Episode 13: The Mother Wound Explained: Why You Keep Repeating Relationship Patterns (And How to Break Them Through Somatic Healing)

Why do you keep repeating the same relationship patterns… even when you know better?

In this episode of The Unfuckwithable Woman, Briony Montgomery explores the deeper truth of the mother wound - not as a personal flaw, but as a relational and nervous system pattern inherited across generations. 

This episode unpacks:

• What the mother wound actually is (beyond your relationship with your mother)
• How patterns like people pleasing, hyper-independence, and over-functioning are formed
• Why these patterns live in the body, not just the mind
• The role of culture, lineage, and relational environments in shaping your nervous system
• How somatic therapy supports long-term, embodied healing

Briony shares clinical insight and lived experience to guide listeners into a deeper understanding of how the body holds relational patterns and how those patterns can change.

This is not about fixing yourself.
This is about understanding your system and learning how to work with it.

If this episode resonates, explore somatic practices and work with Briony at
www.thesomatherapycollective.com

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Explore deeper support through The SomaTherapy Collective

Offerings include:

• The Daily Root - daily nervous system support
• 1:1 Somatic Therapy Sessions
• Clarity Sessions
• Mother Wound & Matrilineal Healing
• The MotherWay

This work is about more than healing symptoms.
It is about reclaiming your body, your voice, your humanity and your connection to life itself.

Empowerment. Healing. Liberation.

The revolution starts within.

Music by Finn Holleman
Photography by bethcronin_stillpoetry

Connect with Briony and The SomaTherapy Collective across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube.

📩 briony@thesomatherapycollective.com

#somatictherapy #moth...

