May 24, 2024 • 43 mins
Our mother wounds represent the unprocessed trauma and insecurities we pick up from the dynamic we each have with the women who raise us and shape us. In today's episode we break down the psychology of our mother wounds including their origin, their impact and their manifestation, from our body confidence to our competition with other women, our ability to trust and connect, our fear of disapproval and chronic people pleasing.
We also explore ways to heal this wound, both in collaboration with our mother and on our own. Listen now for more!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here.
Back for another episode as we break down the psychology
of our twenties. The relationship that we have with our mother,
both as children and as we become adults, is one
(00:43):
that we don't necessarily speak bad enough, but it undoubtedly
shapes the people that we become, not just in our twenties,
not just in our thirties, but in our forties or
if we decide to have children, How we date, how
we relate to others, how we relate to ours and
our bodies. I think it is a tailor as old
(01:03):
as time that each of us takes something from our
childhood and from our parents, some of which is good
and some of which is less than good, isn't helpful,
some of which we only really begin to come to
terms with the older we get, whether that is you know,
our quirks, our insecurities, our coping mechanisms, the ways that
(01:24):
we sell sabotage. I think the more mature we get,
the more separation we get from our parents, the more
we begin to realize that so much about who we
are stems back to how they chose to raise us.
And when it comes to our parents, the relationship and
the dynamic that we have with our mother and with
our father differs greatly, and so it's going to create
(01:47):
its own unique pattern of so called wounds. And that
is exactly what we are going to be talking about today.
We're going to examine the psychology of mother wounds and
how our unique relationship with this caregiver, this person who
raised us, who shaped us, can actually cause some damage
(02:09):
and some hidden elements of who we are that we
might not necessarily like. Even if you think this topic
doesn't apply to you, or you think that the idea
of a wound is a bit dramatic, I'm just going
to tell you there is something each of us is
going to be able to relate to in this discussion,
even if you don't think it now, Because the bond
(02:30):
that we have with our mothers is so primal and
so strong and so important that it leaves a mark
on each of us, a mark that we eventually come
to terms with. It's not that our mothers are to
blame for everything that is wrong with our lives. It's
not that every problem stems back to them, just that
when we explore this dynamic a little bit more, we
(02:53):
begin to, I think, make visible some things about ourselves
that are normally hidden. And that is exactly what we're
going to do today. We are going to discuss the
origins of mother wounds, how they differ from our father
wounds in two critical ways. Five of the most common
types of wounds or inherited patterns of behavior that you
(03:14):
might recognize yourself in, and how to kind of break
the generational cycle, how to heal, what to do, what
to read, what to investigate, what to explore about yourself.
There is so much to talk about when it comes
to our mother dynamic and our quote unquote mummy issues.
So without further ado, let's get into it. The mother
(03:42):
child relationship is a profoundly important one. It is almost
spiritual in a sense. It's our first example of love.
It is the first time we experience safety and protection
and self esteem. There is this beautiful quote that says
our mother's our first homes, we are always trying to
(04:03):
return to them. But I think that doesn't mean that
there is unprocessed trauma in that relationship that isn't passed
down without our knowledge that there isn't things that every
parent I think does the wrong that influence our relationship
with ourselves as well as those around us on a
very physical, social, mental, and emotional level. I think we
(04:28):
all know that how we were raised impacts our adult
personality and our self expression, from very core concepts like
attachment style, to our interpersonal skills, our personality, our way
of relating to others, our values. There is a whole
library and litany of ways in which our childhood environment
ends up replicating itself in our adult behaviors. But it
(04:49):
kind of begins so much earlier than our memories can recall.
It begins all the way back in the womb. There
have been more and more studies revealing to us that
our behavior is being formed before we even open our eyes,
before we are even sentient beings, and it's being formed
by our mother's experiences and our mother's stress and our
(05:11):
mother's memories. So this is a phenomena known as fetal programming,
whereby our mother's emotional state can actually impact how our
brains develop when we are still in the womb. And
I think a lot of these studies go to show
how deeply linked we are to this person, to our mother,
(05:32):
the person who birthed us, who grew us for nine months,
on quite a biological level, what she experiences is passed
through to us. And this is also supported by evidence
that traumatic experiences, even generations before, can be passed down epigenetically,
meaning that our mother, our grandmother, her mother, they leave
(05:55):
an almost chemical mark on our genes and how they
are expressed that lasts generations. So the way that they
discovered this was through a few different avenues or through
different means a few different situations. So firstly, way back
in the eighteen hundreds, after the US Civil War, researchers
began to notice worse life outcomes for the offsprings of
(06:18):
prisoners of war during that situation and the children of
these offspring in ways that didn't really line up with
what we thought about reproduction, which is that when children
are born, they are a blank slate. It wasn't just
about the kind of economic conditions that these war veterans
found themselves in. It wasn't just around what these children
(06:40):
were being taught. It seemed that on a very genetic,
basic biological level, these children were inheriting certain stress responses,
certain fears, certain behavioral problems that stemmed back to their parents' experiences. Again,
after World War Two and the Holocaust, researchers in twenty
(07:01):
fifteen found that children and grandchildren of those who had
survived this horrific experience had epigenetic changes that increased how
they responded to fear and how they coped with stress,
and their predisposition to certain mental illnesses. And this was
a human study, but it replicated an animal study that
(07:24):
was conducted probably like three years before that that was
kind of going on at the same time. That found
that essentially, when we had rats in this environment where
they were conditioned to associate the smell of something in
particular like cherry blossom with pain, even generations later, their
offspring was still reacting negatively and disproportionately to that smell,
(07:49):
even though these the children of these mice had never
experienced the pain themselves, Even when they were separated from
their like mice parents, there was something going on in
our DNA that was adapting to the environment of our
mother and the environment of our father. It kind of
reminds me of this quote that trauma is an echo
(08:10):
that only our descendants can hear. That is pretty profound,
and it seems that science confirms it. Our mother's experiences,
even before we arrive, are going to impact us greatly
through our development and therefore our reality after we're born,
And those experiences won't just impact us genetically or on
(08:32):
a DNA developmental level, but also in terms of how
she chooses to parent us, what she impresses on us,
her perception of our relationship, her insecurities, her fears about
the world, and where we as her child sit within
that space. That is perhaps the biggest distinction between the
importance of mother wounds and father wounds. There is this
(08:55):
additional layer of connection between us and our mother, this
kind of flesh and blood bond. And it's not to
say that that means we're always going to be closer
with our moms and that they're always going to be
our favorite parent. Our fathers have like no role, no
responsibility at all. It all comes back to mom, absolutely not.
(09:15):
It's just that it's different. If you want to hear
more about the impact of father wounds, we did do
like a whole episode on that a few months back.
Episode I think it's one hundred and eighty one. The
psychology of father wunds that is equally important. But something
I say in that episode that I think is important
in this context as well, and in distinguishing where your
(09:38):
you know, childhood wounds are coming from, is that each
of us kind of has this voice in our head,
right It's the same voice that criticizes us, the same
voice that judges us, that scolds us, and it's going
to sound more like your mother or more like your father.
And I think that is a really great way to
identify where your parental wounds are stemming from, and not
(09:59):
who was real responsible, but who they're really in connection with.
The other distinction is that father wounds are typically more
grounded in problems with authority and independence and approval, whereas
mother wounds are just naturally more emotive and concern self esteem,
self worth, boundary issues, codependency, a fear of rejection, even
(10:23):
excessive people pleasing. We learn a lot from our mothers,
perhaps the majority from our mothers, about how to relate
to others on an emotional level. As stereotyped as that
may be, it is just the case that normally our
mothers are conditioned to take on that role as emotional
provider and teacher because that's what they learn from their mothers.
