Healing the Mother Wound

Allow me to let you in on a few secrets about healing the mother wound.

First, if you had a complicated relationship with your mother, I want you to understand this:

There’s no ‘good’ or ‘evil’ parent in therapy. There is no good or bad parenting.

We only have:

• Traumatized vs Healed parents

• Conscious vs unconscious parenting styles

If you look keenly in your family tree, you will notice that the trauma did not start with your mother or father.

This means they didn’t just wake up one day and decide they will unleash hellish levels of pain on their children. Like you, they are just victims of someone else’s unconscious parenting.

Most spend their lifetimes reacting to their own trauma and acting on the whims of their subconscious minds, which hurts a lot of people in the process. But they are not even being consciously malicious.

What is Healing?

In therapy, you do not even need to drag anyone into a session with you.

For example, last year I went through an 18-day process of healing the inner child, it was me and the therapist. It involved the use of abstract concepts aimed at me ‘mothering myself’

As in, being the mother I would have wished the hurt little girl in me had.

The second part of the process, which I worked through in April, was breaking the co-dependency.

See, I had internalized that to earn love and approval from my primary caregivers, I needed to be successful, strong, and to be parenting my siblings in one way or another.

So, I needed to shift my source of validation from my family to myself. I needed to become my own source of validation.

Once I started stopped seeking validation from my family, I started seeing how much time and resources I had lost.

I started seeing how I had transferred this co-dependent pattern into my romantic relationships because I was always an enabler to man-child partners.

As in, I gravitated towards men who needed mothering because that’s how I understood love.

After identifying this subconscious program and rewriting it, it stopped bothering me when people called me selfish or uncooperative. I stopped jumping at the first call and disrupting my entire life to follow my caregiver’s subconscious whims.

• I stopped getting coerced into attending jobs and interviews I didn’t want to be part of.

• I stood my ground about becoming a writer and told everyone off.

• I stopped hopping onto co-dependent projects like paying rent for a sibling that had gotten their house locked. Yes, I’d receive the call and be told people are contributing, but I’d respectfully decline participating.

• I started demanding 50/50 bills contribution from any sibling that lives with me and is old enough to earn their money.

Did it go down well?

No-once you tell a co-dependent person to split bills they suddenly ‘realize’ you’re very toxic. But you know what? This is the best gift you can give them because now they will organize their lives and go settle down alone, where no one makes toxic money demands. So-breaking co-dependency helps everyone grow and individuate.

Does the unhealed parent understand your healing?

Again No.

They understand it as they are-not as you would like them to. Most think your boundaries mean you hate them or you’re being disrespectful.

But you can neither fix nor change them. Your work is doing what helps you live a healthy, interdependent and integrated life.