Are Unhealed Mother-Daughter Wounds From Childhood Complicating Your Life Today?
Do you or did you have a painful, difficult relationship with your mother?
Does it feel like you never really had a mother or that you had to parent yourself?
Do you feel “trapped in the past,” reliving painful patterns and relationship dynamics you experienced with your mom growing up, as if many of your relationships now are clones of the one you had with you mom?
If you struggle with lingering unmet needs or trauma from childhood, it’s likely your life has been impacted to this day. Maybe your relationships are complicated, strained, or unfulfilling. You may feel sensitive, easily hurt or triggered by others, and have a hard time managing your emotions. Whether in your marriage, family relationships, or in friendships, you may struggle with creating and maintaining appropriate closeness, either feeling too afraid to connect or becoming too dependent on others to meet your needs.
Insecure mother-daughter relationships can also result in long-term emotional struggles since you likely did not receive the emotional validation and support you needed as a child, which forms the basis of learning to love yourself. Many women who had insecure, painful relationships with their mothers growing up also struggle with depression or anxiety as adults. They often have physical health challenges, including chronic illness, pain, or weight issues.
Those of us living with The Mother Wound often go through life with the nagging feeling and deep felt-sense that there’s an unhealed hole in our hearts. We sense something really important is missing in our inner foundation. We have a hard time trusting ourselves—and others—to do what’s best for our minds, bodies, and spirits.
Yet, by healing our mother-daughter relationship from childhood, we can free ourselves from deeply imprinted beliefs that we’re unworthy, unlovable, or incapable of change.
What is The Mother Wound?
“The Mother Wound” is an injury that develops beginning early in childhood, when a child’s needs for consistent and close nurturing, protection, and guidance by her mother, are not well met. It leads to painful, insecure mother-daughter relationships in need of healing.
Nearly half of us have insecure attachment styles, often due to early unmet needs and traumas. And while the prevailing belief is to think of trauma as being violent or life-threatening in nature, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) studies demonstrate that attachment injuries can be traumatic. [1] In other words, the Mother Wound is a form of trauma.
The fact is that mothers can only give what we receive. The Mother Wound is generational. It perpetuates the injuries and insecure patterns that arise from inadequate maternal nurturing, protection, and care from mother to daughter across generations. Oftentimes, these injuries are grounded in and made worse by adverse circumstances and unhealed injuries our mothers experienced before us. These unhealed childhood wounds and adverse circumstances affect mothers’ abilities to fulfill the needs of their children. These adverse circumstances include things like unsafe living conditions, spousal abuse, living in a culture that demeans and devalues women, early separation from mother, moving, divorce, or a lack of consistent maternal care in general. If our early childhood needs weren’t met well, chances are our mothers’ weren’t met either.
As women, the Mother Wound is the basic core injury that we carry with us into adulthood. This wound runs deep, imprinting our bodies, psyches, emotions, and core beliefs about ourselves and how we experience and create relationships, including the people we attract into our lives. This imprinting makes it difficult to access and heal without knowledgeable, effective guidance. Because the Mother Wound often ties into fears around safety and meeting primary needs, healing requires reaching a point of readiness as adult women.
I understand and empathize deeply with experiencing the Mother Wound. I experienced this injury myself through most of my life, even though my wonderful adoptive mother was loving and caring, nurturing, protective and guiding, and my birth mother made a loving choice when she placed me for adoption.
The Mother Wound still colored my life and my relationships, even though I’m a therapist. Healing this injury deeply and fully was my personal quest for decades. The deeply healing experiences I had beginning in my late 30's led me on my Heroine's Journey of healing this injury; I can now joyfully say it's complete. I was led into Energy Psychology so that I can facilitate this deep healing of the Mother Wound for other women in a way that doesn't take years and years, nor reliving the fear and pain.
Through working with me in my specialty Heroine's Journey Program, Healing Your Mother Wound, Healing Your Heart, you'll be guided on your own journey of healing and overcoming these core attachment injuries.
Healing The Mother Wound Once And For All
Whether or not your mother is present and available to do the work of healing your relationship, or whether or not it’s best for you to seek out a relationship with your mother now as an adult, you can heal from your early wounds in a way that deeply releases your injury. I will guide you through the healing process, including teaching you powerfully effective self-care processes and techniques. Step by step, you can become freed from the burdens and limitations of the Mother Wound, so you can live in the present, feeling peace with your childhood, a deeper sense of inner security and happiness, greater harmony, secure connection, and love with your spouse and daughters.
