47: The Mother Wound: Advice for Healing Your Relationship with Your Mother

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Dec 21

The mother wound is the pain caused by your relationship with your mother. This can happen through your relationship or through witnessing how your mother interacts with the world. In this episode, I discuss the mother wound, what it is, and how we can begin to heal.

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I also answer a question from someone who feels town between their mother and a new relationship and doesn’t know if they can continue to live with their mother, and someone who wants to heal their relationship with their critical mother.

Journal Prompts:

What is your current relationship with your mother? Allow yourself to free-write about this relationship. Do not filter yourself, be honest about how you truly feel about your mother.
Has your relationship with your mother changed over time? If so, why? How does this make you feel?
When you think about your mother, what emotions arise? Where do you feel these sensations in your body?

Download the full list of FREE journal prompts!

Book Suggestions:

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson

Other Resources:

Understanding The Mother Wound, The Intergenerational Pain Women Inherit (mbgmindfulness)
What Is the Mother Wound and How Do You Heal? (Healthline)
The Mother Wound (Psychology Today)

Timestamp ⏱️

0:00 Intro

1:20 Episode Breakdown
4:50 Teaching
22:23 Listener Question 1
38:50 Listener Question 2
50:52 3 Journal Prompts

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NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool called Otter. Please forgive any typos or errors
Amanda Durocher (Intro) 0:00
Welcome to New View Advice, a safe place for you to ask your most vulnerable questions about life, relationships, healing, and so much more. I'm your host, Amanda Durocher, and I believe our fears and traumas are often what holds us back from living life to the fullest. Join me here each week as I offer advice on how to move through whatever is holding you back from being your best self. Let's get started. Hi, there beautiful souls. My name is Amanda and this is New View Advice. If you're new here, this is a healing centered advice podcast. And what I mean by that is that it is my intention to offer you guidance on the healing journey. It is not my intention to give you all the answers you seek because I believe you have all the answers you seek, you just may need a little guidance and a new view along the way. Thank you for tuning into today's episode. Today we'll be talking about the mother wound and our relationships with our mothers and healing the relationship between us and our mothers. I did a lot of research before this episode to see how other people define the mother wound. And there are different definitions on the internet. Some people think it's just mother daughter relationship. Some people think it's codependent mothers and their children. But here today, I believe everyone has a mother wound. So it's not gender specific. In my opinion, I have seen in my own life, how no matter our gender, our relationship with our mother has affected us moving forward. And oftentimes, the wounding that happens in childhood from our mother affects us in the present. I think this is an important topic to discuss. Because I think that the mother wound, as I mentioned, affects everyone, our relationship with our mothers is a primary relationship in our lives. So you may have no relationship with your mother now. But it doesn't mean that the relationship you had when you were a child isn't still affecting you. My guess is it is still affecting you. And I think that the relationships we have with our parents are so complex and dynamic, and can cause so much good emotions, but also can cause so much pain and heartbreak. And so many people I meet feel so bad talking about this topic, they feel so bad having any negative feelings towards their mother, we have as a society almost built up a wall around talking about how our parents have negatively affected us. It's almost viewed as disrespectful. It's viewed as wrong and bad. So many people go straight to but my parents were doing the best they could. And that's a beautiful perspective, because I think that everybody is always doing the best they can in any given moment. Even people who you would deem as doing, quote unquote, bad things, I believe are doing the best they can. And it is the suffering they live with. It is the trauma they live with. And it is the unhealed parts of them that caused them to react in certain ways. And I believe that all our parents did do the best they could. But it doesn't mean they did everything we needed as children. It does not mean that we had everything we needed, it doesn't mean we always felt safe. And it's important for us to acknowledge our own pain and suffering. And it's important not to bypass the wounding and pain that happened within these core relationships. And today we'll be focusing on the relationship with our mothers. I also want to mention that if you were not raised by your mother and your father, but you were raised by your grandparents or you were raised by adoptive parents, this mother wound can still be present because it's really on whoever you put as that motherly figure is where we often feel this mother wound. So today I will be doing an intro on the mother wound. I'll talk a bit more about what is the mother wound, why it's important to heal how you can see if this has affected you in your own life in ways to heal this moving forward. I'll also be answering two questions one from someone who is currently living with their mother who is depressed and they're finding it very difficult to continue living with their mother and they're looking for advice on what to do moving forward. And another is from someone who has a very critical mother and is finding they feel distant from their mother but wants to heal this relationship. So that's a quick breakdown of today's episode and let's jump on into talking about our relationship with our mothers.