(10:43):
It's a whole generational, historical, traditional thing, and for women
in particular, our mothers also teach us how to operate
in a patriarchal society. That is the second big factor
that distinguishes mother wounds and father wounds zones involve understanding
that mothers and daughters especially are situated in and influenced
(11:07):
by a patriarchal society that is oppressive to women. The
mother wound is normally a cultural trauma that is carried
by our mother along with the dysfunctional coping mechanisms that
she has used to process the pain and adapt to
the environment in which she was raised. In that she
wants us to be capable of surviving as well, and
(11:28):
so we inherit her way of managing some of the
burdens at society unduly places on women. So I think
that we can see this patriarchal influence in some of
the most common and prevalent types of mother wounds, such
as poor body confidence and self esteem, jealousy, competition with
(11:49):
other women, perfectionism, trust issues, fearing disapproval. I think that
this facet around patriarchal influence, though, is most noticeable when
it comes to how you and I see our bodies
and how we see other women. So let's explore that
for a second. So I had a friend who once
(12:10):
said to me, I hate my body because my mother
hated hers, and it flawed me. Because I think that
this encapsulates what we're speaking about perfectly. Our mothers significantly
impact the relationship that we have with appearance and with
beauty through verbal messages, through role modeling, through comments on
(12:33):
not just our own bodies, but the bodies of other
people that we see out in public, in magazines, on
the street. They influence us through their own experiences with
diet culture, and how this almost seeps into our impression
and perspective on our own bodies. The words that they
speak about themselves in particular, truly do get absorbed into
(12:56):
our own internal dialogue. If we spend our childhood continuously
hearing our mothers talking about how much they hate and
despise their thighs and their shoulders and their wrinkles, and
their eye color and their hair color. As we grow up,
we inherit those very features that they hated. And how
(13:16):
is it that we are meant to love that part
of us that our mother didn't even like about herself, if,
as well, they spend our childhood, you know, switching between
different yo yo dets, going keto and then vegan and
then doing juice fasts, or you know, throwing all the
processed sugar out in the house, which is something that
my mom did all the time. Ultimately, they are going
(13:39):
to bring us along with them because they control our
environment as well, and so we internalize this behavior as normal,
and we believe that our bodies, our size, deserves to
be controlled and in some ways punished. It's where like
the concept of an almond mom came from. You know,
a mother who unintentionally gives incredibly unhelpful and unhealthy dieting
(14:04):
advice that is projecting her own insecurities onto her children. Right,
it has nothing to do with us and everything that
she decides to place worth in and to place value in,
such as beauty and thinness. As one doctor put it
in this article, I read this phenomenon of alm and mums.
It's been going on for a long time, therefore it's generational,
(14:27):
but it's also rooted in diet culture. It's rooted in
internalized biases, fat phobia, a projection of fear, and this
pursuit of thin privilege rather than health. All these behaviors
implicitly influence our body image, our self esteem, and the
younger that we're exposed, the more deeply ingrained it can become.
(14:50):
That is a mother wound that it's not spoken about enough,
the inheritance of not body positivity, but body negativity. And
you know, speaking my own friends and the people around me,
I think there are very few of us who were
not left unscathed by this. In a way. Another wound
that really seems to derive from that influence of misogyny
(15:12):
and patriarchy on parenting is the tendency to almost feel
a little bit competitive with other women. Now, I was
discussing this with a friend recently in regards to job
hunting and then also like the in also like dating,
especially like dating in our twenties, and she said something
really really interesting. She said, I'll kind of like paraphrase here,
(15:34):
but she explained how our mothers and our grandmothers were
some of the very first generations to have even like
a smidge of increased freedom to choose a career, to
date freely, to appreciate kind of some of the benefits
of that sexual and female liberation movement of the sixties.
But in that experience, they also were pitted against each
(15:55):
other in a lot of circumstances because the opportunities were
so unequal, like there were just not many of them,
so there was always this sense of competition, especially with
other women. I read this explanation that a lot of
women in that generation realized that the opportunities for them
were still quite slim, and they were also still very
(16:15):
much based on male approval, and so they saw that
as something to fight over, which they then passed on
to their daughters. Right, It's like viewing other women as
competition is very much derived from the fact that a
lot of us still appreciate, and our mothers in particular
appreciate that women are still the less dominant sex in society,
(16:40):
and so there is this need to be more aggressive
when it comes to asking for opportunities, this need to
be more cutthroat to work harder, but to also be
more polite and to see other women as something that
could jeopardize that for you, whether that is when it
comes to jobs, when it comes to careers, or it
comes to finding a partner. Honestly, if you read into this,
(17:04):
if you read some of the articles around this, it
is so enlightening to be like wow, like they may
not have even you know, explicitly understood what they were doing,
but there was always this sense of like women as
competitors rather than women as friends. So those are two
ways I think a lot of us can relate to
when it comes to mother wounds of a cultural and
(17:26):
a patriarchal origin, especially if you're also a woman and
a daughter. But I also want to move on to
discussing some of the more general emotive psychological wounds that's
around forming stable relationships, fearing disapproval, and also the chronic
people pleasing that I think a lot of us find
(17:46):
ourselves trapped in. So all of that and more after
this shortbreak, when people kind of talk about mummy issues,
which is essentially just a very colloquial way of describing
mother wounds, what they're normally referring to is a difficulty
(18:08):
in dating, in forming relationships, maintaining healthy, stable adult relationships
because that original bond that we had with our mother
was unhealthy during childhood. You have to remember that for
most of us, our first example of what it meant
to be cherished and loved and cared for, what it
(18:31):
meant to trust, and what it meant to feel safe,
was our mother and that connection that we had with her.
And there are so many ways that that can actually
go quite wrong, especially when it comes to our attachment
to them. It might include circumstances of emotional neglect, of
(18:52):
enmeshment and parentification, or controlling behaviors initiated by our mothers.
They don't let us go and make our own mistakes,
they don't let us be our own people, or even
narcissistic abuse. And normally, when we are in that environment
where the relationship that we have with our mother and
childhood and adolescence wasn't allowed to form naturally and normally,
(19:17):
two things end up happening that fall under the umbrella
of mummy issues. The first is that we form a
really unhealthy closeness to our mothers normally because they depend
on us for some kind of emotional need right, or
they do everything for us. They enmesh themselves in our lives.
They don't allow us to separate. That often happens in men,
(19:42):
and it often results in them looking for someone to
fulfill that same role. They don't understand that that relationship
and that dynamic is not appropriate, that there isn't somebody
who is going to be their mother, who is going
to do everything for them, who is going to serve them.
Or the second thing that happens is that we push
back against any kind of relationship that replicates or mimics
(20:06):
the closeness and dependency that we have with our mother,
because you know, we understand what it means to be
that emotionally tied to somebody and then perhaps hurt, so
we get and we become quite cynical when it comes
to love. We find it hard to trust. This might
result from perhaps your parents getting a divorce and your
(20:27):
mom maybe didn't handle it well. She kind of separated
for a little while. She you know, took a step back.
Maybe you didn't see her, you felt abandoned, or even
narcissistic abuse, whereby your mother really saw herself as the
center of her own universe. She had children, to fulfill
her own needs and her own wants, which meant that
you were kind of always a bit of a puppet,
(20:47):
and you both as children, we have this natural inclination
to want to be close to our mother regardless of
how she's treating us, but then also resenting her for
those negative emotions that we would be feeling in response
to mistreatment, neglect, maltreatment. When somebody comes along that makes
us feel a similar way, a sense of you know,
(21:08):
a similar sense of safety, even if it's misplaced. We
automatically associate that with, you know, the other foot coming down,
the other shoe dropping, which is one of control, which
is one of perhaps being let down. So I want
to kind of illustrate two examples of this because I
feel like that's quite like a broad Strokes approach. For example,
(21:30):
if your mother parentified you, that's a big instance in
which we see mummy issues or mother wounds in parentification.
What essentially happens is that the role of the parent
and the child have been reversed, and so you served
as her confident, you had to regulate her emotions. There
was a level of guilt maybe that she used to
(21:51):
get you to do what she wanted, you felt like
you had to take care of her. When you reach
your early twenties or adolescence, when you naturally start seeking
out emotional independence, firstly, your mother might really push back
against that and guilt you into believing that you're abandoning her,
that you don't love her anymore, you don't see her enough,
(22:13):
And you might also find yourself becoming quite emotionally unavailable.
