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Hello, everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s.
The podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our
20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast.
New listeners, old listeners, whatever you are in the world.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we break down the psychology
of our 20s.
The relationship that we have with our mother, both as children and as we become adults,
is one that we don't necessarily speak about enough.
But it undoubtedly shapes the people that we become, not just in our 20s, not just
in our 30s, but in our 40s.
When or if we decide to have children, how we date, how we relate to others, how we relate
to ourselves and our bodies, I think it is a Taylor's oldest time that each of us takes
something from our childhood and from our parents, some of which is good and some of which
is less than good, isn't helpful.
Some of which we only really begin to come to terms with the older we get, whether that
is our quirks, our insecurities, our coping mechanisms, the ways that we self sabotage.
I think the more mature we get, the more separation we get from our parents, the more we begin
to realize that so much about who we are stems back to how they chose to raise us.
When it comes to our parents, the relationship and the dynamic that we have with our mother
and with our father differs greatly.
So it's going to create its own unique pattern of so-called wounds.
And that is exactly what we are going to be talking about today.
We're going to examine the psychology of mother wounds and how our unique relationship
with this caregiver, this person who raised us, who shaped us, can actually cause some
damage and some hidden elements of who we are that we might not necessarily like.
Even if you think this topic doesn't apply to you or you think that the idea of a wound
is a bit dramatic, I'm just going to tell you there is something each of us is going
to be able to relate to in this discussion, even if you don't think it now because the
bond that we have with our mother is so primal and so strong and so important that it leaves
a mark on each of us, a mark that we eventually come to terms with.
It's not that our mothers are to blame for everything that is wrong with our lives, it's
not that every problem stems back to them.
Just that when we explore this dynamic a little bit more, we begin to I think make visible
some things about ourselves that are normally hidden.
And that is exactly what we're going to do today.
We are going to discuss the origins of mother wounds, how they differ from our father wounds
in two critical ways.
Five of the most common types of wounds or inherited patterns of behavior that you might
recognize yourself in and how to kind of break the generational cycle, how to heal, what
to do, what to read, what to investigate, what to explore about yourself.
There is so much to talk about when it comes to our mother dynamic and our quote unquote
mummy issues.
So without further ado, let's get into it.
The mother child relationship is a profoundly important one.
It is almost spiritual in a sense.
It's our first example of love.
It is the first time we experience safety and protection and self-esteem.
There is this beautiful quote that says our mothers are our first homes.
We are always trying to return to them.
But I think that doesn't mean that there is unprocessed trauma in that relationship that isn't
passed down without our knowledge.
That there isn't things that every parent I think does wrong that influence our relationship
with ourselves as well as those around us on a very physical, social, mental and emotional
level.
I think we all know that how we were raised impacts our adult personality and our self-expression
from very core concepts like attachment style to our interpersonal skills, our personality,
our way of relating to others, our values.
There is a whole library and litany of ways in which our childhood environment ends up
replicating itself in our adult behaviors.
But it kind of begins so much earlier than our memories can recall.
It begins all the way back in the womb.
There have been more and more studies revealing to us that our adult behavior is being formed
before we even open our eyes, before we are even sentient beings.
It's being formed by our mother's experiences and our mother's stress and our mother's
memories.
This is a phenomena known as fetal programming whereby our mother's emotional state can
actually impact how our brains develop when we are still in the womb.
And I think a lot of these studies go to show how deeply linked we are to this person,
to our mother, the person who birthed us, who grew us for nine months on quite a biological
level.
What she experiences is passed through to us.
This is also supported by evidence that traumatic experiences, even generations before, can
be passed down epigenetically.
Knowing that our mother, our grandmother, her mother, they leave an almost chemical mark
on our genes and how they are expressed that lasts generations.
So the way that they discovered this was through a few different avenues, through different
means, a few different situations.
So firstly, way back in the 1800s, after the US Civil War, researchers began to notice
worse life outcomes for the ospreings of prisoners of war during that situation and the children
of these ospreings in ways that didn't really line up with what we thought about reproduction,
which is that when children are born, they are a blank slate.