Amanda Durocher (Teaching) 4:20
Today I wanted to start with talking a bit more about the mother wound and healing our relationships with our mothers from this overall perspective. Before I dive into today's questions today, I also just wanted to mention that I love my mother this is not a mother bashing episode. This is not a mother hating episode. I actually have a great relationship with my mother and this relationship has improved over time the more I heal my own mother wound. This was actually a wound that was hard for me to look at my early years in therapy we're very much focused on my father because his absence in my life through working a lot and being emotionally absent and physical We absolutely a lot of the time really affected me. And it was very apparent how that affected me. And I had a lot of resentment on the surface, because of my relationship with my father and how I felt like we were never close when I was a child. And my mother was the parent who was always there. So as a child, I felt safe with my mother, but not with my father. And it wasn't until my 20s, that I began to realize that even though my mother was much more present than my father, she wasn't perfect. And there were things that needed to be looked at and healed. Because my mother didn't show up for me in all the ways I needed her to. And that's okay, no parent is perfect, and no parent is able to show up for their child in every single way. And because I have looked at my relationship with my mother, as I mentioned, I have actually grown in my relationship with my mother. And we were able to have a healthier relationship. But it was important for me to take the time to look at my relationship with my mother. But I mentioned this also, because I think that a lot of people struggle to dive into this step of seeing how our parents weren't perfect. And it can be really hard, because we've built up so many walls around this, especially as children because they think that in order to cope with what we were living with, we had to tell ourselves, our parents were perfect. Or like in my situation, I deemed one parent as the bad parent, one parent as the good parent. And the truth is, both parents were imperfect, and both parents were doing the best they could and every given moment, and the whole situation was more complicated than my child mind could see. But I couldn't bypass the healing that I needed to do in order to free myself of the pain I experienced in my youth. And also, I believe that healing the mother wound and the father wound teach us how to Mother ourselves and father ourselves, which is so important for adulthood, it is so important for us to learn how to resource, our own love, our own responsibility, our own respect for ourselves, our own safety within ourselves. And these wounds are often a place where we really begin to trust ourselves, love ourselves, and create that safety within ourselves. So the mother wound is created by your relationship with your mother, and also by witnessing your mother. So what I mean by this is that if you witness your mother, always making herself small in social situations, this would often affect you as a child, because as children, we are always observing the world. And we are watching how our parents act in the world to know how it is safe to act in the world and with other people. So we're often observing how our parents act. And then that's how we begin to act in the world, because children often mimic the behaviors they see, because it's a learning how to act in the world. So they're always observing. So if you had a mother who constantly made herself small, never included herself in the conversation, always put others first, this can cause you to act the same way in the world. And this is something we want to bring awareness to the mother wound can also be a form of intergenerational complex trauma. So this means that this can be something that's passed on through the generations. So your great grandmother was always doing things for others, but never included herself, and also was emotionally closed down. So she was unable to show love through holding space, creating space for others feelings, but she would always make food. This can be passed on to the next generation to your grandmother, who then lived with a mother who was unable to open her heart. So then this grandmother is unable to open her heart because she was never taught how to do that. And she was never taught it was safe. But she learned that you can show love by making food. So then she becomes a caregiver and always provides in one way, but not in this emotional way. And then this is passed on to your mother. And then this can be passed on to you, the impact our parents have on us, affect us and then will affect our children unless we heal these patterns. So because this trauma can be passed on through generations, I think this can add to the guilt of finally looking at this pattern, because I think that if your parent didn't look at it, then it can be difficult for you to look at because you may be able to look at your parents childhood and see that your mom had it quote unquote worse than you did. We're always trying to compare one another's childhoods, one another's traumas, and I really don't believe they're ever comparable. I think your pain is real. And we need to just acknowledge that. So I just mentioned that because I think that another reason this can be difficult to look at is because we can compare ourselves because many of our parents do try to create childhoods that were better than their own. So many adults So we'll see what was lacking in their childhood. And then they tried to create that for their children. But it doesn't mean they filled all the gaps, it doesn't mean that they actually showed up and made their children feel seen and loved. It just means that they did something that they wish they had. It doesn't even always correlate over to their children. For example, in my life, both my parents grew up low income, so they didn't have a lot of money when they were growing up. So my father created a lot of wealth, he wanted to not worry about money, and he didn't want his children to worry about money. But through creating that he was providing money, but he was absent. He was never around. And when he was he was angry and hostile. And my mother didn't grow up with a lot of money. So I felt like she was always guilting me to be grateful for the money. But all my young heart wanted was a father, who was there was a father who was kind to her. So I found that my father was absent, and my mother would guilt me for not being grateful enough, she would guilt me, because I wasn't grateful for what she didn't have. But I was missing something, I was missing something real, I was missing an emotional connection with