You are scared that you're going to repeat that same
bond with somebody else and find yourself increasingly engulfed or
enmeshed in their life. Another example that I heard from
a listener the other day that she kindly agreed to
let me share was her observing how her mother had
(22:37):
gotten really caught up in a nasty marriage, in an
abusive relationship. She spent a lot of her childhood really
constantly wishing that she would leave, that her mother would leave,
and eventually just kind of realized that she couldn't control
what she decided to do. That kind of resulted in
her spending a lot of her early twenties resenting her
(22:58):
mother for the situation and the environment that she was
put through, but also really fearing that she would repeat
the example that her mother had set that there was
this generational curse that she was going to see this
behavior as normal and tolerate it herself for accept it
herself and end up in the same position. So when
(23:18):
she started dating, she was on hilert. She couldn't trust
anybody around her because she had seen this example of
how her mother, somebody so similar to herself in blood
and genetics and relationship, had gotten caught up in this
terrible situation that had resulted in her getting hurt. So
I think these situations they go to show yet again
(23:40):
how much we take on from our mothers and the
kind of invisible influence they will inevitably have over our
adult choices and experiences, especially when it comes to love.
I think whilst the love that we share with our
mother may be familial, once again, I will say it again,
it is our first example of what to expect. And
(24:01):
so depending on the love your mother showed you, or
the love that your mother exposed you to in other environments,
how maybe even that connection was manipulated in some respects,
it can create some wounds. I want to give you
two final examples of kind of mother wounds that we
see quite often even if we don't have a label
(24:22):
for it that don't typically fall into like the mummy
issues in a dating sense, like they're a bit more
broad and therefore perhaps don't receive as much recognition. The
first is around fearing disapproval, and we see this a
lot in people whose mothers were quite overbearing or who
were perfectionists themselves. If our mothers were highly critical of us,
(24:47):
maybe it was that they were kind of projecting their
own desire for success and admiration and achievement onto us.
They were looking to us as a proxy for them
to fulfill all of their wishes for having a successful career,
for being brilliant, for being praised, and so they see
us as an example of her choices and as an
(25:10):
example of her morals and her greatness for other people
to observe, rather than seeing us as independent people who
are growing up on our own and who want to
do our own thing, and who want to become our
own person and be happy in our own achievements. We
were kind of an extension of her, and that's where
(25:32):
her need to really bear down on us and control
our behavior came from. That's where her need to be
involved in everything came from I think when we are
raised in that environment and we have a mother of
that nature who is kind of being compelled to treat
us that way, we begin to conflate a lot of
our achievements and material accolades with our self worth. And
(25:57):
so as we get older, when we don't have that
external validation or that external pressure from our parents, from
our mother to succeed, When we don't have our mother
keeping us on track, keeping us disciplined, we end up
kind of declining in performance. We end up having to
question who we actually are without her around, without her
(26:18):
pushing us, and we also in a way lack confidence
in our own decisions. We question our own choices because
our mother always had control over them. We never really
got a say, and so we never really began to
build that independent muscle, that independent skill set. I think
(26:39):
this kind of disapproving impossible to please mother figure also
makes us crave validation or constantly seek out ways to
impress her or another maternal authoritative figure the way that
we could never impress our mother as a child, we
start looking for ways to impress you know, strong females
(27:00):
and strong women in our lives as an adult. So finally,
we have chronic people pleasing. I'm thinking about this now.
We probably should have talked about this when we were
discussing the links between mother wounds mother daughter dynamics in patriarchy,
but that time has past. We're going to talk about
it now. Something we know as a fact is that
women are more likely to be people pleasers because of
(27:22):
our conditioned role as caretakers, managing the emotions of others,
suppressing our needs for those around us, keeping the pace,
maintaining like the harmony, especially as women as daughters who
do we learn that from normally our mothers through observational
learning to seeing how they adapt and respond to what
(27:44):
others require of them, and how they sacrifice themselves, their emotions,
their boundaries, their rest for other people, and we see
how they behave we watch them for all those years,
and we kind of take that as a lesson on
how we should act and who we should be as women,
as caregivers, as providers. It is known as the people
(28:06):
pleasing or the pushover wound. Sometimes that can also manifest
in resentment, right, feeling like our mother never taught us
how to stand up for ourselves, never showed us that
we could be brave. We could be more courageous, we
could be better at setting boundaries, and because she didn't
do that, we have ended up as somebody who was
always living for others. I think it's okay to feel
(28:27):
angry about that, but still love your mother at the
same time, and still understand why she did what she did,
to think about what you would have done differently in
that circumstance if you were raising yourself all over again,
but also knowing that, as simple as it sounds, she
was doing the best she could. I do genuinely believe
that our parents very much operate at the sealing of
(28:49):
what they believe they are capable of giving us. With
each generation, though, that stealing is going to get higher,
and our emotional intelligence, our resource us is hopefully expand
we learn from their mistakes, and so if we one
day decide to raise our own children, we take everything
that we saw them perhaps do wrong, their missteps, and
(29:12):
we ensure that we don't do the same thing. I think,
speaking of our own children, speaking of generations, the wounds
that we do carry from our mothers, I think influence
our perspective on wanting to be mothers ourselves and wanting
to have children someday, and whether we'll be any good
at it. This is not something that we speak about
very much, especially in our early on mid twenties, having children,
(29:35):
how we should raise them. It feels like a very
far off reality, a far a fantasy for a lot
of people, myself included. Perhaps it's not something that you're
interested in at all, which is also super fair. But
the older we get, I think, the more aware we
do become, whether you want children or not, of how
our unresolved or unhealed wounds will be passed down and
(29:56):
will impact those around us. Mother and wounds are in
a sense inherited, but they are also contagious and not
contagious and like the viral bacterial sense of the world,
but in the sense that the more exposure you have
to unhealed wounds, the more likely that the behavior of
(30:19):
that person will inevitably influence your own behavior as well,
and your unhealed wounds maybe doing that to those around you.
And I think this is where the devotion to healing
and the necessity of healing really comes from. If it
was just you who were suffering, honestly, that would be
(30:40):
bad enough, that would be hard enough. You deserve more.
You deserve to really know yourself outside and within this
space and to understand how you are the way that
you are. But it's also the sense that eventually you
know the person that you have become because of how
you were raised and your quirks, your insecurities. These small
(31:02):
coping mechanisms, these big, perhaps maladaptive coping mechanisms that you
have adopted, may end up sabotaging what you want from life.
They may end up sabotaging your romantic relationships, your friendships,
and eventually, again, if you decide to have children, the
relationship that you eventually have with your own kids. So
I think my biggest advice I have is to process early,
(31:25):
but not all at once. It's super amazing that we're
considering this in our twenties, right, Honestly, at whatever age
it's important. But I think when we first become aware
of these wounds that we might be carrying, it's almost
like starting a marathon. It's almost like looking at this
massive set of kilometers, is this massive task in front
(31:47):
of us, and wanting to just jump right in and
repair the relationship and fix everything straight away, reverse all
the generational trauma straight away, but there are some things
that I think we have to do before that, And
firstly that is to really think about what you need.
What are the wounds that you feel you need to
work through, What is it that you're looking to heal from.
(32:10):
What is the impact that you are seeing in your life,
What is your emotional experience and where where is the origin?
What is it coming down to. What part of your
mother's behavior, what part of her reactions to the world,
what part of her own upbringing are they kind of reflecting.
I think you need to be clear on where you
(32:30):
see the link and the origin and the root coming
from before you can come to the table and say, hey,
this was my experience and I want to speak about it.