It wasn't just about the kind of economic conditions that these war veterans found themselves
in.
It wasn't just around what these children were being taught.
But seemed that on a very genetic, basic biological level, these children were inheriting certain
stress responses, certain fears, certain behavioral problems that stemmed back to their parents'
experiences.
Again, after World War II and the Holocaust, researchers in 2015 found that children and
grandchildren of those who had survived this horrific experience had epigenetic changes
that increased how they responded to fear and how they coped with stress and their predisposition
to certain mental illnesses.
This was a human study, but it replicated an animal study that was conducted probably
like three years before that, that was kind of going on at the same time, that found
that essentially when we had rats in this environment where they were conditioned to associate
the smell of something in particular like cherry blossom with pain, even generations later,
their offspring were still reacting negatively and disproportionately to that smell.
Even though the children of these mice had never experienced the pain themselves, even
when they were separated from their like mice parents, there was something going on in
our DNA that was adapting to the environment of our mother and the environment of our father.
It kind of reminds me of this quote that trauma is an echo that only our descendants can
hear.
That is pretty profound and it seems that science confirms it.
Our mother's experiences, even before we arrive, are going to impact us greatly through
our development and therefore our reality after we're born and those experiences won't
just impact us genetically or on a DNA developmental level, but also in terms of how she chooses
to parent us, what she impresses on us, her perception of our relationship, her insecurities,
her fears about the world and where we as her child sit within that space.
That is perhaps the biggest distinction between the importance of mother wounds and father
wounds.
There is this additional layer of connection between us and our mother, this kind of flesh
and blood bond and it's not to say that that means we're always going to be close with
our moms and that they're always going to be our favorite parent.
Our fathers have like no role, no responsibility at all, it all comes back to mom, absolutely
not.
It's just that it's different.
If you want to hear more about the impact of father wounds, we did do like a whole episode
on that, a few months back episode, I think it's 181, the psychology of father wounds.
It is equally important, but something I say in that episode that I think is important
in this context as well and in distinguishing where your childhood wounds are coming from
is that each of us kind of has this voice in our head, right?
It's the same voice that criticizes us, the same voice that judges us, that scolds us
and it's going to sound more like your mother or more like your father.
I think that is a really great way to identify where your parental wounds are stemming from
and not who was responsible but who they're really in connection with.
The other distinction is that father wounds are typically more grounded in problems with
authority and independence and approval, whereas mother wounds are just naturally more
emotive and concern self-esteem, self-worth, boundary issues, codependency, a few of rejection,
even excessive people pleasing.
We learn a lot from our mothers, perhaps the majority from our mothers, about how to relate
to others on an emotional level.
As stereotyped as that may be, it is just the case that normally our mothers are conditioned
to take on that role as emotional provider and teacher because that's what they learn
from their mothers, it's a whole generational, historical, traditional thing.
For women in particular, our mothers also teach us how to operate in a patriarchal society
that is the second big factor that distinguishes mother wounds and father wounds.
Mother wounds involve understanding that mothers and daughters, especially, are situated
in and influenced by a patriarchal society that is oppressive to women.
The mother wound is normally a cultural trauma that is carried by our mother, along with
the dysfunctional coping mechanisms that she has used to process the pain and adapt to
the environment in which she was raised in, that she wants us to be capable of surviving
as well.
She is the inherent her way of managing some of the burdens that society unjewelies places
on women.
So I think that we can see this patriarchal influence in some of the most common and prevalent
types of mother wounds, such as poor body confidence and self-esteem, jealousy, competition
with other women, perfectionism, trust issues, fearing, disapproval.
I think that this facet around patriarchal influence though is most noticeable when it
comes to how you and I see our bodies and how we see other women.
So let's explore that for a second.
So I had a friend who once said to me, I hate my body because my mother hated hers.
And it floored me because I think that this encapsulates what we're speaking about perfectly.
Our mothers significantly impact the relationship that we have with appearance and with beauty
through verbal messages, through role modeling, through comments on not just our own bodies,
but the bodies of other people that we see out in public in magazines on the street.
They influence us through their own experiences with diet culture and how this almost seeps
into our impression and perspective on our own bodies.
