Your Mother Wound Archetype is the “Rebel”

About the “Rebel”

You tend to be blunt, funny, perceptive, witty, and strong. By some, you’ve been called a badass. You are good at reading people and situations. You have long been adept at taking care of yourself and doing what you have to do, even when others disagree. You like adventure and variety. You may often hesitate to trust others or be slow to put your cards on the table. Being in touch with your emotions and what you feel about things can be difficult for you. Emotions can feel overwhelming at times, and sometimes it seems easier to ignore them. You may vacillate between feeling flooded by emotions or shut down.

You may be surrounded by many people but sometimes struggle with loneliness or feeling misunderstood.

Your Dynamics with your Mother as a Child:

There may have been volatility or lack of structure in your household. You may have felt overwhelmed by the intensity of your mother’s feelings, needs, and outbursts. You may have hidden from your mother, been protected by older siblings, checked out, or left home younger than usual. You may have felt a lot of pressure from your mother or from the family in general. You may have longed for more attention or affection from your mother, but it didn’t feel safe to express this need openly. You may have felt neglected or unprotected by your mother, perhaps even falling through the cracks. You had to be strong and protect yourself in moments, having to “power through.”

Your Dynamics with your Mother as an Adult:

You don’t feel very close to your mother and perhaps never have beyond obligatory communication and gestures. Your relationship with her feels complicated and stressful much of the time. You may feel some deep resentment towards your mother about how she was emotionally demanding but yet dismissive of you and neglected your needs as a child. You may harbor anger about her lack of self-awareness and how that impacted you as a kid. You may have felt quite “on your own” as a young adult. Your mother may be self-absorbed and doesn’t put in much effort to get to know you better. You feel unseen but struggle with the knowing that your mother also suffered a lot as a child. Your mother may “play the role” and say the typical motherly things but never actually follow through, which leaves you feeling unseen and unvalued by her. You may feel in a slump for days after seeing her.

What is the Mother Wound?

Before going further, I’d like to share a brief explanation of what the “Mother Wound” is.

The Mother Wound is the pain rooted in our relationship with our mothers that is passed down through generations of women in patriarchal cultures and has a profound effect on our lives. When left unresolved, we pass on the Mother Wound that our mothers and grandmothers before us failed to heal, on to the next generation.

The Mother Wound is a combination of unhealed childhood trauma and the patriarchal beliefs that say women are inferior and should remain small, silent and self-sacrificing in order to be loved. Often our mothers passed down these beliefs either with the intention to protect us and help us fit in to a patriarchal world, or due to their own unconscious projections of their disowned pain. As little girls, our basic human needs for love, safety and belonging (most acutely felt with our mothers) became blended to some degree with the toxic belief that we must be “small” in order to be loved. Thus, the Mother Wound sets us up to struggle as women with perpetual feelings of low self-esteem, low self-worth, shame, self-doubt, guilt and never feeling good enough.

This is NOT about blaming our mothers or making them wrong; it’s about taking radical responsibility for our own healing, owning our inner gifts without shame, and doing our part to liberate women as a whole.