my father. And then I was made to feel bad about it by my mother, which created a lot of shame, and made it really hard for me to look at these parental wounds in my own life. And all those responses came from my parents own beliefs, my parents own upbringings, my parents own traumas, but it had the ripple effect of creating shame and trauma within me. And I mentioned that because that's that intergenerational trauma, how one generation affects the next generation. And it's not until one person so that would be me that would be you, is willing to look at the pain and heal it, are we able to change that pattern. But the truth is, pain just causes more pain until it is looked at and witnessed. This pain has to go somewhere. It's the same with abuse. So abuse is a form of pain. So say you're abused by your mother, that abuse energy has to go somewhere so that abuse energy lives within you. And you can end up abusing others outside of you, or you end up abusing yourself. And that's what happened in my life. I've talked about on other episodes, some of the traumatic experiences I had in my life. But because of that the trauma and the pain exercise in my childhood, I took it all and I brought it within I abused myself, many of us are afraid of parent laying out our parents patterns. But then we end up taking that energy and that unhealed wound and punishing ourselves, which is another reason why it's so important for us to dive into healing our relationships with our parents, and today our relationship with our mothers. So it's important for us to begin to tease out the layers of the mother wound Because oftentimes, there's many, many layers, there's many different ways and nuances to how your mother was not perfect. And sometimes it's all connected. And sometimes it's different ways. And each layer wants to be witnessed and healed one layer at a time, an example of the healing the layers. So let's take self abandonment, you may have witnessed your mother constantly ignore herself, never talked about herself and never have her own needs. And so one layer of this could be that you have picked up this pattern and you find that you self abandon another layer could be that your mother really took on a caregiver role for her partner. And so then you may end up playing that out in your own relationship, you may see that you do the same pattern. But it's creating an unhealthy dynamic between you and your partner, and maybe resentments building, because you're like, Why am I always taking care of you. But it's actually you're playing out this pattern you picked up from your mother. And so there's many different layers that can arise with this mother wound. And so as you grow up, you may find that your relationship with your mother becomes tense, or that you begin to feel guilt, or you begin to feel resentment, because you're trying to unconsciously often figure out how to be in the world while playing out these patterns. But maybe you don't want to play out those patterns, because they're not true to the authentic you. But oftentimes, our subconscious, or that inner child that we talk a lot about here on the podcast fears that if they change or do something different in the world, that they will lose their mother's love. And so this builds tension between the child and their mother as they grow up. So into adulthood, you may find it hard to be in the same room as your mother, because you see so many of the same patterns or because you feel guilt that maybe you've gone a different way or because your mother is still trying to play out some of these old patterns that you want nothing to do with. So you have a mother who guilts you or criticizes you as a child, you would just take it because oftentimes you had to or as an adult, you just might find you want to distance yourself because you're like, I don't want to play that out. But until you heal it and you sit with your own heart, it's going to just be difficult and it's all always going to feel painful to be in this situation. So some effects of the mother wound are that you can end up with low self esteem, depression, anxiety, you're gonna have difficulty in romantic and platonic relationships, you can have lack of emotional awareness. And you can have difficulties self soothing, or creating that safety within yourself. So how do we begin to heal from the mother wound, so who you're going to have to sit with is you I have found throughout my life healing, the mother wound has involved very little discussion with my mother about the pain she has caused me. Sometimes after I go through a healing, I can talk about it with her sometimes I don't, because it doesn't really matter how she feels about my childhood, it matters how I felt about my childhood. And I found sometimes when I tried to bring out how I felt it goes directly to how she interpreted it. And the truth is, it doesn't matter how she interpreted it, what matters is how I felt about it. And that's what you're going to find as you're healing your mother wound in your relationship with your mother is that it matters how you feel. It doesn't matter how anyone else felt, it doesn't matter what the actual truth was. What matters is how you felt the emotions that arise, the emotions you felt, as a child as a teenager, even as an adult. How you feel is so important. Just doesn't matter how others felt because as you're healing, it's really about you, and learning to read mother yourself. So healing the mother wound involves giving yourself the love you needed as a child. So it involves in my mind, inner child work. I think that healing our parental wounds, and our relationships with our parents involve a lot of inner child work involves a lot of witnessing yourself as that child. So different ways you can do that is by journaling. With this child meditating, you can sit, close your eyes and envision this child on your lap or in front of you. My inner child often likes to do arts and crafts. Well, we talk about different things in my childhood, or she likes to hold my hand as she shows me things that hurt her in the past. That's how I do a lot of inner child work through guided visualizations. But it's bringing awareness to these moments, and the healing and witnessing that your pain was real, and offering yourself that love. And oftentimes how we feel love is to feel seen and heard. So your inner world wants you to see it, and wants you to hear it. And so how we do this is by bringing awareness to these moments. I've talked to a lot of one on one clients recently, and many will bring up a memory from their childhood that keeps replaying in their head. And they're like, I don't know why this keeps replaying. And to me, that's a sign that that memory is looking to heal. So if you find yourself replaying a certain memory over and over again, that