Episode 14: The Death Mother Archetype: The Hidden Pattern Behind Shame, Freeze & Self Abandonment

What if the voice inside your head that tells you to stay small, over perform, disconnect, or abandon yourself… isn’t actually yours?

Episode 14 of The Unfuckwithable Woman goes deep into the Death Mother Archetype and the hidden nervous system patterns shaping relationships, shame, perfectionism, emotional shutdown, people pleasing, burnout and survival mode. 

In this episode, Briony Montgomery explores how inherited relational wounds become internalised in the body and why so many people live disconnected from themselves without understanding why.

This conversation explores:

• mother wounds and attachment trauma
• freeze, shutdown and nervous system survival states
• the inner critic and self abandonment
• perfectionism, emotional disconnection and shame
• matrilineal repair and inherited trauma
• how oppressive systems shape disconnection from self and body
• somatic therapy and returning to the body

This episode is not about blame.
It is about awareness, healing and breaking unconscious patterns.

If you’ve ever felt emotionally numb, stuck in survival mode, hypervigilant in relationships, or unable to fully rest, this episode will help you understand what may be happening underneath the surface.

Listen now and explore deeper support through 1:1 sessions, The Daily Root and somatic healing pathways at:
The SomaTherapy Collective

Join The Unfuckwithable Community

If this episode resonated with you, don’t leave the conversation here.

Subscribe to The Unfuckwithable Woman on YouTube for grounded conversations on somatic therapy, nervous system healing, matrilineal repair, trauma healing and embodied living.

- Subscribe on YouTube
- Share this episode with someone who needs it
- Leave a review to help this work reach more people

For daily nervous system support, grounding reflections and small consistent practices that bring you back to your body, subscribe to The Daily Root 🌳🤎

