Inner Child Healing and The Mother Wound

I have a juicy topic for today and that is the mother wound and inner child healing. Super excited to dive into this with you all. If you’re new to inner child healing and understanding the archetypes like the mother wound you can take a look at some previous episodes where I dove into these topics on the show as well. Inner child healing is a constant evolution and constant conversation and as I go through my own healing journey I uncover my own layers of it and I’m here to share that with you all. Today we’re going to talk about the mother archetype and how it personally showed up in my life and how I’ve seen the subconscious patterns get created and this episode was inspired by an Instagram caption I was writing when I realized how long it was getting! So I decided to jump on the mic and just share it here.

Defining the difference between the mother wound and the mother archetype

The mother wound in the spiritual development space, when we say that we’re referring to the wounds that were handed down generationally. Any trauma, limiting beliefs and unhealed trauma that your great grandmother experienced; she passed it down to your grandmother in which whatever your grandmother didn’t heal was passed down to your mom and whatever your mom didn’t heal gets passed down to you. I believe that our work as conscious, spiritual beings; those of us that are interested in healing and becoming the best versions of ourselves but not from this materialistic gain of all these external things but really coming home to ourselves and learning more about who we are underneath all these patterns and conditionings we’ve picked up along the way; healing the mother wound is part of that. That’s what the mother wound is. For example, your mother struggled with feeling seen and heard by her mom and so because of that she turned into a perfectionist who didn’t talk about her feelings in which she passed this down to you. She probably raised you with the same lens that she was raised under and this isn’t to say that our parents did a bad job raising us. We were born to imperfect beings and humans and back then this type of work wasn’t getting done. I know for sure that my parents were not doing therapy or inner child healing and reflecting on how their actions were projections of their own inner child. It doesn’t mean that it’s bad and I think it’s an amazing opportunity that we get to heal within ourselves and also that we’re not passing this down to future generations. I’ve been diving deep into this work because I so deeply desire to be a mother and have a child and if I had a baby three years ago, I definitely would have passed on a limiting belief of needing something in order to feel like I mattered. I would’ve been putting this invisible burden on my unborn child to be validation for me. So, that’s the mother wound, wounds handed down generationally and to add, these wounds can develop if you had a mother who was not available to meet your emotional and physical needs (i.e. if your mother was absent, if she worked a lot) for me, my mom left when I was 4 so I felt abandoned by her for much of my life and that created a deep wound within me that told me that I didn’t matter.

Archetypes were discovered by Carl Jung, templates that he states are developed through unconscious thought patterns. We collected them through years of collective experiences. These archetypes have been passed down to us and live in our subconscious. We are already born with these archetypes within us. There is a mother archetype and within the archetype there is a shadow which is the wounded and unhealthy and there is a light which is the divine and healthy. So this is what we’re going to dive into and how these experiences get triggered through our childhood and how we can utilize inner child healing to heal the mother wound and inner child but then be also to re-parent ourselves and be able to identify when these wounds or shadow archetypes are really holding us back from having a life that we love.

When I was 8 or 9, I remember my stepmom said to me, “I don’t want to tell you what to do, I just want you to know and you do it.” - Looking back, that’s a huge expectation to place on a child. She was specifically talking about cleaning the house whereas she didn’t want to tell me what to clean, she wanted me to know it and just do it. So, while she was talking about cleaning I internalized it where I made it a point to anticipate all of her needs before she even knew. To reflect on the experiences we’ve had as a child, as a child we want to be seen, heard, loved, acknowledged and taken care of. So you are unconsciously going to do all the things that are required of you so the parents in your life could take care of you. For me, it meant walking on eggshells, really learning to anticipate all the needs of my stepmom before she could say anything because if I didn’t she would get really angry with me, and when this would happen she would give me the cold shoulder and not talk to me for a week, like completely ignore me. It was hurtful and I hated it; so that wouldn’t happen, I did all of these things and changed myself so she would be happy, that’s the codependency. I learned to read the different nuances in her body language to see if I was doing something right or not - I would go clean something and look at her to see if it was correct or good enough. I learned how to intuitively take care of people because of this and I really saw this as a skill growing up because it served me in so many ways. It allowed me to fly under the radar at school with certain things, it allowed me to be a teacher’s pet which would really help me out with a lot of things because my teachers took care of me, it helped me with the affection of my boyfriend’s parents and really getting nurtured and taken care of by them. Which is what I needed to survive because I was kicked out of my house when I was in high school just shortly after I turned 18 during my senior year and I had nowhere to live. That skill that I acquired allowed me to move in with my boyfriend at the time at my parents' house and they cared for me. This experience did serve me but it was me being a martyr and people pleasing wrapped in a pretty bow that allowed me to look like an easygoing, caring person. I wasn’t being authentic when I look back on my moments I spent with my boyfriend’s parents - what I would say, how I would respond, how I would dress, what I would do was all very calculated so they would like me. Consciously, I didn’t know any of this was happening. I didn’t know I had these wounds and didn’t know I was consciously showing up like this because of the expectations that were placed on me as a child. Subconsciously, when I became an adult it turned into a toxic relationship where I kept replaying this trauma cycle. In business, it looks like attracting clients that I felt I needed to mother. That martyr of let me put all my needs to the side and let me take care of you. For me, that looked like working 16 hours a day, constantly being available and there for people and really neglecting myself and my own self-care where I broke out in eczema because I was working so much. It also manifested as a lack of self-trust. I had this inability to make decisions in my business because I really needed to know if it was right or not because growing up I would look to my stepmom and seek her approval. These experiences turn into the subconscious patterns and conditionings and it replays them over and over in your life; which is why they’re called patterns.

