How to Heal the Mother Wound
Becoming a parent is a beautiful and hard thing.
One of the things that can be beautiful and hard is navigating how parenthood shifts your relationship with your own parents.
This is a broad topic, so for the purpose of this blog - I’m going to focus on the mother-daughter relationship and more specifically, something called the mother wound.
You may not know that your relationship with your mother (or lack thereof) is playing out in real-time in your mind, body, and relationships—especially those that matter most to you.
Do any of these behaviors/patterns sound familiar?
People pleasing
Perfectionism
Self-criticism
Low self-confidence
Lack of self-trust with feelings and intuition
Not feeling worthy of attention or love
Feeling guilt and shame
Feeling like an imposter
If you answered yes to one or many of these, you should know that your relationship with your mother plays a considerable role.
The basic premise of the mother wound is that if your mother was not available emotionally, critical, and/or unable to attune to your needs when you were growing up, you have adapted and evolved to have certain “unhelpful” beliefs and behaviors (see list above).
If you are feeling some panic that you are going to f&#$ up your own kids, stop that right there! Understanding the mother wound is important as a tool for reflection and action in your own life, not as fuel for beating yourself up or blaming your mother for everything she did/didn’t do.
The point is that your mother was your first teacher and model for relating to the world and yourself. So it’s important to be curious about what you were taught and what was modeled for you. AND to reflect on whether you want to teach and model the same ways of being, doing and relating to your own kid(s).
Whether we like it or not, we repeat what we don’t repair.
If we had an emotionally unavailable mother, then it is on us to heal our mother wound and untether from the mother we wish we had, to BE the mother and the human that we want to be.
This work is not necessarily easy, but it is incredibly rewarding and life-changing, not only for you but for generations to come in your lineage.
Here are five tangible ways you can get started healing the mother wound.
1. Learn about it! Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters by Karen Anderson is a great place to start or Discovering the Inner Mother by Bethany Webster.
2. Practice mindfulness. Use the lens of curiosity and kindness to explore how the mother wound shows up in your life.
3. Find a community. Whether it’s a group therapy program, a mom’s group, or a mom friend who relates to having a hard time with their mother (there are MANY of us!), surrounding yourself with a supportive community is a powerful way through difficult work. More on this below.
4. Mother/Parent yourself. Learn how to attune to your own needs and mother yourself.
5. Be gentle and have a lot of grace with yourself!
While the above steps can get you closer to the healing your nervous system needs, it can be hard to do this work alone and even more challenging to find a community or someone who really understands. For these reasons, the founder of Parent Wellness Group and her other business The School of MOM, Sarah Harmon, created a small group healing program specifically for moms struggling with their relationship with their own mothers.
If you are seeking support in helping to unravel and understand your personal mother wound, as well as joining a community of mothers who are as well, check out The School of MOM’s UNTETHERED program.