Transcript

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Welcome back to the Unfuckwithable Woman. This is a space where we tell the truth about healing, not the polished version, not the digestible version, but the kind that actually changes your life. I'm Brianny from the Soma Therapy Collective, and in this series we are going deep into the patterns that live in your body, your relationships, your lineage that are very prevalent at big transitions and thresholds of your life, particularly midlife, and meeting the current world climate. I've spoken about somatic therapy in previous episodes and why your body holds the key to healing. And today we're moving into something that sits underneath so much of what you experience, the mother wound. Because if you've ever found yourself thinking, why do I keep attracting the same relationships? Why do I feel responsible for everyone else? Why do I struggle to feel fully safe even when nothing is wrong? This episode is going to give you language for that. We're going to name the pattern of the mother wound. So when people come into this work, they often believe they are dealing with something personal. My anxiety, my attachment star, my inability to rest, my patterns in relationships. But very often what we are actually looking at is inheritance, not genetic destiny, relational inheritance. And this is where the conversation around the mother wound needs to deepen. Because this is not just about your relationship with your mother. So let's talk about what actually the mother wound is. So this wound is not something you have, it is something you are inside of, and that it is inside of you. It is in the relational field, a patterning that lives in your nervous system, shaped through generations of women adapting to survive. Your mother did not create this alone, she inherited it, and so did you. This is why the mother wound cannot be resolved through simply understanding your mother or forgiving her, because the wound is just not about her behavior. It is also the conditions and the culture that shaped her and the patterns that were passed through her. You might recognize this in yourself as the good girl pattern, overfunctioning, people-pleasing, hyper-independent, seeking validation outside of yourself, or that deep, often unconscious feeling of I need to be a certain way to be loved. And this doesn't just live in your thoughts, it lives in your body, in how quickly your system activates in relationship, in how you respond to closeness, distance, and conflict. And I'd like you to kind of have a little pause here and think about something or a situation or relationship where you can kind of see this pattern within you, or that you have engaged in this in this wounding. Like let's reflect in a space and time that a moment that you realize that this wasn't just you, a relational pattern that you keep repeating. How this shows up in your body, not just in thoughts, but in a felt sense. When you kind of felt that you were in an automatic response pattern that felt quite similar to your mother or to your parentage, uh, that you just felt misaligned or disembodied in who you are and in relation to your response to a particular dynamic or situation. And just have a little reflect on you might have one or you might have many of those little personal stories or experiences or memories. It's really great to take notice of those memories and those stories and just kind of gently touch into where these stories have taken place, and that in itself, those experiences are a connection and a thread into this space that I call the mother wound. And it's also in and around culturally as well. Like we are definitely in a mother wound culture. We are definitely in a space where the relational field, the community field, the global field is does not center, does not center that nurturing and nourishing relationship between the mother and the child. And so we also have an experience in the culture where we are cultured in this kind of death mother energy. Another part of mother wound is looking for the mother in the other. And it's one of the most powerful ways to recognize the mother wound. It's noticing where you are still looking for the mother. And when I talk about the mother, I'm not just referring to your birth mother or the woman who raised you or that mother figure that raised you. I'm also talking about that connection to life itself, that connection to the earth, that connection to the very force that brings life through, that has a cycle of life and that leads us into death. It's that kind of other force around you that you can really lean in and trust to support you at any one time throughout your day and throughout your life. So it's also a larger context and that even that connection with all those role models of mothers or women in your life that has that capacity or that role of nourishing, or should have had that role of nourishing and supporting you. So it's in partners, in friendships, in mentors, in authority, looking for the mother in the other. Like, where are you looking for the mother in other people? Uh, and looking for that approval in safety and validation at being chosen. And when we don't receive it, that sense of feeling rejected or unworthy, activation that happens in our system. And then what we go to doing is then we adjust ourselves. We adjust ourselves in this process of when we're looking for the mother in the other and we're looking around external places and spaces for that approval and that validation in safety and being chosen. And then when we don't receive that, and that sense of rejection and unworthiness is activated, and then our behaviors after that is often that we adjust ourselves, we overgive, we over-accommodate, we abandon ourselves, we cut things away, we put things of ourselves in exile to maintain the connection, to get that validation from the other. And this is not weakness, this is this is adaptation, and this is why the same patterns repeat, because the body is not trying to sabotage you, it is trying to complete something that is unresolved in your system, and and we all look for that sense of safety in community, and that's our sense of belonging, as well as it has a protective factor as well, because we survive and thrive better in a community setting. And so when we're rejected by community and those that care for us, um, particularly the mother, it can feel like we were put into a survival mode and it can feel threatening. And so the body will naturally always go to that protective factor and those protective parts in the way they've been formed, and that will be activated and triggered in order for your survival. And when this is activated, it's really important to have compassion and understanding, which is why I'm sharing it with you. Because when we can start to see that our body is actually activating things in order to protect