memory is not arising to punish you, it is arising to be witness is your mind playing a loop of showing you what wants to be witnessed. And many of us just continue to shove down the memory, we just shove it down, we shove it to the back of our head or into our stomachs wherever you keep the things you shove down. And what these memories are asked actually looking for is acknowledgement. They want you to take it that one step deeper. What is that memory showing you what emotion is arising many times we shove it down because an uncomfortable emotion is arising with the memory, sadness, anger, depression, devastation. And what you're gonna do with that memory is either journal about it or sit with it. I think a lot of people think meditation is clearing the mind. That's one form of meditation, my form of meditation is oftentimes allowing these moments up to be witnessed. And wow, it is up. It's like watching it like a movie. So you want to remain the witness to the situation. You want to watch this memory from a third person perspective, you want to see what that child is telling you? What is the scene that is playing out in your head? And what are the emotions? And what was that child looking for in that moment, and what didn't happen. And so it's about bringing awareness, that self awareness to the past. And so oftentimes with this awareness with this witnessing, it's also beginning to witness your mother. Rather than being attached to your mother, it's beginning to see her as a human outside of you so many of us are so attached to our parents, which is why it can be hard to look at these wounds. Because we view them almost as a part of ourselves. I'm seeing like, attached to us, and you need to disengage to be able to see them clearly. And when you're able to start seeing your parent as a human rather than as your mother Does that make sense so many of us, your mother's different than we view the rest of the world, you have to start viewing them as a human, we're able to bring awareness to the patterns, they may be playing out that may be affected us or the patterns we're playing out that they also played out, or the way they act and how it has hurt us. But it's when we begin to separate and put distance between us and them is when we're able to start healing this relationship. So that's how we begin healing the relationship. And then after we begin to witness it and bring awareness to the patterns to the pain, it's beginning to forgive ourselves for being so young, forgive ourselves for taking so long to look at these patterns, forgiving ourselves for holding on to this pain. And I find it's really through self forgiveness, that then we're able to forgive those outside of us. So for me personally, forgiveness always comes with self forgiveness first. And once I truly forgive myself, and I forgive the experience, in my part in it, I'm able to forgive those outside of me, for example, my mother easily, because I've already sat with my own pain, I've brought love to it forgiveness, and acceptance of who I am and who I was and who I want to be moving forward. And then I'm able to forgive my mother, I'm able to forgive her because she was just holding a place. She was just playing a role in this game called life. And I'm able to move forward differently. So I hope something in that was helpful. But I'm going to answer two questions. And I hope that through these questions, I'm able to bring a bit more clarity to the process of breaking down the mother wound and that relationship with your mother and beginning to look at it, witness it, heal it, love it and forgive it. So let's jump into question one.
Amanda Durocher (Listener Question) 21:53
Dear New View Advice, I am in a bit of a pickle and would gladly appreciate your help. I am trying to juggle two different relationships and I'm having such a hard time doing so. I am a 21 year old female who still lives at home with her divorced and buried depressed mother. I've tried to help her. But our relationship seems to have many ups and downs. Since I've gotten a new partner. I am all she has. She has no friends, family nearby does no activities for herself and is just so sad all the time. I'm trying to help myself out of my own depression and be a better person for my current relationship with my partner, and for myself, but things just always seem to go wrong when I'm trying my hardest to make it go the right way. Whenever I am with my partner, she always makes me feel the worst by saying if you are so happy there, why don't you just move there, that really upsets me. And I'm now at a point where it's been said so many times that I might actually do it. I can't keep living in a toxic environment while I try and help myself. She's making it so so hard to want to help myself be a better person for myself and my new partner, when she is always hanging on to the chain around my ankles. I'm sick of being sad, and I want to be a happier person. But how do I go about doing that my relationship with my partner is good and bad. I adore him. But at the same time, a lot of the things he says slash does annoy and upset me. I love him. And I really do believe that he is the one for me. I guess that between both him and my mother, I'm a bit lost on what to do. I can't keep them both happy while working on my own happiness. Any advice? Thank you for this question. I am so sorry to hear about this difficult time you're having with your mother, and with your partner. I think that from what I've read, it really sounds like the relationship with your mother is affecting your relationship with your partner. So today, we're really going to focus on that first part of the question and your relationship with your mother. This sounds like a really difficult situation. And I just want to honor the process you're moving through, I think you have great awareness, and you're seeing what is and isn't working for you as well as what is triggering for you. And that's such a great first step. So I just want to honor that. I also want to honor that the situation you're in is not easy, it will never be easy. And I just honor you. So I'm going to offer some advice here. There's no rush with the advice I offer. It's also take what resonates leave what doesn't. And I also just want to say that I'm so sorry that you find yourself here and that you don't have a mother who can support you through this. So I think so many of us wish we had mothers who could support us through everything. So I'm sure that instead of your mother causing relationship problems for you, you would probably like if you could talk to your mother about your relationship, but instead that's not the case. And I just want to honor that because I think that that's true for so many people. And it can be so painful to admit to ourselves that we wish