Emotionally Absent, Cold Mothers
Mothers Who Have Not Done Their Inner-Work, Use and Hurt Their Children. Speaking the Unspeakable for Healing and Restoration.
Cold and Emotionally Absent Mother Syndrome
A pervasive Inner Critic is running through the minds of most humans. The inner critic is not something we were born with; it is the internalized voice of caregivers or other authority figures in our lives during our formative years. When we experience emotional abuse as children, we grow into adulthood carrying all the cruelty we faced at the hands of those who were meant to encourage and love us, with these hurtful voices still echoing inside our thoughts and bodies.
This is why meditating, taking psychedelics, doing breathwork, or doing yoga—without addressing the deeper root causes of our anxiety and depression—will only provide temporary relief. True healing requires us to venture all the way to the roots of our heartbreak.
Our parents were often abused by their own parents. As I reflect on my experiences with my mother, I want to express great compassion for her and the wounds she endured. She was not given the fertile soil needed to grow into the beautiful soul that lies beneath her Survival Strategies and Constructed Personality.
While I feel compassion for her, evading the truth of my experience and staying silent about it would only perpetuate this ancestral trauma through me. Patriarchy feeds and thrives off of secrecy, silence, and lies. Many of us are conditioned early on not to speak our truth, to stuff down our real feelings and experiences; this conditioning serves the perpetuation and continuation of domination culture. I do not write to blame and shame my mother or mothers in general but to end this cycle of silence with me.
Child abuse has persisted for thousands of years within the framework of Patriarchy. Under patriarchy, the family system has often been one of domination. The family is frequently expressing the dynamics of a cult. Riane Eisler refers to this as The Domination Family—a structure characterized by shame, humiliation, punishment, and the repression of our full humanity and emotional depth.
Mothers have an immense impact on their sons, and often, it is men's unconscious wounding from their mothers in childhood that connects to their emotional exploitation of women, the objectification of women’s bodies, and the outright disrespect and disregard they have for the feminine in their adult lives. However, in this essay, I will speak to the mother-daughter dynamic.
There has often been a particular strain of control and domination between mothers and daughters. Mothers frequently criticize and manage their daughters, sometimes overtly and at other times covertly, teaching them to conform to the expectations of patriarchal consciousness. Unless the Mother-Daughter Wound is addressed directly, digested, and grieved, mothers will pass on patterns of power-over rather than power-with to their daughters. This ensures that the daughter does not surpass her mother and remains compliant with patriarchal systems, if not globally, at least, interpersonally.
By globally, I mean a woman can break from Patriarchy by shifting her life into more earth-based consciousness, womb wisdom, permaculture, herbalism, Indigenous traditions, creativity, art, poetry, and music. However, without addressing her direct wounds with her Mother and Father, her interpersonal relations can still maintain layers and patterns of coercion, manipulation, people-pleasing, domination, and shame.
I will share part of my own story and the relational dynamics between my mother and me to illustrate the Internalized Inner Critic and the archetypal patterning and tendency of women to try to Re-Mother friends, family, and community. This relational setup is based more on taking than on loving.
Unconsciously, if we are trying to re-mother another person to fill the gap of nurture, care, or love from their childhood, we attempt to shape that person into the love we never had so that we can finally receive the love we longed for when we were little. The truth is this approach doesn’t work. No person can ever fill the wounds of our childhood. Our experiences must be grieved on their own terms, not fixed or filled by others.
No one can take away the reality of what happened to you. When you take your experiences seriously and allow yourself to feel all your survival strategies and relational habits tied to them, the truth and light of your own soul will flourish. You will no longer evade or avoid your direct experience with life and the truth of how it has shaped you, allowing access to the you beneath the trauma.
Not only this, but I fundamentally believe that most women do not thrive when our energy and time are spent being emotional caregivers and re-mothering men, family, or friends in our lives. And in fact, this prevents those people from having to own up and do their own inner work or face the consequences of their decision not to.
I share this to highlight why so many women struggle with eating disorders, body image issues, obsessive spending on anti-aging products, and codependent relationships with men.
Recently, I was out to dinner with a friend at Safta in Denver, an Israeli restaurant. Nearly all the women I saw over the age of fifty had plastered and frozen faces because of Botox and other plastic surgeries done to try to appear younger. As a thirty-six-year-old woman, I thought, Is this really what I must look forward to? Aging in fear and denying the realities of the life-death-life cycle? Is this all older women have to offer me—- their desire to be my age? It’s sickening and quite sad.
To dive deep into this is another essay in itself, but the point is, if we do not tend to our mother wounds, we will remain psychologically adolescent or as hurt children for the rest of our lives. This will prevent us from growing old as women in our beauty and full power. Rather than being ourselves, we will continue to hide behind masks, and facades and feel the pressure to remain Maidens when we are, in fact, Mothers or Crones.
When our unique patterns with our mothers are seen clearly, felt, and processed, we women can reclaim our Power and Sovereignty.
