The Unfuckwithable Woman

Episode 2: Yearning for the Mother

• Briony Montgomery • Season 2 • Episode 2

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In this soul-stirring episode, Briony Montgomery guides us through the ache of longing—for belonging, safety, and the elusive love of a mother rarely seen and deeply missed. Drawing from her own journey of loss, ancestral wounding, and the search for home within, Briony unpacks:

  • The idealised, patriarchal mother image we’ve internalised—self-sacrificing, invisible, and extinguishing our own needs until vitality fades.
  • The archetypal mother: a partial reclamation, real yet still shaped by expectations and perfectionism.
  • The emergence of the primordial mother—raw, fierce, boundaried, intuitive, and wholly alive. She embodies grief and joy, destruction and creation, welcoming you exactly as you are, not to fix you, but to hold and tend you.
  • How you know you’ve met her: you feel seen, safe, free to rage, weep, or simply be. A deep exhale of belonging.

If you’ve ever felt fractured by trauma—yearning for connection, healing, and a mother who is neither idealised nor nullifying—this episode offers recognition, grounded spiritual medicine, and an embodied reclaiming of love and belonging.

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Welcome back to the unfuckwithable woman. I'm Brian Montgomery. And today we're gonna talk about something that lives deep in our bones, something that aches in the marrow of our being.This yearning for the Bubba. Maybe you felt it a quiet longing for home, for belonging, for safety. Maybe you felt it as grief that seems bottomless, or as rage that burns in your chest and has nowhere to go.This yearning is not simply for the mother who raised us or for some perfect, idealized figure. It's much deeper. Maybe you've noticed it in your own life, moments where you wait for someone to simply hold you, to accept you as you are. [...3.3s]This yearning is very familiar to me from when I was very young. I had a very dysfunctional relationship with my own mother and an absent father.And so this yearning to belong and to be held had was knitted in very early on. And when my mother died [...0.7s] in 2,001, what I discovered was this yearning for the mother, for this belonging, for this sense of love and acceptance for who I was that I'd never had that.And so after my mother's death, I learnt and started to [...0.8s] grow and tend to this deep yearning of [...0.7s] for the mother, [...0.6s] for this primordial place within me that just felt like there was a big hole.And [...0.6s] after my mother's death, I began a really a pilgrimage of sorts within and around me, of discovering who I am [...0.6s] and seeking out [...0.8s] that [...0.6s] and connecting with that deep primordial archetypal mother [...0.7s] that would give me a sense of safety and love and connectedness and okayness, not from around me, which I had been taught [...0.7s] to [...0.6s] seek this mother in the other through external validation, [...0.7s] and by performance, by being successful in their eyes and performing for love and for belonging and for my place in community. And when I started to tend to this wound, this yearning that I had within my system, I started to find and connect with a deeper place within my psychic and within my system, and within life and the earth and community and others that started to fulfill this [...0.6s] deep [...0.6s] yearning, this deep, tending of [...0.7s] finding this [...0.8s] primordial[...15.0s], [...0.7s] very accepting, part of life and, and within myself. And I can even extend that yearning into relationship as well.When in relationship, I I was seeking that validation in my relationships of meeting this need, of this yearning within myself, of love and safety, belonging, in connection.And I was seeking it in all places, but within myself, but within earth, but within the very spark of my existence and of life in itself[...4.0s].And when I was seeking it with others and through other ways and other humans and other external experiences, [...0.8s] it just ruptured that yearning even further. And that disappointment and that disconnection to myself and to others and to the mother, and it felt like I had failed.It felt like there was something wrong with me that I couldn't have that yearning and that longing fulfilled because I must have been broken. I must have [...0.7s] not been worthy.There must have been something that I was doing wrong in those relationships. And I was seeking the mother in the other in a way that could not be fulfilled, that could not meet the yearning or the tending in my own system for what I was longing for. It was a very empty cup and it was very superficial.And it was [...0.7s] brought into this. It's constantly met this top level of what a mother is, this idealized mother. And [...0.6s] it just was not ever, I never felt, fulfilled in that space, in that place and in relationship.And I always felt there was a lacking within me and within who I was and in my experience. And it sort of had this