Right If you say, well, I hate my body, but
I don't really know how you were involved, it's kind
of like, you know, it might not be your mother,
it might be something else, and it's kind of hard
to work through that experience and to work through this
(32:53):
very current reality for yourself if you're still kind of
ambiguous around where this may have actually come from. It Also,
I think I think is very easy to feel anger
before any other emotion because it is such a simple,
one sided emotion. It is so one track minded. But
anger is not necessarily helpful in these circumstances. It's not
(33:14):
necessarily helpful to go in all guns blazing, looking to
find someone to blame, looking to find someone to hurt,
to scream at, to discuss with. Yes, those conversations will
eventually need to happen and are important, But I also
think that the second component, in the second thing we
need to understand before we go about addressing our mother wounds,
(33:37):
is addressing how we think our mother is going to respond.
Think about whether she will be able to accept that
responsibility or is it something that you just have to
acknowledge that she is the way she is, she did
the best she could and kind of process it on
your own. Sometimes I find, and this is of course
my own perspective, that our problems and anger can become
(33:59):
more entrench when we look for closure in our parents,
because half the time they don't even realize what they did,
and half the time they probably don't want to take
responsibility out of a human need to protect their ego,
one that we all have. No one is going to
enjoy being told that they were a bad parent. No
(34:20):
one likes taking on blame for the way that we are,
especially somebody who feels so personally involved in our development.
This isn't to say that a discussion might not one
day take place, and I actually think it's really important,
just that you need to be clear on what you
actually need out of that conversation, how your emotional experiences
(34:40):
and reality relates to your mother wounds, and what you
can expect from your parent, what you can expect from
your mother. I think the hardest situations are when you
go in you have all this courage to say, hey, like,
I feel like you have created an unhealthy pattern in
me around attention seeking, around validation seeking, around love, and
(35:05):
I want to talk about it. I want to understand
why you raise me the way you did. And she
turns around and goes, well, no, that's not my experience.
I'm not that kind of mother. You saying that I'm
a terrible mother, and suddenly you're shut down, and I
think it's something to be prepared for. You probably know
her quite well. What do you think that you're going
to get out of that conversation and be realistic with
yourself about it? And you know about the closure that
(35:27):
you might be available to you before you enter. There
are a lot of things that we can do for
ourselves when our mother is perhaps not involved and not
up for discussing, not willing to take accountability. I think
first is coming to terms with what you are okay
with and what you are not in this day and age.
The good thing about growing up and maturing, about getting
(35:49):
older and finding independence beyond the family unit is that
you kind of get to control your physical and emotional
environment from now on. And that means that you have
the capacity to say what is no longer okay with
you and put in that distance. For example, comments about
your body, about your choices, about what you eat, what
you wear, who you date. You can put those things
(36:11):
off limits. Maybe that is by saying to your mother,
you know, hey, I'm not open to talking about this.
I'm not in the mood. Let's talk about something else.
Maybe it's that first step of being like that's actually
quite hurtful, and you know, this is what the emotional
experience it creates for me. I feel anxious when you
say comments about my body. I feel uncomfortable, and I
(36:31):
don't want that to define our relationship. So maybe that's
off limits from now on. Maybe we don't discuss it,
not even maybe that is off limits. From now on,
we won't be discussing that. Boundaries are spoken about a lot, right,
but they are so important in healing these wounds. I
think it's equally important to review the other relationships that
you have in your life and whether you know that
(36:54):
original relationship you have with your mother is influencing how
you're the behavior that you're accepting from these people, like friends,
like partners, like colleagues, are they're boundaries that need to
be set with them as well that you previously didn't
because of this people pleasing wound, because of this kind
of self sabotaging wound, this self abandonment wound that has
(37:17):
directly come from you know, your mother being overbearing or
being absent, or training you to be very passive and
a bit of a people pleaser. My final tip is
that it's also valuable to address your inner critic. That
voice we talked about in your head that sounds like
your mother or your father. If you can recognize that
(37:37):
it's your mother's critical voice, Notice when that speaks up.
Notice where you are feeling it when that voice comes
into play. What it is about? What is it directed?
Towards Do you hear that critical voice when you are,
perhaps you know, not feeling as productive as you usually are?
Are you hearing that in a voice when I don't know,
(38:00):
you don't fit into the genes that you used to
fit into, or when you feel like you've let somebody down,
or when you're not pushing yourself hard enough at work.
It's really important to identify your inner critic and what
it speaks up in response to, because that is normally
where the wound is located. Secondly, replace that in a
(38:22):
critic with your own voice, one that builds you up,
one that is not going to scold you, one that
is not going to tear you down for simple small
mistakes or parts of your reality that you like and
that you accept. It's also important, I think that when
you feel angry, when you get frustrated, or you're feeling misunderstood,
(38:43):
or you know you're taking on the criticisms, the anxiety,
the thoughts of your mother, to separate yourself from that
feeling by grounding yourself, doing a repetitive doodle, listening to
your favorite album, going for a quick walk, taking a
warm shower, detach from the emotions that you have implicitly
absorbed from her through your experiences. That doesn't mean that
(39:05):
you need to suppress all your negative emotions, more so
that you make them manageable, so that when you know,
you can kind of take a step back and really
identify why you're feeling the way that you are, where
that is coming from, and how you can process that
without having that kind of cloud of confusion over you,
without just being compelled by anger. So finally, there are
(39:27):
some books that I would really recommend from people who
have spent a lot more time with this subject matter
than me. The first one is titled It Didn't Start
with You by Mark Wallen. This book is phenomenal, and
I honestly think that it's a better version of the
classic The Body Keeps the Score. It's much more modern,
it's much more thorough. He essentially discusses how trauma is
(39:51):
essentially hereditary, which we know, and how the legacy of
those memories has passed down to us by way of
emotional inheritance, usually from our mothers and the mothers and theirs,
and it's super accessible. I would really recommend it. The
other one is What My mother and I Don't talk about.
That is a collection of fifteen essays by fifteen different writers,
(40:12):
and it's very very revealing and very honest and really
examines how complicated our relationship with our matriarch and our
maternal creator can kind of be. So the reason that
this series of essays came to be was that the
like the person who essentially contacted all these women to
contribute and who edited the entire anthology, Michelle Fieldgate. She
(40:37):
wrote this essay a while back that went super viral
about her coming to terms with her stepfather abusing her,
but it actually really turned into like an exploration of
how that changed her relationship with her mother, and she
spoke to sorry to fourteen other women around what that
experience or just a different experience was like for them
(40:58):
that kind of changed their perspective towards their mum. So
ten out of ten I would really recommend it. And
as of you know, a concluding reminder, a concluding affirmation,
It's okay to have mixed feelings about your mother as
you come to terms with the wounds that she may
have unintentionally left right like she is kind of and
(41:19):
may still be the center of your universe. You may
want her attention and love her as much as you
have ever loved anybody else and still feel angry and
still feel hurt for her not being able to fulfill
your maybe emotional needs as a child, or forgetting it wrong.
You can feel both things at once. That is like
the complexity and the nuance of human relationships, that we
(41:42):
hold multiple feelings for somebody at one time. It doesn't
necessarily mean that, like this relationship is over, that your
mother was a terrible person, that she meant to hurt you.
I think a lot of healing when it comes to
healing our mother wounds stems from a place of forgiveness
and empathy and realizing why this reality was the one
(42:06):
that you had to endure and that you experienced where
that came from for your mother, and stopping the ball there,
making sure that if you choose to have children, it
doesn't get passed down or it doesn't get spread around,
that you don't end up kind of contaminating your relationships
with the unhealthy patterns that you've learned from her. So
I really do hope that you've enjoyed this episode. I
(42:28):
hope you got something out of it. I hope you
learned something new. I hope that this has helped you heal.
If you have any further questions for the contributions for
the experiences that you want to talk about, please feel
free to message me at that Psychology podcast on Instagram.
Make sure that you're following us over there so you
can vote on future episodes so you know what's kind
(42:49):
of coming out, and that you're following us on Spotify,
Apple Podcasts, wherever you are listening right now, leave us
a five star review or subscribe if you would like,
and make sure that you're taking care of yourself. Be
kind to yourself, Be gentle to yourself. The fact that
you have sought out this information is wonderful and I
think kind of proves that you're on a great journey.