our relationship with our mothers was different. Because it's always been a certain way but many of us desire something that we don't have. We wish it was better. We wish it was perfect. We wish our mothers were able To be that unconditionally loving presence in our lives, and for so many people, that's not the case. So I just want to honor that, because I'm so sorry, you're moving through this on your own. So my first piece of advice for you is that you need to prioritize self care, you need to find ways to take care of you not take care of your mother and not take care of your partner, you talk about how you feel like you have to balance them. First, you need to take care of you, you need to balance your own inner system, so to speak, you need to find ways to prioritize yourself, because to me, it sounds like your cup is on empty, you're unable to give in both these relationships, and you're finding that it's really difficult and that you're unable to what it sounds like is really be present in either of them. And I want you to really, really prioritize yourself. And I know how difficult it can be when you have these two other relationships to really prioritize yourself. But it is essential for you to prioritize you, we really can only help others as much as we help ourselves. So in order for you to better assist anyone in your life you need to assist you first. I've noticed in my own life, that it can be really easy to put my own needs last, many times what I need is self involved in time alone, and more time consuming. Or so that's how it feels. But this is a very common female pattern, as well as a very common pattern picked up from our mothers, many mothers put others needs before their own. And this is a societal pattern. And because of this we feel we need to do this to society teaches us that women are the loving caregivers that needs to take care of everyone. But many women fall short for many reasons. But the main one being that they never learned how to prioritize themselves first, it is so important for you to prioritize you. And this can be a really hard habit to break. So I advise finding small ways to prioritize yourself, giving yourself time in the morning or in the evenings. I think that oftentimes what our heart wants is for us to feel and look at hard truths. And though I don't think we can heal all the time, I also think we need to hold ourselves accountable that if we want things to change our lives because we aren't happy. The only one with the power to do that is us. And oftentimes it's going to be finding time to really start diving into those hard truths, those hard feelings that you may be holding on to. I also believe that self care is really important for you right now. Because in order for you to look at those hard truths and those hard emotions, you need to be taking care of yourself. When we are healing from relationships, when we're healing from our relationships with our mothers, when we're healing from anything, it is so important to take care of ourselves. Because the healing journey isn't easy. It's incredibly difficult to sit with the pain, you have experience that you have shoved down and lives in your body. It's an incredibly difficult process. It's incredibly rewarding. And on the other side of all this stuck trauma, pain and suffering is freedom. But it's not an easy process. So in order for you to start looking at your relationship with your mother, you're going to need to find things that are self care that feel good, you're going to need to find ways to create the balance within your life of looking at the hard truths and then finding something that feels good and fills your cup up. And feeling the hard truth is a form of self care. But you're also going to want to balance it out with I'm seeing coloring coloring is such a great self care. I really think that helps us integrate from feeling hard feelings, maybe you're into yoga, maybe you're into journaling, maybe you're into meditation, but it's finding the balance between allowing yourself to release some of this hard feelings. And also allowing yourself to just fill your own cup up, just have those moments to yourself. I also think a big part of the mother wound is the expectation that our mothers will change or finally show up differently. So many of us play out the pattern with our mothers, maybe this time will be different. Maybe she will show up differently this time. And we are expecting our mothers to change even though our entire lives, they have not changed. They have showed up one way. And so we play out this pattern of maybe this time, she'll be different maybe this time, she'll hear me maybe this time, she'll be kind, all while our mother has never changed. She continues to play out the same patterns that very often her mother played out before her. It takes one person to be a cycle breaker and this means to break the generational pattern. And that all starts with you prioritizing you and what you need and learning to self resource because it sounds like your mother depends on you for a lot of her emotional support. And it's time for you to begin to prioritize yourself and start creating a boundary Are you there, I really think you need to start setting some firm boundaries with your mother. And she's probably not going to like it. It sounds like she's been using you in many ways in her own life, and it's just no longer serving you. I wanted to repeat back to you that you wrote, I can't keep living in a toxic environment. While I try and help myself. I think this is something that you need to take some serious time with. I can't tell you if you should move out of your mother's house. But I think that it's important for you to prioritize you. And if you feel like your mother is abusing you, or creating a toxic environment, I do want you to know that you don't deserve that. It's incredibly difficult to be more of an adult than our parents are. But for you, you may need to leave your living situation in order to begin to heal. So that's a decision I invite you to take the next 30 days to consider. It will not be easy to move moving never is. But you just need to start really getting intentional about what you need this question had a lot of I don't know what to do, should I live here should I not. And how you're going to figure out if you should live here is to become intentional with the next 30 days. Because moving does involve parts. So first, you need to become clearer on what you need. And then you need to become clear on the steps you need to take. So if it's moving, you need to become clear on how that's going to happen. And we're going to live and that's going to involve a lot of time. And then if it's staying, it's how can you live here without it feeling like a toxic environment? And how can you set those firm