Subscribe to The Daily Root

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

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Welcome back to the Unfuckwithable Woman. This is a space where we move beyond surface level healing and into the deeper pattern shaping your body, your relationships, and the world you're living in. I'm Briney from the Soma Therapy Collective, and in this series, we're unpacking the layers of what lies underneath your experiences. In the last episode, we spoke about the mother wound, how it's inherited, relational, and lives in your nervous system. And today we're going deeper. Because to truly understand the mother wound, we have to be willing to look at something that can feel uncomfortable. The Death Mother archetype, which was first coined by Marion Woodman. So there are parts of the human experience that we don't want to look at, parts that feel confronting, shame-filled, or too close to home. And so instead of understanding them, we avoid them. But what we don't understand is we unconsciously repeat them. You might recognize this pattern in subtle ways, that harsh voice in your head, the pressure to get everything right, the way you tighten when things feel out of control, the moments you withdraw love from yourself or others. This is not just personal. This is archetypal. And it has been shaped by the systems that we are living inside. So let's talk about the death mother archetype. The death mother is not a person, she is a pattern. And you can also get a death father. So we can kind of the death mother is what was coined by Marianne Woodman, and the death parent is absolutely valid because it encompasses both the father and the mother. This archetype emerges when care becomes conditional, when control replaces connection, and when survival overrides love. So Marian Woodman spoke about the archetypal death mother as a mother that has a child, and this is kind of a summarization. This is not in her words. Um that the child is born out of service to service the mother. And so the child represents this kind of meeting the mother and serving the mother in the ways the mother needs to feel validated within. And that can be in a dynamic where culturally the mother is expected to have a child or relationally, or she's forced to have a child. It can also be culturally as well through abuse. And the death mother can be also identified through the lineage as well as in family dynamics with a mother who has addiction issues, who is neglectful, who is abusive, or who has been abused, or has lived in a dynamic where there has been those complexities, or there's like a preference over with husband or with other family members, or even with work, over the need of the child. And the child grows in this dynamic, feeling that they need to change and shift and shape themselves to meet the mother and for them to get the mother's love and acceptance and also to feel safe as well. It becomes like a survival, a survival instinct within the child. And the child to meet the mother where the mother's at, instead of in a healthy dynamic, the mother adjusts and meets the child where they're at. The child adjusts themselves and shapes themselves into meet the mother, and in that as the child grows and seeks validation through external resources and external people and external experiences to fulfill a deep longing of belonging and love within themselves, that they kind of exile parts of themselves to shape themselves into be of service to the mother. And in the exiling of these places and spaces within themselves, then they adapt and adopt this kind of inner critic. And they they adopt this death mother voice inside their own systems that they grow with, that rears up when that individual is going to try something new or something that they haven't done before, or something that goes completely against the grain of what they've been raised in, or the mother has cultured them in, or even the culture has cultured them in. And that voice comes up as like a protective factor in this sense of like fueling fear and this sense of uh feeling unsafe if they step out of line or start to create or do things that is not prescripted or been told for them to do. Um, the Death Mother is quite a controlling, and you can see her in the mythology of Medusa, like her stare is icy, and her stare turned you to stone. So in the nervous system, it's like this freeze nervous system response, and you freeze in it to kind of make yourself smaller or not visible to the mother, so you can feel safe and feel like you're not going to be annihilated in a lot of ways. Death mother is is inherited, and the mother's role in this, I think it's really important to share that the mother's role, spoken about through Dr. uh Clarissa Pancola Esther's uh work with warming the stone child, and you can see some similarities in in that body of work as well, is that the mother's role is to hold the flame of the child. As the child grows, the mother tends to this internal kind of life force of the child, that creative part, that unique part, all of those different parts of the child that make that child who they are. And within, as that mother holds that space in a really healthy dynamic and holds that flame, when the child comes of age, the mother gives the flame back to the child. So this is a healthy sequence of what would happen in a dynamic where the mother and child are in this healthy uh equilibrium and really secure attached space. And the death mother in that whole imaging is what I see. The death mother goes to extinguish the flame within the child for her own purposes and needs because she cannot meet the child's needs or cannot meet the child where it's at, because potentially, and most often she has had a death mother as well, or she has things in her life at the current time that is preventing her from actually feeling safe and secure in order to hold that flame of the child, to then pass it to the child when they come of age for them to tend to themselves. So when we navigate death mother energy, we're actually navigating, identifying this archetype in the system and all the patterns, and then we're identifying how we can actually start to locate that internal flame, stoke that internal flame and get that kind of firing again. So the death mother is also shaped through capitalism, colonialism, hierarchical systems that prioritize production over relationship and where worth becomes something that you have to earn, where safety depends on how well you perform, where love is given or withdrawn based on behavior. And this doesn't just exist out there, it lives in our homes, in our relationships, in our bodies. You can see the death mother in shame and control, harshness, emotional unpredictability, perfectionism, the inability to tolerate mess, emotion or vulnerability. The death mother is not stable, she is not nourishing, she is reactive, fearful, and often deeply overwhelmed. And when we have not been supported to understand this pattern, we then internalize it as we grow in this environment. I'd like you to sit now and just kind of have a moment to reflect on where you can see the influence of the deaf mother in your own life. It could be a personal relationship, something that's directly related to you, or it could be some a relationship that you can see outside of yourself that you that that has a place in your life that you have witnessed, like a friendship or or a family member or something distant from you, or even in kind of the culture or or um or something you witnessed in your day-to-day. Um, and start to recognize that pattern. Um, see if you can see it like in that parent-child. Is there a moment or an experience that you've seen or had where there has been this sense of control, overriding, connection? And the death mother can be in snippets as well. It can be that we go in and out as well, particularly if we've been impacted or had a relationship with the death mother archetype. We can actually move in and out of this archetype. In its very nature, an archetype is an energy. We can move in and out of these archetypes and we can use them in order to understand our own psyche a little more deeply and understand other humans and relationship and connection and our connection to each other and the world. And as you're remembering or kind of reflecting on a moment where you may have seen this death mother energy, I just like for you just to bring an awareness to what you're noticing in your body as you are recalling or remembering this memory. And we're just noticing right now, because it's really important as we move with death mother that we become much more connected with our nervous system and our body, and we start to notice patterns in and around the death mother so we know what our patterns are in order to respond and repattern. So the death mother shows up uh in every day, though not always looking extreme. Often she is subtle and she looks like the pressure to be perfect, the inability to rest, the need to control outcomes, the fear of being seen as too much or not enough. And she's often masked. So she could look like a woman or a mother that has got everything together, and she puts on a front on the outside to the world, and yet at home behind closed doors, there can be a very different reality unfolding. So she shows up in parenting as controlling behavior instead of relating, reactivity instead of regulation, fear-based responses instead of connection, and she can also show up in with in parenting as a need to kind of like perfect the outside dynamic or the appearance of the family. This is not always the case, but in my own story and my own experience, the the women in my uh mother line would absolutely look incredibly put together and beautiful to into the outside world. They were admired and adored, and and behind closed doors, they were dealing with some pretty horrific abuse and horrific experiences that really negated or really did not support secure attachment with their children, with other people. It had them in a state of survival, and they had to, in that survival state, they had to pull everything that they could together through every possible resource because again, a death mother as well, she needs to survive too. And often in the middle of these of these archetypes is this little child who hasn't had modeling or a measurement of understanding what secure attachment, connection, nourishment, vulnerability, and stability and healthy relationships can look like or feel like. So when we deal with uh death mother, we move with death mother, we we bring compassion to this archetype, compassion to ourselves, compassion to these experiences and those who are living in this reality and showing up in this way as well. That's not to negate your experiences or the pain that you may feel after having been impacted by a death mother, but it just shows a little bit more of a wider picture as to why these this archetype is formed and how it impacts and how it moves. So in the parenting field, it can really look like that woman, that mother, really um being a perfectionist and really being like a martyr and doing everything that she possibly can to hold together the image and illusion that her family is functioning when behind closed doors it's not. And there could be a huge amount of factors in that that could come from not even her own doing. It could be coming from so many other factors outside of her control. And she is coping the best way that she can at that time. And that's not to say that doesn't shift and change, and that's also not to say that there's not death mother, um, there's not women who engage with this archetype that don't have capacity to change and that they are like this because this is what nature has made them like. This is how they have come as well. So it's not to say that that negates or excuses these uh mothers for their behaviour, but there's so many other variable factors in this that we can't just kind of classify it in one way, in one slipstream, in one presentation. We've got to take on and assess the whole picture and um and really bring a very unbiased lens to um to the table. So Death Mother shows up in relationships as withholding love, emotional volatility, testing, controlling, or withdrawing, and she shows up in the body, as I've mentioned, as freeze. So she will be frozen in her state or shut down, like completely, lights are on no one's home. She can also be in a fight state, too. And the person that is confronted with the Medusa type energy of the deaf mother is in shutdown and freeze. They can't move, they're like petrified, uh, as if they're going to move at the going to be annihilated. And the feeling of being uh stuck, numb, disconnected going through life without fully feeling it, a hollowed sense of being like a functional free state of what I what I liken it to. And I want to say that this is not laziness. This is a nervous system response. It's not failure. This is a nervous system that has learnt it is not safe to feel. It is not safe when someone is looking at me in a way that makes me feel fear. It is not safe when I hear someone's voice raise. It's not safe if I see behaviors that remind me of what happened to me as a child. It is not safe for me if I see a particular presentation of a woman that is behaving in a particular way towards me or towards others or towards her children. And I just like want to get the hell out of there because it's too much for my system. My system all of a sudden is triggered into a pattern of behavior that I do not feel safe. And so a lot of people live in this functional free state, in this kind of frozen space, particularly if they've um had a trauma or many traumas, and particularly because the culture is the way it's structured, where there's a lot of constant um pressure and pushing against boundaries and not respecting your need for how safety looks like for you and what your nervous system needs and what your body needs to feel safe, secure, and nourished and securely attached. And when you have these constant systems of oppression and violence constantly telling you and gaslighting you not to feel the way you feel, or that your experience was not like that, then you also go into that shutdown and free state because that is also part of