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.
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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.
Today, we’ll explore how to do that.
Before we begin, if you need more support on this journey, I explore this topic much more deeply in my Healing the Mother Wound Journal:
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Here’s a description of the journal:
Is your mother the source of some of your deepest rage, grief, and shame?
Do you have a broken, strained, or nonexistent relationship with her?
The mother wound is one of the deepest, most traumatic, and haunting sources of pain we can carry in life.
But how do we heal it and move on from this wounding?
Through the power of gentle but fierce reparenting, the Healing the Mother Wound Journal can help you to befriend your inner child, give yourself the love you’ve always wanted, and release the burden of emotional pain.
Features of this journal include:
- 40+ journaling prompts and activities exploring the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of healing the mother wound
- Lush images with quotes
- Healing mantras
- Oracle/tarot card spreads
- Book recommendations
- Gender-inclusive
- Printer-friendly (low ink usage) PDF version
- 100% editable format PDF version
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Table of contents
What is the Mother Wound?
I have always had a complicated 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.
While I may be wrong, 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. Growing up, she made it very clear that my role was to obey and conform to her, the all-knowing parent, and the faith. There was no equal middle ground on which we could meet.
The only time when I ever felt valued and worthy was when I did everything she wanted me to do and fit the role of the “good Christian girl.”
These days, I don’t speak with my mother directly except via text message. While my heart has softened towards her through the years, and I appreciate all she did for me growing up, she made it very clear to me that leaving the Christian faith and allowing myself to love someone outside the faith (Mateo) equals 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:
- Feeling insecure around women in general.
- Sabotaging yourself when you experience happiness or success.
- Possessing weak boundaries and an inability to say “no.”
- Self-blaming and low self-esteem that manifests itself as the core belief: “There is something wrong with me.”
- Co-dependency in relationships.
- Minimizing yourself to be likable and accepted (aka, people-pleasing).
- The inability to speak up authentically and express your emotions fully.
- Sacrificing your dreams and desires for other people unnecessarily.
- 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.
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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:
- Stay at home and give up their ambitions as child-bearers.
- Be the primary caretakers of the household.
- Constantly serve others and their needs, while giving up their own.
- Hold it all together 100% of the time because that’s what “good mothers” do.
- 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.
Remember, if you need help on your path, would like to go deeper than what this article has offered, and get access to 40+ psychospiritual journaling prompts, integration tarot spreads for healing the mother wound, and more, see my Healing the Mother Wound Journal!
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!
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How so I regain the confidence in myself after falling rock bottom? I am drained. I am suffering from this mother syndrome. I always wanted a loving mother but thought she wasn’t always there for me. And I am autistic so I have suffered a lot in my life because of this.
I’m so sorry to hear this, Josh. Definitely start with the advice in this article. Basic self-care is the best place to begin if self-love is too difficult right now.
Some recommended phrases/terms to google online if you want to search something related to this topic. (PS: Switch mother to father here when looking things up, if this applies more to your father or also to your father, which is even worse.) 1. Signs of abusive mother 2. Abusive mother books 3. Abusive mother quotes 4. Abusive mother stories 5. Abusive mother in psychology 6. Abuse worksheets 7. Toxic relationships journal prompts 8. Abuse journal prompts 9. Childhood trauma journal prompts 10. Abusive mother movies 11. Abusive mother self-help 12. Abusive mother poetry 13. Abusive mother songs 14. Abusive mother and daughters 15. Abusive mother and sons 16. Abuse workbook 17. Abuse self-help books 18. Abusive mother stories 19. Mother wounds 20. Mother issues
Im 51. I had a very complicated relationship with my mom. I felt totally loved as a child, but once I became an adult and had a daughter of my own, mom got really weird. She was very hard on me and did not allow me to feel anything. If I cried,,”it was stop crying, it solves nothing”. Problems I had She diminished, yet she would be so comforting to other people with the same issues. She lived with me and it was so stressful. My mom became terminally ill in February 2022 and I jumped at the chance to care for her. She would tell me how great I was doing at taking care of her in one breath; then insult me in the next. She passed away in August and I am experiencing a sadness that I never knew was possible. I’m also really confused with my feelings. I miss her, but I don’t at the same time.
I’m actually undergoing a situation with my mom, I searched for this matter once again after an argument I had with her. I’m 20, and I still live with her, as far as I know I got to understand that if we don’t heal our mother’s wound it will haunt us forever, through other people appearing to show us the same our mother did, and through many self-sabotaging ways that would lead us to where we need to heal.
Recently I realized this through my boyfriend’s grandmother, for some reason they both live together, and I visit him there, his grandmother is great, but I realized she doesn’t really care that much about me, I started to see similarities with my mother, and i guess she doesn’t treat me the same cause just as my mother she needs to keep appearances so she wont go tell me all she thinks as my mother does, this had made me want to spend less and less time with her, which was difficult since she’s my boyfriend grandma and they live together after all, with that i mean i often wanted to go there to have some air, not be around my mother that much and at the beginning it was great but now i realized his grandma just keep some appearances with me, and just some, and its like i go from my home to another house for the day to have the same kind of environment but with a different person, and i dont want to move on from this house to then in the future find it again unresolved.
my mom is a narssicistic, very negative, wants to control me as much as she can and she thinks that as a parent she is better than me knows better than me and is better than me in all ways, reason as to why she always feels with the right to take decisions for me, to tell me how to live my life, or what i must do with it, when she gets mad she would stop talking to me or my family for days, wouldn’t eat, and such.