I shared on Instagram how competing was a coping mechanism for my wounded inner child and someone responded with, “Omg, I thought I competed to take me away from the drama of my hometown but now that you’re saying all of that I can definitely see how this lands and resonates.” So the process of inner child healing is this process of going back into our past and discovering with gentle curiosity, the root causes of these self-sabotaging patterns that we have. Self-sabotage is self-protection. We do all these things to protect ourselves because it protected us in the past but now as an adult it’s sabotaging us.

The wounded mother archetype is the people pleasing and the martyr. I prefaced my personal experience and story to give you an idea of what a wounded mother archetype looks like. The shadow mother archetype belief is I am not enough as I am. For me, that really happened when my stepmom said, “I don’t want to tell you what to do, I just want you to know and to do it.” - that made me feel as if I’m not enough and that I needed to do all this stuff for her in order to be loved and accepted and seen. I did some Googling and the definition of martyr is someone who sacrifices their own needs and wants in order to do things for others. These are people who don’t just help from the joyful heart but they do so out of obligation or guilt. I definitely felt bad with my clients and felt an obligation of needing to do something or else they won’t succeed. Sacrificing your own needs and wants in order to create things for others reminds me of the toxic relationship I was in; I lost 99% of my friends because of this relationship. 

When we are operating from this shadow archetype, it manifests as behaviors of people pleasing, rejection of self and others, the wounded feminine. It creates a pattern of people pleasing and martyrdom to feel worthy. That’s where we get our worthiness and validation from. Other unhealthy aspects of it are: looking outside of self for answers, not trusting oneself, not having boundaries, being very self-critical, judgmental and self-neglect (not taking care of yourself first). A mother archetype looks like: compassionate boundaries, putting your self worth first and within yourself, knowing you’re worthy of existence, having self soothing skills, knowing how to hold space for yourself and having grace and ease, having the tools to self soothe and self cope. Rather than doing things for other people as the coping mechanism. This came up a lot when I started fostering and rescuing. I had this idea that I needed to save all of them to the point where I was having nightmares of opening my sliding door and seeing sick people and animals out in front of me and not being able to save them all. With the mother archetype, you understand that you can’t serve and save everyone and I serve and save myself first so then I can serve others.

Going back to the core limiting belief of “I am not enough,” the new core belief to adopt and embody the mother archetype is “I am worthy of existence and I am enough as I am.” There is nothing you need to do, feel, have or achieve to be worthy, to love yourself, to be enough. When we are able to adopt the mother archetype, what happens is we start to make time for our self care and we start to prioritize that. Self-care looks different for everyone and maybe that means you have a morning routine or maybe that means once a month you schedule a day just for yourself. The cadence of your self-care doesn’t matter because everyone’s lives are vastly different. So make sure you don’t accidentally get into a comparison mindset with that. Using healthy and compassionate boundaries look like having soft and flexible boundaries. There isn’t one type of boundary and it’s knowing when to use a soft, flexible or hard one depending on the situation. It’s a beautiful practice to know what you’re not available for. Sometimes that looks like saying no to disempowering thoughts about myself. Last but not least, you’re able to see yourself through an empowering and nurturing lens.