How to Mother Yourself (Self-Healing For Wounded Souls)

Loneliness. Emptiness. Anxiety. The insatiable craving for unconditional love. 

A painfully haunting truth I keep coming across on the healing path of inner work is that so much of our suffering as adults comes from the wounded child within us.

If you experienced a neglectful, abandoning, or otherwise abusive upbringing, chances are that you have a mother or father wound – perhaps both. In this article, I’ll be exclusively covering the mother wound, as the mother is our first home and connection to the world.

Critics of the notion of childhood trauma argue that “blaming your parents for your struggles as an adult is ridiculous.” 

But this isn’t about blame. It’s not about shaming our parents. It’s about understanding the truth of what happened and doing something proactive to help ourselves heal, grow, and thrive. Denial just keeps us stuck in old patterns.

If you’re like me, and you’ve suffered a mother wound that has had a debilitating impact on your adulthood, I want to shine a light in the darkness. 

I’m not doing this as a teacher or guru, but as a fellow traveler and friend on the inner path of soul reclamation. It is our right to live from our Whole selves. Re-mothering ourselves is one of the most powerful ways of doing that (for men, women, and non-binary folks).

In the words of the Adult Children of Alcoholics/Dysfunctional Families World Service Organization in their Loving Parent Guidebook,

“Becoming our own loving parent is at the core of healing from a dysfunctional childhood and the gateway to the gifts of the child within.”

How the ‘Death Mother’ Wounds Us 

The death or devouring mother is an archetype that was first spoken about in psychological literature by psychiatrist Carl Jung, and was later developed by Jungian analyst Marion Woodman.

This frankly disturbing and creepy idea is something we often see in fiction – movies like Coraline (2009), Hereditary (2018), Carrie (1976), and characters in books like Miss Havisham from Great Expectations and Mrs. Lisbon from The Virgin Suicides.

As the shadow side of the warm and loving archetype of the Great Mother, the Death Mother is the aspect of our external and internalized mother energy that is:

• Cold
• Rejecting
• Perfectionistic
• Punitive and controlling
• Rage-filled and abusive
• Hates expressions of joy, play, or creativity
• Wants you to stay small and stuck in one role
• Smothers, suffocates, and tries to control you

There are many other signs of the Death Mother – and your own mother may have exhibited some or many of these signs. I’m simply including the most common symptoms here, so if you don’t find a characteristic listed, it’s still a real and relevant part of this topic.

Death Mother = Ice Queen

Essentially, the Death Mother is the archetype of the “ice queen” – the Medusa monster whose gaze turns you into stone. The one who doesn’t truly see, understand, or love you for who you are.

When we’re raised by toxic, narcissistic, dysfunctional, or emotionally immature mothers, we experience this Death Mother energy. 

The abandonment and abuse from the Death Mother happen in a multitude of ways through time. The impacts are cumulative and often result in issues like CPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder), attachment disorders, addictive patterns, mental health struggles, and more.

The Internalized Death Mother or Why You Are Your Own Worst Enemy 

In an interview conducted in 2009 for the Journal of Archetype and Culture, Marion Woodman shares,

“If we face Death Mother while growing up, we will inevitably internalize her, and if we have internalized her, then we will either project Death Mother onto others – seeing her in our boss, our lover, or our children, or we will act her out by directing her energy onto others, and/or onto ourselves. Until we begin to examine what we are carrying within our own psyches, we risk being possessed by the Death Mother archetype.” 

Again, this internalization of the Death Mother can happen within women AND men (as well as non-binary folk).

If you have introjected this archetype (that is, taken it into you), you may experience any of the following signs:

• You have a vicious inner Critic that is hard to silence
• You feel an insatiable inner void of yearning for love, belonging, and acceptance 
• You’ve had issues with your body image (body dysmorphia, bigorexia)
• You’ve had a dysfunctional relationship with food (overeating, bulimia, anorexia, orthorexia)
• You are an addict or have addictive tendencies
• You’re highly perfectionistic
• You carry toxic shame
• You tend to chronically self-sabotage
• You suffer from imposter syndrome
• You have social phobia and an excessive fear of judgment
• You experience chronic anxiety or depression
• Your nervous system is stuck in a freeze state (lethargy, numbness, emptiness)

The solution to this internalized Death Mother energy is the process of reparenting, and more specifically, self-mothering.

As Woodman goes on to say,

“Children who are not loved in their very beingness do not know how to love themselves. As adults, they have to learn to nourish, to mother their own lost child.”

Self-Mothering is Vowing to Stop Abandoning Yourself

I love the deep words of poet and teacher Jeff Foster,

If abandonment is the core wound

the disconnection from mother

the loss of wholeness

then the most potent medicine 

is this ancient commitment

to never abandon

Yourself

to discover wholeness in the whole-mess

to be a loving mother

to your insides

to hold the broken bits

in warm open awareness

 and to illuminate the sore places

with the light

of love

Learning how to mother yourself begins with (1) awareness, (2) acknowledgment of the truth of what happened, and (3) the vow to stop abandoning yourself.