us, then we can start to move in a more compassionate and understanding relationship and dynamic with our body and see it, it's not as though it's um trying to sabotage us, it's actually trying to support us. I'd love you now just to have a little think about a place and space where you have sought validation from another, and you can see that pattern really clearly. You've sought the validation uh and safety with somebody outside of you or a system outside of you, and then that didn't um they didn't reciprocate, and then you had a sense of feeling rejected or unworthy, and then you've adjusted yourself. I'd I'd like to invite you just to sort of reflect right now and see whether or not you can identify um, you know, that scenario in your own life. Um and the reason I ask you to reflect on that is because that's a really powerful portal uh into a space of understanding how you respond to these types of dynamics. Because we do all respond differently, even in the rejection, uh, even in how we seek validation and safety, uh, even where we seek that uh validation and safety, and then how we adjust ourselves to accommodate in order to regain or maintain that connection. Um, and then when we can identify start to look at those experiences and identify, that can be a really powerful place to start. And you know, you can have experiences that you've remembered in potentially a relationship dynamic that you saw this really clearly, or a moment of realization in in mid-pattern, like that's kind of sequential, and then you've realized, wow, I'm I'm I'm engaging in this dynamic again. And and why did I start to kind of uh you know make myself small and meet them where they're at, even though I don't necessarily believe that was the right thing to do, or I have these values and principles that I normally uh uphold myself by. And in this instance, I shifted and adjusted them in order to meet that connection or that person where they were at, or even that system. Uh, and when we start to slow it down and when we start to look at it, when we start to look at the patterns within these dynamics, we start to look at the somatic work. We start to pattern our nervous system, which is why somatic work is just so powerful in these types of patterns. And when we're wanting to work on mother wound, then we can work it in the embodied state and really get deeply uh transformational long-term healing because we look at the patterns of our nervous system and then we repattern the nervous system. So this is the kind of work that I do in my clinic space, uh, and it's quite revolutionary and um it's quite a really empowered place to be when we're working with mother wound. So there's a narrative in the healing space that says that you can heal your mother wound. And I really want to gently challenge that because the moment someone says, I've healed my mother wound, it often tells me that the work has stayed in the mind or in a very top level of consciousness because the mother wound is relational, which means it continues to reveal itself through the relationship, throughout our life, in every relationship, in an intimate setting that we have, particularly intimate settings. It can even show up in our work because we're working so closely with others in whatever field that we're we're in. It can also show up unconsciously and quite in subtle ways. And I want to speak to that's not a failure. If you feel that you have actually healed your mother wound and you've dealt with the your mother issues, and you know, the mother is in of herself, the energy of the mother and the relationship with the mother is like a relationship with the child and like a relationship with life. It is forever pulsating and growing and shifting and moving, even our own systems, even the cells in our body. And we need to show up, we need to kind of dismantle this idea of um healed. I've I've healed, and see, um, healed is actually a moving part of growing and life and living, that we never really heal anything. What we do is that we're in this constant space of tending to, because healed gives an idea that there's an end destination, that there's kind of this place that we meet and we don't have to deal with it anymore. Uh the the reality is that we have to tend to all of these things and all of these places and spaces and edges that we have come in with and also experiencing. And so it is an ongoing long-term relationship that you build with this wound and that you build with your in the relational field, with those places, spaces, events, past and present, that represent or hold that energy or that essence of what the mother is for you, that nourishing, kind of stable, all encompassing, I'm holding you no matter what, kind of energy that the mother is, you know, in our system represents or that we identify with. And I want to, you know, this this healing of the mother wound and you know, and seeing it in the relational field that reveals itself, you know, over and over again, not as I said, as a failure, but as an opportunity, because it shows up when you feel unseen, when you feel too much, when you feel not enough, when you feel overwhelmed, burnt out, stressed, when intimacy activates something in you. It's not a regression, it's not that, oh, we're back here again. It's not that you haven't healed it. It's just that it's an ongoing alive pulsation that needs tending to, just like you would wash your body every day, just like you would brush your hair, just like you would exercise or make sure you're, you know, tending to your dietary requirements. It is just another space to relationally move with and show up to. And it is always unfolding and showing aspects of ourselves and portals into understanding others' life, ourselves, past experiences, um, and even as we move forward, who we are in this time, it's quite an illuminating, really juicy, incredibly um it's painful the wound, and also it's liberating in so many ways when we turn to face and we start to build a relationship with it. And it really is in how you meet it that the work, like it's not so much the wound itself, it's in how you show up. There's so much in tending to the mother wound, in how you show up to it that tells so much of where you're at and what you're what you're dealing with at at this particular time and past. Because the energy is not in so much the wound, it's how you meet it. It's how you tend to it. It's how you tend to your own system when it's there, it's how you move with it when it's there, it's how you move in the relational field when it's there, it's where you go to within yourself when it's there. It's the presence, it's the awareness, it's the self-worth, it's the capacity, it's the embodiment. It's there that what the work is really kind of um needed. And we're often overstep. We often have the triggering of the of the wound, and then we step into the action. But it's really the