cycle of just going back into itself, this longing and then reaching a place of tending to that longing in an external way [...0.8s] and then feeling unfulfilled.All that collapsing and feeling unfulfilled and feeling that or having that rejection and then feeling like somehow I had brought that into myself, somehow I wasn't worthy enough. And that whole cycle just kept and cycling.And underneath there was just this great yearning [...0.6s] for the mother, this great yearning for [...0.7s] feeling held and supported and loved and safe and belonged to myself and then to community, and then to my external environment around me[...11.1s].What is the idealized patriarchal mother? The world we live in, this colonized patriarchal capitalist culture has handed us an image of the good mother. She is endlessly giving, she never says no, she forgives everything, even when she destroys it. She looks perfect, smiles through exhaustion and sacrifices herself for everyone. She puts herself right down the bottom of the list, and she champions that she's the martyr.She is [...0.6s] this pedestal superhero type, can have it all mother woman. She doesn't even have to be a mother woman that just is pedestal and idealized. She doesn't [...0.8s] get rageful, she doesn't get sad or in a grief.It's all binary and all contained. She is predictable to the patriarchal culture. She is running a script, [...0.6s] and she is [...0.7s] by biolarged outside looking in.She is successful in so many ways of being really contained and restrained and really segmented in [...0.7s] this, [...0.6s] in others ideology and the cultures ideology of what a mother is, of what a woman is. And she doesn't just back it for herself.She expects other women, [...0.6s] and she becomes this internalized, she internalized the patriarchal woman, the patriarchal mother. And she expects other women and other mothers to fall into the same [...0.8s] slipstream, the same ways in order to validate who she is.So she doesn't like anybody who's sitting out or on the fringe or outside the box, or questioning or poking this idealized way in which she performs, expected to perform, and others perform around her[...8.3s].This idealized mother archetype doesn't just shape our families, it shapes our world because while we praise her sacrifice, we replicate it on the planet.We extract her from everything, we extract her from it all until she is depleted. We destroy forest, we frack the earth, we rape the earth, we poison rivers and exploit the body of the earth as if she exists only to give.We are seeing this result in the ecoside genocide and the poly crisis femicide across the globe right now. And inside, many of us have this internalized figure. We silence ourselves to be good. We abandon our needs to belong. We carry shame and guilt for being too much, not enough, or simply human.This is what I call the death mother culture, a culture that kills vitality, cuts us from our humanity, is [...0.6s] shames. It's nurse made. And it teaches us that love must be earned through self [...0.6s] erasure. Maybe you felt this giving until you are empty, or being praised more for your silence than your truth.I know for me, there were many times when I have been [...0.7s] champions for [...0.7s] holding it all together, for placing my needs aside for my children, [...0.6s] or for previous partners, or for the expectation of my family, or for the expectation of the culture.If I dress a certain way, [...0.6s] I am policed for that. I don't look like what's expected of a mother [...0.6s] or of a woman of my age. And I am constantly [...0.7s] placed in this space of confronting the expectation of what it is to be a woman in a death mother culture. I don't fit.Many of you may feel that as well. I'm a fringe dweller. I live on the edge. I poke. And I'm actively resistant to the culture and the regime because it's in my, not just in my nature. It's where my creativity flows from. It's where my work flows from.It's how I mother from, it's how I live from. It's how I can pivot and remain grounded in chaos and how I can serve and best tend to the parts of me that have been ostracized or encouraged to be cut away and pushed into the shadows all my life until I reclaim them after my mother's death.And so the very nature of me speaking on this subject, the very nature of the work that I do, the very nature of sitting in clinic space with women who are [...0.6s] yearning and longing to find those resources and the gifts that they have cut away [...0.6s] forcibly or been expected to, [...0.6s] in order to fit and to feel like they belong, in order to be accepted into the community and the culture that tells you that you just being in your whole embodied [...0.7s] a womanness is not [...0.7s] acceptable, is not welcome, that you are not to rock the status quo, that you need to fit [...0.6s] and tick the boxes of what this patriarchal, colonized culture that death mother culture that is running rampant and telling you that you are not enough, that you should be more, that you should be less just simply by inhabiting