(43:11):
So I'm super proud of you. And until next week,
be kind, be gentle, and we will talk soon.
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here.
Back for another episode as we break down the psychology
of our twenties. The relationship that we have with our mother,
both as children and as we become adults, is one
(00:43):
that we don't necessarily speak bad enough, but it undoubtedly
shapes the people that we become, not just in our twenties,
not just in our thirties, but in our forties or
if we decide to have children, How we date, how
we relate to others, how we relate to ours and
our bodies. I think it is a tailor as old
(01:03):
as time that each of us takes something from our
childhood and from our parents, some of which is good
and some of which is less than good, isn't helpful,
some of which we only really begin to come to
terms with the older we get, whether that is you know,
our quirks, our insecurities, our coping mechanisms, the ways that
(01:24):
we sell sabotage. I think the more mature we get,
the more separation we get from our parents, the more
we begin to realize that so much about who we
are stems back to how they chose to raise us.
And when it comes to our parents, the relationship and
the dynamic that we have with our mother and with
our father differs greatly, and so it's going to create
(01:47):
its own unique pattern of so called wounds. And that
is exactly what we are going to be talking about today.
We're going to examine the psychology of mother wounds and
how our unique relationship with this caregiver, this person who
raised us, who shaped us, can actually cause some damage
(02:09):
and some hidden elements of who we are that we
might not necessarily like. Even if you think this topic
doesn't apply to you, or you think that the idea
of a wound is a bit dramatic, I'm just going
to tell you there is something each of us is
going to be able to relate to in this discussion,
even if you don't think it now, Because the bond
(02:30):
that we have with our mothers is so primal and
so strong and so important that it leaves a mark
on each of us, a mark that we eventually come
to terms with. It's not that our mothers are to
blame for everything that is wrong with our lives. It's
not that every problem stems back to them, just that
when we explore this dynamic a little bit more, we
(02:53):
begin to, I think, make visible some things about ourselves
that are normally hidden. And that is exactly what we're
going to do today. We are going to discuss the
origins of mother wounds, how they differ from our father
wounds in two critical ways. Five of the most common
types of wounds or inherited patterns of behavior that you
(03:14):
might recognize yourself in, and how to kind of break
the generational cycle, how to heal, what to do, what
to read, what to investigate, what to explore about yourself.
There is so much to talk about when it comes
to our mother dynamic and our quote unquote mummy issues.
So without further ado, let's get into it. The mother
(03:42):
child relationship is a profoundly important one. It is almost
spiritual in a sense. It's our first example of love.
It is the first time we experience safety and protection
and self esteem. There is this beautiful quote that says
our mother's our first homes, we are always trying to
(04:03):
return to them. But I think that doesn't mean that
there is unprocessed trauma in that relationship that isn't passed
down without our knowledge that there isn't things that every
parent I think does the wrong that influence our relationship
with ourselves as well as those around us on a
very physical, social, mental, and emotional level. I think we
(04:28):
all know that how we were raised impacts our adult
personality and our self expression, from very core concepts like
attachment style, to our interpersonal skills, our personality, our way
of relating to others, our values. There is a whole
library and litany of ways in which our childhood environment
ends up replicating itself in our adult behaviors. But it
(04:49):
kind of begins so much earlier than our memories can recall.
It begins all the way back in the womb. There
have been more and more studies revealing to us that
our behavior is being formed before we even open our eyes,
before we are even sentient beings, and it's being formed
by our mother's experiences and our mother's stress and our
(05:11):
mother's memories. So this is a phenomena known as fetal programming,
whereby our mother's emotional state can actually impact how our
brains develop when we are still in the womb. And
I think a lot of these studies go to show
how deeply linked we are to this person, to our mother,
(05:32):
the person who birthed us, who grew us for nine months,
on quite a biological level, what she experiences is passed
through to us. And this is also supported by evidence
that traumatic experiences, even generations before, can be passed down epigenetically,
meaning that our mother, our grandmother, her mother, they leave
(05:55):
an almost chemical mark on our genes and how they
are expressed that lasts generations. So the way that they
discovered this was through a few different avenues or through
different means a few different situations. So firstly, way back
in the eighteen hundreds, after the US Civil War, researchers
began to notice worse life outcomes for the offsprings of
(06:18):
prisoners of war during that situation and the children of
these offspring in ways that didn't really line up with
what we thought about reproduction, which is that when children
are born, they are a blank slate. It wasn't just
about the kind of economic conditions that these war veterans
found themselves in. It wasn't just around what these children
(06:40):
were being taught. It seemed that on a very genetic,
basic biological level, these children were inheriting certain stress responses,
certain fears, certain behavioral problems that stemmed back to their parents' experiences. Again,
after World War Two and the Holocaust, researchers in twenty
(07:01):
fifteen found that children and grandchildren of those who had
survived this horrific experience had epigenetic changes that increased how
they responded to fear and how they coped with stress,
and their predisposition to certain mental illnesses. And this was
a human study, but it replicated an animal study that
(07:24):
was conducted probably like three years before that that was
kind of going on at the same time. That found
that essentially, when we had rats in this environment where
they were conditioned to associate the smell of something in
particular like cherry blossom with pain, even generations later, their
offspring was still reacting negatively and disproportionately to that smell,
(07:49):
even though these the children of these mice had never
experienced the pain themselves, Even when they were separated from
their like mice parents, there was something going on in
our DNA that was adapting to the environment of our
mother and the environment of our father. It kind of
reminds me of this quote that trauma is an echo
(08:10):
that only our descendants can hear. That is pretty profound,
and it seems that science confirms it. Our mother's experiences,
even before we arrive, are going to impact us greatly
through our development and therefore our reality after we're born,
And those experiences won't just impact us genetically or on
(08:32):
a DNA developmental level, but also in terms of how
she chooses to parent us, what she impresses on us,
her perception of our relationship, her insecurities, her fears about
the world, and where we as her child sit within
that space. That is perhaps the biggest distinction between the
importance of mother wounds and father wounds. There is this
(08:55):
additional layer of connection between us and our mother, this
kind of flesh and blood bond. And it's not to
say that that means we're always going to be closer
with our moms and that they're always going to be
our favorite parent. Our fathers have like no role, no
responsibility at all. It all comes back to mom, absolutely not.
(09:15):
It's just that it's different. If you want to hear
more about the impact of father wounds, we did do
like a whole episode on that a few months back.
Episode I think it's one hundred and eighty one. The
psychology of father wunds that is equally important. But something
I say in that episode that I think is important
in this context as well, and in distinguishing where your
(09:38):
you know, childhood wounds are coming from, is that each
of us kind of has this voice in our head,
right It's the same voice that criticizes us, the same
voice that judges us, that scolds us, and it's going
to sound more like your mother or more like your father.
And I think that is a really great way to
identify where your parental wounds are stemming from, and not
(09:59):
who was real responsible, but who they're really in connection with.
The other distinction is that father wounds are typically more
grounded in problems with authority and independence and approval, whereas
mother wounds are just naturally more emotive and concern self esteem,
self worth, boundary issues, codependency, a fear of rejection, even
(10:23):
excessive people pleasing. We learn a lot from our mothers,
perhaps the majority from our mothers, about how to relate
to others on an emotional level. As stereotyped as that
may be, it is just the case that normally our
mothers are conditioned to take on that role as emotional
provider and teacher because that's what they learn from their mothers.
