Episode 13: The Mother Wound

In this episode we get into what the mother wound actually is — not just a difficult relationship with mom, but an emotional injury formed when our earliest and most foundational relationship could not fully meet us. We talk about why it goes so deep, how it shapes the critical voice in your head, your relationships, your self worth, and the roles you learned to play long before you were old enough to choose them.

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They can both be true at the same time. And holding both with honesty and with compassion is where all of this work begins. Welcome back to Breaking the Cycle, the podcast about unpacking your roots and rewriting your story. I'm Vivian, your host, and I'm so glad you're here. I'm not sure where you're listening from, but in the US, where I spent the majority of my life, Mother's Day has just passed. And for many of you, I'm sure listening today have difficult or complicated relationships with your mother. Today I want to dive deep into what is called the mother wound. And before we go anywhere, I really want to say here, and just like every time I talk about the mother, is this not about blaming our moms. This is not about blaming how she treated us, how we weren't treated, the lack of. This is not about blame. It is about understanding. And once you understand, you can take that full responsibility and work it yourself. I also want to mention that in society, in culture, in religion, the mother figure upholds a certain type of hierarchy. Like she is this soft, loving being. And if we didn't have that experience, we have this inner conflict, and it can create a lot of anger and resentment and a lot of pain. So I just want to put all this on the on the table here before we dive deep into it. And I also want to address another factor here: guilt. So again, that culture, religion, society makes us feel that if we say anything but positive things about our mother, we should feel guilty. Or if we set any type of boundaries, or we don't want her a part of our lives to a certain extent, then there's that guilt. But she's your mother, you came from her, she's given you life, you owe your life to her. So I'm one of those people that do not feel that way. And I have been told by a numerous amount of people when I didn't speak to my mom for 13 years, that uh just like what I just told you guys, she's your mother, you need to connect with her. And it was just making me feel angry, even resentful. Like I would defend myself when people would say that to me. And these are a lot of people are good intention people, and people also that might even have distorted relationships with their mothers. Maybe they are people who have curated their whole life around their mother. They don't even understand the concept that they have curated their whole life, in which maybe if they did something or were a certain way, that their mom would love them. So that is me just telling you guys about all the things right before I dive deep into this beautiful subject called the mother wound. So maybe you've heard the term mother wound, but you don't actually know what it means. I'm gonna break it down for you and make it real simple. It's an internalized wound that forms when the first and most important relationship of your life, the relationship with the woman who was supposed to be the first safe place, could not fully meet you, could not fully see you, could not fully attune to your specific needs. And I want to be clear about something here that I think is really important. The mother wound does not require a dramatic origin story. It doesn't require abuse or abandonment or any type of cruelty. It can form in the quietest, most ordinary of homes. It forms when a mother, however loving she was to you, however well-intentioned she was to you, could not emotionally present herself in the way that the daughter needed. Does that make sense? When she was physically there, but emotionally somewhere else, when her love was real but conditional, and who you were being, how you were behaving, whether you were making her comfortable or proud, when she needed you to be a certain way in order for her to be okay. And the daughter that was raised in that environment does what all little girls do. She adapted, she learns, she begins to understand without anyone ever saying it directly, which parts of her are welcome and which parts of her need to disappear. That learning of what parts of me okay and what parts of me I need to disappear, that gap is what is called the mother wound. It's not a single moment, it's thousands of small ones. The mother wound does not stay in childhood. It travels, it follows us into every single relationship, every room, every moment of our adult life, often in ways that you would never connect back with your mother at all. It shows up as the critical voice in your head, the one that tells you that you're either too much or that you're not enough. That voice is not originally yours. It is hers, it is your mother's. It is the internalized critical presence of a woman who cannot fully love herself and therefore could not fully see you. It shows up in the way that we receive love. It makes us feel that we have to perform to be loved, that love comes with conditions. It shows up in relationships to your own femininity, to your body, to your relationship with food, to the parts