The Unfuckwithable Woman

Episode 4: The Ancestral Mother Wound – Healing Lineage, Healing the World

• Briony Montgomery

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Message me at briony@thesomatherapycollective.com

The wound is not just ours — it lives in our lineage, our bodies, and our world. Healing it is the revolution.

Have you ever felt like the ache inside you wasn’t just yours? That your grief, rage, or silence carried the weight of generations before you?

In this raw and soulful episode, I dive into the Ancestral Mother Wound — the imprint of patriarchy, colonisation, and hierarchical systems that fracture our bonds to self, to mother, to community, and to the earth.

Through my personal story and the lenses of IFS (parts work), attachment theory, epigenetics, and somatic healing, we’ll explore:
💔 How trauma is passed through lineage and DNA.
💔 Why so many women feel unseen, exhausted, and disconnected.
💔 How grief and rage live in our nervous systems as survival strategies.
🌿 And how tending to this wound — for ourselves and our children — becomes medicine for our times.

The ancestral mother wound isn’t just personal. It’s the root of cultural disconnection, ecocide, genocide, and the polycrisis we face. And yet, within it is also our liberation. When we tend to it now, we shift the inheritance we pass on — from rupture to resilience, from silence to belonging.

This is lineage work. This is revolution. This is the heart of The MotherWay — a 16-week somatic, decolonised pathway back to your body, your belonging, and the primordial mother within.

✨ Listen now to Episode 4 of The Unfuckwithable Woman Podcast.
👉 Ready to tend your own mother wound? Join me inside The MotherWay: http://www.thesomtherapycollective.com

🌿 Join the Unfuckwithable Movement 🌿
Stay connected and empowered with The Unfuckwithable Woman. Subscribe, share, and continue your healing journey with us.

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Music by Finn Holleman

Photography by bethcronin_stillpoetry

Listen to Season 1: The (re)Sourced Woman here

Connect: briony@thesomatherapycollective.com

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SPEAKER_00:

to the unfuckwithable woman. I'm Bryony Montgomery and today we're embarking on a deeply soulful exploration, the ancestral mother wound. This isn't simply a wound between mothers and daughters. It is a tapestry woven through culture, lineage, DNA, the way we move in relationships, in community, internally, and how we connect to earth and to each other. It's the imprint of patriarchy, colonization, and the hierarchy systems that have passed down generationally through trauma, silence, rage, grief and resilience throughout the generations. And yet it's also our healing when we tend to it now for ourselves, for our children, for the world, we begin to dissolve oppressive systems, return to earth, community, connection and embrace mattresses. Today through the lens of parts work, informed IFS, attachment theory, epigenetics and somatic nervous system healing, we'll unpack how this work is not just personal, it's the work for our times. My own story in and around how I came to this work and particularly discovering my own ancestral mother wound that was coming down through my lineage was the death of my mother. And it was when she had the cervical cancer and she got the cervical cancer diagnosis and she went through surgery and cancer treatment and into remission and through that process I came to understand that my own maternal grandmother who had died when I was about five or six had also had cervical cancer at the time of her death and I remember feeling especially after she died this really deep primordial sense of that there was something happening in my mother maternal mother line that was rupturing connection rupturing the connection that the women had with their own emotions with the reality of where they'd come from and what they were subjected to throughout the historical dynamic of the family relationships you know the abuse the stuff that wasn't spoken about there was a lot of things that my own mother took to the grave that I still don't still cannot clarify to this day with any accuracy and She had experiences that really impacted and fractured her own connection with her mother, with women, with connection. She had this huge abandonment wound that was passed down to me and she just had this very stoic martyr, I will do it on my own, I don't need help from anybody, I can work through this, I know what to do and I need to remain strong and I need to have it all together and there was lots of nuances and lays in that in the way that she mothered in the way that she was in the relationship with my father as well as in community and her friendships and she really kept a lot to herself and after her death what I started to see and through my own experience that was confirmed shortly after her death because I had abnormal cells in my cervix that had to be surgically removed moved that could have developed into cancer and when I went to the doctor I remember so clearly I went to the doctor I'd had this really abnormal cycle actually a couple of cycles that were really obscure and I just innately and primordial felt something wasn't right and I went to the doctor that had taken care of my mother when she had the cancer and I said I need a pap smear and she said you're not due for one and we really volleyed backwards and forwards with me giving her so many reasons as to why I wanted it and in the end she conceded just because I was not going to let it drop and she gave me the pap smear and it came back with these abnormal cells and I had them taken out with loop incision not long after and this was before I had my children. Now if I hadn't have listened to my body and I had have carried that wounding and that narrative in and around this kind of I can do it on my own I'm you know an island I'm a martyr and if I had to follow the same pathway as my mother and my maternal grandmother and the other women in my family mother line and particularly in my paternal line to this kind of stoic you know I can do it all I can do it myself this super woman super mother status that is quite culturally encouraged and accepted and part of that patriarchal colonized way of mothering and womaning, then I could have potentially been in a very similar position to my mother and had cervical cancer. When I discovered that the abnormal cells were in my cervix and I had absolutely, I've had trauma, sexual trauma in my past and I knew this and I had unpacked it a little bit. So I knew there was definitely DNA, there was definitely things happening internally within me because I hadn't faced it and dealt with it and I just started to really explore and think about epigenetics and DNA and how these stored stories and experiences and trauma that are in our body that don't get resolved and how those things manifest in the body so when I started training in natural therapies and aromatherapy and energy healing I started to explore how there was a a blueprint of ancestral legacy within the DNA, but also within the stories, also in the behavior, also in the energetics of the family line that came through into the child that was transposed, transposed onto the child. And then the child, if not meeting that in a different way, would often have, and particularly in my line, would have a very similar experience or touch on a very similar context and deal with it in a very similar way to what the ancestors had done and sometimes carrying legacies that are not their own and having things happen to them and within their bodies without actually having a physical earthly experience in this lifetime and so when I started to study I started to explore that these these patterns not just ancestrally but also with experiences that have happened in our life that get lodged in the body and they they manifest or they come about in this dis-ease they they create this they knock out the equilibrium inside the body and you can also take this too with death mother culture and having a death mother or a death father this internalized wanting and longing to die this internalized critic that just constantly and persistently just kind of tells this narrative of that you're no good and that things will never go your way and that you're worthless and and you can't do that and all this kind of all this kind of energy that's that