The relationship between mothers and daughters is energetically, emotionally, and spiritually complex on many levels. It is meant to be that way. This blog is written with deep love and respect for all mothers, including my own. It is written to honour mothers and the role of women systemically. The relationship with your birth mother sets you up with the opportunity to learn all that you wanted to learn during this human lifetime. The relationship with mother provides a catalyst and opportunity for spiritual development and growth. Whether you feel you have a great relationship with your mother or one that is more problematic, there may be opportunities for personal growth and development that you have yet to recognize or explore. By omission, this blog post is not implying that the relationship with father is not important, however, it is my intent to focus on the relationship between mothers and daughters. If you are a son, much of what I have written may be relevant for you too, however you can check out my blog posts on emotional wounds for men. Let me share some systemic healing information about the relationship between mothers and daughters.
Emotional Response Patterns
It is a normal part of early childhood to develop emotional response strategies and patterns to deal with experiences of emotional trauma and stress. These emotional response strategies and body holding patterns will remain in place for your entire lifetime unless you decide to shift them. It is up to you as an adult to shift the patterns that no longer serve you well. That’s what all this systemic energy healing work is all about.
What emotional response patterns did you unconsciously develop as a baby? Are you the high achiever, the perfectionist, the responsible one, the clingy one, the alien, the low achiever, the unwanted gender child, the clown, the organizer, the take charge one, the abandoned one, the black sheep, the worker, the nurturer, the entertainer, the hero, the one left out, the protector, the fragmented one, the fixer, the helper, the psychic one, the procrastinator, the martyr, the indecisive one, the know it all, the weak one needing protection, the irresponsible one, the sickly one, or the one focused on outer physical appearance? What about birth order? Do you carry the middle child syndrome? You might want to look to your life, interests, and career choices to help you sort out your early emotional response patterns. You may carry a combination of several of these emotional response strategies, or many others from a long list. The development of these emotional response patterns was your means of emotional survival as a baby and child.
The Psychology
When a baby daughter loses energetic and emotional connection with mother she may respond emotionally in a number of ways. The child may take on the energy pattern of: I’m not good enough. I’m unworthy. I’m alone. I’m rejected. I will die. I’m not safe. I don’t deserve to live. I don’t exist. I’m a failure. I’m not beautiful. I’m left out. I’m separate. I’ll lose control. I’m not lovable. I’m not wanted. I’m not important. I’m not loved. I’m responsible. I need to be perfect. I don’t need anyone. The daughter holds this pattern in her body for life unless body focused energy work is embraced. These patterns may have been your way of being seen by your mother or your way of showing up in your greater family system. Mother may have been very busy with many other children in the home or she may have had a great deal of work to do, and you may have felt emotionally threatened and not seen. Sometimes this happens even if you are the only child and mother was emotionally distant and drawn back to something emotionally unresolved that occurred in her past.
The Biology
Let’s go back to the beginning to explore the development of your emotional response strategies.
The young child develops these emotional response patterns to survive at all costs and to overcome feelings of annihilation or extinction. These emotional response patterns are biological, evolutionary survival mechanisms built into the baby’s body. That is why the biology or physiology of the body cannot be separated, diagnosed, or studied separate from the emotional dynamic of the human being. Emotional unwellness brings on physical, psychological, spiritual, relational, and financial unwellness.
A separation wound may have developed with mother even if something huge, obvious, or seemingly significant did not occur. Behind that diagnosis of cancer may be ancestral emotional woundedness. Behind that heart disease may be an ancestral broken heart. Behind those digestive issues may be an ancestral emotional inability to take in nourishment. Behind the addictions may be an inability to settle into the energy of the body because of ancestral emotional pain.
The measure of life stress or trauma is subjective and individual to each one of us. It is contextual. You may be able to handle an emotional dynamic in one situation, but struggle with it in another situation. What may appear insignificant to one person may be felt intensely by another. That is why many quantitative, empirical studies omit important aspects of the human condition. Emotions are part of the biology. Emotions are imprinted on the cells of the body. They cannot be ignored. These unconscious emotional events in relationship with mother set your core fears in place for life. Fear is one emotion that definitely creates unwellness. To release fears, worries, and grief is part of a healing journey.
