The Mother Wound
Opening
Across more than 20 years of this work, one theme has shown up again and again: the mother wound.
It wears many faces — the jealous mother, the controlling mother, the smothering mother, the mother who couldn’t nurture, the mother who didn’t know how.
And I want to be clear: this isn’t about blaming mothers. As a mother myself, I know no one sets out to wound their child. What I see most often is a cycle — mothers carrying their own mother wound, often unacknowledged, and passing it down.
At the root of it all is the ideal mother — that imaginary, exhausting figure we’ve all been told to either become or search for. She is selfless but strong, nurturing but independent, flawless yet invisible. She doesn’t exist. And yet generation after generation, women bleed themselves dry chasing her, leaving both themselves and their children aching.
The mother wound, then, is not only about what you didn’t receive — it’s also about what your mother could never give, because she herself was chasing a phantom. A phantom bound up in the unattainable, exhausting ideal of the “perfect mother” — an illusion that consumes many women until it eclipses every other part of who they are, leaving them hollowed out when their children become adults.
The mother wound wears many faces, and I’ll be sharing several of these journeys. But I want to begin here — with a client whose journey spans both ends of the spectrum, revealing just how deep the pattern runs and what begins to shift when the cycle is interrupted
Before
She grew up in privilege, devoted to her father, and idolizing him in every way. When her parents’ marriage ended in her teenage years, naturally everything shifted.
For a time, she lived with her mother. Like many teenage girls and their moms, they clashed — two strong wills, two different worlds, strained communication, often colliding. Her mother, still trying to find her own footing after the divorce, struggled to meet her daughter where she was.
In the midst of this, my client made a decision that would mark both of them: she chose to go live with her father. The complication? He was now partnered with her mother’s former best friend who also had a daughter who was her friend.
Her stepmother was not pleased to have her there — and did little to hide it. Cruelty, rejection, unkindness. Still, my client endured it, because she adored her father. She chose the pain of living with her stepmother over the tension with her mother, believing that being close to him was worth the cost.
Fast forward: she went to college, met a man, married, and became a mother herself. Determined to be the ideal mother and correct what she considered to be her own mother’s mistakes, she immersed herself in the mother role.
The, her father became ill and transitioned. The relationship with her own mother remained strained, though intact — civil, but distant.
Substance abuse problems threaded through all of it, complicating every bond.
Then came COVID. Her marriage imploded, and the one role that had given her life stability and meaning — being a mother — was ripped away in when unrestricted access to her children became a reality. The divorce, still not complete, is hostile, draining, destabilizing on every level, and the painful. The final sting? Her own mother took her husband’s side.
The Work
When she entered the container, the wound wasn’t only emotional — it was physiological. Years of collapse, conflict, and instability had left her nervous system raw, defaulting to fight-or-flight or collapse at the slightest trigger. The destabilization of leaving her home in the divorce only intensified it.
The work required consistency that she struggled with: grounding practices, daily routines, nourishment through food, and simple rhythms that gave her body a sense of safety again. Nervous system repair and regulation and consistency are still the focus.
Alongside this, we work with the Field: regular energy repatterning and repair, smoothing the static that kept her caught in loops of panic and collapse. Her skin itself reflects the stress of her story — imbalances rising and flaring as her body fought to protect her. When her system calms, her skin begins to heal too.
We reframed childhood stories — moving them from the lens of a wounded child into the perspective of an adult woman. This shift is allowing her to see her past without drowning in it, and to begin separating from the old identities shaped by her parents’ fractures.
Nourishing, nurturing activities become medicine. Rituals, rest, and practices that remind her body what it feels like to be cared for — by herself, not just by others.
The Turning Points
The breakthroughs didn’t come in a single moment, but through her willingness to keep showing up for truth.
Facing reality: She began to recognize that staying in collapse and repeating “it’s not fair” kept her bound to the wound. Naming reality, as painful as it was, became the first doorway out of victim consciousness.
Owning her part: She started to see how her choices and narratives had fueled her suffering — not as blame, but as power. If she had been part of weaving the story, she could also be part of rewriting it.
Creating a new story with her mother: Instead of clinging only to the old hurts, she began to open to the possibility of a different relationship. Not erasing the past, but choosing to engage from her adult self rather than her teenage/own wound.
Listening to her body: She admitted that what she had been doing wasn’t working. Her system was screaming for regulation, nourishment, and care. Hearing that cry — and answering it — was a turning point in itself.
Each willingness, each yes to reality, loosened the grip of the old wound.
The Aftermath
The journey is far from finished — but the ground beneath her is steadier. Through nervous system repair, reframing old stories, and nourishing her body, she’s begun to glimpse what life beyond the wound could look like.
She is now preparing for a court date, determined to bring her children back into her life without restrictions. The patterns that once left her collapsed are no longer running the show in the same way. She is meeting reality with more presence, more regulation, and more truth.
As part of our ongoing work together, she will soon begin a residential stay with me — a 2–3 month immersion designed to stabilize her nervous system, root her in nourishing daily rhythms, and anchor the transformation that has already begun.
This is not the end of her story. It is a threshold. And like all thresholds, it invites us to return, to witness what unfolds as the work continues.
The Reflection
The mother wound shows up in countless forms — jealousy, control, neglect, smothering, absence. It is rarely intentional, and most often generational, passed from one woman to the next until someone is willing to face it.
This client’s journey reveals how the wound cuts both ways. As a daughter, she carried the ache of absence. As a mother, she devoted herself to embodying the ideal mother — flawless, selfless, above reproach. But when unrestricted access to her children was taken away, that identity shattered. The very role she believed made her whole collapsed beneath her, exposing the phantom ideal for what it is: unattainable, exhausting, hollow.
What this shows is how deeply the mother wound imprints itself: on the nervous system, on the body, on the very stories we tell ourselves. And yet, it also shows that the cycle can be interrupted. Healing begins not by blaming mothers, but by meeting reality with courage, creating new patterns of care, and stepping into adult authority.
Here is the hardest truth: the mother wound repeats — no matter how differently we think we’ve done things, no matter how “good” we believe we’ve been — if we haven’t walked through it consciously with the one who gave us birth into this world.
At the broadest level, the mother wound mirrors something larger: the erasure of women from religion and spiritual authority. When Sophia — the feminine face of Divine Wisdom — was silenced, women lost their sacred mirror. Without that reflection, generations of mothers raised daughters without access to their full inheritance. The personal wound and the cultural wound are bound together.
This is the work: breaking the inheritance of collapse, shame, and silence — so that what we pass on is not the wound, but freedom.
CTA
If you recognize yourself in this story — circling in collapse, caught between loyalty and resentment, longing to break free of patterns you didn’t choose, trying to meet that unmeetable ideal of Mother — you don’t have to carry it alone.