Mother can be such a beautiful word. For many it conjures up memories of a welcoming shoulder to lean on, a warm hug to fall into and a batch of fresh baked cookies to ease the pain of a bad day. But it’s also a complicated word – a word loaded with difficult memories and yes, sometimes a lot of hurt, abandonment and pain.
Every woman experienced a unique relationship with her mother but not every woman blossomed in that relationship. Many women, despite their mother’s good intentions and well-meaning hearts, endured relationships with their mothers that caused issues that affect them to this day – and this isn’t usually the mother’s fault. The problems we face are bigger than that. I believe being negatively impacted by the mother-daughter relationship is as common as it is because women, as a gender, have endured centuries of abuse, neglect, dismissal and oppression.
The arguments we keep repeating with our spouses, the areas we feel disconnected from our children, the unhealthy patterns we keep repeating, the insecurity that plagues us, the mistrust we have of our own intuition and gut feelings, the areas in our lives where we can’t speak up, the competitive or inauthentic relationships we share with other women, the challenge we have with setting healthy boundaries and the way we feel removed from our passion and purpose can all be traced to the legacy of how women were treated that runs in our family.
If we don’t know what that legacy is, how can we hope to heal it?
I work with women who have experienced complicated relationships with their mothers and the one thing I’ve come to understand is women are a brave and beautiful bunch. We are emotional warriors who, despite the pain and tears, face the scariest and most grueling emotional battles with courage and determination – and we do it for our families, our marriages and because we want to take care of our communities and the world. We heal because we care. We heal ourselves and our own emotional wounds because we want to prevent our children from experiencing the suffering we endured. We talk about our feelings and dig up our past because we want to offer unconditional love to our spouses. We look at our issues and take responsibility for our emotional wounds because we want to heal the planet and make it a more peaceful place. We aren’t perfect but try and we care a lot.
We put other people’s needs ahead of our own. We empathize and carry the emotional burdens so others won’t have to. But the mother wound exists because women have been expected to do this. They have been forced to shoulder more than their share of the emotional labor in the family, in their communities and in the world and it has left them depleted, spent and empty.
And, in their emotionally depleted state, they’ve often been responsible for raising children – who had, of course, no choice but to become emotionally depleted also.
It’s not just that mothers have been raising children from an emotionally depleted state. It’s also that their wisdom has been devalued and mistrusted. For instance, in the culture I was raised, emotions, intuition and creativity are regarded as frivolous, unnecessary and ineffective more often than they are acknowledged as powerful and important. These ideas about emotions, intuition and creativity affected my grandmothers and they affected my mother and they have most certainly also affected me. You can’t take that which is inherent within me, put it down, devalue it, dismiss it and expect these actions not to affect my self-esteem, my choices, my relationships and the way I parent.
The Mother Wound is real and it is most likely affecting your life in one way or another. But healing the Mother Wound doesn’t have to be hard. It can be as beautiful as women coming together and supporting each other in healing circles. Women coming together to mother each other – spiritually and emotionally – heals the Mother Wound for every heart in the room who is witness to the healing. Sisterhood is medicine. And it is such an important medicine for mothers of daughters to take regularly. It will heal the past and usher women into a new relationship with each other and ultimately reunite each woman with her innate wisdom.
And from her center she will navigate her life with her unique internal compass and her life will become her own.
She will no longer apologize for having an opinion. She will no longer feel content with playing small to make someone else feel comfortable. She will no longer swallow her feelings, sweep the issues under the rug, cry herself to sleep without asking for help, expect herself to be a super woman, ignore her dreams, feel ugly in her body, settle for inequality, keep her mouth shut or feel like a bitch, value being nice to the point of sacrificing herself and take care of every single other person while putting herself and her needs high up on some abandoned shelf.
Through the Mother Wound, we learned to abandon our intuition, our passions, our opinions, our needs, our magic, our creativity and our emotions. We sacrificed ourselves. Meeting with other conscious women in an authentic and sacred commitment to unconditional sisterhood, we can find ourselves again. And when we heal, our relationships heal, our children heal, our communities heal and our daughters are freed. Our daughters can lay down the Mother Wound and follow their hearts.
But first it’s up to us. Let’s nourish and free our own hearts and show them how it’s done.
If you’re interested in exploring your own Mother Wound, I host a free of charge online Mother Wound Wisdom Circle most Mondays at 10 am MST. We meet in my private online meeting space and use intuition, sisterhood and simple soulful art activities to mend the Mother Wound and return to our personal power. You can register here or read more about it here.
I believe women of all shapes and sizes are beautiful. I also believe a woman’s relationship with her body is sacred and if she feels like she wants to lose weight that’s her business and no one else’s. As a woman who used to be active and thin until her late twenties and is now considered obese but who still feels beautiful and worthy, I encourage women who feel shame around their body to consider learning to love themselves before they try to lose weight. Losing weight because you hate yourself is believing you need to be different before you are lovable and I’m sorry but there’s enough of that ridiculous attitude out there in the world for us to be flogging ourselves with it too. Losing weight isn’t going to make you love yourself or your body. I didn’t always believe this. In the past, I was deeply convinced that losing weight is exactly what would solve all my problems but it’s just not true. Being happy and loving myself is a job for my heart and mind, not my calorie counter.
Over 16 years ago, while standing in front of my washer and dryer, I had a fall-to-your-knees in desperation kind of moment. I was so tired of hating myself and trying to lose weight and failing. I was so tired of living in a mind that felt like a war zone where all weapons were pointed right at me. I stared up at the ceiling – it sounds cliché but that’s exactly what I did – and I asked God for help. I said, “Please God. Help me to stop feeling this way. Help me get rid of this struggle with weight and my body and help me heal this problem FOREVER.” I didn’t ever want to struggle with this issue again. I was mad and desperate. I felt hopeless and spent.
was the first one in and the last one out. I was so happy in water. I felt alive and free when I was playing in the water. But I hadn’t been swimming in years. My son was one at the time I heard these instructions and my destructive body image issues had prevented me from doing a lot of things with him I would have otherwise enjoyed. The instructions to purchase a swimsuit were perfect because being in water made my heart shine yet I had denied myself that joy because of the shame I felt about my body. The realization I had been denying myself and my son something I loved so much all because of how much I hated myself and my body hit me like a heavy weight to the chest and I walked to my bedroom, plopped myself down on my bed and cried and cried. Then I called my sister in law.
Over time, the commands worked. The shame I felt around my weight and my body eventually disappeared. It still pops up every now and again but never loud enough to disrupt me or make me feel bad about myself. I can be around other people without feeling like a blob. I can have my picture taken and not feel like my presence is ruining an otherwise great shot. I can eat whatever I want in public without feeling judged. I can live my life without a constant barrage of negative thoughts ruining my fun.
When I heard Divine Mother’s voice, I was in my room waking from a nap. I listened to her instructions and proceeded to eat mostly smoothies. On the third day, I was sitting at my computer working on my taxes when Divine Mother’s voice interrupted me again. This time she said something along the lines of, “It’s done. You are well. You will always be sensitive but you will never be sick like you were.” And that was that. I haven’t been sick since. I still don’t know how to process that. I’ve eaten bread and sugar and take out and I’ve only felt mild symptoms. I feel like I understand what she meant when she said I will always be sensitive but I won’t feel as sick as I was. My body still doesn’t like bread or potatoes but the reaction is so very mild – like a hiccup compared to the wrenching pain and debilitating depression and anxiety I experienced for four years.
