Confronting the Mother Wound
The aftermath of having an emotionally immature mother is codependency & enmeshment.
The Mother Wound
Being motherless is haunting. Existentially, to be without a mother creates immense feelings of loneliness, shame, fear and grief.
You may have a physical Mother. However, if she is soulless, or emotionally immature, the imprints she left on your little psyche will last a lifetime if you do not consciously begin to surface the ways her emotional immaturity harmed you.
Surviving childhood without an emotionally available, loving, attuned mother comes at a high cost. Rather than you living into adulthood as a sovereign individual, you may experience the following:
Unidentifiable and unspeakable terror, horror & hypervigilance.
Enmeshment in your relationships.
Enmeshment: enmeshment refers to a dynamic that happens in relationships where personal boundaries are unclear or permeable. This leads to a loss of autonomy, sovereignty and the capacity to feel oneself as a unique individual.
3.Codependency in your relationships.
Codependency: codependency is a dysfunctional relational dynamic where one person takes on the role of “giver” at the expense of their own needs, limits, boundaries, and desires. The other person takes on the role of “taker.” Often archetypally, a person oriented towards codependency will attract another with an orientation of narcissism. However, some relationships consist of two individuals taking turns being one another’s “giver” and “taker.” Within codependent dynamics, it is impossible for both individuals to be authentically themselves. Instead, they are merely playing a script. In some cases, the intimacy of love, which comes from two individuals being themselves in a relationship, is too vulnerable or terrifying for both individuals and so rather than moving into sovereignty and intimacy, they will stay stuck in the roles of “giver” and “taker.”
Here are some examples that will indicate to you if you have mother wounding:
If you were left to cry on your own or were shamed for being angry, sad, or afraid.
If your mother received confidence in herself through your accolades.
If you were shamed for needing to rest, kept chronically busy, or forced to participate in activities you did not want to do.
If you were recruited to fill her own wounds by coming to you and asking you to be her emotional support.
If you were humiliated, shamed, punished for being angry, and told that you are a bad girl/boy for feeling hatred or rage.
If you were called stupid and shamed for spilling cups, breaking plates, or any other form of harmless accident as you were developing.
If you were called ugly, lazy, stupid, obnoxious, overly sensitive, dramatic, etc.
If your mother gave you to your father to experience his wrath, punishment, shame, or any other form of abuse (rather than protecting you from him or leaving him altogether).
You may still be enmeshed or in a codependent dynamic with your mother in your unconscious or conscious life if you are:
You are holding yourself back from living an emancipated, sovereign, thriving life.
If you are more worried about her needs than yours.
If you feel like you cannot separate from the relationship for fear that if you do, she will physically die.
A chronic feeling that you did something wrong or are bad.
Immense feelings of helplessness and despair.
Noticing that as soon as you are about to pursue something in your life that would be good for you, you become filled with terror and guilt that you must have done something wrong. (This may be an unconscious agreement you made when you were little: you are not “allowed” to surpass her in any domain. The unconscious agreement may be that you are here to serve her purposes, not the purposes of your own soul— enmeshment & codependency).
If you feel more compassion for what she went through, than what she did to you.
Notice yourself running from love, intimacy and real connection, or sabotaging it when it’s close.
Being compliant, sweet, nice and docile when internally you feel angry or frustrated.
The aftermath of the mother wound
Our mother wounds go deep; they swim in the core of our bones. The extent to which we have made them conscious and dealt with them is the extent to which we will be able to live sovereign, emancipated lives.
When we have undigested mother wounds, we tend to project her onto others. We recruit others to replay the roles, stories, and dynamics of our past. If the other person does not have a strong sense of self, they will likely play into the script with you. They will temporarily, in your presence, take on the qualities or behaviors of your mother.
These projections are a form of narcissistic behavior. We become unable to see the other as truly other. We reduce others into small versions of our own making to play our scripts. We only see others through the lens of our mother’s wounds and our desires/wants to re-enact them or attempt to heal them. If we are in a conscious relationship of some sort with a therapist, trusted friend, or colleague, we can work through the projection by consciously speaking to the transference and counter-transference dynamic at play.
No other person can ever be the mother we never had. This is a vacancy that has to be contented with on its own terms in the light of love within our souls, and the presence of others who are at least a little more differentiated and sovereign in themselves than we are—- so that they do not fall into our projections.
Sometimes, others are truly mean, cruel, dismissive, or emotionally abusive. They aren’t the projections of our parents; that’s what they are actually up to! The more we’ve digested our earlier wounds, the more precise our capacity to feel through what is projection and what is not. Our discernment in relationships will sharpen. We will know with greater acuity who we want in our lives, and who we do not.
The sorrow and heartbreak of not having an emotionally healthy relationship with our mother will last a lifetime. Even if we have a healthier relationship with her in the present, much of our psyche is formed in the first seven years of life, so whatever happened to our little ones back then still matters, even if things between us and her seem better now.
Some of us must cut contact with our mothers in adulthood because the dynamics are still at play. Each of our journeys will look different in how much contact we have with the people who hurt us when we were powerless and vulnerable.
The good news is that the patterns and habits of relating to ourselves and others through codependency, enmeshment, people-pleasing, projection, and terror do not need to last a lifetime. We can live a life of freedom despite being motherless or fatherless. It’s quite incredible how resilient our hearts are.
You are enough.
You are worthy.
You belong.
Stay tuned, the next post will be about the father wound.