The Pregnancy
Was your mother’s pregnancy with you welcomed with love or was your mother horrified to discover she was pregnant? Did your mother struggle emotionally in any way while she was pregnant with you? Was your mother well supported during her pregnancy by your father and her family members or was there conflict or uncertainty of some sort going on in her life? Regardless of your birth situation, you all have a mother and a father, even if father was donated sperm. Take the time to understand the impact of your mother’s pregnancy scenario on your life today. The baby developing in the womb will feel any adverse emotional state of her mother and feel it as a threat to her life. The baby takes the emotional experience and emotional memory of mother epigenetically into the cells of her body moment-by-moment, hour-by-hour, and day-by-day. In a full term pregnancy there are about nine months worth of emotional experiences to consider. The baby’s primary goal at this point in life is survival and she will respond accordingly.
If the baby feels mother as emotionally unwell or needy, the baby will unconsciously offer to take care of mother’s emotional wellbeing from that moment onward. The baby sacrifices her own wellbeing out of love and loyalty to the family system to help her mother. The child develops emotional strategies in agency with mother in order to ensure survival. The baby unconsciously says, “Your needs will come before my needs mother.” This process occurs for all babies in one way or another with varying outcomes.
The felt sensation in the body of the baby becomes, “If mother is doing well, I will survive.” As a little baby coming into the world you may have taken on the body-felt sense, “I have to comfort her and carry her pain. She can’t do it on her own. I am responsible for her wellbeing. She won’t be happy and fulfilled if I don’t carry her emotional burden. I have to take care of things and do a good job or I won’t survive.” That is the unconscious emotional life of the developing baby. At this very early moment of life, to ensure survival, the daughter sacrifices herself, and she becomes a martyr to carry or share mother’s emotion pain. At that moment, the daughter sets herself up for a lifetime of struggle. That unconscious decision may set up the child for the journey she wanted to experience in this lifetime. When you carry these early emotional response patterns into adulthood, each adverse situation that you face feels once again like a situation of survival. That makes it very difficult to be in relationship with others and why so many relationships are challenging.
The Birth
What did you experience at birth? You were suddenly delivered into this strange and frightening new world leaving behind the warmth of mother’s protective womb. Was your mother there to greet you emotionally? It’s a reflexive autonomic action for survival to bond with mother. You searched for the warmth of mother’s body against yours, you searched for a nipple to feed and comfort you, you looked up into mother’s eyes to make a connection, and you searched for confirmation that life was a good thing. Perhaps mother breastfed you and perhaps she didn’t.
Many come through the birth process to life and mother is not present emotionally or energetically. Mother may have been drugged for your birth. There may have been birth complications and mother’s energies were scattered. Maybe you were whisked off to a nursery to be cared for by strangers. Maybe you had to be placed in an incubator. Maybe your birth triggered mother’s own childhood wounds. She may have been overwhelmed with feelings of unresolved emotional childhood or ancestral wounds or trauma, and turned away energetically. Perhaps, from her place of emotional woundedness, mother experienced you as her source of love and her source of comfort. Rather than giving to you, which is the natural order of life, mother was in an energetic position to receive from you.
Mother’s Emotional World
Mother was there physically, however, emotionally and energetically she was absent. Mother may have been drawn energetically by any unresolved emotional trauma in her family system such as when a child in the family died young, was miscarried or aborted, or was given up to adoption; a parent leaving or dying young; a lost or unrequited first love; accidents and other tragedies; deep family secrets that are left unresolved; she may have experienced war; she may have experienced religious oppression; or someone might be missing from her family system.
Do your best to create an understanding of mother’s emotional childhood experience. You will have to step outside the box for this exercise. If you stay within your narrow perception of childhood and remember only the worst dozen things your mother did, you will not be able to answer that question. You will be unable to tap into all that your mother did do well for you energetically. You will not be able to get acquainted with your mother at a deeper level.
Here goes… Who was your mother? Who loved her? What do you know about her parents? What did her parents emotionally pass to her? Did your mother have siblings? What do you know about mother’s siblings? What emotional trauma occurred in her life? How did the trauma impact her life? Did your mother have many friends? Did your mother like school, and if not, why not? What did your mother like to do with her spare time? What were your mother’s natural talents? What was going on in your mother’s community when she was growing up? What do you know about your mother’s grandparents? Did your mother emigrate? If she didn’t, who in the family did? The list of questions is endless. The unresolved emotionally traumatic events held within your mother’s body might have occurred in her generation or in past generations.
Separation Wounds
A daughter’s relationship with her mother becomes the template or blueprint for all her future relationships. If the relationship went reasonably well, the daughter likely feels confident, loved, and has high self-esteem and self-worth. When you are honest with yourself, do you feel that you got enough energetically and emotionally from your mother? This question is asked without any blame or judgement. It is meant to acknowledge what is or was.