(10:43):
It's a whole generational, historical, traditional thing, and for women
in particular, our mothers also teach us how to operate
in a patriarchal society. That is the second big factor
that distinguishes mother wounds and father wounds zones involve understanding
that mothers and daughters especially are situated in and influenced
(11:07):
by a patriarchal society that is oppressive to women. The
mother wound is normally a cultural trauma that is carried
by our mother along with the dysfunctional coping mechanisms that
she has used to process the pain and adapt to
the environment in which she was raised. In that she
wants us to be capable of surviving as well, and
(11:28):
so we inherit her way of managing some of the
burdens at society unduly places on women. So I think
that we can see this patriarchal influence in some of
the most common and prevalent types of mother wounds, such
as poor body confidence and self esteem, jealousy, competition with
(11:49):
other women, perfectionism, trust issues, fearing disapproval. I think that
this facet around patriarchal influence, though, is most noticeable when
it comes to how you and I see our bodies
and how we see other women. So let's explore that
for a second. So I had a friend who once
(12:10):
said to me, I hate my body because my mother
hated hers, and it flawed me. Because I think that
this encapsulates what we're speaking about perfectly. Our mothers significantly
impact the relationship that we have with appearance and with
beauty through verbal messages, through role modeling, through comments on
(12:33):
not just our own bodies, but the bodies of other
people that we see out in public, in magazines, on
the street. They influence us through their own experiences with
diet culture, and how this almost seeps into our impression
and perspective on our own bodies. The words that they
speak about themselves in particular, truly do get absorbed into
(12:56):
our own internal dialogue. If we spend our childhood continuously
hearing our mothers talking about how much they hate and
despise their thighs and their shoulders and their wrinkles, and
their eye color and their hair color. As we grow up,
we inherit those very features that they hated. And how
(13:16):
is it that we are meant to love that part
of us that our mother didn't even like about herself, if,
as well, they spend our childhood, you know, switching between
different yo yo dets, going keto and then vegan and
then doing juice fasts, or you know, throwing all the
processed sugar out in the house, which is something that
my mom did all the time. Ultimately, they are going
(13:39):
to bring us along with them because they control our
environment as well, and so we internalize this behavior as normal,
and we believe that our bodies, our size, deserves to
be controlled and in some ways punished. It's where like
the concept of an almond mom came from. You know,
a mother who unintentionally gives incredibly unhelpful and unhealthy dieting
(14:04):
advice that is projecting her own insecurities onto her children. Right,
it has nothing to do with us and everything that
she decides to place worth in and to place value in,
such as beauty and thinness. As one doctor put it
in this article, I read this phenomenon of alm and mums.
It's been going on for a long time, therefore it's generational,
(14:27):
but it's also rooted in diet culture. It's rooted in
internalized biases, fat phobia, a projection of fear, and this
pursuit of thin privilege rather than health. All these behaviors
implicitly influence our body image, our self esteem, and the
younger that we're exposed, the more deeply ingrained it can become.
(14:50):
That is a mother wound that it's not spoken about enough,
the inheritance of not body positivity, but body negativity. And
you know, speaking my own friends and the people around me,
I think there are very few of us who were
not left unscathed by this. In a way. Another wound
that really seems to derive from that influence of misogyny
(15:12):
and patriarchy on parenting is the tendency to almost feel
a little bit competitive with other women. Now, I was
discussing this with a friend recently in regards to job
hunting and then also like the in also like dating,
especially like dating in our twenties, and she said something
really really interesting. She said, I'll kind of like paraphrase here,
(15:34):
but she explained how our mothers and our grandmothers were
some of the very first generations to have even like
a smidge of increased freedom to choose a career, to
date freely, to appreciate kind of some of the benefits
of that sexual and female liberation movement of the sixties.
But in that experience, they also were pitted against each
(15:55):
other in a lot of circumstances because the opportunities were
so unequal, like there were just not many of them,
so there was always this sense of competition, especially with
other women. I read this explanation that a lot of
women in that generation realized that the opportunities for them
were still quite slim, and they were also still very
(16:15):
much based on male approval, and so they saw that
as something to fight over, which they then passed on
to their daughters. Right, It's like viewing other women as
competition is very much derived from the fact that a
lot of us still appreciate, and our mothers in particular
appreciate that women are still the less dominant sex in society,
(16:40):
and so there is this need to be more aggressive
when it comes to asking for opportunities, this need to
be more cutthroat to work harder, but to also be
more polite and to see other women as something that
could jeopardize that for you, whether that is when it
comes to jobs, when it comes to careers, or it
comes to finding a partner. Honestly, if you read into this,
(17:04):
if you read some of the articles around this, it
is so enlightening to be like wow, like they may
not have even you know, explicitly understood what they were doing,
but there was always this sense of like women as
competitors rather than women as friends. So those are two
ways I think a lot of us can relate to
when it comes to mother wounds of a cultural and
(17:26):
a patriarchal origin, especially if you're also a woman and
a daughter. But I also want to move on to
discussing some of the more general emotive psychological wounds that's
around forming stable relationships, fearing disapproval, and also the chronic
people pleasing that I think a lot of us find
(17:46):
ourselves trapped in. So all of that and more after
this shortbreak, when people kind of talk about mummy issues,
which is essentially just a very colloquial way of describing
mother wounds, what they're normally referring to is a difficulty
(18:08):
in dating, in forming relationships, maintaining healthy, stable adult relationships
because that original bond that we had with our mother
was unhealthy during childhood. You have to remember that for
most of us, our first example of what it meant
to be cherished and loved and cared for, what it
(18:31):
meant to trust, and what it meant to feel safe,
was our mother and that connection that we had with her.
And there are so many ways that that can actually
go quite wrong, especially when it comes to our attachment
to them. It might include circumstances of emotional neglect, of
(18:52):
enmeshment and parentification, or controlling behaviors initiated by our mothers.
They don't let us go and make our own mistakes,
they don't let us be our own people, or even
narcissistic abuse. And normally, when we are in that environment
where the relationship that we have with our mother and
childhood and adolescence wasn't allowed to form naturally and normally,
(19:17):
two things end up happening that fall under the umbrella
of mummy issues. The first is that we form a
really unhealthy closeness to our mothers normally because they depend
on us for some kind of emotional need right, or
they do everything for us. They enmesh themselves in our lives.
They don't allow us to separate. That often happens in men,
(19:42):
and it often results in them looking for someone to
fulfill that same role. They don't understand that that relationship
and that dynamic is not appropriate, that there isn't somebody
who is going to be their mother, who is going
to do everything for them, who is going to serve them.
Or the second thing that happens is that we push
back against any kind of relationship that replicates or mimics
(20:06):
the closeness and dependency that we have with our mother,
because you know, we understand what it means to be
that emotionally tied to somebody and then perhaps hurt, so
we get and we become quite cynical when it comes
to love. We find it hard to trust. This might
result from perhaps your parents getting a divorce and your
(20:27):
mom maybe didn't handle it well. She kind of separated
for a little while. She you know, took a step back.
Maybe you didn't see her, you felt abandoned, or even
narcissistic abuse, whereby your mother really saw herself as the
center of her own universe. She had children, to fulfill
her own needs and her own wants, which meant that
you were kind of always a bit of a puppet,
(20:47):
and you both as children, we have this natural inclination
to want to be close to our mother regardless of
how she's treating us, but then also resenting her for
those negative emotions that we would be feeling in response
to mistreatment, neglect, maltreatment. When somebody comes along that makes
us feel a similar way, a sense of you know,
(21:08):
a similar sense of safety, even if it's misplaced. We
automatically associate that with, you know, the other foot coming down,
the other shoe dropping, which is one of control, which
is one of perhaps being let down. So I want
to kind of illustrate two examples of this because I
feel like that's quite like a broad Strokes approach. For example,
(21:30):
if your mother parentified you, that's a big instance in
which we see mummy issues or mother wounds in parentification.
What essentially happens is that the role of the parent
and the child have been reversed, and so you served
as her confident, you had to regulate her emotions. There
was a level of guilt maybe that she used to
(21:51):
get you to do what she wanted, you felt like
you had to take care of her. When you reach
your early twenties or adolescence, when you naturally start seeking
out emotional independence, firstly, your mother might really push back
against that and guilt you into believing that you're abandoning her,
that you don't love her anymore, you don't see her enough,
(22:13):
And you might also find yourself becoming quite emotionally unavailable.
