Some family stories are told so often they become part of the family.
Others survive because nobody talks about them at all.
For more than 20 years, Detroit-area mental health therapist Nneka J. Owens says she has listened to women talk about their relationships: marriages, families, communication, disappointment and healing.
But one relationship kept showing up.
Their mothers.
Women from different backgrounds would describe painful, complicated relationships with their mothers, sometimes carrying wounds they had never discussed openly.
Owens began to notice something else.
Sometimes the story didn’t begin with the daughter.
“One of the biggest challenges I see is generational patterns,” Owens says. “In some families, difficult mother-daughter relationships have been passed down for generations and have almost become normalized.”
A mother may be carrying unresolved hurt from her own life. She may have complicated feelings about motherhood or the circumstances under which she became a mother. Those experiences don’t disappear simply because she has a daughter of her own.
“When those wounds go unaddressed,” Owens says, “they can unintentionally affect the next generation.”
That realization is behind Owens’ first Mother-Daughter Walk, scheduled for September 20 at Ford Field Park in Dearborn.
But the walk isn’t simply a celebration of mothers and daughters.
Owens wants to make room for the relationships that aren’t easy to celebrate, too.
When an apology matters
There is a version of family healing that sounds simple.
Someone gets hurt. People talk. An apology happens. The relationship is repaired.
Real families aren’t always that clean.
Owens says one of the first things many daughters want isn’t an elaborate explanation for what happened.
They want acknowledgment.
“Many daughters simply want their mothers to recognize the pain they caused, take responsibility without making excuses, offer a sincere apology, and make an effort to do better,” she says.
But Owens is equally clear about what healing doesn’t have to mean.
It doesn’t always require putting a broken relationship back together.
“Sometimes restoration isn’t possible or even appropriate,” she says.
A mother may have died before those conversations could happen. In other cases, restoring contact may not be healthy.
The work then changes.
The daughter still has to decide what she will do with what happened to her.
“The focus then becomes helping the daughter process the pain, find peace, and move forward without carrying those wounds into future relationships,” Owens says.
That last part may be the most important.
Because unresolved pain rarely agrees to stay in one relationship.
It can influence how a daughter sees herself, how she parents, how she responds to conflict and what she eventually teaches another generation about love.
Mothers aren’t the only women who mother
Owens also wants the walk to expand what people imagine when they hear the word mother.
“You don’t have to be a biological mother to make a difference in a girl’s life,” she says.
Grandmothers. Aunts. Cousins. Friends. Women who stepped into spaces someone else couldn’t fill.
They all count.
Owens believes those relationships matter because the women who mother girls often help establish some of their earliest ideas about relationships, security and self-worth.
“How we show up matters,” she says.
Her hope is that women become more intentional about raising girls who are confident and secure and who grow into women who understand their value.
That means the September gathering isn’t reserved for mother-daughter relationships that are already healthy.
There is room for celebration.
There is also room for grief, difficult conversations and beginning again.
From a walk to something larger
Owens has spent much of her career creating spaces for conversations people don’t always know how to have.
In 2009, she created Truth Parties for Relationships, bringing single men and women together for direct conversations about relationships. Her work has included Black Marriage Day events, relationship education and community programming. She also hosts the Behind the 90s Podcast with Nneka and founded the Behind the 90 Foundation, which focuses on relationships and emotional wellness.
More recently, her concern about generational trauma led her to begin developing a documentary about problematic mother-daughter relationships within the African American community.
The walk is another piece of that work.
Owens hopes it eventually leads to workshops, retreats, conversations, bonding experiences and an annual gathering.
But underneath all of that is a fairly simple proposition.
Families cannot change patterns they refuse to name.
“When we speak up about difficult issues, we raise awareness and give people permission to stop suffering in silence,” Owens says.
And perhaps that is where generational healing actually starts.
Not with pretending the past didn’t happen.
Not necessarily with putting every relationship back together.
But with deciding that whatever was handed to you doesn’t automatically have to be handed to the person coming next.
Mother-Daughter Walk
The Behind the 90 Foundation‘s first Mother-Daughter Walk takes place Sunday, September 20, 2026, at Ford Field Park, 22051 Cherry Hill Street in Dearborn, Michigan. Registration begins at 1 p.m.
The event is open to mothers, daughters and mother figures of all ages and will include food, music, games and resources.
Filed under