boundaries so that you can feel safe at your home? My guess is because you're living with your mother is that maybe you've never lived in a place where you felt full safety. And that is something that comes with age, I know that I didn't feel fully safe in my home until I began healing in my 20s. That was the first time I experienced safety. I never felt safe. When I was child, I never felt safe with roommates. It was really with my current partner where I began to feel safe in my home for the first time, which created an environment that allowed me to heal. And that safety goes with the self care, both of those are the going to be the foundation for you healing moving forward for you finding that happiness, you need to create safety for yourself. So you need to be realistic with yourself if your current environment is conducive to your own safety. So I want you to ask yourself for 30 days, what do I need? I would log it in a journal and log every day how you're feeling? Should I move? Should I not move? And I want you to start to insert yourself into the equation. Not what does your mother need over the next 30 days? Not what does your partner need? What do you need? This journal is all about what you need, not what anybody else needs. Many people struggle with this because we felt loved when we gave up our boundaries. And when we rolled over when other people asked us to. But the truth is, that's not real love. That's codependency. And you will feel real love when you begin to love yourself. Another line I wanted to honor is this line that you wrote, she is making it so so hard to want to help myself be a better person for myself, and my new partner, when she is always hanging on to the chain around my ankles. I thought this was a really clear visual of how you are feeling. And I wanted to repeat that back because I wanted to honor that visual. And I also want you to take some time with that visual, you describe that you feel like your mother has a chain around your ankles. I know it's not a literal chain. But I think it's a very clear graphic in your mind. And this is how you truly feel. And I want you to take a moment to really feel that you feel like you are bound to your mother and that you are not free. I am so sorry. You feel this way. I find this heartbreaking. This isn't how we're supposed to feel in our relationships with our parents. And you do not deserve to feel this way. And I invite you to honor that, to sit with that and to really feel that. In a perfect world, our relationships with our mothers would be safe spaces for us to explore the world and always know there was a safe place to come back to many of us don't live in that reality. But as an adult, you do not need to feel bound to your parents. Many of us feel guilt towards our parents because they provided for us but the truth is, you are not bound to them. If they abuse you if they don't treat you well. You need to take care of yourself. It is so important for you to take care of you and to begin to love yourself in the ways that you weren't when you were a child. And a lot of times we have to set firm boundaries with our parents. And then after we heal, we can loosen up those boundaries. Some people may choose to never speak to their parents again. Some may choose to not speak to their parents for a month. Some may choose not to speak to their parents for six months for a year. It's what you need, and your boundaries can change moving forward. But you have to honor what you need here in this moment. What do you need right now in order to heal, and in order to feel free, and in order to find your happiness. So I also think inner child work would be good for you. So to begin to dive into the layers around this, but right now, I do think this may be too hard when you're still living with your mother, and when you're feeling so bound to her. And I also think that the boundaries need to be created first, before you can do the inner child work, because my guess is that your inner child needs to feel safe, before your inner child is going to show you what needs to be healed. So I find with inner child work, it's best done when we have some distance from those that we are working through layers around. So for example, your mother, and I'm going to discuss inner child work more in the next question. And so I did want to mention it here. Because I think that this will be an important part of your journey to dive into healing and feeling the younger you and how she was treated by your mother. If you do decide to continue living with your mother, I think it would help for you to get a therapist or someone to work with once a week, so you can dive into the relationship with your mother in a safe place. I think it's important for you to start unpacking what's going on here and what you want for yourself moving forward. But I think that your first priority is self care, and boundaries and deciding if you're going to live with your mother. And if you are how that is going to look different moving forward. And your mom may not be able to live with you with boundaries. And then your choice might be put on you that you have to move. But if I were you, my first priority would be to sort that out first. So that's why I'm not going to dive into inner child work in this question, because I want you to really focus on creating that safety for yourself that time for yourself and prioritizing yourself first. And then the last thing I wanted to mention is that as you are doing all this to be self compassionate with yourself. I know I threw a lot at you here in this question. But I also do believe that you're doing the best you can. And I want you to practice being kind to yourself as you're setting boundaries. As we begin setting boundaries, they're never pretty, they can come off harsh. And sometimes we can even go back on our own boundaries. And it's so important to be kind to yourself, as you move through this process. For your question. It sounds like you take on the weight of others, and also all of your own stresses. And I invite you to let yourself off the hook. You're not perfect no one is. So what can you do every day to honor yourself? Is it going for walks? Is it journaling? Is it moving your body? Is it being kinder to yourself? Is it seeing friends? Is it bringing awareness around the way you speak to yourself in your life, nothing in life is easier with criticism, it actually makes everything harder. So self compassion eases us back into the present moment and assists us in taking those next steps that our heart is asking us to take, the more kind we are to ourselves, the more compassionate we are also begins to create that safety within ourselves. So I hope something in this answer was helpful. I'm sending you all my love today. Thank you so much for this question.