your system is feeding on creates dis-ease which you know creates end disease so I started to explore this and started to really focus and look at my own maternal line and the fractures and things and experiences that I'd had that I had not released the charge from or metabolized that were in impacting me in other areas and in my life in my relationships in my story and when I started to metabolize and process them I saw so much difference in how I showed up and how I process things but also too I started to relate very differently to the experiences from my past and also too in relation to my ancestors in relation to my mother in relation to my father and then when I became became a mother myself in relation to my own children and in my own intimate relationships. So through this you know this has continued on for me through you know it started with epigenetics, it started with building up the foundations of my own system energetically, physiologically, cell by cell rebuilding myself back and then moving into embodied work and expressing the sensations in my body and from experiences and the ancestral lineage through the felt sense of the body through the soma and then through the nervous system through somatic healing and also to alongside of that parts work in a critic work and attachment theory which have been all been extremely pivotal in actually healing processing releasing charge and being with not just my personal story but the cultural story my ancestral story legacies and unpacking all of that in order to really show up to the world and show up in the day-to-day in a really present grounded and very focused on humanity connection community and tending to this wounding tending to this separation within myself and within the culture in relation to community relationships and the earth and also my ancestral It's really important with Mother Wound that we really move directly with uncovering and discovering who we are ancestrally, colonisation and we decolonise that whole process and decolonise where we've come from and start to own our own wounding, our own stories as well as our ancestral lineage and their stories and start to understand where we come from and really place that that on and have a place that in our own healing and in our own day to day and in our own presence in how we actually show up in relationship, in the world, in community and actually what we sow the seeds for in relation to servicing and being of service to something greater than just ourselves and our own individual wound with our mother or our own lineage that we start to connect with a wider web of how we can actually best serve and how we can actually show up for humanity and for the world. So our first step is naming what is the ancestral mother wound. The ancestral mother wound is the trance migration of wounds, grief, shame, fear, even resilience passed down through our culture, through family, through DNA itself. Modern science shows us that trauma doesn't vanish it is carried sometimes unconsciously through epigenetic inheritance and I want to really insert there too that this is also including neurodiversity if you have a trauma in your if you've had a trauma or there's been a trauma a big trauma in the epigenetic line in the in the ancestral lineage then often you're going to have people that are going to come into the lineage that are going to be born that are going to be diverse that are going to be on a kind of spectrum because of the impact of that trauma that does really shape not just your experience but actually your physiology actually how you connect actually your epigenetic makeup as well as how you relate to earth how you relate to humans and how you relate to yourself and how you relate to family and the family lineage so I really want you to understand that that also has an impact as well Attachment theory tells us that our earliest bonds sculpt our internal working models, how we learn often unconsciously to love, to trust, to feel, to feel safe or not. These models become the lens through which we see ourselves and others, shaping our relationships and community. And there's the internal family systems model, IFS model, which I'm in formed in is a therapeutic model that sees us not as a single self, but as a constellation of parts. And this is what I refer to as parts work. These parts, the exiles that are carrying old pain, managers trying to protect, firefighters reacting when overwhelmed, play out in our inner worlds. At our centre lies the self. It's a self-energy. It's embodying calm, compassion, clarity, courage, and the eight C's of self-energy, which I won't refer to in this podcast, but I'll definitely pop a link in the call notes for you to have a look a little bit more about IFS work. A parts work offers us a way to understand how parts of us may be burdened by ancestral or collective trauma. Some parts carry messages that aren't even originally ours. These are unattached burdens. Through blending and unburdening, we can help these parts release heavy burdens of silence, of grief, shame and of inherited oppression. And so the mother wound lives not only in our hearts but in the tissue of our being, felt in how we love, how we protect how we surrender and also too it is also through the culture as well so I have referred to the death mother culture before and this is what we're in we're in a death parent culture and I liken it to a death mother being that we are very segregated and and violated and oppressed and cut off from the great mother from the all life force a life-giving force that grows the tree the flowers brings the seasons you know has the elements grow working in harmony together as well as you know the same with you know it brings death it brings destruction it brings the sun the moon the stars the like each year rolling you know rolling cycling this all affirming primordial force is what I refer to as the mother and the mother wound is the separation from her so when we have this separation from the Great Mother, we generally have a separation in the lineage, in the ancestral lineage from practices in and around honouring life, honouring the Mother, honouring emotions, honouring these parts of ourselves, honouring the whole of