The words that they speak about themselves in particular truly do get absorbed into
our own internal dialogue.
If we spend our childhood continuously hearing our mothers talking about how much they hate
and despise their thighs and their shoulders and their wrinkles and their eye color and
their hair color, as we grow up, we inherit those very features that they hated.
And how is it that we are meant to love that part of us that our mother didn't even
like about herself?
If as well they spend our childhood switching between different yoyo diets, going keto and
then vegan and then doing juice fast or throwing all the processed sugar out in the house,
which is something that my mom did all the time, ultimately they are going to bring us
along with them because they control our environment as well.
And so we internalize this behavior as normal and we believe that our bodies, our size deserves
to be controlled and in some ways punished.
It's where the concept of an almond mum came from, a mother who unintentionally gives
incredibly unhelpful and unhealthy dieting advice that is projecting her own insecurities
onto her children.
It has nothing to do with us and everything that she decides to place worth in and to
place value in such as beauty and thinness.
As one doctor put it in this article I read, this phenomenon of almond mums, it's been
going on for a long time.
Therefore it's generational but it's also rooted in diet culture, it's rooted in internalized
biases, fat phobia, a projection of fear in this pursuit of thin privilege rather than
health.
All these behaviors implicitly influence our body image, our self-esteem and the younger
that we're exposed, the more deeply ingrained it can become.
That is a mother wound that is not spoken about enough, the inheritance of not body positivity
but body negativity.
And speaking with my own friends and the people around me, I think there are very few of
us who are not left unscathed by this in a way.
Another wound that really seems to derive from that influence of misogyny and patriarchy
on parenting is the tendency to almost feel a little bit competitive with other women.
Now I was discussing this with a friend recently in regards to job hunting and then also like
dating, especially like dating in our 20s.
And she said something really interesting.
She said, I'll kind of like paraphrase here, but she explained how our mothers and our
grandmothers were some of the very first generations to have even like a smidge of increased freedom
to choose a career, to date freely, to appreciate some of the benefits of that sexual and female
liberation movement of the 60s.
But in that experience they also were pitted against each other in a lot of circumstances.
Because the opportunities were so like unequal, like there were just not many of them.
So there was always this sense of competition especially with other women.
I read this explanation that a lot of women in that generation realized that the opportunities
for them were still quite slim and they were also still very much based on male approval.
And so they saw that as something to fight over, which they then passed on to their daughters.
It's like viewing other women as competition is very much derived from the fact that a lot
of us still appreciate in our mothers in particular appreciate that women are still the
less dominant sex in society.
And so there is this need to be more aggressive when it comes to asking for opportunities.
This need to be more cutthroat, to work harder, but to also be more polite and to see other
women as something that could jeopardize that for you.
Whether that is when it comes to jobs, when it comes to careers, or when it comes to finding
a partner.
Honestly, if you read into this, if you read some of the articles around this, it is so
enlightening to be like, wow, like they may not have even explicitly understood what they
were doing, but there was always this sense of like women as competitors rather than women
as friends.
So, there are two ways I think a lot of us can relate to when it comes to mother wounds
of a cultural and a patriarchal origin, especially if you're also a woman and a daughter.
But I also want to move on to discussing some of the more general, emotive, psychological
wounds that surround forming stable relationships, fearing disapproval, and also the chronic
people pleasing that I think a lot of us find ourselves trapped in.
So all of that and more after this short break.
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Let's get into it.
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When people kind of talk about mummy issues, which is essentially just a very colloquial
way of describing mother wounds, what they're normally referring to is a difficulty in dating,
in forming relationships, maintaining healthy, stable adult relationships because that original
bond that we had with our mother was unhealthy during childhood.
You have to remember that for most of us, our first example of what it meant to be cherished
and loved and cared for, what it meant to trust, what it meant to feel safe was our mother
and that connection that we had with her.
And there are so many ways that that can actually go quite wrong, especially when it comes to
our attachment to them.
It might include circumstances of emotional neglect, of enmeshment and printification or controlling
behaviors initiated by our mothers.
They don't let us go and make our own mistakes, they don't let us be our own people or even
narcissistic abuse.
