Healing and reframing the mother wound

Have you heard of the term “mother wound”? There are many interpretations of it. In basic terms, the mother wound is the phenomenon of growing up with a mother who couldn’t adequately care, protect or/and connect emotionally to their child. Parentification and abuse also fall into this category.

Growing up with an extreme version of the mother wound, I had created many survival strategies to avoid looking at this within myself. This had been the biggest stuck point on my journey.

I had realised, for years, on the rational level, that my mother was extremely traumatised. What I went through wasn’t intentional and she couldn’t help it. But the breakthrough only happened when I realised it on the emotional level.

Experiencing this realisation on the emotional level is painful. We go through the pain of the loss of something we have never had. We feel the emotional pain the ‘child self’ had to numb out to survive. And that’s why the emotional realisation and integration cannot be pushed and naturally come to the surface when you have enough capacity in your system.

Be aware of methods and techniques that push and claim quick fixes.

Pushing the healing of this profound wound causes retraumatization and more splits in the psyche.

Something that was helpful in my own journey was a reframing that came up spontaneously after I hit a ‘healing threshold’.

At some point, I suddenly realised (an emotional realisation) that I needed to stop trying to heal the mother wound. Instead I said to myself:

“I don’t have a mother wound. What I have is the responsibility to fill in the gaps I missed in my own child development. As an adult I can now nurture these developmental gaps myself”.

And with wonderful methods at my disposal, I have achieved many goals that just a couple of years back would have been impossible.

And because I have walked my own talk, it’s now a honour to support my clients in regulating their nervous system and strengthening the relationship with their own healthy adult selves. So that they too can stand firm on their own two feet.

Onwards and upwards.