Ponder your current situation; do you rely on others to keep you feeling safe in the world? Perhaps you have a tendency to feel insecure or struggle with uncertainty. You might need to control things. You might need structure in your life. You might have difficulty with intimacy. This developed in relationship with your birth mother. How is your feeling of self-worth or self-esteem? This developed in relationship with your birth mother. How is your level of confidence? This developed in relationship with your birth mother. If you are a survivor, this developed in relationship with your birth mother. Do you love yourself unconditionally or do you seek love from others to feel good about yourself? This developed in relationship with your birth mother.
If mother wasn’t fully present emotionally and energetically for you, a relationship of emotional distance may have established. You may have experienced an early emotional separation or bonding injury with mother. Your emotional response pattern may be independence. “I don’t need anyone.” “I’m just fine on my own.” “I will make it on my own.” This doesn’t help you to have healthy relationships with others in adulthood. Quite often you don’t recognize the emotional response patterns until you have lived a few decades and experienced many relationships.
Not Enough of Mother
If you experienced an emotional separation wound with mother, it creates an energy dynamic of abandonment that will impact your life in a huge way. A daughter that feels she didn’t get enough from mother will have abandonment issues. Each time the daughter gets close to someone she will develop the same inner feeling she experienced with mother. If the daughter experienced energetic abandonment, in a close relationship with family, friends, or an intimate partner, the daughter will want to draw people in close to her. However, if they get too close to her energetically she will unconsciously push them away. She has to live her pattern of abandonment.
Too Much of Mother
If the relationship with mother was energetically overwhelming, the daughter may push mother away. The daughter who pushes away her mother may struggle at some time in life physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, financially, or as mentioned, with regard to relationships. Often, a daughter will feel emotional distance from her mother, blaming mother for this distance, when in reality it is the daughter unconsciously rejecting mother and setting up the distance. If the daughter experienced energetic inundation as a child, she may initially push others away. Eventually she begins to feel out of balance or perhaps lonely. Her response may be to gather someone to her so she can experience the energetic inundation she felt in childhood. If we don’t work to minimize the impact of the character style you developed in life, you will fall back to the default position of abandonment or inundation that you experienced as a child.
Bonding Wound
A bonding or separation wound with mother at birth or in early childhood may create an energetic entanglement with mother. If mother had to be in the hospital for a time or another sibling arrived when you were at a very young age, it may have triggered a separation wound with mother. If mother went to work when you were young or off on a vacation without her child(ren), a separation wound may have developed. If you were sent to live at the home of an extended family member or with others outside the family for periods of time at a young age, a separation wound may have developed. Adoption at birth or at an early age immediately creates a separation wound with mother. It is my belief that the development of a separation wound with mother is unavoidable and it is a necessary part of our life journey on planet Earth.
An emotional response pattern that created emotional distance from mother may bring about a rejection of mother and/or a merging with mother. A daughter may unconsciously or consciously attempt to be the opposite of her mother, hence rejecting her, or she may take on many of mother’s qualities, merging with her. What you reject in your mother you also reject in yourself, since you are genetically 50% mother. If you have been seeking wellness for decades and yet it seems elusive, you cannot get connected to your authentic core self within and a feeling of unconditionally love for yourself if you consciously or unconsciously reject your mother. You may also carry a thick layer of rigid energetic armour or draw upon physical weight to protect your inner core self and to guard against emotional pain. Through systemic family constellations, it is often found that rejection of mother can contribute to many immune system conditions. If you have merged with mother, you may not have a strong healthy energetic boundary of your own and this is a key area of systemic healing work for you. You will likely feel inside that your mother is not strong enough to carry her own fate.
Relationship With Mother
I’ve heard it said that the way you respond to group situations is the way you feel in relationship with your mother. How do you emotionally respond to group settings? Are you overwhelmed by groups, do you feel responsible for everyone’s comfort, do you lack confidence, do you dread being in groups, do you feel threatened, do you feel like it is your role to make everyone happy, do you thrive, are you quiet, do you shrink energetically, do you become the busy worker behind the scenes, do you make yourself indispensable, do you immediately step in to take charge and organize things, do you become the leader, or do you attempt to stand out or be recognized in a group? This might be something to ponder to help you sort out your relationship with your mother and to understand any early childhood wounds you may carry.
This is Part 1 of a three part series. If you received benefit from this blog post, please LIKE it and SHARE it with others who may also benefit. If you would like to receive my blog posts as they go online, please SUBSCRIBE to my blog by entering your email address in the space provided.