a woman's body, you are revealing too much. You're not revealing enough.You're too fat, you're not thin enough, you're too old, you're too young, you're too sexualized, you're not sexualized enough.Every time we step out of our front door and we step into public spaces, or we step into places and spaces [...0.6s] and inhabit all of who we are, we rub this patriarchal death parent, death mother and death father culture in the community, in [...0.6s] the, culture, in the one on one relationships. We are open to scrutiny.No matter what we do say who we are, how we look what time of day it is, there is always somebody there that is going to, a structure that is going to pull you down or there to question your very existence. [...7.0s]And in my own [...0.6s] personal story, It is maddening to constantly have to move with the goalpost just because you [...0.6s] don't fit into this patriarchal, colonized, [...3.9s]death parent way of being living, breathing, procreating, [...0.7s] expression of self in this kind of heteronormative way of living when most of us are diverse[...2.1s], struggling with mental health issues and all sorts of issues in and around what it is to show up for ourselves, but also show up to be and feel belonged and part of a community and feel, [...0.6s] loved and safe and [...0.6s] celebrated in every part of who we are. [...2.5s]And when we internalize this shame and guilt for being too much, not enough, it's like internalized longing for death.For our, it's like a long internalized journey of slowly dying within [...0.6s] and slowly erasing ourselves and fracking our own, being in order to fit with the current narrative about what women serve and how we serve the culture and how we fit in to the world and the culture and community. [...10.5s]Let's talk about the archetypal mother. But from here, many of us, from learning that the internalized death mother is present, we awaken something deeper inside of us.It's an archetypal mother. She is more real than the saintly ideal. She holds some boundaries. She has connection to the body, to the sacred, to the wild. And yet, [...0.6s] she's still colonized. She is still bound by narratives of what motherhood should look like. She is measured against standards of affection. Her wildness is tolerated, but only in fragments. Perhaps you felt this two moments where you began to step into your truth but still felt trapped by what others expected[...3.2s].I have felt this archetypal mother and this connection within three play with my children and being a mother of five children, my eldest is 18. And so I've had the full spectrum of what it is to raise a child to adulthood.And the groundedness that of the archetypal mother has been so very present in the early stages of me being a mother or being a woman.After my mother died, I came to learn about my body and learn about myself and my [...0.7s] sense of who I am [...0.7s] through meditation, and through learning and cultivating my spiritual self, and dismantling a lot of these segmentations or binaries within me that had been set there by my parentage, by my mother, and also by the ancestral legacy that I still have to this very day, still navigating.And when my mother died, and I started to develop and learn about all these aspects of myself.I found this archetypal mother, this really grounded sense of self through meditation, through spirituality, through my body, through movement, through the different [...0.7s] qualifications and tools and practices that I learnt, [...0.6s] in the early stages of my, life in my early 20s and moving into the work that I do now, I found this [...0.6s] really great grounded, held archetypal mother, but it was only for fragments. It was only for [...0.6s] limited periods of time.And I would fall back into [...0.7s] this longing and this yearning for this archetypal mother. And I kept moving backwards and forwards and kept developing this grounded sense of self and reclamation of who I am and who I was.And this selfish core self, and that this archetypal mother was still [...0.6s] evasive, was still not quite able to root itself herself into my system because of all the segmentations and because of all the colonized ways within myself that I needed to dismantle, dissolve and move in and around, said this really significant binaries that the archetypal mother was coming through but wasn't quite dissolving all of those parts because the archetypal mother is still colonized.She is still. If I take the archetypal mother in the way of the earth mother, [...0.6s] the spiritual mother, [...0.7s] which is where I came from and when, what I am still confronted with, she's still colonized. She still looks a certain way, behaves a certain way.She's still idealized. She's still a binary of the culture. She still is fleshed out in this particular narrative, in this particular way.The Earth Mother, the grounded archetypal mother, is still [...0.7s] shaped by a death mother culture. She still patriarchal in her very nature. She still is [...0.7s] expected to perform and be a certain way. And so