You are scared that you're going to repeat that same
bond with somebody else and find yourself increasingly engulfed or
enmeshed in their life. Another example that I heard from
a listener the other day that she kindly agreed to
let me share was her observing how her mother had
(22:37):
gotten really caught up in a nasty marriage, in an
abusive relationship. She spent a lot of her childhood really
constantly wishing that she would leave, that her mother would leave,
and eventually just kind of realized that she couldn't control
what she decided to do. That kind of resulted in
her spending a lot of her early twenties resenting her
(22:58):
mother for the situation and the environment that she was
put through, but also really fearing that she would repeat
the example that her mother had set that there was
this generational curse that she was going to see this
behavior as normal and tolerate it herself for accept it
herself and end up in the same position. So when
(23:18):
she started dating, she was on hilert. She couldn't trust
anybody around her because she had seen this example of
how her mother, somebody so similar to herself in blood
and genetics and relationship, had gotten caught up in this
terrible situation that had resulted in her getting hurt. So
I think these situations they go to show yet again
(23:40):
how much we take on from our mothers and the
kind of invisible influence they will inevitably have over our
adult choices and experiences, especially when it comes to love.
I think whilst the love that we share with our
mother may be familial, once again, I will say it again,
it is our first example of what to expect. And
(24:01):
so depending on the love your mother showed you, or
the love that your mother exposed you to in other environments,
how maybe even that connection was manipulated in some respects,
it can create some wounds. I want to give you
two final examples of kind of mother wounds that we
see quite often even if we don't have a label
(24:22):
for it that don't typically fall into like the mummy
issues in a dating sense, like they're a bit more
broad and therefore perhaps don't receive as much recognition. The
first is around fearing disapproval, and we see this a
lot in people whose mothers were quite overbearing or who
were perfectionists themselves. If our mothers were highly critical of us,
(24:47):
maybe it was that they were kind of projecting their
own desire for success and admiration and achievement onto us.
They were looking to us as a proxy for them
to fulfill all of their wishes for having a successful career,
for being brilliant, for being praised, and so they see
us as an example of her choices and as an
(25:10):
example of her morals and her greatness for other people
to observe, rather than seeing us as independent people who
are growing up on our own and who want to
do our own thing, and who want to become our
own person and be happy in our own achievements. We
were kind of an extension of her, and that's where
(25:32):
her need to really bear down on us and control
our behavior came from. That's where her need to be
involved in everything came from I think when we are
raised in that environment and we have a mother of
that nature who is kind of being compelled to treat
us that way, we begin to conflate a lot of
our achievements and material accolades with our self worth. And
(25:57):
so as we get older, when we don't have that
external validation or that external pressure from our parents, from
our mother to succeed, When we don't have our mother
keeping us on track, keeping us disciplined, we end up
kind of declining in performance. We end up having to
question who we actually are without her around, without her
(26:18):
pushing us, and we also in a way lack confidence
in our own decisions. We question our own choices because
our mother always had control over them. We never really
got a say, and so we never really began to
build that independent muscle, that independent skill set. I think
(26:39):
this kind of disapproving impossible to please mother figure also
makes us crave validation or constantly seek out ways to
impress her or another maternal authoritative figure the way that
we could never impress our mother as a child, we
start looking for ways to impress you know, strong females
(27:00):
and strong women in our lives as an adult. So finally,
we have chronic people pleasing. I'm thinking about this now.
We probably should have talked about this when we were
discussing the links between mother wounds mother daughter dynamics in patriarchy,
but that time has past. We're going to talk about
it now. Something we know as a fact is that
women are more likely to be people pleasers because of
(27:22):
our conditioned role as caretakers, managing the emotions of others,
suppressing our needs for those around us, keeping the pace,
maintaining like the harmony, especially as women as daughters who
do we learn that from normally our mothers through observational
learning to seeing how they adapt and respond to what
(27:44):
others require of them, and how they sacrifice themselves, their emotions,
their boundaries, their rest for other people, and we see
how they behave we watch them for all those years,
and we kind of take that as a lesson on
how we should act and who we should be as women,
as caregivers, as providers. It is known as the people
(28:06):
pleasing or the pushover wound. Sometimes that can also manifest
in resentment, right, feeling like our mother never taught us
how to stand up for ourselves, never showed us that
we could be brave. We could be more courageous, we
could be better at setting boundaries, and because she didn't
do that, we have ended up as somebody who was
always living for others. I think it's okay to feel
(28:27):
angry about that, but still love your mother at the
same time, and still understand why she did what she did,
to think about what you would have done differently in
that circumstance if you were raising yourself all over again,
but also knowing that, as simple as it sounds, she
was doing the best she could. I do genuinely believe
that our parents very much operate at the sealing of
(28:49):
what they believe they are capable of giving us. With
each generation, though, that stealing is going to get higher,
and our emotional intelligence, our resource us is hopefully expand
we learn from their mistakes, and so if we one
day decide to raise our own children, we take everything
that we saw them perhaps do wrong, their missteps, and
(29:12):
we ensure that we don't do the same thing. I think,
speaking of our own children, speaking of generations, the wounds
that we do carry from our mothers, I think influence
our perspective on wanting to be mothers ourselves and wanting
to have children someday, and whether we'll be any good
at it. This is not something that we speak about
very much, especially in our early on mid twenties, having children,
(29:35):
how we should raise them. It feels like a very
far off reality, a far a fantasy for a lot
of people, myself included. Perhaps it's not something that you're
interested in at all, which is also super fair. But
the older we get, I think, the more aware we
do become, whether you want children or not, of how
our unresolved or unhealed wounds will be passed down and
(29:56):
will impact those around us. Mother and wounds are in
a sense inherited, but they are also contagious and not
contagious and like the viral bacterial sense of the world,
but in the sense that the more exposure you have
to unhealed wounds, the more likely that the behavior of
(30:19):
that person will inevitably influence your own behavior as well,
and your unhealed wounds maybe doing that to those around you.
And I think this is where the devotion to healing
and the necessity of healing really comes from. If it
was just you who were suffering, honestly, that would be
(30:40):
bad enough, that would be hard enough. You deserve more.
You deserve to really know yourself outside and within this
space and to understand how you are the way that
you are. But it's also the sense that eventually you
know the person that you have become because of how
you were raised and your quirks, your insecurities. These small
(31:02):
coping mechanisms, these big, perhaps maladaptive coping mechanisms that you
have adopted, may end up sabotaging what you want from life.
They may end up sabotaging your romantic relationships, your friendships,
and eventually, again, if you decide to have children, the
relationship that you eventually have with your own kids. So
I think my biggest advice I have is to process early,
(31:25):
but not all at once. It's super amazing that we're
considering this in our twenties, right, Honestly, at whatever age
it's important. But I think when we first become aware
of these wounds that we might be carrying, it's almost
like starting a marathon. It's almost like looking at this
massive set of kilometers, is this massive task in front
(31:47):
of us, and wanting to just jump right in and
repair the relationship and fix everything straight away, reverse all
the generational trauma straight away, but there are some things
that I think we have to do before that, And
firstly that is to really think about what you need.
What are the wounds that you feel you need to
work through, What is it that you're looking to heal from.
(32:10):
What is the impact that you are seeing in your life,
What is your emotional experience and where where is the origin?
What is it coming down to. What part of your
mother's behavior, what part of her reactions to the world,
what part of her own upbringing are they kind of reflecting.
I think you need to be clear on where you
(32:30):
see the link and the origin and the root coming
from before you can come to the table and say, hey,
this was my experience and I want to speak about it.
Right If you say, well, I hate my body, but
I don't really know how you were involved, it's kind
of like, you know, it might not be your mother,
it might be something else, and it's kind of hard
to work through that experience and to work through this
(32:53):
very current reality for yourself if you're still kind of
ambiguous around where this may have actually come from. It Also,
I think I think is very easy to feel anger
before any other emotion because it is such a simple,
one sided emotion. It is so one track minded. But
anger is not necessarily helpful in these circumstances. It's not
(33:14):
necessarily helpful to go in all guns blazing, looking to
find someone to blame, looking to find someone to hurt,
to scream at, to discuss with. Yes, those conversations will
eventually need to happen and are important, But I also
think that the second component, in the second thing we
need to understand before we go about addressing our mother wounds,
(33:37):
is addressing how we think our mother is going to respond.
