Healing Our Mother Wound

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Are you:
Deeply triggered by criticism?
Unable to accept love without suspicion?
Addicted to chasing the approval of others?
Can't seem to rest even when you're tired?

These may stem from an internal script from childhood.

Did you experience:
A mother's love that felt conditional?
Expected more from you than you could give?
Engulfed by her own struggles so that there wasn't space for yours?

These experiences wound us as adults.

We are not fighting our mother, we are fighting a voice that lives deep inside us.
Recognizing this is the beginning of liberation.
The Mother archetype at best represents nurture, and safety.
Distorted it can manifest as control, fear of abandonment or dependency.

This inner mother can be harsh, critical and unrelenting:
"You must be perfect to be loved.
You must sacrifice yourself to be accepted.
Your needs are too much.
Your boundaries are selfish
Your ambition is dangerous."

We carry this mother archetype into our adult relationships:
We may expect our boyfriends/husbands to save us, parent us or heal a wound they did not cause.
This is self-sabotage.

We may pull away from love just when it starts to feel safe.
If our boyfriend/husband do not meet some perfectionist invisible standard, we feel abandoned again.

It's not them who abandon us, it's the archetype projecting unmet needs onto them.

We may deny our desires because they may feel too much.
We may mimic her behavior:
If she was alone, we may stay alone.
If she was silent, we may hesitate to speak.

Her suffering is not ours to replicate.

To heal, we must name this archetype and identify when our behavior is being motivated by it.
Healing means we honor our mother not by remaining stuck but by rising and healing the wounds within us.
We must re-parent ourselves, learning to give ourselves the care, guidance and compassion that we may never have consistently received.
We must become the mother our inner child needed.

We need to listen to painful feelings that arise in us and ask,
"What do I need emotionally right now?
What would a loving mother say to me in this moment?"

Give ourselves rest without guilt, celebrate without permission.
We may never have the motherly presence we longed for.
But today we can choose not to live under the rules that were written for a boyhood version of us that has since become a man.

Notice the moments when we say yes to avoid guilt, when we shrink to avoid envy or when we apologize for taking up space.

Question, "Who taught me this and do I want to carry it any longer?"
We stop acting from habit and begin acting from intention.
We let our values, not our wounds, guide us.
When we catch ourselves in a dysfunctional childhood pattern, we pause, breathe and consciously choose the next step forward.
We open to experiencing joy that doesn't need permission, self-worth that doesn't need proof, love that doesn't come at the cost of our integrity.

Freedom is not the absence of pain but the presence of personal autonomy.

We don't need to sever ties with our mother to heal but we do need to redefine her place in our psyche.

The mother we seek is not behind us, she is within us.
The more we integrate her consciously, the less we need her externally.

Note:

• Respect Differences: racial, cultural, class, religious/spiritual, age etc.
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• Zoom link available on this event page until 7:30pm once you rsvp.