downs where she played her grandmother, her mother, and herself all at once. She got into Juilliard and could not go. She got into drama programs in the States and found herself, over and over, cast as other people's mothers, which she describes as both a wound and a doorway. It was not until she was sitting alone for three days on an Outward Bound solo in the Utah desert, nine crackers a day and a whistle around her neck, that something cracked open.
She is now a psychotherapist, trauma specialist, and founder of Overture Therapy in New York, where she works with anxious moms navigating the ways that a child's crisis can bring every old wound roaring back to the surface.
This conversation goes somewhere I was not entirely prepared for. Maya reframes anxiety in a way that stopped me cold, and she has a way of talking about the guilt and shame that lives in a mother's body when her child is struggling that made me feel genuinely seen. She says something about what anxiety is actually asking for that I keep returning to.
If you have ever felt like your child's struggle has cracked open something in you that you did not know was still there, this one is for you.
You'll learn:
- Why Maya grew up believing mothers disappear, and what she tried to do about it
- What maladaptive behavior actually is, and why context changes everything
- The reframe she offers for anxiety that makes it something other than the enemy
- What she means by parking next to yourself, and why it is so hard to do
- The message an anxious mom is actually passing to her kids, and how to change it
EPISODE RESOURCES:
- Free, 15-minute consultation with Overture Therapy
- Overture Therapy website
- Hear Brenda Zane on Maya’s podcast, “How Did You Get Here?” episode 22
This podcast is part of a nonprofit called Hopestream Community
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