It is such a potent time on the planet at the moment for women to look at the mother wound, not as a wound in the simple sense of something broken or wrong, but as a pattern, as a power dynamic, as the first place where we learned what love felt like, what receiving felt like, what obedience cost us, and what we had to become in order to feel held. Because even in the scenario where you had an amazing relationship with your mother, there is still so much that is subliminally, subconsciously directing your life in a particular way.
Your relationship with your mother is all about receiving from her, because the dynamic is set up that she is your caretaker, she is your caregiver, and you are the receiver of that. As you become older, of course, you give back. Children give their mothers immense love and joy and value. But in the beginning, in that infant state, you are not doing anything. You are simply existing. Your frequency is pure, unvarnished, untouched. You are in an innate season of receivership and there is no loaded definition placed onto that. Nothing in you, as an infant child, second guesses whether you should just be receiving and receiving and receiving all this nurturing from your mother.
So your innate capacity to receive is biological. It is normal. It is yours. And yet, as we grow older, our ability to receive diminishes because layers begin to form around what receiving means, what it might entangle us in, what we might have to do for it, what we might owe, what we might lose. These meanings are formed first in the relationship with our primary giver. Our mother is our primary giver and we are the primary receiver of our mother.
And in a society where mothering is not honoured, where mothering is not supported, where mothering is hard and depleting and isolating and unsupported and uncelebrated in almost every aspect, we encounter women who are mothering to the best of their ability in a depleted state. Not necessarily every day, not necessarily always, but enough. Enough that the child feels it. Enough that love is not experienced as an effortless overflow of opulence, abundance and unconditionality. Enough that something in the body begins to notice the difference between the unconditional love it knows is possible, and the love it receives in this human world.
That is not about blame. That is not about making our mothers wrong. It is about being honest enough to see that many of us did not have mothers who were connected to an undepleting source of love that filled them first, fully and completely, so that the overflow could move into us with ease. Most of us had mothers who were tired, burdened, doing their best, giving from an empty cup, waking up and doing it all over again. So we received love, but we also received the conditions around it. We received warmth, but we also felt absence. We received care, but we also began to understand that there were certain ways to be that created more love, more adoration, more consideration, more positive attention.
And so children learn to perform love. We become the people we think our mother needs us to become in order to get more love, more approval, more of whatever it is that we are craving inside our particular energetic blueprint. This is the first place we learn performative action for the fulfilment of love, for the fulfilment of needs, for the fulfilment of positive reinforcement. The child’s sole goal is to feel unconditional love, connection and unity within the family unit, because that is our innate biological make-up. We are unity beings. We live in connection. We live in unconditionality of love. That is where we thrive.
When we encounter a drastic divergence from that, we will do anything we possibly can to receive love, not just in drips and drabs, but in the most consistent and abundant way possible. If we work out very quickly that our mother likes it when we do this, we will change our behaviour to service that need. A lot of the time, that means being extremely obedient, compliant, helpful, dependable, the good girl, the one who makes life easier, palatable and enjoyable.
We are all raised to be obedient in some way. And that obedience, whether our caretakers meant this or not, creates deep self-doubt, because obedience is really about doing what somebody else wants and overriding our own internal dialogue. What does my body need today? What does my mind want to think today? How do I wish to act? Obedience is taking the back seat in our own life to somebody else’s rules, somebody else’s power, somebody else’s control. Even if your mother was not controlling, her power structure in the family dynamic was larger than yours as a child. She knew how to drive, how to go to the shop, how to use the kitchen appliances, how to open the fridge, how to feed you and change you and put you in and out of a bath. She was the more powerful one in the dynamic between mother and child. And so obedience to her was the first power dynamic you existed in.