when I became, in contact with this archetypal mother, she was in and out.And what I realised when I moved to a space, in a community where that earth mother, where that archetypal mother was celebrated, what I saw was that archetypal mother was not celebrated in her primordial and wild way.She was actually, she had been clipped and segmented and put into this binary of what she was to feel be like.And in a lot of ways, she was [...0.6s] another version, another face of the death mother. [...20.9s]So she wasn't this archetypal mother, wasn't this whole encompassing mother that I [...0.6s] had really longed for and was trying to get in connection with and reawaken in my system.She was still this aspect of a death mother that still held women and mothers in a particular narrative of what she was to be like and who she wants to be.Like the Earth Mother, [...0.8s] the archetypal mother is still patriarchal in her nature[...5.0s]. And if you confront her and you confront that narrative, you are [...0.6s] shut down.There is no conversation in and around the stickiness or the difficulty with this binary. You're in an archetype of mother space in a patriarchal space when any conversation that sticking in hard is shut down. So the primordial mother is where we're moving towards beyond her, beyond the idealize.An archetypal mother is a primordial mother. She is the one our bones are aching for, fierce boundary, unafraid to be cutting. Like Kali Ma, like Durga. She is not here to be palatable. She is here to protect life, to protect her all children, and the web of life itself, the earth, community, belonging.She stands something more than just the physical archetypal mother. She embodies not just love but grief, not just nurturing, but destruction.She births and she also clears what no longer serves. She holds rage as sacred. She honors chaos, sadness, vitality, joy, death, and rebirth as all part of life. The primordial mother is intuitive and discerning. She welcomes you without judgement, but not indiscriminately. Her devotion is not narcissistic. It's grounded, genuine, and fiercely protective of community, life, and belonging. And how do you know you've come into contact with her? You feel safe, [...0.6s] you feel seen exactly as you are. She accepts your imperfection and meet you with love, but also with clarity.Her need is not to control you on or understand every working part, but to meet you with presence in where you're at. Something. She is something that you exhale. I belong, and I am whole.Maybe you've known someone like this, a teacher, a mother figure, a friend who radiated fierce compassion. Or maybe you've glimpsed it in yourself[...15.1s].And the first time I really had a glimpse of the Primordial Mother was when I started unpacking different parts of myself when I looked, when I discovered the Death Mother, Marion Woodman's work with the Death Mother archetype.Then I started to really connect with the primordial mother. In order to be [...0.6s] in connection and move with the primordial mother, we must accept [...0.7s] and we must have a familiar familiarity and a way of moving with shame, of moving with the dark, of the shadows, of the aspects of mothering and womaning and humaning that we don't talk about.We need to start to find connection in community and language and acceptance in places and spaces where we get to drop the facade of who we are and this constant expectation to be more than or perfectly hit the target every time as a woman and as a mother and what I'm talking about is really quite dicey.It's really quite, there's a very thin line here. You hear it and you see it when you're exploring it with women that you feel safe with [...0.8s] in ways that if you've had an experience that you have shown up in relationship, particularly with children, where you haven't been on your game, when you've had an experience of yelling or using words [...0.6s] that that don't sit really well, the culture says it's just a no.Perhaps you've had behaviours that you feel ashamed of, that you have responded towards others or your children or or, partners [...0.6s] that this the culture shames, that [...0.6s] puts you down.That if you were to bring language to that or place in places and spaces that were safe that may bring into question who you are as a woman and who you are as a mother.And why I say it's dicey and a really thin we're walking a very thin line here is that this is where it can quick, it could flip into abuse. It could flip into the perception that you are an abusive person or that you are not a good mother and not a good human.And we have all been there that when we have behaved in ways [...0.7s] that has brought into question with question ourself if you are grounded and working and really rooted into humanity and connection [...0.6s] that you have really question whether you're a good person, whether or not that was okay. And that's the humanity peace that we bring in. And we have pathologized that out of our systems.The colonized patriarchal culture and archetypal mother, mother has pathologized that