How to know if you have a mother wound

Mothers and their adult daughters. What image comes to mind? Is it two women out shopping, maybe they’re cooking together, or a woman being given emotional support from her mother?

This is the narrative that we are given by the media - women who adore their mothers and are adored back. However, in my therapy practice, I often hear a very different story. A story that many women feel ashamed to admit, one that is often not talked about. It comes with feelings of shame, grief and often an undeniable pull to repair the relationship or to fix the mother in some capacity. Some call this the mother wound.

4 signs of the mother wound

It may show up in various ways. Here are the ways I have found it has shown up the most in the therapy room.

1. You may feel unloved

Clients often talk about a deep sense of knowing they are unlovable. If they are in relationships, they question why that person is with them and are waiting for them to abandon them. This is a particularly painful internalisation of not receiving enough emotional care as a child. When a person feels unloved, it can make the ground beneath their feet unsettled, holding this deep sense of shame, that they were not enough to be loved.

2. You people please

People pleasing can come from a place of attending to another’s needs at the cost of your own. Some mothers are unable to regulate their own emotions and attend wholly to their own needs, therefore, the child becomes a tool in their regulation. Put frankly, the mother relies on the child to help them still emotionally regulate. This has the knock-on impact of the child focusing on ensuring the mother is OK and their needs are met, whilst their needs are considered less important. In adulthood, this may present as not being able to identify what your needs are, never mind knowing how to meet them.

3. You don’t feel safe

You may feel like the world is dangerous and an unsafe place to be; you learnt to be hypervigilant and may feel a sense of panic or anxiety. It is a mother’s job to keep her child contained. The infant does not distinguish between itself and the mother in early life, and the mother and child are in complete symbiosis together. If the mother is not attuned to her child’s needs enough, then that can lead to developmental trauma, and of lack of containment, which can lead to not feeling safe in adulthood.

4. You lack a sense of self

This may take the form of not knowing who you are. Not being certain of your core self, your values, your beliefs and your core being. It may feel like where there is you there is a blank, or the space is taken up by your mother. I have worked with clients who answer enquiries and questions about themselves, by telling me all about what their mother’s response would be. This can be a result of the previously mentioned developmental trauma, in which as an infant you may not have received enough emotional connection.

How to heal the mother wound

Healing the mother wound requires the reparenting of yourself. I suggest beginning by implementing a support system around you. Seek out a therapist who can offer you consistency and safety, in which you can work within the therapeutic relationship to heal the wound.

If therapy isn’t currently an option, and you have someone who can offer you support and you feel safe enough with, talk to them. Is there an online community that you could join to work through the issues?

As many people feel incomplete and though they may have missed some developmental milestones, the goal is to create space for healing in a compassionate and non-self-judgmental manner. Allowing yourself to find some of your missing pieces, learning who you are, what your needs are and how to be the mother to yourself that you didn’t have.

Get to know yourself, and be gentle as you learn to trust your inner wisdom. With clients in the room, I ask them to begin identifying their basic needs and then write plans of how they will meet them. This may be as simple as cooking a food they may have always wanted to try or writing a 'No List' (a list we work on together of their absolute nos), working on exploring their values.

A book I recommend to clients is The Emotionally Absent Mother: A guide to self-healing and getting the love you missed by Jasmin Lee Cori.

Point of note: There are many reasons why mothers are unable to attend to their children’s needs, be that nature, nurture or fate. The aim of this work is not to blame your mother (although processing anger is OK) but to acknowledge with compassion that you didn’t receive good enough mothering.