Inner work is a path that can help you move through this process. We begin with the practice of getting embodied, then we learn how to practice self-compassion, then we move on to healing the inner child, and finally befriending the shadow self. These are what I call the “four pillars” of inner work, and I explore each of these steps more in my ultimate inner work guide.

If you would like to begin this work ASAP, I have created a simple but powerful Healing the Mother Wound Journal, which can serve as your commitment to start this work.

How to Mother Yourself: 3 Self-Healing Practices For the Wounded

“In every adult there lurks a child—an eternal child, something that is becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention and education. That is the part of the human personality which wants to develop and become whole.” – Donald Kalsched, Trauma and the Soul 

We all carry a spirit of innocence within us – what some call the eternal child or divine child who craves love, joy, and wholeness.

I believe it’s this aspect of your Soul that has led you to this very moment of reading this article. Whether you’re a man, woman, or non-gendered person doesn’t matter. Everyone has the capacity to show kindness and nurturance toward themselves. It’s just a matter of learning new skills and unlearning old patterns.

Learning to self-mother has been one of the most precious and healing practices I have ever experienced. It has taken me from self-hatred to self-compassion, from self-abandonment to self-care, and from self-sabotage to self-sovereignty. It’s a practice I weave into my life every day through mirror work, journaling, or meditation.

If you would like to learn how to mother yourself, here are some places you could start:

1. Get grounded in your body and regulate your nervous system

Dr. Eugene Gendlin, the founder of a beautiful somatic healing practice called Focusing, writes in his book of the same name,

“You must learn to be with your negative feelings as you would be with a hurting child.”

He then goes on to write,

“Real learning can occur only in dialogue with one’s body.”

Befriending your body is the first step in the inner work path. Without it, we live from a place of frozen dissociation or a hyperactive state of fight or flight energy.

Mothering yourself means caring for your body, finding groundedness, and re-establishing peace in your physiology. It means eating healthy food, drinking enough water, exercising each day, and sleeping enough hours every night.

Yes, this is basic stuff. But it is foundational to all forms of psychospiritual healing. Without it, we are building houses out of straw. We need a healthy, regulated, and resilient nervous system in order to thrive physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. 

My guide on nervous system regulation can help get you started.

2. Create a nurturing journaling habit

What I love about journaling is that it engages so many of our senses: we physically write or use our fingers to type, we hear and express our internal voice, and we see the words on the paper or screen. It’s brilliant for all types of learners.

Journaling is our doorway into seeing ourselves and holding space for our thoughts, fears, desires, and dreams.

It can be a therapeutic space to vent and also a portal to accessing the deeper voice of our Souls. It’s a habit that can take us 3 minutes a day, up to 30 minutes or more.

If you like gentle guided journals, the Healing the Mother Wound Journal is a perfect complement to this article. It can hold your hand through this process, and it contains 40+ lovingly crafted prompts to facilitate self-mothering.

If you like free-wheeling it, you could choose to dedicate 5-10 minutes every day for a whole month to exploring the topic of the mother wound. You could even answer a simple question every day, such as “How did I mother myself today?” or “What did my inner child need today?” Add it to your calendar so you don’t forget.

3. Disentangle from the wounded inner child (meditation, mirror work, and more)

In IFS (internal family systems therapy), they talk about being “blended” (or enmeshed) with certain parts of yourself. The wounded inner child is one such part.

It’s possible for us to be living within our wounded inner child’s energy every day without knowing it. We may live, love, and go about our daily lives as 5-year-olds-in-adult-bodies, rather than as mature adults. This is totally unconscious and habitual.

If you often feel anxious, triggered by people’s moods or behaviors, sensitive to rejection, or overwhelmed by the world and as if you struggle to cope (I have many times!), you’re likely blended with your younger self.

The key here is to disentangle yourself through various meditation techniques (such as learning to watch your thoughts), mirror work (using a mirror to speak to your inner child, thereby creating distance), grounding yourself in your body and breath, journaling, and practicing self-kindness.

Mateo recorded a beautiful inner child healing meditation (begins 3:05), which you can use to facilitate this process: 

Be Gentle, Be Consistent

“The most essential task of self-mothering is building a deeply felt sense that we are lovable and deserve to be loved. Self-mothering is
the practice of loving and accepting the inner child in all phases of his mental, emotional, and physical experience.” – Pete Walker

There are so many routes to self-mothering, and I have shared the first three paths I recommend for beginners. If you’d like to go deeper, other than the Healing Mother Wound Journal, I recommend my two signature inner work journals: the Self-Love Journal (do this first), followed by the Inner Child Journal (do this second). 

As this is such a painful topic that ties directly into many of our core wounds, I recommend going slowly, being gentle with yourself, and staying consistent. Keep yourself accountable (self-fathering energy here!) by carving out a small nook of your day for this work. Add it to your calendar. Small doses of this work, done regularly, are the best approach in my experience. 

Tell me, what is one area of self-mothering that you’d be curious to learn more about? I’d love to hear in the comments.