The Mother Wound

The Mother Wound

Moving from Shame into Connection with Ourselves

If your mother provided support by taking care of your physical needs, but didn't give love, care or security, especially if you were born a girl, you may experience the mother wound. If this is the case, she probably didn't provide empathy by mirroring your emotions and helping you label and manage these emotions. You probably felt unable to express negative emotions in her presence, because she would have been critical.

You may also experience the mother wound if she was too busy with work or her own interests. If she expected your support from a young age with her own emotional or physical needs, she would have been unavailable to offer love and nurture you in the ways you deserved. This would also have been the case if she suffered emotional or physical abuse herself or had an untreated mental health condition, or alcoholism or drug addiction.

So if your mother wasn't there for you on an emotional level, or perhaps you were always trying to be perfect to gain your mother's approval, or felt nervous or frightened around her or reluctant to turn to your mother for comfort, it may be time to explore your mother wound, and to acknowledge that your mother was suffering from the effects of living in a Patriarchal culture. 

If we don't heal from the mother wound, we will most likely have the same behaviours we ourselves experienced as a child with our own children. Hence passing it on. Not only do we experience shame, low self-esteem, lack of emotional awareness, inability to self-soothe, and the feeling that nurturing relationships are not available for you, but so will your children. The Inspired Feminine Leaders program can help you to heal and reconnect with those lost parts of yourself.

In our patriarchal societies where women have often been relegated to second-class citizens, mothers may unconsciously pass on their own mother wound to their daughters. Daughters either accept what their mothers teach them or aim for empowerment. And often they don't find it easy to take this stand, and as a result hold back themselves from self actualisation.

If you have low self-esteem, a lack of emotional awareness, an inability to self-soothe, so instead you turn to food, alcohol or drugs, or the feeling that nurturing relationships are not available to you, because you don't know how to trust, it is probably time to heal your mother wounds.

Healing from the mother wounding leads to a feeling of well-being. We move out of shame and into connection with ourselves.

When we acknowledge our feelings and allow ourselves to grieve over what we didn't receive as a child, we can create the emotional space we need to be able to move towards forgiveness. If you can recognise your mother for who she is or was, and not dwell on who you would have liked her to be, knowing that the way she treated you was only a projection of her own unhealed wounding from the Patriarchy onto you.

You can move towards understanding and acceptance.

We can choose to take the steps to heal our own mother wound, by making sure we are being spacious and loving to ourselves. In so doing, we make sure we don't pass this hurt on to our children and grandchildren.

t can entail acknowledging negative feelings such as anger and resentment, and then forgiving our mother.

We need to be able to express the pain of feeling unloved, ignored or ridiculed, and acknowledge the consequences.

Journaling as well as working with a facilitator who knows how to hold space for you can be helpful for this.

If our mother was unable to build our self image in a positive way, we can let go of our less than ideal self-image and recreate a self-image that is aligned with our true self 

Without feedback from our mother, we didn't get what we needed to develop self-awareness. So we need to learn how to be in touch with our emotions.

This is achieved by taking time to stop and feel what we are feeling, and then name what we are feeling. Only then will we be able to get in touch with our needs and get them met in healthy ways.

We can also learn how to parent ourselves, and give ourselves all the things that we never received as a child. Self-care isn't spoiling ourselves. It's taking care of our needs. What kind of self-care do you need?