The Mother Wound: 9 Signs You’re Experiencing It (& How to Heal)

I want you to take a moment and think about the kind of relationship you have with your mother.

What does it look like? How does it feel? Do your thoughts drift to the good times, or do they dwell on the bad times?

Our mothers were pivotal players in our development as children, and they formed the very foundation of our emotional and psychological growth.

To this very day, our mothers continue to influence us both through our deeply ingrained perceptions of life and through our feelings towards ourselves and other people.

But although our mothers may have tried their very best to nurture us, our relationships with them may have been laced with undercurrents of shame, guilt, and obligation.

In fact, we may continue to carry unresolved grief, fear, disappointment, and resentment towards our mothers long into our adult lives.

This deep pain is usually the result of unhealed core wounds that are passed on from generation to generation.

If you possess the Mother Wound, it is vital that you learn how to treat, repair, and reconcile those broken parts within you that still yearn for your mother’s love.

Healing the Mother Wound within you has the potential to transform your life and improve your relationships tenfold. And today we’ll explore how to do that.

What is the Mother Wound?

I have always had a very strained relationship with my mum. As a child, I remember the great fear and reverence I felt towards her; fear because she was the primary disciplinarian in the fundamentalist religious household, and reverence because she was so self-sacrificing.

As an artist, she was (and still is) extremely skilled in watercolor and oil paintings, yet she was never able to actualize her dream of becoming a professionally paid artist despite how brilliant she was and still is.

These dreams further dimmed as she kept giving birth to children, and eventually, it became a rare occurrence for her to pick up a pencil or paintbrush.

I could always sense this lurking disappointment and resentment bottled up within her because of these lost dreams.

As I got older, the admiration and affection that I held towards my mother became tainted with anger and sadness.

Although she was extremely generous with her time and effort, dedicating her time exclusively to raising me and my siblings, her emotional coldness was distressing to me. Growing up, she made it very clear that my role was to obey and conform to her, the all-knowing parent. There was no equal middle ground on which we could meet.

The only time when I ever felt loved was when I did everything she wanted me to do and fit the role of the “good Christian girl,” like a perfect little daughter.

These days, I don’t speak with my mother directly except via text message. She made it very clear to me that leaving the Christian faith and allowing myself to love someone outside the faith (Mateo) is a severe betrayal.

By leaving the faith and “living in sin,” I have effectively excommunicated myself from their religion and, ultimately, her daily life.

As you can see, the Mother Wound occurs when we have a fractured, distorted, or broken bond with our mother figure. This is a trauma that can be passed down from generation to generation and has a profound impact on our lives.

When left unresolved, we pass on the wounds that our mothers and grandmothers before us failed to heal. These wounds consist of toxic and oppressive beliefs, ideals, perceptions, and choices.

Finally, our children repeat the cycle, harming their own children and their children’s children with centuries of unresolved pain. (Please note here that our fathers carry their own wounds, but in this article, I want to focus on our mothers specifically.)

9 Signs of the Mother Wound

If you suffer from the Mother Wound, you’ll likely experience the following problems:

1. Feeling insecure around women in general.
2. Sabotaging yourself when you experience happiness or success.
3. Possessing weak boundaries and an inability to say “no.”
4. Self-blaming and low self-esteem that manifests itself as the core belief: “There is something wrong with me.”
5. Co-dependency in relationships.
6. Minimizing yourself to be likable and accepted (aka, people-pleasing).
7. The inability to speak up authentically and express your emotions fully.
8. Sacrificing your dreams and desires for other people unnecessarily.
9. Waiting for your mother’s validation on an unconscious level to fill the emotional hole within you.

Mother Wounds are developed at a young age and are bound by the belief that “I was responsible for my mother’s pain,” and “I can make my mother happy if I’m a good girl/boy.”

The truth is that we weren’t and still aren’t responsible for our mother’s pain – only she is. We also can’t make our mothers happy unless they truly decide to be happy.

Yet, unfortunately, as children, we were not aware of this, and on a subconscious level, many of us still believe that we are the culprits of our mothers’ angst.

Where Does the Mother Wound Come From?

Women have lived under patriarchal rule for centuries. Religion and society, in particular, have been instrumental in perpetuating the myths that women should:

1. Stay at home and give up their ambitions as child-bearers.
2. Be the primary caretakers of the household.
3. Constantly serve others and their needs, while giving up their own.
4. Hold it all together 100% of the time because that’s what “good mothers” do.
5. Utterly deplete themselves in order to support their families and raise children.

As a result of these intense and super-human standards, women abandon their dreams, lock away their desires, and smother their needs in favor of meeting the cultural ideal of what motherhood “should” be.

This pressure is suffocating for most women, breeding rage, depression, and anxiety, which is then passed on to their children through subtle – or even aggressive – forms of emotional abandonment and manipulation (such as shame, guilt, and obligation).

This forms the Mother Wound.

But it is important that we understand how much our mothers have gone through in the face of these oppressive ideals and expectations. It is vital that we realize that no mother can be perfect, no matter how hard they try, and use this knowledge to cultivate forgiveness.

Finally, it’s important that we learn to humanize our mothers in a society that strips them of their humanity. No mother can act in a loving way 100% of the time. The sooner we embrace this reality, the better.

Healing the Mother Wound – 3 Steps

Many women these days speak about embracing the divine feminine, which sounds nice in theory, but without confronting and healing the Mother Wound, this is nothing but another fuzzy ideal and form of spiritual bypassing.

As a woman who carries a very deep Mother Wound, I have experienced just how lonely and saddening it can be to feel the emotional and psychological absence of your mother.

Although I still have space to improve, I want to share with you three tips that will help you on your healing path:

1. Learn to separate the human from the archetype

We briefly explored the archetypal mother above: that of the selfless, giving, completely nurturing woman who diminishes her own needs in favor of her children’s needs.

In reality, mothers are human beings with flaws and issues. The more we expect them to live up to society’s expectations of the “perfect woman,” the more we deprive them of their humanity.

You may like to ask yourself, “What damaging beliefs and expectations do I have about my mother that cause me pain?”

Common beliefs and expectations include, for instance, “my mother should always be emotionally available,” “my mother should be my best friend,” “my mother should never get angry at me,” and so forth.

2. Give up the dream that your mother will be who you want her to be someday

Stop waiting around to receive the love, support, and validation of your mother. Remember that you can never change who she is, nor do you have the right to – that is her responsibility.

As you slowly learn to relinquish your hope that she will be everything you ever wanted her to be, you can allow yourself to grieve her absence.

Experiencing grief is a vital part of the healing process, and in my experience, it can last for years. But allow it to happen. It is ultimately good for you. Journaling, art therapy, and physical catharsis are powerful ways of processing this grief.

3. Find your inner source of unconditional love

While you may not have received unconditional love from your mother, you can find it within yourself.

A huge part of my own healing process has been learning how to re-parent my inner child.

Learning how to love myself has revealed to me a deep well of endless love that supports, cherishes, and wants the very best for me at the core of my Self. This very same source of love is within you as well.

As you slowly dissolve the limiting beliefs and perceptions you have about yourself and the world, you will find it easy to transform your desire for outer support to inner acceptance.

The Final Product …

Healing the Mother Wound within you will transform your life. You will be able to set better boundaries, establish healthier relationships, take care of your needs better, develop empathy for others, trust life more, and feel more comfortable in your skin.

Share with me below: if you were to heal the Mother Wound, what would transform in your life? Also, if you have any wisdom to share with those suffering from this wound, please comment below. You never know who you may help!