of yourself that are soft, that are vulnerable, that are openly in need because those parts were not always safe with her. And so you learn to present a version of yourself that needed nothing. How familiar are you guys with just the idea of feeling extremely independent? Like I don't need anyone. It can show up in the friendship that we have with other women, in the difficulty trusting others fully, especially women, the part of you that is always waiting to be betrayed, dismissed, or made to feel like you're not enough. Because the first woman in your life, the one that who was supposed to be this safe haven, this safe space, could not be fully safe. And the nervous system generalized that. It said, women are not always safe. Be careful. And it shows how you treat yourself in the harshness, in the criticism, the impossible standards that you've created for yourself, in the way you withhold rest, pleasure, and compassion from yourself, the same way they were withheld from you. In my work with women and in my own personal journey, I have come to understand that healing the mother wound moves through four distinct but interconnected layers. Not steps, not a checklist, layers. Because this is not linear work. There's no end goal here, there's no finish line. We're not trying to get quote unquote healed. We're trying to get honest with ourselves and then to keep growing from that honesty for the rest of our lives. I know that sounds dramatic, but if somebody says they're quote unquote healed from their mom, walk the other way. Because you are continuously finding out who you are. And the first layer of understanding how your mother shaped you is not about blaming her in any kind of way. It's about you being honest with yourself, looking clearly at yourself, perhaps for the first time, at what the relationship with her was actually like. Not the version of you that you keep on protecting, not the story you tell yourself to make yourself feel like you're okay, like you're diminishing your own experience, but the real thing, that real relationship, what it actually felt like to be her daughter, what you needed that you did not receive, what you learned about yourself through her eyes. This requires so much courage. Because if you've been telling yourself your whole entire life that you've had a good childhood, this can feel like betrayal, like you're ungrateful for your lived experience, like you're making your mom the villain of your story. But I want you to hear this. You can love your mother and still grieve what she could not give you. Those two different things are not in conflict. They're both at the same time. And holding both with honesty and compassion is where this work begins. The second layer is grief. Grieving the mother that you never had. In my opinion, this is the most important layer of this whole thing. And how do you know that you fully have grieved the mother that you never had? Because when you fully are allowing yourself to do that, you're going to go through layers of betrayal, guilt, anger, resentment. And it could take years. And then you'll finally see your mother as this broken person, and you can just fully accept her. Some people even go further and forgive her. But forgiveness is not the ultimate goal here, it's acceptance. So to go from having that mother wound, now acknowledging it, and then all of a sudden you're going to forgive her, which in my opinion is called spiritual bypassing because we're not even accepting our mother. We haven't even grieved the mother that we didn't have. We're all of a sudden going to accept it. Um sorry, for forgiveness, because that's what we've been told is the last layer of healing. Sorry, guys, that's bullshit. Acceptance. Acceptance is so important. And I think this is something that a lot of people need to acknowledge. Acceptance, acceptance, acceptance. Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a process to be moved through. It does not move through the mind alone. It moves through the body, through tears that have been held on for years, through anger that finally gets to exist, through the slow, tender acknowledgement, maybe for the first time, that you lost what was real, that what you needed was legitimate, that the little girl who wanted more from her mother was not asking for too much. She was just asking. Acceptance does not mean approval. It does not mean that what happened was okay. It means you stop spending your life energy fighting a reality that can't be changed and begin redirecting that energy toward the life that still is possible, the one that is waiting for you on the other side of grief. And I'm not talking about a different relationship with your mother. I'm talking about a different relationship with yourself. That third layer is reclaiming your authentic self because the mother wound at its core is a wound to the authentic self. It is the wound of having learned very early that who you actually are is not welcome, that you needed to edit yourself, perform, manage yourself in order to stay connected to your mother, the woman that you needed most. And so part of you disappeared, the part that felt like you were too much, the part that wanted things that she could not give, the part that was angry or sad or joyful in ways that made her uncomfortable. That part was simply yourself. Reclaiming your authentic self is not a grand dramatic moment. It's not a single