moment between the triggering of the wound and the action. It's that space in between, particularly in somatic therapy, that we slow everything down. So then we don't move straight into the action. We actually get comfortable in sitting in the unknown, in sitting in the noticing, the listening, the slowing down, the presence. And when we actually get comfortable and we we build and scaffold that part, then the next step is not as important. It's it's crucial, yes, to move in a direction, but it becomes less important in how to tend to it because the tending happens in that space in between. Because you've met the wound, you've met who like what your system is telling you, and you've met the field. And then the next step will always be in congruence with that. I want to also touch on in this episode in and around how this wound affects men and relationships, because it does, men have mother wounds as well, and it does play out in relationship. Yeah, so men carry this wound too, often in ways that are less spoken about. It can look like difficulty accessing emotional depth, reliance on women for emotional regulation, disconnection from their own needs and in relationship, and also their inability to be able to really have a great and supported connection with their healthy masculine self. And this can create a dynamic where the woman can become the mother in the relationship and the men become the child. And this can lead to burnout, resentment, and disconnection. And sometimes a man can even preference his mother over his wife, and that is also too where the mother wound really comes into play because the natural flow of relationships when you have children, as a mother, if you have a son, is that the son will eventually leave the home and create his own family. And the mother's role in that is to allow that and support that to happen. And when the the son leaves the home in order to create his own family, his focus then needs to move into be that that family that he creates is his number one priority. It's not to the exclusion of looking after or caring for or having a relationship with his parents or his other, you know, his birth family. Though the preference has to be that he needs to care for the family that he's created, the children that he's created. Um, and the the mother's role in that as a mother-in-law is to move with that and support the son as the actual man of his whole household. And her relationship and his relationship need to switch and adjust to that. And often in relationships where you have a very overbearing mother-in-law and you have um, you know, a son who really kind of keeps needing his mother's validation and and can't quite stand up to her, you find that that dynamic there is a mother wound and has some death mother mother energy associated with it as well. And if you've been in this dynamic as a woman and that's been your husband to the mother-in-law, um, then there is actually really nothing in that dynamic that you can actually move with or penetrate, or or that that is really something between the son and the mother, and that's something that they need to work work on. And that's an invitation for you to focus more on your own well-being and your on your own pathway and on your own mother wound as well, because definitely that that dynamic there will absolutely trigger your own wounding. And so it really comes down to again in that relational field is showing up in these dynamics and tending to this wound, even external to you, even seeing it and identifying in other relationships. Um, and really, where do you need right now some nourishment and nurturing and following that step and bringing more presence into your system and your field? And I also want to say to um, you know, any dynamic in and around where there's there's a mother wound, even for men, that this is about understanding the pattern. It's really important that it's not about what's right or wrong, it's just having a greater insight and understanding as to why you're responding the way that you respond and why you're seeking the things that you seek. Because when we don't identify it and when we don't see it, when we turn away from it for very like lots of reasons why we do that, what we do is we continue to live inside it and we continue to cycle with it, even to our own detriment and our own children, whether it's a male or a female, uh, to our own parenting detriment, and it just ripples out into the community and it keeps this wounding very much centralized in the culture because nobody wants to talk about it, nobody wants to deal with it, nobody wants to tend to it. So if we tend to it in our own system, then we can start to tend to it in the external environment. So, somatic work, the work I do in clinic space, it just absolutely revolutionizes the mother wound. Because you can't think your way out of this wound, and it does not live in your thoughts, does not live in the cognitive space. It lives in your nervous system, in your body's expectation of what love feels like, what safety feels like, what connection uh requires for it to be safe, stable, and supported. And this is where somatic work becomes essential because it allows you to feel what is happening in real time, it supports you to stay present with activation in your system and to choose differently if you want to, from the patterning of what you've always known. Uh, and it it when we're in the body and making those active choices, the body will really move us into that state of protection and safety. And when we're using the mind, we'll draw from experience past experiences and we'll go to what we know. And so when we can move with it in the body and the inside and in the patterning inside of ourselves, then we can start to move much more consciously and start to reform new neurological pathways in how to respond when these sorts of things are triggered. I do this work in the clinic space one-on-one. I also have a really great daily nervous system practice uh bringing these this nervous system on how to work with the nervous system into the daily, into your daily life through the daily route. And I move all of my work in and around matrilineal repair and tending to the mother wound in all the spaces and places in which I work with students and uh and clients. And this isn't about fixing yourself. Like, I don't even like that term and like to fix yourself. It indicates that there's something wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with you in all the presentations and spaces and experiences that you have and bring into this moment. It's really about having all those different experiences and parts of you speaking together and find forming some kind of unified uh expression where your self, where your core self is leading and interrupting in the inheritance of the of the ancestral lineage and also of the cultural narrative that we are all marinating