Because it was a love bond and a creation bond, the complexity of the mother relationship takes on huge meaning. We can spend years doing mother wound healing, journalling, therapy, family constellations, past life regression, hypnosis, all the things, and still feel capped. Still feel limited. Still feel as though something invisible is holding us at a certain level of income, visibility, intimacy, success, expression or power. We can say, I have done the work. I have moved through the triggers. I have found calm around the old stories. And yet, I am still not living in the identity that I feel so deeply inside of me is my true self.
And maybe the question becomes, how much love did I get showered on me for doing literally nothing but existing? Not for achieving. Not for behaving. Not for being easy. Not for fixing. Not for being quiet, brilliant, beautiful, helpful, successful, pleasing or good. Just existing.
That question is not intellectual. It has to be felt in the body. Because when the body realises that it did not receive the fullness of unconditional love it was built to receive, grief can come. Not always loud grief, but strange grief. A grief for the self who performed and still did not get the love she was promised. A grief for the woman who became hyper-capable, hyper-independent, over-functioning, over-delivering, over-fixing, and then was celebrated for the very patterns that took her away from herself.
This is where the mother wound becomes more than a childhood story. It becomes a whole identity. You go out to school and are further reinforced in that behaviour. You go to university, get a job, start a company, build a life, and every aspect of society rewards the performance. You are celebrated for having no needs, for being available, capable, tireless, useful. You become someone else’s personal assistant, someone else’s therapist, someone else’s coach, mentor, priestess, emotional support system. You are admired because you do not ask for much. You are loved because you are easy to love.
But what do you get in return? Often, the illusion of love.
And when you start to turn it all around and ask who is giving back to you, sometimes you realise nobody, because you have become a woman without need. That is the entire requirement of the good girl. You do not ruffle feathers. You do not talk back. You do not make big splashes. You do not ask to be met in equal measure. You service others. You make them comfortable. You help them feel at ease around you. You lose yourself in mothers, men, others, work, success, service and silence.
Unravelling from that is difficult because you have to unravel every aspect of who you think you are. It can feel like a death. Who am I if I am not helping everyone around me? Who am I if I close down my rescue farm for every stray I have collected, every person I am propping up, every relationship where my value is attached to what I do? What is this relationship if I am not doing something for them?
That can be lonely. But it can also be clarifying. Because what you are grieving is not always the relationship itself. Sometimes you are grieving the fact that you never lived your life as yourself. You lived a performance in service of other people’s happiness, other people’s comfort, other people’s capacity. You became the ultimate good girl. You overperformed for your bosses, your clients, your family, your lovers, your friends. You made other people’s lives easier and called it love.
The mother wound asks us to stop performing for scraps. It asks us to release success as a requirement for worth, and worth as a requirement for love. It asks us to release the abandonment, the lack of protection, the conditionality of love, the suffering as identity. It asks us to release not knowing who we are because we have been too busy becoming what everyone else needed.
And it asks us to remember that unconditional love is not something we earn. It is not something we become good enough to receive. It is not dependent on being obedient, capable, silent, successful, desirable or useful. It is the original frequency. The body knows it. The waters of the being remember it. The cellular structure remembers. The question is whether we can hold more of it, whether we can allow the body to operate from that frequency not only in ceremony, not only in meditation, not only in retreat, but on an ordinary morning in the middle of our actual lives.
Healing the mother wound, then, is not about looping in victimhood. It is not about saying, this person did this to me, and staying there. It is about elevating the perspective and the codes the body can hold into a higher container for unconditional love. It is about seeing the humanness of the mother and no longer making her the sole source of what was always meant to come from something larger. It is about handing back the burdens that were never ours, releasing the responsibilities that were not ours to carry, and breaking the habit of rushing in to fix what is not ours to fix.
It is a practice. It is a journey. It is the slow remembering that we are allowed to receive without performing, allowed to be loved without managing the room, allowed to become more powerful than the versions of ourselves that kept everyone else comfortable. And perhaps that is the real clearing of the mother wound. Not rejecting the mother. Not blaming the mother. But finally no longer abandoning ourselves in order to remain loved by her, or by anyone who carries her shape in our lives.