Amanda Durocher (Listener Question) 38:20
I have been having some issues with my mom recently, my mom has always been very critical of everything I do, whether it's work activities, clothing, boyfriends, etc. I have felt distant for a while. But I do want to fix our relationship. She thinks of us as best friends. But her passive aggressive comments and her criticism keeps me distant. I've tried setting boundaries in the past, but she either doesn't change or gets hurt or very emotional. What should I do? Thank you for this question. I think that unfortunately, having a critical mother is very common for so many people. So I just want to honor this for you. Because I think that having a parent's criticism is very hard to live with. And it can often be that critical voice that lives in our head. So I believe that if we are self critical, it's oftentimes the voice of others playing out in our head. And throughout the healing journey, we are able to look at this criticism almost one layer at a time and see where it originated from. But I just want to say that I am so sorry to hear about your mother's criticisms. Having a critical parent is really challenging and difficult. So I'm so sorry to hear that your mother criticizes you. You do not deserve to be constantly criticized. You are an adult and you are able to make your own decisions. And I'm so sorry that your mother continues to criticize everything that you do. So from your question, I'm going to make the assumption that you do not live with your mother. And so I'm going to advise you to begin to bring awareness to your relationship with your mother. If you still lived with your mother. My advice would be similar to the first question where I would say you need to become really clear on if that living situations where for you and how to set boundaries, but from this question, I'm going to assume that you don't live with your mother. So I know that you said that you have tried to set boundaries in the past, but they didn't work. And I think that boundary setting can be really difficult for people, especially people who have no boundaries to begin with. But it's important to remember that many people will continue to push our boundaries, it's not set it and forget it, we may need to reiterate these boundaries. Clearly, multiple times, many people in our lives are going to push our boundaries, many people are going to see if you're really going to hold it. And it's up to you to hold it and to repeat over and over again, your boundary. So say you have a mother who constantly comes over without her being invited, you need to continue to repeat that she's not welcome at your house, unless she asks ahead of time, she cannot show up unannounced, because it's disruptive to your schedule. However it feels you can communicate with her how that feels. But you need to continue to reiterate it and your mother may get upset with you. And that's one of the hard things about boundary settings, is that people may get upset with us. But you have to remember that when you allow your boundaries to be broken, it may make your mother feel better. But my guess is you end up upset with you. And that's not fair to you. So yes, you may upset the other person when you're setting boundaries. But that's just going to happen in order for you not to be upset with you, the person whose back you have to have in this situation is yourself. You need to take care of you, especially as you're working through the mother wound and you're learning to read mother yourself, it is so important for you to show up as the mother you wish you have as the mother with the firm boundaries as a mother who protects your safety. As the mother who holds that unconditionally loving place for you, that mother who continually forgives you, re mothering is showing up for yourself the way you wish your mother had shown up for you. And so that's going to be a big part of your healing, I believe, is really learning to stick with these boundaries, and changing your view around them. Maybe instead of viewing the most boundaries around your mother, viewing them as boundaries for your inner child boundaries for yourself continually telling yourself I'm showing up as the mother I wish I had. And reframing your mind around what those boundaries mean. Instead of I'm keeping my mother out, maybe viewing it as I'm keeping that love within. I'm holding space for the love and the healing I am creating. Rather than keeping something out. It's about what you're creating within you. Sometimes a reframing of the mind can assist us when we have trouble setting boundaries. I also think when we're wishy washy with our boundaries that can be from our own wounding. So it can be hard for us to stick up for ourselves and to be firm with boundaries for many reasons. Maybe you never saw anyone do this as a child. So it's scary, maybe you're afraid of more criticism. So it can seem easier not to set the boundaries. Maybe you feel like no one ever listens to you. So what's the point, we can have many beliefs around boundaries. So if you find boundaries to be difficult, I invite you to explore your relationship with boundaries. And if you can be more clear, or if you need to be more compassionate with yourself as you begin setting boundaries. So maybe being firm with your boundaries is too hard right now, I would invite you to begin journaling and exploring your relationship with boundaries as the first step. The next thing I would advise would be inner child work. I think that in order to use the word fix your relationship with your mother, I would say heal your relationship with your mother, it will involve you, as I mentioned earlier, re mothering yourself and really creating the space for the what sounds like resentments that are arising. So my guess is you're keeping your mother at a distance, because if you were to let her in, there's too much pain there. So you're becoming a bit disconnected, but then you're becoming distant. And it's important for you to begin one layer at a time looking at your relationship with your mother. And I think that creating the boundaries and the distance will assist you in your healing. Because I find when we're doing inner child healing, a lot can come up and it doesn't heal in a day. It's oftentimes a process of having a memory arise, or an instance or a pattern, and then allowing the feelings of that to arise. Sometimes we can move it in 10 minutes. Sometimes it takes a week to really feel that anger and allow that inner child to feel that anger or feel that sadness or that disappointment. And we have to allow all the feelings Up first, we have to allow ourselves to feel the feelings because that helps us to clear and release the feelings which after that step, then we can add in the love and the forgiveness. And sometimes especially at the beginning of our healing journeys. It can take months to work through some of these childhood patterns. Many times when I'm working with either my mother wound or my father wound so my relationship with one of my parents. It's not a one day fix because these are deep seated wounds that were created. And oftentimes connected to these wounds are many beliefs about ourselves in the world. So you talked about having a critical mother, I also found my mother to be critical. And so many of the criticisms I have lived with were words that she had said to me. And that has taken years honestly to continue to look at and heal. And sometimes when I'm in the deep depths of the healing, even though my mother is one of the closest people in my life, I do need a break. And I just need some time to not speak with her. Because I don't want to say something I regret. And I just need to create that safety within myself that it's okay for me to be healing us. And it's okay for me to be feeling this way. And as I mentioned in the intro, the more you allow this stuff up, the more you allow yourself to heal this, it will heal your relationship with your mother, and you'll be able to see her as a person rather than your mother. And so her criticisms most likely hit a childhood wound. And so she may always remain critical. But the more you heal, the more that you won't internalize those criticisms, you'll be able to just see that those aren't about you at all. Because the truth is when people are critical, or people are harsh, or people say mean things. The truth is, it's not about us, it's always about them. The truth is, it has nothing to do with us. But oftentimes, it goes right into our bodies, and we internalize it as if it is about us. But the truth is, everybody's criticisms are about them. It's not about us, and we don't have to take on the words of others. I've been working with saying that's not mine, when somebody criticizes me, that's not mine. That's not for me, and just visualizing a gold wall in front of me and just seeing that criticisms pop right off the wall. So that's been helpful for me, and maybe something like that would be helpful for you to just start observing the criticisms instead of internalizing them.