Death Mother. Remembering that Death Mother takes up all the space around her and all the space within you in your connection with her. Like there is no room for you to have differing feelings, thoughts, experiences than hers. You adopt and adapt to her experiences as a way of survival, the same as you adopt and you adapt to the cultural experiences as though they're your own as well. So again, just want to bring in a time that you can just a moment that you can just stop, do some breathing, just slow your breath right down, and feel your sit bones where this where they're connecting to the the surface beneath you. And even bringing some awareness to the feet and where that's connecting to a surface beneath you as well. If you're feeling a little disjointed still or disconnected, and you're feeling it uh much more difficult to move into your body and feel where that support is on your sit bones and your feet, then I invite you to put one hand on top of one arm and the other on the other arm and just hug. Just hug yourself. Just feel that holding. Feel the structure of your arms, feel the pressure of the arms crossing on your chest, and just hold that space for a moment. My body innately goes to rocking when I'm feeling that I'm needing some extra scaffolding and support, my body naturally rocks. You might find movement helpful too. I really invite you just to be with your body right now. And as you're finding some grounding and presence in the body, just think back to a time where you felt stuck or disconnected. You don't need to look anything deep here, it can just be that you were driving to work and and you got in your car at home and then you're at work and then you don't know how you got there. Or it could be that you had your coffee this morning and you finished it before you even felt like you tasted it. It could also be that you time with somebody and you didn't hear a word they said or you didn't hear everything they said to you. You had to ask them to repeat it, or you were a little bit embarrassed to ask them to repeat it and tried to maintain connection, and that was really hard for you. So just remembering some of those times and that you Miss something in your day that was really important to somebody else. I know as a mother that happens to me often. And if and once you've identified what that moment is or what those moments are, I wonder if you can move into a space where you can feel like what that disconnection felt like in your body. So it could feel like a vacancy or or like a hovering above the ground or like um a shutdown, like that you just like your whole system just kind of had a veil go over the top of it, or that you left your body. I just want you to notice what that freeze felt like in your body at that time. And with no judgment at all, I just want you just to notice that in that moment of disconnection and um being out of your body and and not connected to that moment or that that situation, how this impacted you, how this impacted your relationship, how this impacted your parenting. Now we are living in a time where this archetype is amplified, through systems at reward, over overworked, all overworked, got disconnection to self, to each other, to the globe, to what's happening in the in the global in the global climate right now, self-abandonment, external validation. We're really taught to produce instead of relate, to perform instead of feel control over ourselves and over the direction of our life, or even over our health and well-being. There's no cultivation of trusting in the self and community and each other. There's a real reliance and a tr and a misplaced trust in systems, hierarchical systems and cultured systems that are actually built on oppression and violence and actually are being shown, particularly at this time, in quite just like shocking, disturbing, and deeply abusive ways. And that trusting in that the system that we thought had our best interests at heart has been fractured. So in this, it this creates a culture where we are disconnected from our bodies, we're disconnected from each other, we're disconnected from the earth, and we're disconnected from what actually sustains life. We we live in this state of isolation, segregation, and disconnection, which is actually making us on every possible level quite dis eased and quite ill. And where we're needing more, we're needing to outsource more things through the medical and pharmaceutical and mental health issues are on the rise. We've got physical health issues on the rise, we've got worried about resources, and we've got a warming earth for whatever reason that you believe that that is happening. We have worries about food and supply, and we have war that is not necessary in these times. And that sense of uh disembodiment or disempowerment because so many places and spaces and structures and organizations are shutting down and limiting freedom of speech and our and our voices as a unified force in the world. And so that erodes our sense of self, that erodes our sense of community, that erodes our sense of connection and that trust. Uh, especially when that trust has been annihilated from the systems that we thought that was there to protect us. We now are in a space where that has been severed and fractured. And now we need to rebuild trust and we need to rebuild connection with other things that is more stable and secure. So, in a lot of ways, what we're seeing right now in the world is death mother has been revealed, the veil has lifted, and this archetype is very prevalent right now. And as I said, like it doesn't necessarily have to be a woman, it can also be a death father, it can be a deaf parent. So you can transpose and move. A death father can look a little different, but you can actually move that onto the male figureheads and the role models and the leaders of the world right now. And you can see definitely that there's this death mother, mother wound energy that's running and annihilating life that is starting to wake up and say, hey, this doesn't feel good. This this is not okay. I I want individual expression and my body feels like this and my health is like this. So I'm needing these different ways in order to manage that and to meet that. And this works, and you're telling me that I need to do it this way. And so there's a great huge trans transformation that is happening across the planet right now for everybody. It's really important that when we understand Death Mother, it's not about the blame and the shame, which is often associated with Death Mother, because Death Mother really does talk in shameful and moves in the body through shameful ways. It's really about bringing awareness so that we can begin to choose something different. And shame lives in the shadows. The only place shame does not live in is when we bring things out in the open and we can communicate and we can foster and we can really bring compassion to those things that we have kept in the shadows for a long time. So there is a misconception in healing spaces that we should only focus on love and light, softness, but if we only cultivate one side, we become ungrounded. Like, how do