I have to say that first, i love her with all my heart, she’s the one i have spent more of my life with, and as much as i love her i realized i cant stay with her any longer, she has to heal and change and only if she decides to know i understand that, i have been suggesting for her to go to psicologist, so she can go under therapy, she has had some trauma from all her life unresolved and that has affected all her life, she had treaten me, my sister and my dad poorly, doesn’t even tolerate not having the tv on at all times just not to feel alone with her mind, and always wants to be right.
I’m on a spiritual journey, as this page says I’m doing shadow work, im doing anything possible to positively improve my life. And one of the things i realized is that i cant grow more if i keep living in and environment like this. Althought she is lovely and she is really not a bad person she has too many issues unresolved, turning out in all those traits i mentioned about, i have looked around for so many answers and I’m not sure what to do anymore, i want to live on my own, but im not sure if going zero contact would be something good after all i still love her.
I understand she is not perfect, i have been doing my best for being understanding, but i have found myself several times, in desperation begging her on my knees to stop to please stop that she is hurting me, my sister and my dad a lot, then she would get moved and say she was sorry for being a bad mom and such words,but after some time would go back to the same. It’s hard, since i want to heal but she keepd on hurtin me again and again, today she told me to go out with her and my sister, i told her first that i didnt really want to go since i was busy, she insisted and i realized i could then do something outside that was a must, but then after she got mad she told me to stay, and i feel hurt since, my sister has now a job and was paid yesterday, they went out without me to buy stuff, to eat outside to have some nice time outside and she decided on that after telling me to stay. It hurts being treated this way, it hurts that whenever i feel sick or im in pain she goes all dramatic and crazy and even gets mad at me for that, even when the one in pain is ME and makes it more difficult for me. She tells me i will regret it after she dies, and its like its an understandament we are going to die one day, but its been years since she started using that excuse to manipulate me, i cant live everyday sick worried about doing her every command just in case she is not here tomorrow, or i cant let her treat me like garbage just because she might not be here tomorrow. I have been there before too, i have tried my best to make her happy, to make her proud, to make her feel special but now i realized its not my duty and never was, it was never my resposanbilitie to make her feel loved, when she has so much self hatred inside, it was never my duty to make her feel supported when she never supported herself, it was not my fault she went throught all that pain. it is not my fault she feels sick for no taking care of herself during so many years, its not my fault.
I have to say something for all of you, i hope this might reach whoever needs to be reached, but one of the things that has hurt me the most was she telling me i was too young for anything, ever since i have memory, that destroyed my self steem and so many things in my life, cause she would make sure in all ways, through her words and action to let me know i wasnt enough and that i was too young that i was too naive that i was insufficient and such, now im 20, and i see how she supports tennis players on tv that are on their 17, i see how she talks to me about artists (i’m an aspiring illustrator) that are 14 and are already super professionals at art and she showing it to myself with that emotion and excitement for them. I didnt matter i was the best of my class, i didnt matter how well i behaved, i didnt matter i graduated cumlaude at school, it didnt matter all the gifts i gave to her, i didnt matter any of that, any of the effort didnt matter not matter how hard i tried she would always look for something to be mad about, to be upset about, to make me guilty about, or to make me feel worthless, and then in normal days when eating lunch she would say “i dont undertand why your sister and you have so low self-steem and so many issues into making friends, i was never like that!” ha! isn’t that funny?
my sister is 27, and still at home, still to naive, even more than me, if you ever read on it you will know how in a house with a narcissitic parent there would be the golden child and the scape goat, well most of the time i was the scape goat, the black sheep, and unreveled child, isn’t it too easy to just say that im just a tennager even if im 20 and tennagers are like this to bury how many things she has been doing wrong? you know the past is on the past i can take care of it but why does she keep on doing the same after saying she was sorry for making us like this?
I make the exercise to forgive her everyday, but then she screams at me, she always ask what am i doing, which i go for no answer most of the time or to just vaguely say “nothing” to get her off my back, cause i have been there before, trying to be close to her, thinking it was great, feeling so much love for her, doing all this things for her to then feel how she stabs me on the back, like telling something of me to my dad that he didnt have to know or such things, or worse getting mad at me and pointing at me with those same things i confided with her.
Honestly thinking about it i have done so many things in order to make things better but to not avail. I even thought recently if i made a lot of money and sent her travelling maybe things would be better but now i doubt it. I’m just so tired, even with what i said at the beginning of this, my mom and my boyfriend’s grandma when they would talk they would often agree on how misbehavied my boyfriend and i are or such stuff, like they would be like right ! they are nutheads! what would they do without us!
Is like she got some reinfforcement with someone just like her to be like “see? i told you, i was right, you are wrong im always right and she says im right so im 1000% right about how you dont know nothing and wouldnt be anything without me!” she would say things that literally mean this and her body language, the way she says it, makes me undertand that she feels triumphant about it.