in and being um directed by. I mean, they got you to this point right now, and we want to move, we want to move from this point or sit in this space right now with a deep love and acceptance for who we are and what got us here. And so the the idea of fixing is you don't need fixing, you have everything available to you in this space right now. It's just about being discerning on how we use that and how we move that and how we digest that as well and process that in in order for that to be moving in a more coherent and stabilized uh and tended to way. And I want to add, like it's a little personal share from my own experience, that the mother wound for me really became apparent after 2002, after the death of my mother, and seeing so clearly after her passing, how our relationship was so ruptured and so out of balance and unhealthy by an inherited way in which she mothered and was mothered, and I could trace it back. And at the time, even at the time before her death, there was like a really deep sense of me wanting to pull back and wanting to really separate from that codependent dynamic and not really understanding back then what that was and not being able to articulate it to her. And after she died, I went on a great journey of really rediscovering and rebuilding myself and understanding that in her mothering, uh, she had done the best that she could do, and she had made decisions based on keeping herself safe and what she believed would keep her children safe. And in unpicking and understanding what had been happening in that ancestral lineage, but also too in the culture also of you know the times that I was raised, it all fed into this melting pot of that in a patriarchal, colonized, hierarchical structure of oppression and violence, that what is centralized is not life, is not children, is not mother. What is centralized is the other. What is centralized is power. What is centralized is the person that is the most powerful, the system that is the most powerful. And that does come at a cost. Uh, and in that, you know, kind of drive to be top dog and on top of that pyramid, and as a matter of survival and success and all those things that capitalism champions in our culture, is that these things like being open and being like slowing down and resting and being present with and making allowances for how our nervous systems, in meeting people where they're at, in connecting with something other than uh, you know, just success and drive and power, but connecting with those things that make that help us to feel good, that help us to feel our body and feel that connection with others, that really raw and and vulnerable state of just being who we are, mistakes and all, chaos, human, and all the complexities of that, in that really beautiful array of different streams of colour and presentation, that in this kind of drive to feel belonged in this culture, that we have to dampen down, we have to trample on, we have to subdue aspects of ourselves and aspects of community and in relationship that is ultimately causing this mother wound and causing this rift within our own system and within our communities and globally as well. And when I started to realize that after my mother's death, and I started to rebuild, and I started to see so clearly as how this wound was shaping and impacting my life and my nervous system and my health and my relationships, then I was able to tend to it uh really directly and over a longer period of time have found new ways in order to be in relationship with myself, my body, with my children, with my in my intimate relationships, uh, with the world at large, even with my work. And it's not like a quick fix, it is a slow, um, sometimes feels backward type, dynamic, where you just don't feel you're getting traction. Other times you're going like you're just blitzing it. So it's really about coming back to having that compassion for the self and building and connecting to that inner archetypal mother. And I liken that inner archetypal mother to life itself, to the great source, to the thing that we lean into in our darkest days, to what we pray to, to what we put out into the universe for intention, and then we see that come back or manifestation, if that's something that you do. It's that kind of sense of like real deep reverence and beauty in that very moment, like gratitude. It's so finite and so individual and so beautiful in that moment that we take that and we collect that, you know, around us and within us, and we start to rebuild what that mother looks like and feels like for us. And then we lean into that in which we've built within ourselves and around ourselves, and then that's the archetypal mother, that's the nourishment and the mother that we didn't have, that we longed to have growing up and ongoing. And when we can do that and build that and create that and tap into that and be resourced from that, that is tending to the mother wound. That's when the mother wound doesn't become so centralized and focused in your life. It becomes the alchemy, it becomes the exact thing that soothes the wounding that was that was already there and created throughout your life. So archetypal mother is something I work on with clients and students as well through all of my work and in the clinic space. I really appreciate you listening to this episode and and reflecting on your own journey. It's really important that we spend time in reflection and curiosity about our own presentations and how this kind of work penetrates or hits us in our field and in our body. And if this episode has stirred something within you, that's not accidental, that's recognition. And this is where the work begins. It's not in blaming your mother, it's not in blaming yourself, but in becoming conscious of what you've inherited and what you are marinating in in the culture and in the in the world right now. So you can begin to relate to it differently. So if you'd like to go deeper, you can start with a daily route. It's a simple, powerful somatic practice that's delivered to your inbox daily, and you can subscribe through www.tesoma therapy collective.com. You can listen to the next episode in this series, and we will be exploring the Death Mother archetype in relation to the mother wound and how it shapes our world and our nervous system. So keep a keep an ear out for that. And an invitation if you feel that this work really speaks to you, that you can work with me directly through the Soma Therapy Collective. Again, you can find all of that information on how to work with me and book in with me at www.the Soma Therapy Collective.com. You can also see my work uh through YouTube, on Instagram and TikTok and on Facebook as well, through Brony Montgomery and the Soma Therapy Collective. And it I want to finalise this episode in saying to you, you are not broken. You are patterned, and patterns can change. Thanks for listening.