breakthrough or a sudden transformation. It is a series of small, quiet, profoundly courageous acts of coming back to yourself. The moment you make a choice based on what you actually want rather than what you think that will make everyone else feel comfortable, the moment you let yourself be seen, really seen by someone else safe enough to hold it. The fourth layer is rebuilding self-trust and emotional safety. Because one of the most lasting legacies of the mother wound is the erosion of trust in yourself, in your own perceptions, in your own emotional experiences, and trusting other people. When the person was supposed to reflect you back accurately, could not do that, when her version of you was distorted by her own wounds, her own needs, her own unexamined history, you begin to doubt your own inner knowing. You learn to override your feelings, to second guess your own instincts, to defer to others' perception of reality instead of your own, because your earliest experiences taught you that your own inner world was not a reliable guide. Rebuilding self-trust means learning slowly with an enormous amount of patience and compassion to trust yourself again, to trust your feelings as valid information rather than inconsistent noise, to trust your body's signals, to trust your own perception of what is happening in your relationships, your life, and your inner world. And emotional safety means creating internally first and then externally the conditions where all of you is welcome, where you don't have to edit or perform, where the parts of you that were never safe with her can finally have the space to breathe. This doesn't happen overnight, and it is never finished. I already told you guys about that. Because we are human beings, we are always growing, always evolving, always meeting new layers of ourselves that we have not seen yet. If you are someone who likes to check things off, who is waiting for the moment when the work is done and you can finally move on, I want to gently offer you a different frame. The goal is not to be healed, the goal is to be more fully yourself, more honest, more present, more compassionate toward the parts of you that are still finding their way, more willing to keep growing, even when growing is uncomfortable. Before I close, I want to say one more thing because I think it matters enormously for this compassionate piece of work that we just did. Your mother had a mother wound too. Whatever she could not give you, the attunement, the emotional presence, the unconditional welcome of all of who you were, she almost certainly did not receive that either. She was shaped by her mother, who was shaped by her mother back through generations and generations and generations of women who fully could not be themselves to their own mother. This is the cycle. This is what we are breaking. Not by becoming perfect, not by having it all figured out, but by being willing to look, to feel, to grieve, to reclaim, to trust ourselves a little more than the generations before us. You are not just healing yourselves. Every time you choose honesty over performance, every time you let yourself be seen, every time you extend yourself to the compassion your mother couldn't, you are breaking something that has been passing through your family for longer than you can trace it. That is now small. That is everything. The mother wound is one of the deepest wounds a woman can carry. And it is one of the least spoken about because it lives in a gap between what love looks like and what love felt like, in the space between a mother who tried and a daughter who needed more. If you have been carrying this in your body, in your inner critic, in your relationships, in the way you move through the world, I want you to know that you are not alone. And I want you to know that this wound, as deep as it is, is not the final word on who you are. It is the beginning of the most important journey you will ever take back to yourself. Before I let you go, I want to ask you two questions. Question number one What part of yourself did you learn to hide in order to stay connected to your mother? Maybe you were too excited, you had too much energy, so you tried to suppress some of your energy because it made your mother uncomfortable. Maybe your temper, your anger made your mother uncomfortable. Maybe your tears made your mother uncomfortable. She would say things to you. What part of yourself did you hide to stay connected to her? Question number two. What parts of you came online in order to stay connected to your mother? So maybe you've been a good girl, maybe you were a performer, you were the achiever. What parts came online in order to stay connected to your mother? And both of these questions are things that don't stay in childhood. Again, they are things that come with us into adulthood. And no matter how old you are, you can be 70 years old and still be disconnected from certain parts of yourself, still be totally unaware of how this mother wound has played a part. So there you go. I hope that this episode brought you some insight. Thank you so much again for listening. And if you made it this far, a double thank you. If you found this episode helpful, I would love for you to leave me a five star review because it helps me, it encourages me to make more episodes and it helps the algorithm see this podcast. So thank you again and see you on the next episode.