The Mother Wound and How It Can Affect Your Life

I wanted to unpack a real life example today, which I hope that you’ll find helpful.

Here’s the background.

Let’s say that mum feels rejected and unsupported in her family life. There’s a lot of pressure on her to birth boys as expected in her culture, but instead she has two daughters. One of the daughters feels a strong call to support her mum throughout her life. But of course, she can’t help in the ways that the mother needs, and so the child ends up blaming herself and feeling guilt, shame, sense of failure and inability to support others because she couldn’t help her mum/ parents/ family.

What’s more, a divorce was mentioned even before this child’s conception. The parents stayed together, but the tension was in the air. The child becomes vigilant in order to protect her parents from rejection, disappointment, fear, sadness and embarrassment. She stops herself from being carefree and their sadness is overpowering. The adult-self recognises that it was not her job to fix this situation but the child within didn’t know that and so she can’t shake off the feelings.

Does this sound familiar to you?

Let’s explore this together. I can tease out many themes from this scenario, but I’ll focus on three today.

First is the theme of rejection.

In my experience, the rejection that mother felt in her marriage was probably much older than that. It is possible that her parents were disappointed to have a girl and there may have been other instances of not feeling accepted or supported in her family of origin. Conversations about divorce were likely to be the side-effect of the feeling of rejection and abandonment that was already in place.

Because the mother didn’t have an opportunity to heal this wound, she passed it on to the next generation of girls, who feel like they have let their mother down by being born the ‘wrong’ gender. At some deeply unconscious level, these girls can’t fully accept themselves, so chances are that the feeling of rejection plays out in their family lives too.

Rejection can feel so confusing. If the child’s experience is that no matter what she does it’s never enough to make the mother happy, it must mean that the child herself is not enough. Otherwise she’d be loveable as she is without efforting to gain love and validation.

Second is the theme of empathy and boundaries.

Being empathic is a gift, but if there are no boundaries in place, it can turn into a heavy burden. Until the age of 2, a child does not feel separate from her mother. She doesn’t know where she ends and the mother begins. As a result, everything that the mother feels, the child feels too. If their energies get entangled at that early stage and the child is constantly worried about the parent’s happiness, she practically absorbs the mother’s negative energies and has no means of processing them. As a result, that energy can get stuck in the child’s body, weighing her down. She then constantly palpates energy of other people to make sure that they are OK. This constant energy reading can consume a lot of energy, as well as create unhealthy patterns, such as merging with other people energetically and not being able to maintain clear boundaries.

Third point is about safety.

If the question of divorce is in the air, even if you don’t follow through with that decision, it can create a lot of unsafety for the child. The child quickly clocks that if the parents are OK, then she’s OK, because her mum and dad can look after her. If one or both parents don’t feel good in their family life, even if they mask their feelings, the child can never fully relax and let her guard down. She lives in a constant fear of abandonment. As a result, she can never fully let her guard down and can become manipulative in trying to save her parents’ marriage by avoiding sharp corners and any conflict. Again, that takes up a lot of energy and can leave you feeling exhausted. That low (and sometimes not so low) level of anxiety can be damaging to the nervous system, because it is constantly on.

The good news is that none of these patterns are set in stone, if you’re willing to heal them. You can release fear of rejection, set clear energetic boundaries after you cleanse other people’s energies from your body and re-wire your nervous system.

And that’s exactly what I offer in my 12-week programme, where you’ll heal your anxiety, fear of rejection, and sense of unsafety (and so much more) not only at a personal level, but also at an ancestral level (that includes your parents, as well as your children). The course begins in September, but if you join the super-early bird offer, you’ll get three additional live courses in June-August and a library of healing resources that will change your life once and for all.

All details are here.

Places are limited so apply now to make most of the support in 2022.