Do you understand where healing begins? Like most people, you’re quite aware when something is not right in your life. You just want to know what can be done about it. You’ve made the decision to begin your healing journey.
Healing requires a desire for change and a willingness to follow through. If you choose to remain in victimhood or in denial, then you can’t expect to find healing. Frequently, where healing begins is looking at your relationships with your mother and father. From there it can go in many directions. Those early relationships impact all aspects of your life. If you immediately shut down emotionally by these statements, then that’s exactly where your healing will need to begin. Avoid the urge to turn away and run, intellectualize, defend, or rationalize. I encourage you to step into your healing journey.
If you struggle to find inner peace, self-love, emotional wellness, or fulfilling success in relationships and life, it might be because you can’t fully take in or feel the love of your parents. What you reject in your parents, you will also reject in yourself. What you emotionally try to carry for a parent will keep you from living your own life fully. You will go through life searching for meaning, life purpose, or something that’s missing, and you will feel the need to fill that emptiness inside. You will expect your relationships to fill that emptiness, when the emptiness can only disappear or recede through emotional healing within.
Relationship With Your Mother
Let’s begin with mother. How is or was your relationship with your mother? Was it warm and loving or cold and distant? Does the thought of mother bring a smile to your face or do you cringe and tighten your body? Was your mother happy or sad? Are you mother’s confidante? Are you mommy’s boy? Do you feel like your purpose in life is to take care of your mother? Do you hate your mother? Did you experience an abusive relationship with your mother? Did your mother engage in addictive behaviours? Do you distance yourself from your mother?
We can be too close to mother or too far from mother. The relationship we have with our biological mother impacts all of our future relationships. In your relationships with others, do you feel the need to gather many people to you in great numbers, do you tend to push everyone away, or do you have a push/pull relationship with others? Our relationships with others, whether that’s friends, family members, or intimate partners, often reflect how well we bonded with our mother while in utero, during infancy, and in early childhood.
Separation From Mother
One of the most common energetic emotional traumas is a separation from mother. This may have occurred as a result of a huge event like having to be in an incubator after birth, mother may have given you up to adoption, one of you may have had a hospital stay away from the other, you may have been sent to live with other family members at a young age, mother may not have wanted a child, you may feel like you were not the wanted gender, or mother may not have been there emotionally for you because she carried her own unresolved emotional trauma from her own childhood and life.
On the other hand, the separation from mother may have been the result of something much more subtle. The young child reaches for mother and she’s too busy. The child feels this innocent event as rejection. Did mother have huge responsibilities that took her attention away from you? Did she have many young children close in age? Did mother lose any children to miscarriage, abortion, stillbirth, or adoption? Did maternal grandmother lose any babies or did any of her children die too early? Was there a family tragedy that was not emotionally resolved or processed in a healthy way? Did mother have strong support from father or did they separate? Was your mother struggling emotionally from the time you were conceived? Was your maternal grandmother struggling emotionally while she was carrying your mother? Did the family live through war or other hardship? Did your mother lose a prior love relationship? These are just a few important questions to consider when assessing your own relationship with mother.
An Attitude Shift
Where healing begins is with an attitude shift. Healing makes no room for judgement or blame. This isn’t about excusing anyone’s behaviour here. We’re trying to understand the emotional aspect of mother’s behaviour and develop compassion for her journey. Your mother couldn’t behave loving and warm if she was overwhelmed with her own unconsciously stored emotional pain.
This healing needs to take place whether mother is alive or transitioned to the other side. Healing is about acknowledging what is (or was) and finding healthy emotional ways to move forward. Your emotional wounds are held in the cells of your body and healing needs to occur emotionally in the body, not in your head. As much as conscious intention can help with shifting attitudes, you can’t think yourself to wellness if you carry emotional wounds in your body. If you resonate with something in this post, you might make the decision to do body focused systemic family healing work. Your wellness depends on healing your unconscious inner wounds and shifting the old emotional response patterns developed in childhood that are no longer working for you.
If none of this seems to apply to you and you feel you have a wonderful relationship with your mother, then awesome. You will likely find your healing somewhere else in the family system. If you feel some healing is necessary, then you now have some idea where healing begins.