Think about whether she will be able to accept that
responsibility or is it something that you just have to
acknowledge that she is the way she is, she did
the best she could and kind of process it on
your own. Sometimes I find, and this is of course
my own perspective, that our problems and anger can become
(33:59):
more entrench when we look for closure in our parents,
because half the time they don't even realize what they did,
and half the time they probably don't want to take
responsibility out of a human need to protect their ego,
one that we all have. No one is going to
enjoy being told that they were a bad parent. No
(34:20):
one likes taking on blame for the way that we are,
especially somebody who feels so personally involved in our development.
This isn't to say that a discussion might not one
day take place, and I actually think it's really important,
just that you need to be clear on what you
actually need out of that conversation, how your emotional experiences
(34:40):
and reality relates to your mother wounds, and what you
can expect from your parent, what you can expect from
your mother. I think the hardest situations are when you
go in you have all this courage to say, hey, like,
I feel like you have created an unhealthy pattern in
me around attention seeking, around validation seeking, around love, and
(35:05):
I want to talk about it. I want to understand
why you raise me the way you did. And she
turns around and goes, well, no, that's not my experience.
I'm not that kind of mother. You saying that I'm
a terrible mother, and suddenly you're shut down, and I
think it's something to be prepared for. You probably know
her quite well. What do you think that you're going
to get out of that conversation and be realistic with
yourself about it? And you know about the closure that
(35:27):
you might be available to you before you enter. There
are a lot of things that we can do for
ourselves when our mother is perhaps not involved and not
up for discussing, not willing to take accountability. I think
first is coming to terms with what you are okay
with and what you are not in this day and age.
The good thing about growing up and maturing, about getting
(35:49):
older and finding independence beyond the family unit is that
you kind of get to control your physical and emotional
environment from now on. And that means that you have
the capacity to say what is no longer okay with
you and put in that distance. For example, comments about
your body, about your choices, about what you eat, what
you wear, who you date. You can put those things
(36:11):
off limits. Maybe that is by saying to your mother,
you know, hey, I'm not open to talking about this.
I'm not in the mood. Let's talk about something else.
Maybe it's that first step of being like that's actually
quite hurtful, and you know, this is what the emotional
experience it creates for me. I feel anxious when you
say comments about my body. I feel uncomfortable, and I
(36:31):
don't want that to define our relationship. So maybe that's
off limits from now on. Maybe we don't discuss it,
not even maybe that is off limits. From now on,
we won't be discussing that. Boundaries are spoken about a lot, right,
but they are so important in healing these wounds. I
think it's equally important to review the other relationships that
you have in your life and whether you know that
(36:54):
original relationship you have with your mother is influencing how
you're the behavior that you're accepting from these people, like friends,
like partners, like colleagues, are they're boundaries that need to
be set with them as well that you previously didn't
because of this people pleasing wound, because of this kind
of self sabotaging wound, this self abandonment wound that has
(37:17):
directly come from you know, your mother being overbearing or
being absent, or training you to be very passive and
a bit of a people pleaser. My final tip is
that it's also valuable to address your inner critic. That
voice we talked about in your head that sounds like
your mother or your father. If you can recognize that
(37:37):
it's your mother's critical voice, Notice when that speaks up.
Notice where you are feeling it when that voice comes
into play. What it is about? What is it directed?
Towards Do you hear that critical voice when you are,
perhaps you know, not feeling as productive as you usually are?
Are you hearing that in a voice when I don't know,
(38:00):
you don't fit into the genes that you used to
fit into, or when you feel like you've let somebody down,
or when you're not pushing yourself hard enough at work.
It's really important to identify your inner critic and what
it speaks up in response to, because that is normally
where the wound is located. Secondly, replace that in a
(38:22):
critic with your own voice, one that builds you up,
one that is not going to scold you, one that
is not going to tear you down for simple small
mistakes or parts of your reality that you like and
that you accept. It's also important, I think that when
you feel angry, when you get frustrated, or you're feeling misunderstood,
(38:43):
or you know you're taking on the criticisms, the anxiety,
the thoughts of your mother, to separate yourself from that
feeling by grounding yourself, doing a repetitive doodle, listening to
your favorite album, going for a quick walk, taking a
warm shower, detach from the emotions that you have implicitly
absorbed from her through your experiences. That doesn't mean that
(39:05):
you need to suppress all your negative emotions, more so
that you make them manageable, so that when you know,
you can kind of take a step back and really
identify why you're feeling the way that you are, where
that is coming from, and how you can process that
without having that kind of cloud of confusion over you,
without just being compelled by anger. So finally, there are
(39:27):
some books that I would really recommend from people who
have spent a lot more time with this subject matter
than me. The first one is titled It Didn't Start
with You by Mark Wallen. This book is phenomenal, and
I honestly think that it's a better version of the
classic The Body Keeps the Score. It's much more modern,
it's much more thorough. He essentially discusses how trauma is
(39:51):
essentially hereditary, which we know, and how the legacy of
those memories has passed down to us by way of
emotional inheritance, usually from our mothers and the mothers and theirs,
and it's super accessible. I would really recommend it. The
other one is What My mother and I Don't talk about.
That is a collection of fifteen essays by fifteen different writers,
(40:12):
and it's very very revealing and very honest and really
examines how complicated our relationship with our matriarch and our
maternal creator can kind of be. So the reason that
this series of essays came to be was that the
like the person who essentially contacted all these women to
contribute and who edited the entire anthology, Michelle Fieldgate. She
(40:37):
wrote this essay a while back that went super viral
about her coming to terms with her stepfather abusing her,
but it actually really turned into like an exploration of
how that changed her relationship with her mother, and she
spoke to sorry to fourteen other women around what that
experience or just a different experience was like for them
(40:58):
that kind of changed their perspective towards their mum. So
ten out of ten I would really recommend it. And
as of you know, a concluding reminder, a concluding affirmation,
It's okay to have mixed feelings about your mother as
you come to terms with the wounds that she may
have unintentionally left right like she is kind of and
(41:19):
may still be the center of your universe. You may
want her attention and love her as much as you
have ever loved anybody else and still feel angry and
still feel hurt for her not being able to fulfill
your maybe emotional needs as a child, or forgetting it wrong.
You can feel both things at once. That is like
the complexity and the nuance of human relationships, that we
(41:42):
hold multiple feelings for somebody at one time. It doesn't
necessarily mean that, like this relationship is over, that your
mother was a terrible person, that she meant to hurt you.
I think a lot of healing when it comes to
healing our mother wounds stems from a place of forgiveness
and empathy and realizing why this reality was the one
(42:06):
that you had to endure and that you experienced where
that came from for your mother, and stopping the ball there,
making sure that if you choose to have children, it
doesn't get passed down or it doesn't get spread around,
that you don't end up kind of contaminating your relationships
with the unhealthy patterns that you've learned from her. So
I really do hope that you've enjoyed this episode. I
(42:28):
hope you got something out of it. I hope you
learned something new. I hope that this has helped you heal.
If you have any further questions for the contributions for
the experiences that you want to talk about, please feel
free to message me at that Psychology podcast on Instagram.
Make sure that you're following us over there so you
can vote on future episodes so you know what's kind
(42:49):
of coming out, and that you're following us on Spotify,
Apple Podcasts, wherever you are listening right now, leave us
a five star review or subscribe if you would like,
and make sure that you're taking care of yourself. Be
kind to yourself, Be gentle to yourself. The fact that
you have sought out this information is wonderful and I
think kind of proves that you're on a great journey.
(43:11):
So I'm super proud of you. And until next week,
be kind, be gentle, and we will talk soon.
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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