What To Expect
Healing Your Mother Wound, Healing Your Heart, is Section I of my premiere Heroine’s Journey Healing Programs™ for healing childhood wounding. My approach for healing the Mother Wound interweaves depth healing, women's spirituality, and timeless Wisdom traditions, distinct from conventional counseling approaches. The foundational question we seek to answer is "What happened to you?" acknowledging the ways that childhood trauma is impacting your life today.
Starting with how the Mother Wound is affecting your life now, we work together to find the beginning of your Mother Wound. While we're finding it, we also do the healing work to heal the trauma, the conscious memories, the body memories, and core beliefs that were imprinted within you from this original injury. We'll discover how this wound was imprinted pre-verbally from conception through your first 18 months of life. The generational patterning of this wound also often begins to become clear, and as it does, we include healing the generational Mother Wound trauma as well. You'll begin to see how this wound has been passed down and perpetuated within your own relationships, from your mother-line before you, and including those with your spouse and children.
My signature synthesis of Energy Psychology and spiritual methods guides this healing to progress in a natural, organic, easy, and gentle way, opening as the layers and threads of the Mother Wound become revealed.
As you continue on your Mother Wound healing journey, I'll guide you to find and connect with your Inner Mother. Many women also seek and find great healing and strength from connecting with Divine Mother or the Sacred Feminine. Both connections with the Divine Feminine presence within yourself, will deepen your inner confidence and security, and further open the door to living freely, openly and at your highest potential.
As the injuries of your childhood Mother Wound are healed and released, you'll be guided to establish a new inner foundation of self-love, security, and belief in your deservingness for all that you deeply Desire in life. You will finally become freed to live in the present, reclaiming life on your terms.
Healing your own Mother Wound opens the doorway for your current relationships to organically improve, becoming easier and stronger. You'll become more secure and trusting, and better able to open up and share yourself more fully with those you love, because you'll feel their love in a much deeper, more complete way. As your healing progresses, your needs in your present relationships will be more easily satisfied by what your spouse and others are able to give you.
Some results from healing the Mother Wound include:
Freedom from living a lot of the time in the past, so you can fully live in the present, enjoying your life and relationships that you have now.
Freedom from feeling secretly nervous or insecure, and frequently questioning yourself, despite your outward confidence.
Healing deep-seated feelings of depression, anxiety, and deep, deep grief, as if your heart was broken long ago.
Freedom to enjoy Thanksgiving, Mother’s Day, other family events and holidays, without feeling triggered like a hurting child and falling back into old family patterns, and then vowing never to see your mother again.
Freedom to co-create and enjoy a new adult relationship with your mother now, that is caring and close. (If this is best for you.)
As your Mother Wound heals, you’ll gain freedom to create soul-satisfying love, full partnership, deep harmony and connection with your spouse, without feeling like you’re married to a clone of your mom (or dad) from the past.
Stopping the chain of generational trauma from the Mother Wound being transmitted to your children, and being the consistently nurturing, protective and guiding mother your daughters need, and you Desire to be for them.
Being able to “show up” in loving presence and full partnership with your spouse, without being triggered or pushed off balance by any unhealed childhood traumas of theirs.
Freedom and confidence to “show up” with your clients, colleagues, students, in mentoring teams, and to lead and contribute at your highest level, without holding back or playing small.
You’ll gain skills, including:Learning how to release disruptive triggers, energy habits, and outdated self-narratives that have contributed to keeping the Mother Wound still activated within you.
Increased resiliency and self-empowerment through learning self-care practices and techniques to aid in healing and balancing your Central Nervous System (CNS). This will support you in stepping out of a chronic stress response, so you can relax inside as you return to a state of safety, belonging, and worthiness.
Connecting with and supporting your Inner Child in her healing journey.
Discovering and connecting with Divine Mother/the Sacred Feminine.
The possibility of forgiving your mother and finding peace with your past.
Learning the Universal Laws of Life and how to consciously work with them to claim and use your creative power to create the life and relationship with your mother that you deeply want now!
You’ve arrived here because, on a deep level, your Soul knows you’re ready to heal your Mother Wound. With my support, you can finally discover and heal core injuries, releasing the generational trauma that has perpetuated pain and relationship problems throughout your life. Countless other women have successfully taken this journey, and you can too, finally healing your heart, learning to live in the present instead of the past, and flourishing in the joyful life you were born for and deserve.
Common Questions About Healing The Mother Wound
“I’ve had a painful relationship with my mother all my life and she has no interest in participating to improve our relationship. Is it really possible for me to heal the Mother Wound?”
Absolutely. I have done it, and so have countless others! Through Healing the Mother Wound, I will guide you in finding core injuries and healing them on a deep level. You will have an opportunity to connect with your Inner Child, offering her the nurturance, protection, and guidance that she didn’t receive as a child.
Our work together can free you from the generational trauma that has been anchored within you, and guide you to discover your Inner Mother—the perfect source of strength, nurturance, protection, and care.
“My relationship with my mother is irretrievably broken or gone. And I do not want to try to retrieve it. How can I heal my Mother Wound?”
I understand this loss deeply; as an adoptee, my relationship with my birth-mother was broken and irretrievable from the time I was born. There are other circumstances where the relationship you needed with your mother cannot be regained.
Even in these circumstances, the injury, deep wound and loss you feel, can be healed, and you can gain a new, inner relationship with a Feminine presence that provides you nurturing, protection and guidance, as I and many other women have done.
We always undertake healing the Mother Wound with care and compassion, a tender touch and the time you need to heal; especially so, in your circumstance.
“My mother has been gone for many years, and in some ways, I feel like I never really knew her. How can I heal the Mother Wound when she isn’t part of my life?”
A lot of the women I’ve worked with begin this journey even long after their mothers have passed. Your inner feelings are ultimately about yourself and early experiences with your mother—and these are all wrapped up and repeated in your lived experiences today. Our work together will engage your memories and imprints, the way you think about yourself and your relationships, and unmet childhood needs to guide you in healing maternal wounds.
“I’m concerned this will be hard and take a lot of time.”
Living day to day with an unhealed Mother Wound is hard - it’s time consuming, and energy depleting. It takes a lot of mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical energy to carry it, and cope with all the ways an unhealed Mother Wound impacts and limits your life, your happiness, your relationships, and your full thriving in life. It’s as if an unhealed Mother Wound is a heavy anchor dragging you down from fully thriving and fulfilling your full potential.
The thing is, to really progress in your life journey this lifetime, and your Soul journey, this injury must be healed, and it is a fundamental drive and capacity you carry innately within you to do it. The deeper parts of yourself will keep bringing you back to it until you do. Working with me in Healing Your Mother Wound will facilitate, guide, and streamline your healing journey, helping you heal this injury more easily and quickly than it would likely take doing so on your own.
“I’m in a good place right now—I don’t want to dig up the past and open myself up to reliving the pain.”
Many women live for years with the Mother Wound on the back burner. Even if we feel successful and fulfilled in other aspects of our lives, there are often relationships—especially with our spouses and daughters—where the Mother Wound is expressed, often via conflict, disconnect, and a lack of personal and relationship security and stability.
The longer we wait to address the injury, the more difficult and painful healing can be. There will come a time in our lives when this pain is no longer in the background. When your season arrives for healing the Mother Wound, trust your Soul—that you are ready and the time is now. This season is here because it’s a necessary step for fully embodying, living and thriving as your True Self in this lifetime, and then continuing to progress on your Soul’s journey.
Healing Your Mother Wound is facilitated in the light and is intentionally designed to be gentle. Any pain is typically transitory and brief. Many women begin to feel the healing and lightening of the burdens of their Mother Wound very quickly.
Healing the Mother Wound Will Heal Your Heart
The deep sorrow and grief you have privately and secretly carried for your entire life can finally be healed. The broken heart of your Inner Child, who did not receive the consistent nurturing, protection or guidance she needed can be healed, and you can regain the joy, security, and bone deep feeling of belonging, connection and worthiness that is your birthright for this lifetime. You were born with the innate capacity within you to do this.
If you are ready to heal your inner child from the Mother Wound so you can have peace with your childhood , feel deeper inner security and happiness, and create greater harmony, secure connection, and lasting soul-satisfying love and partnership in your marriage ~ then I invite you to learn more about Healing Your Mother Wound, Healing Your Heart.
It’s Easy to take the next step.
Request the Healing Your Mother Wound Program Invitation. Read through it. Then let's talk and see if we're a fit for working together to heal your Mother Wound. This is the healing that will heal and free your heart, so you can create the life and relationships that will make your heart sing with soul-satisfying joy.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/index.html