ourselves, having ritual ceremony, having connection and community and ways that we can serve and collaborate with each other and we also have that rupture in the mother line with our direct mother and so it's like one feeds into the other the other feeds into the other and it's kind of this cycle that goes round and round and round and it's not until we actually start to tend to that wound and start to bring some awareness and focus in how we can reconnect with those exiled parts of ourselves with those parts of ourselves that we pushed away to protect to keep ourselves safe in order to serve the mother in order to to serve the death parent, in order to serve the culture, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, in this kind of binary slipstream experience that's really watering down our diversity, who we are, our authenticity, our rawness, our capacity to connect and to feel and to be with each other in a raw and authentic, vulnerable and safe and collaborative way. And when we move in this kind of restricted binary then we don't know how to recognize safe places we don't know how to regulate our nervous system we don't know how to collaborate we're in coming from this attachment place that's so wounded and so disjointed and so disordered or so shut down that often we when we're masking we're moving through life and we're we're We're armoring up, which I often say, like kind of stepping into the day. We're putting all these masks on. We're putting all these layers on in order to protect ourselves because we're trying to keep ourselves safe. And what that's doing is that's keeping us even more separate from tending to the mother wound and tending to the ancestral wounds that actually are keeping us separate from who we are and from life itself. And this unfulfilled sense that we have in life like this kind of like drudgery this kind of dogma way this kind of oh you know like I've just got to get through the day which when we shut down one part of ourselves or when we shut down the the lineage the connection with lineage even the ancestral lineage we shut down all of ourselves we shut we cannot have we cannot just shut down parts we shut systematically a lot of other parts at the same time and so when we start to work on healing this and bring this back and these parts back into the fold and tending to the mother wound and tending to the ruptures in our system and in our lineage with repair then we start to bring all of then we start to tend to the lineage and we start to bring all of this back into the wholeness back into this sense of fulfillment this sense of belonging of community of groundedness of rootedness of compassion of love for the self and this deep deep wonderful connection that we have with life and with each other and with our lineage and where we come from and then we plug back into this primordial force and this is the tending to the mother wound this is the tending to ancestral lineage that's just so crucial for us to go back into our roots and repair where it has been severed either by our ancestors deliberately or unconsciously but also by the culture of violence and oppression that we are all suffering underneath and it's all it's like we take all of everything back into ourselves like all of it I don't even like to label good or bad parts or good or bad experiences but we bring it all into this moment and when we tend to it in the way it moves and we don't push anything in the shadows because we're human and human is messy and chaotic and it's the groundedness it's the central clarity for focus of who we are and where we come from that nobody can take from us not the culture not the ancestral lineage when we have that really rooted and intact then we can start to move with tending to the mother the mother wound and the ancestral lineage mother wound in a way that is really healing and congruent and extremely liberating this mother wound isn't isolated it is woven into our patriarchal, colonised, hierarchical structures. It's the legacy of systems that devalue maternal wisdom, sever our bond to the earth and breed separation and violence. That disconnection fuels the poly-crisis of our time. Climate collapse, war, genocide, social unrest, mental health breakdown and cultural disintegration. Epigenetics tells us that trauma rewires the nervous system, heightening vigilance, dysregulating emotion, making it harder to attach. Descendants of genocide, slavery, war carry cellular markers of inherited trauma. And even talking about what's happening to the Palestinians right now with what is not even being coined as a genocide now is being called a holocaust. We are in uncharted territory about how this is going to impact future generations. And the impact now is like it's uncharted. We're in uncharted territory. And it's actually very scary to think about down the track and what the future generations of the Palestinians going to be having in their physiological systems, their emotional systems, the trauma that these these people are going to have been impacted by is just it's unknown like like it's incredibly scary to see a televised a live genocide and seeing these people suffering this holocaust and not knowing the impacts of that in future generations attachment isn't just personal it is systemic when our communities and societies are shaped by fear and dis connection, attachment ruptures. Our inner parts, the exiled, the managers, pick up the cultural burdens to protect us. That's why so many women feel exhausted, unseen, unmoored, because historically we were never seen, never felt safe, and right now the world is burning. And you will see right now, and I'm seeing this mid-wifing my own mid life is that the grief and the rage at the state of the world right now has placed healing in a space of urgency it is so palatable inside me and inside so many women that I'm seeing not just in my own community and in my own connections but in the wider community and there is no place the culture and the ancestral lineage has not created a map for what we do when the grief and the rage is so front and center because it has been so it's been stamped and been really created in this very negative and binary way of how we feel how we move with how we express