And that's a big part of the healing is becoming the witness, becoming the one who sees what is happening rather than participating in what is happening. Because oftentimes, we play out drama in relationships, and it takes one person stepping out of the drama and witnessing it. And seeing how both people are playing a role, just playing a role. I always like to view it as a movie, playing a role in a movie. And it takes one person witnessing it, in order to change the pattern. So maybe you always respond the same when your mom's critical. Maybe you always don't say anything, or maybe you begin to argue with her. But through healing, you'll begin to witness it and then be able to show up differently. And when you show up differently, she will have to show up differently. It doesn't mean she'll like it. But you'll see that when you begin to show up differently. Other people have to show up differently, because you're no longer playing the pattern. So a new situation has to play out. I also see a similarity in this question about how your mother can get really emotional, which was similar in the previous question, and I think is similar for a lot of children, and their relationships with their mothers having really emotional mothers. So then children learn to be the less emotional ones. And I think that as you're beginning to heal your inner child, it's going to involve you connecting with these emotions that you will likely shut off because your mother was taking up too much emotional space. And so many children become disconnected from yourselves, you say I feel distant, to me, that's a sign that you're disconnecting. And so through this inner child work, you're going to begin to create less distance with yourself. Because when we create distance with others, we also create distance with ourselves. And so for you, I think it's important for you to set the boundaries, I think it's important for you to do inner child work to begin to really look at this relationship with your mother, I think it's important for you to also prioritize self care if you're not, again, healing starts with self care, because you need to take care of yourself as you're healing. Allow yourself to feel these difficult feelings can be tough on the body, there's a reason we shove them down, it's not enjoyable to cry your eyes out, or to scream at the top of your lungs. So it's important to create that balance of feeling the hard feelings and then creating the calming nervous system effects, right. That's why I always recommend baths, and coloring and going on walks. It's how can you allow yourself to feel the heart of feelings and then also allow yourself to know that your body is a safe place to allow these feelings to arise. So we're working on creating safety within ourselves. And so I think that you could do this inner child work through meditation, I have a meditation on my YouTube channel to connect with your inner child. I'm also going to create a meditation for working on this mother wound, which will come out this week as well. And I think you can begin journaling. So I'm going to put some journal prompts on my website for working through the mother wound. And these are two great ways to begin inner child work because it's allowing that child part of you forward it's allowing that past part of you forward, it's allowing yourself to witness the pain that you have not witnessed before. These are two great ways to do it. If you find that you're unable to create the space for yourself, I think finding a therapist or a coach or working with someone, I do one on one sessions and having a space to assist you with this can be really helpful in this process. So before I wrap up the question, I just wanted to offer three journal prompts that may help you with this. And then you'll also be able to find them on my website at newviewadvice.com/47. So three journal prompts I recommend for you beginning to dive into your relationship with your mother, and healing your relationship with your mother would be one, what is my relationship with my mother? Allow yourself to free write about your relationship with your mother, do not filter yourself? Are you angry? Are you happy? Are you scared? Write down how you honestly feel. A lot of people cannot say out loud how they feel about their mother. Allow yourself that safety on the page to write how you truly feel about your relationship with your mother. To think about a time in your childhood, when your mother didn't show up as you wanted her to allow yourself to explore this memory. How did you feel in that moment? What age were you? What ramifications did this have? Was this a pattern that continued to play out? Was this the first time this pattern played out? Allow yourself to explore this memory? Three? If you were to imagine the perfect relationship you could have with your mother? What would it look like? Allow yourself to free write about this relationship. Read this back to yourself and see if there's one thing in this answer that you could give to yourself moving forward. So those are three journal prompts. I invite you to start with I'll have more than that on the website. So you can check out my website again at newviewadvice.com/47. But I hope something in this answer was helpful. I know that diving into these parental wounds, and especially the mother wound can be incredibly difficult. I invite you to be kind with yourself to be patient with yourself and not to rush the process. There's no rush to work through this. I've been healing for years and layers of the mother and father wound still arise. For me these relationships we have with our parents are very complicated. So it's not an overnight process. But it is important to begin to start to observe our relationships with our parents from a new perspective, from a healing perspective and from a self healing perspective that your healing your safety. Your Self Love is just as important as your parents. So again, I hope something was answered was helpful and I'm sending you so much love.
Amanda Durocher (Outro) 52:53
Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of New View Advice. I am so grateful to have these conversations with you each week. And I am so grateful to have had the chance today to discuss our relationships with our mothers. If you haven't already, I invite you to leave a review for the podcast. Reviews really helped to bring more people to the podcast and help people to know this is a safe space to have conversations. You can leave a rating on Apple podcasts and on Spotify. And you go to the bottom of the episode page and you hit five stars that would be so helpful. And on Apple podcasts you can also leave a review and if you feel inspired, you can leave the name of your favorite episode or your thoughts on the podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of New View Advice. As always, I hope I was able to offer you a new view on whatever you may be going through. Send you all my love. See you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai