Three Reasons Why Women Need to Heal the Mother Wound
The relationship with our mothers is primary and foundational. So, unresolved pain related to her can have a profound effect on several areas of our lives, including our core sense of who we are. Our mothers were imperfect human beings with flaws who inevitably left us with some degree of wounding. The level of wounding depends on many factors including how severely our mother was wounded herself. For collective and personal healing, here’s why it is crucial for women to heal the Mother Wound.
Due to how we develop, the only way a child can interpret moments of maternal abandonment or rejection is to form the belief: “There’s something wrong with me.” If we do not heal the Mother Wound we risk living our lives indefinitely with this belief operating at our core, affecting everything that we do.
Three Reasons to Heal the Mother Wound
Here are three reasons why it’s crucial for women to heal the Mother Wound.
1. Your Limiting Beliefs Will Go Unchecked
The belief at the core of the Mother Wound is “There’s something wrong with me.” This unconscious belief can limit you in so many ways:
- Blocks your ability to have true intimacy.
- Causes you to live under the painful mask of the false self: arranging your life around not rocking the boat, staying small in order to be non-threatening to others, needing external approval to feel OK
- Living frozen with fear of failure while still deeply longing to live as your authentic self and bring your gifts to the world.
- Cause you to unconsciously fear that making more money, being more visible, powerful, and successful will cause rejection from or conflict with your mother. (To the unhealed child within, this is just too scary.)
- Will hold you back from new opportunities and creating your dreams due to guilt or a sense that you don’t deserve it.
- Overriding guilt that you don’t deserve to be happy, successful, and fulfilled if your mother is unhappy, lonely, or unwell.
When this belief is released, every area of your life is transformed because on a deep level you know that you are good, valuable, safe, and that life is inherently trustworthy.
It’s difficult to put into words just how profound a shift this is. It happens not all at once but in incremental stages. Slowly and steadily, with each level of grief, of insight and transformation, more and more of your life force is returned to you and available for what calls to you from your soul. Life takes on a new dimension. Because you can see your purity, goodness, and innocence, your sight becomes liberated at a deep level, allowing you to perceive truth and goodness in ways that were previously impossible.
2. The Mother Wound Is a Wound With Life Itself
The Mother Wound serves as a veil between you and life. In the earliest days of our lives, our experience of our mothers was synonymous with life itself. To an infant, the mother is food, the mother is air, the mother is the world, the mother is self. Our very experience of ourselves and of the world was filtered through the body and psyche of this person that was our mother.
At the deepest level, the Mother Wound is a wound with Life itself.
As you heal the Mother Wound, the veil between you and life slowly dissolves. This allows you to feel your very core as goodness; to know in your bones that you belong, to feel your unity with life, with all beings. Ultimately, it allows you to feel an unshakeable love in your heart that becomes a stable background of your life.
3. You Will Not Experience Lasting Healing Until You Address the Mother Wound
Until you get to the root of the causes of your inner suffering, which are the foundational patterns that were put in place in the earliest days in your life and mourn the situations that caused you to internalize them, the personal growth work you do can only go so deep, at a superficial level at best.
No matter how much other personal growth or spiritual work you do, none of it will be long-lasting or truly effective until you address the Mother Wound.
As a “spiritual bypasser” in my early twenties, I spent many years avoiding the Mother Wound because it just seemed too big, too painful, and too overwhelming. But over time it became clear that the surface issues in my life all pointed back to a common core, which was the pain related to my mother and the beliefs about myself that originated from that relationship. All signs pointed thereto that existential, primordial wound. Surprisingly, I came to realize that everything I was looking for through other things was found there, in the last place I wanted to look. The Mother Wound was not the dark abyss I thought it would be. Eventually, the darkness gave way to light, to a realization that no other experience could give me. It is now a fountain of wisdom that nourishes my soul and propels my evolution. This is possible for all of us.
All pain is an opportunity to enter into the heart of life and discover the truth of your divine nature. The Mother Wound is a particularly potent access point to the deeper truth that will liberate you to live as an awakened being.
Your Birthright As a Woman
It is your birthright to know your oneness with all life and the goodness at your core.
Healing the Mother Wound opens up the potential for this to be your experiential reality, not just an abstract concept or idea.
Art credits: All images in this post are by Georgia O’Keefe