it and it is seen as destructive and being in a time that we are in a world that is being destroyed by humans by men by the systems of oppression and violence and by patriarchal women women are not excluded from this there are women propping up the systems of oppression and violence colonized white women and and women from other ethnic backgrounds too are they scaffold the patriarchy they scaffold colonialism and violence and oppression because it's not just in the lineage and culturally but also to protect themselves and their own and right now we are developing and finding ways to be with and lead and this is what I'm doing through my work women through their rage and their grief in an embodied present and way that they can tend to the mother wound and reconnect back into the primordial source it is so important that we metabolize this in our own systems so we can also hold space for others so that we can also metabolize it for our communities and our loved ones it is so important right now it is the medicine of our times at this particular moment in history that rage is front and center and grief and that we find places to rage and to be in our grief that are held that are safe that are healthy that are that are feeding back into humanity feeding back into the earth restoring connection and also metabolizing this for other people and other energies in the world right now because we are all tapping into this the horrors and once we once we hold on to that charge in our body that grief and rage it creates disease it creates ruptures in the lineage it creates ruptures in community in culture and with the mother wound so this kind of we need to move out of this cycle and we start need to start to move this charge out of our bodies and start to find maps and blueprints and move back into that sacred connection of ritual and and connection with what our bodies and what humanity and what the primordial force in collaboration with community and each other and connection and the world and process this and move this out into a space that is extremely healing and beneficial when we move into the rage the fires of rage and the deep wells of grief it is the only way through these times of reckoning it is the only way to heal the deep wounds of which we're trying to grapple with and trying to they've been colonized and been watered down and right through them is this urgency and is this moving in and out of this kind of this kind of numbed out frozen state of being in our nervous system we need big charges to get it out and get out into our social engagement and regulated system in order to find that regulated system within ourselves, we had a big charge. Grief and rage, particularly rage, that's the charge we need to wake us out of our slumber. It is so beneficial for us to dip into these places and the colonized patriarchal systems of oppression and violence that I want us to do that. Because if we move back into connection with our bodies, community, the earth collaboration, and we start to move in these collaborative ways and we start to have body autonomy and sovereignty we won't be putting up with the shit that they're laying out on the table for us they're literally setting the table and we're eating from the shit that they're giving us and it's toxic and it's oppressive and violent and when we start to move into our social engagement we use rage and we grieve we move up into that nervous system healing and regulation oh we are activated and then we are really clear on what we need to do next that is the power that is the liberation That there is the revolution. And I want you to listen to me. This is not just your legacy to carry anymore. Yet the invitation is to tend to it now so it is healed and not landed upon our children or generations to come. It's a burden that we all can carry together. This is matriessence, the rite of passage into motherhood extended to us all, birthing a more connected, earth-centered way of being. Healing the mother wound is an indulgence it is lineage work world care revolution and it is for these times now and by healing through parts work meeting our exiled parts the inner critic offering compassion to the managers inviting self energy to lead we shift our attachment patterns from insecure to secure internally and relationally intending this wound now for ourselves and our children we create a different inheritance one of regulation attachment resilience deep belonging and you can see this in if you've ever mothered or you or you've even reconnected with you've connected with somebody in a relationship and it has had a different connection has has a different way of being that is very different to your own parentage or your grandparents and you can see that I can see that in my line coming through that even the way that I've mothered has been a much more conscious way of actually having secure attachment doing rupture and repair really well and really tending to the wounds and not having anything that is not okay to talk about really bringing consciousness and attention to those parts of ourselves that feel really sticky and difficult and finding a mapping and a way to move with it where it is healthy held invite like in invited it's actually celebrated and it's actually moved through in a way that's really integral and really inclusive of all parts of who we are and I remember doing my healing journey many years ago where after I lost my mother and I remember hearing that the healing that you do now really impacts in real time seven generations forward and seven generations back and I I want to make it really clear that legacies are not always yours to heal. Some can be if you want to, but you really can have discernment and work with a therapist and work in space with well ancestors to not take on the burden of healing the legacy trauma that has been carried through. You can actually give that back. So I want to make that really clear distinction that you don't need to have this overwhelming sense that I need to fix it all because I kind of I'm the one that is coming to the family to neutralize and to heal this wounding you can have discernment and choose not to and that is totally okay and even just you just tending to your own system will