Mother Heartbreak

Unhealed Wounds and Their Echoes in Female Friendships

To the degree you’ve liberated yourself is the degree to which you can hold the space to liberate another.

Differentiation is costly. 
Individuation requires death. 
Disillusionment requires things, people, places, and roles to be shed, die, compost, decay, or vanish. 

If you want to be a butterfly, you have to begin as a caterpillar and then find your way into the primordial cocoon of transformation, where your old self falls apart, decays, rots, and dies over time. 

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Photo by Evie S.

A couple of summers ago, I attended a wedding, surrounded by a bridesmaid party of women mostly in their twenties and thirties, chatting excitedly as hair, makeup, and nails were done for the big day. 

One young woman said, “I’ve been friends with my girlfriends since high school.”

Another chimed in, “That’s so healthy! People who can’t maintain friendships for long periods clearly are unwell.”

I listened with wide eyes and a grin, reflecting on how many friends I’ve lost or grown apart from over the past fifteen years. My friendship fallouts began when I started to learn about codependency in depth during graduate school. Prior to this, it was rare for me to lose a friend.

The disintegration of relationships often signals budding individuation and sovereignty, especially for those of us who grew up in abusive households and had to construct identities that did not align with our authentic selves. While the ultimate goal may be to maintain deep, abiding relationships, many of us must first navigate the loss of communities and people before finding a true home with others. 

As the bridal party continued to chat, I found myself gazing at the ceiling, thinking, "I’m the unwell one in your eyes." If this conversation happened again now, I would voice my feelings and thoughts in response to what was said with a smile, differentiating myself from what was said.  

I had already been contending with the fact that  I didn't belong in this group of women because I wasn't interested in the popular topics, like the movie Barbie or the obsessive following of Taylor Swift, which seemed to dominate the conversation. Back then, I shut down due to this disconnection; now, I would stand tall, allowing myself to be authentic while letting others be themselves as well.

Previously, I struggled to express my true self, particularly with people whose values diverged from my own. As I heal from the heartbreak of my childhood and release negative beliefs like “I am bad,” “I am damaged goods,”  “I am not enough,” or “Something must be wrong with me,” I’m able to accept others for who they are on their healing journeys while also embracing my own path. This does not mean I seek emotional intimacy with just anyone; I am very selective about whom I allow into my inner circle the more and more I reclaim my true nature and Sovereignty.

A few weeks ago, while brushing my teeth, I thought, I have one more spiral of inner work to do around my mother's wound. Two things came to mind: Ayahuasca and Google. 

I picked up my phone and typed “Healing the Mother Wound” into Google’s search box. A blog by Bethany Webster appeared, and I knew this was it. Her insights affirmed my inner hunches about my relationships with women and how aspects of my mother wound had affected many of the friendships I’ve made and lost over the past fifteen years.

It surprises me that in the field of psychotherapy, there is such a lack of robust knowledge surrounding mother and father wounds. While some of us professionals focus on developmental trauma, family systems theory, and relational dynamics, much of psychotherapy tends to emphasize tools, techniques, chemical imbalances, diagnoses, and nervous system regulation, often neglecting a thorough language for interpersonal healing.

Thankfully, Bethany, after 25 years of in-depth therapy with the same therapist, writes prolifically about the mother-daughter relationship—a crucial dynamic to explore if we want women to cease competing, hurting, and conforming to unrealistic expectations in their relationships with one another.

The extent to which we have dealt with, honored, and witnessed the ways our mothers have harmed us directly influences our ability to discern whom to form deep, abiding friendships with and how to create emotionally enriching dynamics rather than conflictual or draining ones. We may not desire close connections with hundreds of women; instead, it is likely that we will find fulfillment in a select few meaningful relationships.

Even if we recognize what our mothers did to us, if we have not fully processed the sorrow associated with those experiences, the patterns we developed to survive their lovelessness will remain intact. We may find ourselves constrained by old agreements, contracts, and survival strategies shaped in our earliest years.

After years of navigating the complexities of female relationships, I’ve come to realize this: when our mother wound has not been fully grieved, it profoundly shapes how we connect with other women. 

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The Impact of the Mother Wound on Female Friendships

1. Unconscious Recruitment: When we haven't dealt with our Mother Wound, we may unconsciously recruit girlfriends to fill the emotional voids in our lives. We might try to rehabilitate or heal our friends, hoping they will finally provide the love we lacked from our mothers. This dynamic stems from an egoic drive; it isn’t genuine love for our friends but rather a desire for them to fulfill what we didn't receive as children.

2. Difficulty in Differentiation: As we strive to differentiate ourselves from these relationships, we find that if our friends are not evolving and healing alongside us, they struggle to see us as the unique individuals we are. Women who seek enmeshment often do not respect our need for differentiation, and they will often leave the relationship at the first sign of us being truly ourselves. 

3. Lack of Self-Identity: Many of us were not nurtured in ways that allowed us to develop a solid sense of self. This lack of mirroring often means that when we encounter a woman who seems self-assured and confident, we may attempt to imitate her rather than discovering our own interests and identity. Beneath this imitation, we will hold immense aggression toward her because she is in her beauty, and we are staying small. Because of our lack of sense of self, we may also find ourselves saying yes to things in the friendship that we actually do not want to be doing/experiencing. 

4. Settling for Unfulfilling Relationships: Consequently, we may find ourselves in relationships with women we don’t genuinely like or wish to connect with, all to maintain the facade of being kind, sweet, or good. It’s essential to recognize that our worthiness and beauty are not contingent on how many enduring friendships we maintain.

5. Internalized Rejection: When a friend ends a relationship, ghosts us, or avoids confrontation, it’s easy to take this as a personal affront—leading us to question our value. This internalized rejection triggers feelings of inadequacy and reinforces the notion that we are unworthy of lasting connection. This simply isn’t true. 

6. Triangulation: We will need to talk about the conflict of interpersonal dynamics in our female friendships or romantic partnerships with other girlfriends, which is a form of triangulation. Triangulation is learned in childhood. When our caregivers do not teach us how to have healthy, direct, and loving conflict, we will avoid it and try to work out our struggles with a person outside of the relationship. (I did this one a lot, to my great dismay. I have much regret for ever speaking about another woman or partner and I’s difficulties without them present, this is a immature way to treat people). Therapy is a great place to work out dynamics with others when they are not present, this is not a healthy thing to do as a normal way to relate in a friendship or to a romantic partner. 

7. Draining Emotional Caregiving: As women, we are often conditioned to be emotional caregivers, allowing girlfriends to emotionally process with us to an extent that drains our life force. Additionally, we may settle for relationships where we feel used to fill the emotional vacancies of others, a pattern developed from being poorly treated in our early years.

8. Ego and Imitation: Moreover, we might allow other women to imitate us because it feeds our ego, but this can result in significant resentment. No human being, in their authentic nature, wants another person to be like them. True intimacy thrives between unique, individuated humans.