And normally when we are in that environment where the relationship that we have with our
mother and childhood and adolescent, adolescence wasn't allowed to form naturally and normally,
two things end up happening that fall under the umbrella of mummy issues.
The first is that we form a really unhealthy closeness to our mothers, normally because
they depend on us for some kind of emotional need, right?
Or they do everything for us, they enmesh themselves in our lives, they don't allow us to separate,
that often happens in men and it often results in them looking for someone to fulfill that
same role.
They don't understand that that relationship and that dynamic is not appropriate, that
there isn't somebody who is going to be their mother, who is going to do everything for
them, who is going to serve them.
Or the second thing that happens is that we push back against any kind of relationship
that replicates or mimics the closeness and dependency that we have with our mother because
we understand what it means to be that emotionally tied to somebody and then perhaps hurt.
So we get and we become quite cynical when it comes to love, we find it hard to trust.
This might result from perhaps your parents getting a divorce and your mum maybe didn't
handle it well, she kind of separated for a little while, she took a step back, maybe
you didn't see her, you felt abandoned or even narcissistic abuse, why buy your mother,
really saw herself as the center of her own universe, she had children to fulfill her
own needs and her own wants, which meant that you were kind of always a bit of a puppet
and you both as children we have this natural inclination to want to be close to our mother
regardless of how she is treating us, but then also resenting her for those negative
emotions that we would be feeling in response to mistreatment, neglect, maltreatment when
somebody comes along that makes us feel a similar way, a sense of, you know, a similar
sense of safety even if it's misplaced, we automatically associate that with, you know,
the other foot coming down, the other shoe dropping, which is one of control, which
is one of perhaps being let down.
So I want to kind of illustrate two examples of this because I feel like that's quite like
a broad strokes approach.
For example, if your mother pre-rentified you, that's a big instance in which we see
mummy issues or mother wounds.
In pre-entification what essentially happens is that the role of the parent and the child
have been reversed and so you served as her confident, you had to regulate her emotions.
There was a level of guilt maybe that she used to get you to do what she wanted, you
felt like you had to take care of her.
When you reach your early 20s or adolescence and you naturally start seeking out emotional
independence, firstly your mother might really push back against that and guilt you into
believing that you're abandoning her, that you don't love her anymore, you don't see
her enough.
And you might also find yourself becoming quite emotionally unavailable.
You are scared that you're going to repeat that same bond with somebody else and find
yourself increasingly engulfed or enmeshed in their life.
Another example that I heard from a listener the other day that she kindly agreed to let
me share was her observing how her mother had gotten really caught up in a nasty marriage
in an abusive relationship.
She spent a lot of her childhood really constantly wishing that she would leave, that her mother
wouldn't leave and eventually just kind of realized that she couldn't control what she
decided to do.
That kind of resulted in her spending a lot of her early 20s resenting her mother for
the situation and the environment that she was put through, but also really fearing that
she would repeat the example that her mother had set, that there was this generational curse,
that she was going to see this behavior as normal and tolerate it, herself or accept
it herself and end up in the same position.
So when she started dating she was on high alert.
She couldn't trust anybody around her because she had seen this example of how her mother
somebody so similar to herself in blood and genetics and relationship had gotten caught
up in this terrible situation that had resulted in her getting hurt.
So I think these situations they go to show you again how much we take on from our mothers
and the kind of invisible influence they will inevitably have over our adult choices
and experiences, especially when it comes to love.
I think whilst the love that we share with our mother may be familial, once again I will
say it again, it is our first example of what to expect.
And so depending on the love your mother showed you or the love that your mother exposed
you to in other environments, how maybe even that connection was manipulated in some respects,
it can create some words.
I want to give you two final examples of kind of mother wounds that we see quite often
even if we don't have a label for it that don't typically fall into like the mummy issues
in a dating sense.
Like there are a bit more broad and therefore perhaps don't receive as much recognition.
The first is around fearing disapproval and we see this a lot in people whose mothers
were quite overbearing or who were perfectionists themselves.
If our mothers were highly critical of us, maybe it was that they were kind of projecting
their own desire for success, an admiration and achievement onto us.