I was my Mother’s wisdom keeper, her emotional support, but she also called me stupid, clumsy, and blind, and told me I had zero capacity to pay attention to details.
This led me to a place with women in my friendships, and sometimes in client relationships, where I let women utilize my emotional care, nurture, support, and wisdom while at the same time was put down, not seen, or had my intelligence in other areas of my life outright ignored or demeaned. I also became the full-on emotional caregiver, with many of my other human capacities, longings, dreams and talents laid dormant and unattended.
Because my mother was emotionally traumatized, rather than doing her own work to heal, she handed me over to the men in my family to carry the emotional weight, secrets, and intelligence. And yet, she resented and hated me for it at the same time because they were “closer” to me than to her.
This led me to develop a strategy with men, romantically and in friendships, where I continually played the role of a caring, emotionally attuned woman. I re-mothered men and tuned into what they wanted from me rather than what I wanted or needed to feel respected by them. This led to an incredible amount of chronic fatigue, PMS, endometriosis, depression, anxiety, financial instability, and abusive romantic relationships.
My Mother controlled everything I did and criticized me for anything that was not done in her way or to her standards. For example, she would demean me for not folding my clothing correctly in my dresser drawers in my bedroom, throw everything out of the drawers and my closet, and tell me to try again.
This led me to a strategy of being terrified of using my hands to touch. This impacted my capacity to clean, cook, garden, adapt to hard skills in outdoor wilderness therapy, art and crafts, and learn to play guitar. Anything that utilized my hands became something I feared rather than enjoyed. In the past, I would drop glasses, break cups, and spill things constantly because I did not believe I was able to be present with what I was doing. When in fact, it was difficult to utilize my hands because they froze, because I was not allowed to express my rage and anger for being so poorly treated.
My mother made negative comments about my body, my clothing choices and my relationship to food. She often looked at me in disdain, whether for dressing too promiscuously, or for the little belly fat I carried around my waste for most of my life due to having a short torso and very long legs. She consistently told me that my clothing style was eccentric, and my style for decoration or beauty gross or distasteful.
This created a relational strategy with myself where I constantly checked my body for fat lines, my face for wrinkles, woke up in the mornings to feel my belly and sides to make sure I could feel my hip bones to prove to myself that I was still thin, binged and purged, starved myself, over exercised and obsessed about what kinds of food I put in my body constantly, while also feeling shame and anxiety for eating food at all.
All of this external invalidation, set me up to incessantly criticize, demean, lambast, chastise myself. I had no Sense of Self, because I was mostly raised being mirrored with what was wrong with me, or what I was not doing right.
The internal voice of self-hatred in me, was the internalized voice of my Mother.
Therefore, more than bulimia nervosa, anorexia, anxiety, depression, or any of the other mental health struggles I severely struggled with in my early adulthood, the more correct language is that I struggled with Cold and Emotionally Absent Mother Syndrome, or as Bethany Webster speaks to, the Mother Wound. And this impacted my finances, my romantic relationships, my friendships, my capacity to create and my career.
Journaling prompts:
How did your Mother relate to your body, appearance, clothing, and relationship to food?
What was/is your Mother’s relationship to food, nourishment and herself in general?
How did your Mother relate to the men in your family? What did she teach you about women’s roles in men’s lives?
What unconscious agreements did your Mother make with you to serve her lack of self-esteem or self-love?
If you are a man, what was your relationship with your mother like? How did she treat you? What did you notice about her relationship with herself, other women, and your father?
I know. This is heavy stuff. Take your time with it. I am sending you a prayer of healing. May you reclaim your beauty, soul, power, sovereignty, and desires.
You have caused me to reflect on my relationship with my Mother and with Her Mother as well. They were very GOOD to me, always there. They pushed me in Jack's direction: I do not live for what the world thinks of me, but for what I think of myself.
Jack London
Tara Rae, I was immediately drawn to this profound "Mother" piece of yours – as it had my experience scrawled all over it! About ten years back I was (finally) led through some remarkable breakthrough work to, as you say, venture all the way to the roots of my heartbreak. Trite but true: there is no other way to get to the other side but straight through.
I clung to the belief – no, the trust! – that enduring the hell I choose to be pulled into, confronting the trauma and processing it, would finally free me from the agonizing emotions that had haunted me daily – crippling anxiety, excruciating shame and self-doubt, explosive anger and a cold, brutalizing depression. And it did! My soul led me to a new life, dare I say a born-again life.
Today, in teaching my emotional release work (I mean what else would I do following that incredible metamorphosis!), I do include psychedelics as a tool. But as you suggest, it's hardly the be-all and end-all that some might believe it to be. Rather, it's one piece of a broader framework that facilitates burrowing deep to those roots of heartbreak.
As I read your personal account regarding you and your mother, you spoke in past tense of struggling. I trust this means you've moved past much (most?) of the limiting patterns that once imprisoned you. I'm sending you so much love. Thank you for sharing.