For her it’s a battle of the ego, for me i just wanted to have a better relationship with her, i dont want to be right i just want all this cronic pain to stop i just want to smile and be happy with her
when i was younger i though it was normal to have this kind of problems, until i realized that other kids didnt have the same kind of problems at all. Until i realized that even tho having some complications or problems at home was normal, it was not ok to feel scared of her, to have to hide my whole life from her, and to even have to tell my friends to be careful of how they would behave or what they would say when around her, cause then she would be all mad at me for what they did or did not, it made me even feel responsible for how they behaved.
Things are better now, but it makes me mad that she still uses the excuse of me being the daughter and me being younger to cancel all logical argument, agreetment, point of view and such that i can give.
If any of you have any kind of enlighment for me to find a solution that can better fit my situation, or if this was helpful for you to realize what hurts you and need to heal or just to know that you are not alone please let me know.
I am looking forward to meeting my Shadow Self. Thank you for the possibility of taking better care of myself with the knowledge I will be reviewing.
My mother has always been the head of the household. As is the norm in many Latino households.
My mother tended to favor her children who were athletic, charming, charismatic, and musical. I was compared to my siblings and failed daily to live up to her expectations.
I was never too musically inclined, I couldn’t play guitar or keep beat with drums. I wasn’t athletic, sports were always a struggle for me. Growing up, I went through phases of obesity followed by depression followed by bulimic tendencies.
I could never perform for my mother. Not on or off the field. I was too fat for years. I became so skinny but still untalented and unathletic. This left a void for me in my life. Our relationship soured even more after I came out.
Today, I have Major Depressive disorder, Generalized Anxiety disorder, and PTSD complex. I’m working on this now, I’ve lived years choosing to see her every day, to forgive her everyday. But it gets so hard sometimes, especially when she triggers responses, and doesn’t understand why I get so frustrated and angry when she prioritizes her other children and her grandchildren over me. I hope one day I can fully forgive her, and we can have a mother-son relationship.
I was in rock bottoms basement last February. This spiral had started and stopped over the past several years. I knew I couldn’t go on and I had to figure this out. It actually started when I saw myself as a child, tears streaming down my face, emotions of worthlessness, sorrow, and fear. I started with that. I went to therapy, she just listened to me ramble and said very little. I walked on my job of 3+ years after waking up at 2 am and a internal voice said, “what are you staying for, get out before they damage you.” Walked into work that morning and handed in everything and walked out. Then starting asking why whenever I felt uncomfortable. My marriage was failing and I had stopped being a mom to my son. That sad little girl kept nudging me. It was long and brutal but the last 2 weeks all the dots started connecting. Yesterday I was exhausted, during a nap had a dream. Basically, I was dragging myself around by my ponytail and every time the one being dragged tried to say something the one dragging knocked her out. At the end, I finally got free and was going to join my people. When a woman, sorrowful, warm, loving, stepped in, grabbed my hands, looking me up and down said “Lilith where have you been?” Spotted my new wrist tattoo while rubbing it said, “oh baby it’s so dark.” I started to try and explain it to her and she said “I know baby, I now. Don’t worry your home.” I woke up confused but filled with love and wanting to try. I had never heard of shadow work or healing your inner child. I did this through initiation. The dream was so vivid and I couldn’t let it go so I googled and landed on shadow work and healing your inner child. Today I can recount the dream in vivid detail and still have that feeling regarding the mother figure and finally feel free. Thought I would share
I have been having the hardest time of my life . My whole world shattered and I’ve been relearning everything . I couldn’t understand what was happening or how to tell others til today when I real about awakening and it brought me to shadow work which I’m finding very interesting as I’ve been through a lot of other extensive ways of trying to irradiate it instead of work with it . The mother wound is a big one and I’m hoping to find true healing & freedom through identifying and working with it . I have been cutting people out of my life permanently at a fast rate who are unhelpful to my process which now realize is called a spiritual awakening or ascension.
I hope you’re feeling a little better since you wrote that comment Grace – spiritual awakenings can feel devastating, but they are such a beautiful and profound opportunity to find your true path in life. Sending lots of love ♡
I was adopted at birth, in the 70’s, when the only kind of adoptions were closed adoptions. I think that creates a mother-wound of a different kind? My own mother (the one who raised me) was often stressed, and she did expect to be respected, but she was also loving, and willing to teach things, and warm, and I don’t feel like I’ve been deeply wounded by her, I just know that she isn’t the person that gave birth to me, and that wasn’t really a subject that was open for discussion. It’s just how are family was. So of course there’s a huge hole where the “other mother” (as it’s so perfectly worded in Coraline) is. And that hole is a wound that is difficult to fill, let alone stitch closed so it can heal, but I’m working on it.
Hi Julie, I hear you. And yes, being adopted and not knowing your birth mother is absolutely a mother wound. I hope this article has inspired you with methods to handle this wound moving forward. Lots of love ❤
YES this is me. I never felt I was allowed my emotions, and also felt responsible for her bad moods. She was controlling and cold and also hysterical.