They were looking to us as a proxy for them to fulfill all of their wishes for having
a successful career, for being brilliant, for being praised.
And so they see us as an example of her choices and as an example of her morals and her greatness
for other people to observe rather than seeing us as independent people who are growing up
on our own and who want to do our own thing and who want to become our own person and be
happy in our own achievements.
We were kind of an extension of her and that's where her needs who really bear down on us
and control our behaviour came from.
That's where her needs who be involved and everything came from.
I think when we are raised in that environment and we have a mother of that nature who is
kind of being compelled to treat us that way, we begin to conflate a lot of our achievements
and material accolades without self-worth.
And so as we get older, when we don't have that external validation or that external pressure
from our parents, from our mother to succeed, when we don't have our mother keeping us on
track, keeping us disciplined.
We end up kind of declining in performance.
We end up having to question who we actually are without her around, without her pushing
us.
And we also, in a way, lack confidence in our own decisions.
We question our own choices because our mother always had control over them.
We never really got a say and so we never really began to build that independent muscle,
that independent skill set.
I think this kind of disapproving, impossible to please mother figure also makes us crave
validation or constantly seek out ways to impress her or another maternal authoritative
figure.
The way that we could never impress our mother as a child, we start looking for ways to
impress strong females and strong women in our lives as an adult.
So finally we have chronic people pleasing.
I'm thinking about this now, we probably should have talked about this when we were discussing
the links between mother wounds, mother door dynamics and patriarchy, but that time is
passed.
We're going to talk about it now.
Something we know as a fact is that women are more likely to be people pleases because
of our condition role as caretakers, managing the emotions of others, suppressing our needs
for those around us, keeping the pace maintaining like the harmony, especially as women and
others, daughters, who do we learn that from?
Normally our mothers through observational learning to seeing how they adapt and respond
to what others require of them and how they sacrifice themselves, their emotions, their
boundaries, their rest for other people.
And we see how they behave, we watch them for all those years and we kind of take that
as a lesson on how we should act and who we should be as women, as caregivers, as providers.
It is known as the people pleasing or the pushover wound.
Sometimes that can also manifest in resentment, right?
Feeling like our mother never taught us how to stand up for ourselves, never showed us
that we could be brave, we could be more courageous, we could be better at setting boundaries.
And because she didn't do that, we have ended up as somebody who was always living for
others.
I think it's okay to feel angry about that, but still love your mother at the same time
and still understand why she did what she did to think about what you would have done
differently in that circumstance.
If you were raising yourself all over again, but also knowing that as simple as it sounds
she was doing the best she could.
I do genuinely believe that our parents very much operate at the ceiling of what they
believe they are capable of giving us.
With each generation though, that ceiling is going to get higher.
Now emotional intelligence, our resources hopefully expand.
We learn from their mistakes.
And so if we one day decide to raise our own children, we take everything that we saw
them perhaps do wrong, their missteps, and we ensure that we don't do the same thing.
I think speaking of our own children, speaking of generations, the wounds that we do carry
from our mothers, I think influence our perspective on wanting to be mothers ourselves and wanting
to have children someday and whether we'll be any good at it.
This is not something that we speak about very much, especially in our early or mid-20s,
having children, how we should raise them.
It feels like a very far off reality, a far off fantasy for a lot of people, myself included.
Perhaps it's not something that you're interested in at all, which is also super fair.
But the older we get, I think the more aware we do become, whether you want children or
not, of how our unresolved or unhealed wounds will be passed down and will impact those
around us.
Mother and father wounds are in a sense inherited, but they are also contagious and not contagious
in like the viral bacterial sense of the world.
But in the sense that the more exposure you have to unhealed wounds, the more likely that
the behavior of that person will inevitably influence your own behavior as well.
And your unhealed wounds may be doing that to those around you.
And I think this is where the devotion to healing and the necessity of healing really comes
from.
If it was just you who was suffering, honestly that would be bad enough.
That would be hard enough.
You deserve more, you deserve to really know yourself outside and within this space and
to understand how you are the way that you are.
