Mommy Dearest
Now to the origin of the Sisterhood Wound . . .
The primary and most foundational relationship we have with a woman is with our own mothers. This relationship sets the stage and is pivotal in how we see ourselves, our truth and how we feel about women. Enter, the mother wound. . . it is not just around the difficulties and challenges between mothers and daughters, but it is also the trauma carried down by the mother, along with any dysfunctional coping mechanisms that have been used to process the pain, and inherited by her children. If the wound is not healed, negative perceptions and beliefs, choices and parenting styles can be passed down through the matrilineal line, causing new pain with each generation.
Here are some of the ways the mother wound can show up in your relationships with other women:
Fear of another woman’s success/competitiveness
Feeling you must remain small to be accepted
Not feeling good enough/Insecurity
Fearing failure or disapproval
Weak boundaries
Unsure of sense of self/people pleasing
Not being able to be vulnerable/Go it alone
Being overly critical of others
Lack of independence
Now, this is not to shame or blame or play victim to our mothers. We all have different relationships with our mothers, whether it be good or bad and all of our mother’s did the best that they could with what they knew and with their own wounding. This is about accepting our own responsibility by creating new relationships with ourselves so that it no longer has control over our life.
So, how do we go about healing this mother wound? Get curious about your conditioning from your family and from society as well as how your needs were not met by your own mother. As I type this out, that last part makes me cringe. . . why? because to me, it does feel like I am blaming my mom. As a mom myself, I know that I do my best and that I would go to the ends of the Earth for them and I know my mom would have for me as well, even though I may not have felt that way a lot of the time. See. . . my wounding just spilled all over the place here, lol . . . It is interesting to see how so much of this is unconsciously done. Now, we are bringing light and consciousness to these areas so that we can stop the intergenerational wounding of women! If you are reading this, you are who your ancestors have been waiting for! This is your sign!
Mommy Dearest
Week 3 Exercise: Tracking the Wound
I am going to ask you to just read these questions, ponder on them and keep them in the back of your head for the next couple of days and when you have had a moment of “A-HA”, write down your answers to these questions. This is not a sit down and devote 20 minutes type of practice. This goes deep, so you need time, you need to be in it, to witness it within yourself for it to become crystal clear.
What are the cultural norms that may have kept your mother in her own wounding?
Do you see these in yourself?
What are the cultural norms that you see yourself in?
What did you need from your mother that you did not receive?
What were your coping mechanisms around not receiving these things?
How has it affected your life or your relationship with other women as a child and now as an adult?
How has your relationship with your mother influenced your relationship with women?
Healing & Resources
Once you have spent some time recognizing and bringing awareness to these woundings, you can then start the process of healing and creating a new relationship with yourself, not from the wounded child, but from an empowered woman perspective. We cannot live our adult lives trapped in the woundings of our 5, 6, 7, 8 year old selves and we want to be the ones to stop it from passing down to other generations. This involves addressing the places within you that are hurt or stuck and giving yourself the compassion, understanding and unconditional love that you wished you had at the time. A lot of this is inner child work and there are many ways you can do this, through writing a letter either to yourself as a child or to your mother (you don’t have to give it to her), guided meditations (YouTube, Insight Timer), therapy, affirmations, or booking a 1:1 energy healing session with me. I will also have a healing practice for you next week that is soooo powerful for this! It is interesting to note here too that in all my research and in my findings that one of the core parts of healing the mother wound is also reconnecting with your sisters and sisterhood, with other women and with the feminine. I feel such a connection and healing when I am with a group of women and I am in the process of creating my own sister circle to help us create a new paradigm of how women who come together to grow, be vulnerable, trust and heal. But, in the meantime, here are a coulple great ones that I would recommend:
Look on Meetups or on Facebook to see if there are any Sister or Women’s Circles too.
Remember to meet yourself and your mother with empathy and set clear and healthy boundaries while you are doing this work! You got this, Sister!
If this is something you feel you want to dive more into, I suggest doing more research and really getting to the meat of it all. What I have provided really skims the surface. Here are some books and resource website to get you started.
Discovering the Inner Mother by Bethany Webster
It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn
Mother Hunger by Kelly McDaniel
The Mother Wound Project website
Inner Child Work - Loner Wolf website: She has some great freebies for connecting with your inner child
The mother wound, like the sister wound is a collective injury and it starts with YOU working through it, the good, the bad, the ugly. You have got to show up for yourself, you have got to show up for your Mother, you have got to show up for your daughter, your niece, your aunt, your grandmother, your friend, all the women! On the other side of pain is freedom. Next week, we will dive into a beautiful, simple yet powerful practice that will step you through your healing into a space of love and compassion and purpose.