you know that if you're only worshiping or focusing on love and light and softness, how do you know it's love, light, and softness if you do not have a counter? If you do not know or understand or tend to the shadow, tend to the difficult, sticky, the hardness of life, how do you know that you are focusing and playing in that space of love, light, and softness if you do not cultivate or have an understanding of the spectrum with the shadow on the other side? And in that, when we when we can when we have this spectrum, when we understand and we tend into all these different parts of ourselves and life, that is what it is to become fully embodied as a parent, as a partner, as a human. So we must understand the full spectrum of who we are, of life, of how we live, of connection, of each other, of humanity. And that is fundamental to include shadow. The death mother is not something to reject, she is something to understand and integrate. Because if we don't, she becomes the inner critic, the harsh voice, the pattern we repeat unconsciously. But when we begin to meet this part with awareness, something shifts. We find a middle point, a place of integrity, choice, conscious responses where we are no longer swinging between extremes. And we often see this like lights up here, darks down here. And I had a really great just an interaction briefly with someone in the community just recently, where they were sharing that when things are going okay for them, they push, they go down into the dark and or they they rock the equilibrium. I get it, I do the same thing as well. I did that much in my much younger years. Absolutely. The the highs and the lows, and I and I tried to find balance in this. And higher I went, the lower with the lows. And what I realize with working with Death Mother and tending to the mother wound and my nervous system and understanding the patterns of my nervous system is that life doesn't need to be like this. It only needs to be like this, like up and down, just up and down, up and down. I mean, of course, you're going to have extreme fluctuations in that, but like just you want a little peek and then you want to go down to the shadow, a little light down. And you want sometimes you're in the in the light more than you're in the shadow, but you really want to have an integration of all aspects of the self, all parts of the self, all of these archetypes. You want to be having a working dialogue, a working relationship, a secure attachment to all of these different places and spaces where you, your core self, your centered self, is leading all of these places and spaces and making decisions. Not that the death mother archetype is making decisions for you. She's there. You're working with her, and certainly her opinion and her ways come into the mix, but you are essentially yourself is leading it, not the death mother, not these other parts of ourselves, not the mother wound. So the triggering and the system, you slow it down with somatic work, you slow it down to widen that part between the event or the trigger and the response. And what you want to be doing is playing in that space as I've spoken before and widening that space in between, in presence, sitting with before you actually take the next step. So just spend a moment right now and just kind of have a little think, uh a little reflect on is there been a moment in your life that you have caught yourself before reacting or responding? And how that awareness in that place, in that in that time, changed your response. It's like um when you're feeling like really angry, and the advice of, you know, get it down on paper, everything you're feeling, or you want to send that email because you're so mad about a situation and you're wanting to send that email and you've got all everything down, you're ready to hit send, just wait. Just wait. Just put it in your drafts, have a sleep on it, give it a couple of days, come back to it and refine it. Often in those, in those spaces and places where we're having a reaction, we're often not coming from the most self-led space. And sometimes we are, like sometimes it's valid and it's appropriate to respond like that at that time. So where as you move with Death Mother and understanding all these parts of the self and the spectrum of who you are, then you can start to discern whether it's one of these moments that you're acting from yourself and your centered self, and you're moving into the space and the action is appropriate, or whether or not you can just actually just hold back a little bit and just sit for a moment in that space in between before you respond. And it's also great to even like recognize too in your nervous system what the middle of that, what the middle feels like in your body. Sometimes frustrating, excruciating, like, come on, let's move this. It feels like there's no ground or legs underneath it. And that's an invitation, then how can I find ground in this space? Like, how can I feel grounded, supported, and anchored in order just to take a breather right now, just to be in the middle space right now. So, how somatic works with um working with a death mother is that the antidote to this archetype is not perfection, it is presence, it is returning to the body because the body is where connection lives, capacity builds, and safety is restored. Through somatic therapy work, we begin to come out of freeze and feel again, reconnect to life, and this is where vitality returns. This is the work we do on the inside in order to sit with and tend to the death mother archetype. And if you'd like to work with this archetype, the daily root is my small, consistent daily practices that I email that bring you back into body, that remind you of your nervous system and how to tend to it. I also work with death mother archetype in one-on-one sessions in the clinic space for deep nervous system repair and to tend to the mother wound and give you some real practical ways of how we can actually show up in our system, in our day-to-day, to tend to this archetype and wounding, as well as patterning your nervous system so uh we can spend some more time at widening the middle space, so then we can repattern. And all the work I do is has a foundational root in matrilineal repair, shadow, relational healing, mother wound work, and it's not surface work, it is life-changing work. If this episode felt confronting, that's okay, because often truth is. And if something in you recognize this, that's where your power is. Not in avoiding it, but in understanding it and choosing differently. If you're ready to go deeper, start with a daily route, listen to the next episode in the series, or work with me through the Soma Therapy Collective. You can find all that information at www.the Soma Therapy Collective.com. You can find me on on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and please share. Share, rate, share this episode with somebody that you feel would really benefit from understanding and starting to have conversations in and around the Deaf Mother archetype. Because this work is not about becoming perfect, it's about becoming conscious. Until next time, thanks so much.