Addressing the Mother wound

Lately I have been exploring the impact of the mother bond, through an excellent book : The Emotionally Absent Mother   A guide to self-healing and getting the love you missed. It has been painful reading for me, as part of the exploration undertaken surrounds the roles which Mother plays for us in helping us to connect with our body, feelings, instincts, desires and needs, many of which, for me, were unfufilled.

When young we experience life firstly and most primarily though the body and the instinctual realm.  Being without a functioning ego or centre of awareness we rely for our sense of being, growing self and feeling authentic on the way in which our mother does the following:

Provides a place of attachment and a sense of belonging or not belonging;

Acts as responder of and to our earliest needs, hunger, thirst, discomfort, pain, joy, frustration;

Provides modulation, a way of helping us to regulate and soothe our emotions, frustration and pain, and helps demonstrate how we can transition to and from different emotional states;

Nurtures us, mirrors us, attunes to us and in so doing helps us to know our self and support ourselves throughout life;

Acts a mentor who will encourage us to feel that our needs, wants and desires have a meaning and can be met;

Provides a place of protection where we can come to know what is for our true self, what makes us feel safe and comfortable in our own skin; and finally,

Provides a home base from and to which we can come and go in order to refuel and gain energy for the next part of the journey.

From this comprehensive list it is easy to see that the way in which our mother does or does not do these things provides a foundation for how real we will feel, how comfortable in our own skin and in tune with our deepest selves. Where deficits occur in any of these functions we experience a lack or hole within that can plague us well into adulthood.

When I was first in recovery circles I used to hear a lot about two things. The first was the hole in the soul caused by some of these deficits which addicts had a desire to fill from artificial sources, and the second was of the sense that in some way addicts felt themselves to be aliens, separate and on some level disconnected from a deep feeling of belonging with community and in their own bodies.

I could certainly identify with those feelings but it did not help to hear such things as “well, I guess I was just born this way”.

Reading Jasmine Lee Cori’s book on the role of mother instead has given me a much more real and workable foundation of understanding into where these feelings came from.

It has been painful to identify the ways in which my mother failed to provide many of these things, but I guess liberating too to realise I wasn’t just “born this way” and that I could, in later life look to heal these wounds in new ways and in more nurturing relationships.

Most especially for me therapy has been an essential place in which to address these difficulties in order to feel what is real and true for me and that my difficulties with secure attachment underlay my addiction on many levels.

Today I had another very painful encounter with my mother. I have a sister who has been in psychiatric care for over six months this year and in the past four years has undergone five hospitalisations for anxiety and depression. In my life I have been conditioned by my mother to step in as rescuer for wounds that I in no way caused or contributed too.

Unhooking from this conditioning has proven to be extremely painful. I am still not able to unhook all of the time. After I unhook for a time the compulsion to hook back in is triggered either from a sense of guilt or by some subtle manipulation from my mother.  It can also be triggered I a realising by a deep fear of being on my own and abandoned.

It has taken me so many years to see this. Today for an hour I allowed to let myself be hooked back in again. When I tried to address the feelings I was having about being hooked this way I was then argued with.  When I tried to address the reality of earlier injuries, the impact of these was yet again denied.  As usual my mother resorted to outright manipulation.

At the moment my mother is in a lot of pain. At some level she is aware that she has not been the best mother when we were younger. Rather than own this she feels a deep sense of inadequacy which could so easily be overcome if she could own the wounds of her own childhood and apologise for what she passed down unwittingly. This is something she just cannot do.

Today I finally saw how my desire for attunement, recognition and acknowledgement is hopeless, in fact it is the thing that trips me up time after time. It has been hard enough to suffer from the pain of the many times my mother has hurt me through her own manipulation and denial, but I am hurt even more when I try to address any of it with her. I am told that I need to let it go, and on some level I do but letting go of something is so much easier to do when I can acknowledge what happened in the first place.

I now see I can get that acknowledgement in therapy but not with my mother. So it is time to stop looking to her and hooking myself back into a painful dynamic which I can’t heal in the first place.

Due to what I have suffered I have tried so hard to be there for my other two sisters, both of whom suffered from mental illness as a result of my Mum’s inability to own her wounding and the contribution it has made to theirs. As the one who got into recovery over 21 years ago and maybe as an Aquarian I felt it was on my shoulders to make it right in some way, wasn’t that one of the lessons of my Saturn Moon?

Presently as Mercury is stationing in opposition to Saturn in the sign of larger meaning, Sagittarius which is sitting on my fourth house cusp I am beginning to see that owning Saturn Moon means I have to accept this as the karma of my multigenerational lineage which had a devastating impact on my own emotional development, as it did for both sister’s  I must accept what cannot be argued with or rationalised away.

Saturn shows me I can only come to awareness for myself and healing for myself. I know I have a loving true heart. The part in me that has suffered sees the suffering in others and wants to make it right, but the part of me has to see there are limits as to the change I can effect for anyone else (Saturn squaring natal Chiron in the seventh house).

In the past few months it has been hard enough breaking free from an old pattern that is so deeply entrenched and tied up with my South Node in the seventh house of my chart. Presently Jupiter in on the North Node and so a clarion call is being given to my soul to stand alone and be self sufficient in my connection to my deepest self.

Leo knows where the centre of the sun is, where one can find the warmth, validation and affirmation that is needed and that is within the self by the self, that deepest intuitive part of us that just “knows” when it is in the right place spiritually.   Acting on this knowing has never been more essential than today, after a painful encounter with my Mum.

During that encounter my Mum asked me “don’t you ever think about the pain I have been through in my life?”. The answer is yes, I have stood by her so many times even when it was difficult to do as I felt her pain so deeply at times it was almost impossible to be separate from it. I’ve listened to her cry over her own mother wounds.  She passed it on and so of course I knew it.

It saddened me to think she asked that question. It made me see she didn’t really get me on some level but also as I write this that she is aware the passed on pain is so much bigger than her.

I have to live in the reality. In the end I have to live my life and take the steps to correct and fill the injuries and holes that insufficient mothering left. That is my karma and my burden to bear and hopefully to address as Saturn transits the fourth house after briefly revisiting the third over the next few months, during which I am beginning to see I will get even deeper insights into my Uranus in Leo in the first house (it will square this for the third and final time during these months).

This the part of me that finds it so difficult to be part of a group, and is always so ambivalent in intimate relationships wanting and needing a lot of separate space to feel into the depths of the self.  More insights will come with time.  For now I celebrate feeling at home in the centre of myself, free from the hooks that bind me at times.