to the point that we now no longer can sit in places and spaces in connection and safety and say, I did this. I'm not proud of it. And I just feel like the whole world should swallow me whole. I wanna do it.I wanna redo. I actually find it really difficult to talk about this. I feel so vulnerable. I feel like I failed.And all of these places and spaces that our culture has raced because it's pathologized everything [...0.6s] and we don't no longer have elders and places and spaces and communities that can take these issues and take these times where we are struggling as women, as, and mothers and [...0.7s] soothe what we're struggling with in a way that is whole embodied, held, supported and in a place of nourishment not just for [...0.7s] the woman, the mother, but also for the children, also for the community, and also for those involved in that situation. So the primordial mother she does that, she soothes, she tends, she shows up without judgement. She does not looking at your perfection and how you are showing up on the outside to be successful.She's looking at your authenticity, your integrity, your humanity, your ability to be able to discern who you are, how you act, and how you are gonna step forward in owning and really being supported and loved through that in a way that the archetypal mother cannot because she still [...0.8s] colonized. There's still an expected way of moving. And the primordial mother understands that sometimes there is no [...0.6s] measurement.There is no next step except being present with. And she understands in your, and trust in your innate knowing of who you are, of your pulsation, where you are grounded into life, into legacy, into ancestors, into your role in the into your community's wellness, and how you long for community to be well and to belong and to functioning.She trusts in your processes, and she support you back into connection with self. She completes and helps you complete that cycle of that process, of that experience where there has been shame, where there has felt this kind of rupture, she helps repair that process, that relationship.She is unshakable in her disposition and who she is and how she shows up and how she holds you [...0.6s] and those around you[...22.7s]. And look, it can be scary. It can be [...0.6s] how do I move through this? I wanna fix this? But in her very presence, [...0.6s] in her very unshakeable, stable, grounded sense of love and support for you and for life, [...0.8s] your own sense of it wanting, the yearning of for it to be fixed is felt in just being present with.And if that means grieving, raging [...0.6s] frustration, joy, if that means feeling uncertain and not sure and everything has been upturned and, you don't know the next step, she keeps you held in that space of acceptance and belonging even when it's not clear of where that is for you.And when we are womaning, mothering, tending, lifeing, community, communiting, that's even a word, don't think it is in this space, [...0.6s] what we are tending to is not just something that's just wholly and solely us ourselves and our immediate family.It's actually threading the very nature and this very new pathway of the wilds of the, really creating something new and a new way [...0.6s] of moving with community and sticky contexts and emotion in a way [...0.6s] that has no pathway because we've lost this pathway.We have lost how it is to be sitting and being in belonging and community in relation [...0.6s] where [...0.6s] things get messy and it's chaos and we don't have any sense of it's gonna be okay in the future unless it's this sense of okayness in in the system. This primordial mother leads from embodiment, leads from the nervous system, leads from [...0.8s] not just ancestral legacy and what is here breathing and pulsating right now in the micro, but also in the macro.She is mirroring and moving with globe, with what's happening globally, with what's happening with the earth. She's listening, [...0.6s] she is listening to the trees, to the environment, to the earth, to the waters, to the sky, to the moon, to the stars. She is moving with those around her.She is moving with that, that's not human. She's moving with the unseen, the ancestors, those that have passed the well, ancestors, [...0.6s] the insects, the animals, they all work simultaneously and collaboratively together with the primordial mother. They actually make up segmentations of the primordial mother. They move and shift and everything is moving in this primordial way. Everything is collaborative, everything is in flow, everything is moving in a really beautiful way that's kind of pulsating and at the real core center of what life springs from. And when we meet her and when we're with her, and when we are embodying her and connecting with her, [...0.7s] everything pulses with her.And that balm and that tending and that yearning within for the mother is met in ways at the culture [...0.6s] and even our birth mothers and birth families and our children cannot meet.It's so individualized. It's like connecting deeply with that self flame that was extinguished [...0.8s] by the culture, by the death mother culture, by [...0.7s] colonization and patriarchy. We start to connect with that internal flame and we start to stoke it, and we start to grow and we become the firekeeper of our own soul.This is a primordial mother. [...29.5s]We tend to the stories, we tend to the flame, we tend to the legacy, we tend to the earth, we tend to humanity, community connection, all children, all intimate relationships.We start to see [...0.6s] a larger context and a larger place in which we fit into this incredible, [...0.6s] collective and incredible way that is life, this pulsation of life[...5.2s].Why does having connection with the primordial mother matter? Now we are living in a time of unraveling, ecoside genocide, climate collapse, disconnection, epidemic, loneliness. These crises are not separate. They are the fruits of a culture that is severed us from the primordial mother.To survive this time, and to remember how to live, we must return to her. We must embody her in ourselves, in our communities, in the way we parent, partner, and participate in the world. This doesn't mean becoming perfect.It means becoming whole, [...0.7s] allowing our sacred anger, our grief, our love, and our devotion to guide us. Mothering not just our children, but our communities, our earth, our shared humanity, and each other. [...1.2s]So if you feel this ache, this yearning for the mother, know that it is real. You are not broken. You are remembering. Maybe you've even felt it as you've listened to this episode. A moment of recognition, a longing stirring in your chest.I know I have felt this for a very long time[...4.2s]. So if you feel this ache, this yearning for the mother, know that it is real. You are not broken. You are remembering, maybe you've even felt it as you've listened to this episode.A moment of recognition, a longing stirred in your chest, a memory I know I have [...0.6s] at times when there has been rupture, there has been change, there has been transformation, there has been a calling from the Dark Knight from the underworld to reclaim more of who I am, to let go of things that no longer serve[...2.5s].My divorce back in 2022, [...0.7s] the death of my mother, [...0.7s] the changing of residence of buying and selling or moving house, the birth of a new child, I felt this [...0.7s] every time I have birth, every time that I have created and birthed and raised my children, which is ongoing.When a relationship has how to use by date, when a friendship has been ruptured, [...0.8s] when a job or something has up ended in my life and I have not known where to go, what the next step is, I always come back to the primordial mother.I always come back into connection with myself, with the flame, with the grounding, with life, with a pulsation. I stop, I breathe, I notice, and I ground.I move back into when I don't know the next step, I move back into, I tend. I give way to the confusion, to the curiosity, to the grief. I allow it to be in my system.I come back to the flame within me and I tend, and I sit with the primordial mother. And I remember who I am, where I've come from, all the times that I have felt broken or been broken or needed the bum, the primordial mother.And all the times that she has responded, even at the times when there's been shame and grief and disappointment and anger, she is there, holding me, encouraging me to return back to face her. And she is loving me no matter what. And I wonder if there's been times for you as well where that has been really prevalent. [...14.1s]This is the journey that I take women on through my work in the clinic as well as through my master classes through Mother Way, through the decolonized work that I do through Circle. It's all about somatic decolonized.Pathway back to the primordial mother, to belonging community and the sacred centre of your being [...0.7s] through [...0.6s] the cymotherapy collective. Together, we will name the systems that severed us.We'll release the inherited pain of the motherline and we'll root ourselves in the fierce [...0.6s] boundary, deeply loving presence of the primordial mother who is already within you.This yearning for the mother within is this yearning for the primordial mother[...2.2s]. You are not too much. You are enough. All of you, you are whole. You are welcome. And when you remember that, you rise unfuckwitable.Thank you so much for being here. Please share this episode and the podcast with anyone in your community that we feel would benefit.I'd love you to rate [...0.7s] this episode and the podcast. So please rate, [...0.6s] please go to [...0.6s] the Soma Therapy collective.com and have a look [...0.6s] at what I'm doing in the world and how I'm working with women [...0.6s] in the space of unfuckwitable energy, and also to intending to mother wound [...0.7s] the nervous system as well as connecting with the primordial mother.It's been a pleasure. And until next time, [...0.6s] remember that you are not alone and that you are completely unfuckwitable. [...0.8s][...0.8s]