But it's also the sense that eventually, you know, the person that you have become because
of how you were raised and your quirks, your insecurities, these small coping mechanisms,
these big perhaps maladaptive coping mechanisms that you have adopted may end up sabotaging
what you want from life, they may end up sabotaging your romantic relationships, your friendships,
and eventually again, if you decide to have children, the relationship that you eventually
have with your own kids.
So I think my biggest advice I have is to process early, but not all at once.
It's super amazing that we're considering this in our 20s, right?
Honestly at whatever age it's important.
But I think when we first become aware of these wounds that we might be carrying, it's
almost like starting in marathon.
It's almost like looking at this massive set of kilometers, this massive task in front
of us and wanting to just jump right in and repair the relationship and fix everything
straight away, reverse all the generational trauma straight away.
But there are some things that I think we have to do before that.
And firstly that is to really think about what you need, what are the wounds that you
feel you need to work through, what is it that you're looking to heal from, what is the
impact that you are seeing in your life, what is your emotional experience and where,
where is the origin, what is it coming down to, what part of your mother's behavior,
what part of her reactions to the world, what part of her own upbringing are they kind
of reflecting.
I think you need to be clear on where you see the link and the origin and the root coming
from before you can come to the table and say, hey, this was my experience and I wanted
to speak about it, right?
If you say, well, I hate my body, but I don't really know how you were involved.
It's kind of like, you know, it might not be your mother.
It might be something else and it's kind of hard to work through that experience and to
work through this very current reality for yourself if you're still kind of ambiguous
around where this may have actually come from.
It also I think is very easy to feel anger before any other emotion because it is such a
simple one-sided emotion.
It is so one track minded, but anger is not necessarily helpful in these circumstances.
It's not necessarily helpful to go, to go in all guns blazing, looking to find someone
to blame, looking to find someone to hurt, to scream at, to discuss with.
Yes, those conversations will eventually need to happen and are important, but I also
think that the second component and the second thing we need to understand before we go
about addressing our mother's wounds is addressing how we think our mother is going to respond.
Think about whether she will be able to accept that responsibility or is it something that
you just have to acknowledge that she is the way she is, she did the best she could,
and kind of process it on your own.
As I find, and this is of course my own perspective, that our problems and anger can become more
entrenched when we look for closure in our parents because half the time they don't even
realize what they did.
And half the time they probably don't want to take responsibility out of a human need
to protect their ego, one that we all have.
No one is going to enjoy being told that they were a bad parent.
No one likes taking on blame for the way that we are, especially somebody who feels so
personally involved in our development.
This isn't to say that a discussion might not one day take place and I actually think
it's really important just that you need to be clear on what you actually need out of
that conversation, how your emotional experiences and reality relates to your mother's wounds,
and what you can expect from your parent, what you can expect from your mother.
I think the hardest situations are when you go in, you have all this courage to say,
hey, I feel like you have created an unhealthy pattern in me around attention seeking, around
validation seeking, around love, and I want to talk about it, I want to understand why
you raised me the way you did, and she turns around and goes, well no, that's not my
experience.
I'm not that kind of mother.
Are you saying that I'm a terrible mother?
And suddenly you're shut down.
I think it's something to be prepared for, you probably know her quite well.
What do you think that you're going to get out of that conversation and be realistic
with yourself about it and with about the closure that you might be available to you
before you enter?
There are a lot of things that we can do for ourselves when our mother is perhaps not
involved, not up for discussing, not willing to take accountability.
I think first is coming to terms with what you are okay with and what you are not in this
day and age.
The good thing about growing up and maturing about getting older and finding independence
beyond the family unit is that you kind of get to control your physical and emotional
environment from that one.
And that means that you have the capacity to say what is no longer okay with you and put
in that distance.
For example, comments about your body, about your choices, about what you eat, what you
wear, who you date, you can put those things off limits.
Maybe that is by saying to your mother, hey, I'm not open to talking about this, I'm not
in the mood.
Let's talk about something else.
Maybe it's that first step of being like that's actually quite hurtful and this is what
the emotional experience it creates for me.
I feel anxious when you say comments about my body, I feel uncomfortable and I don't want
that to define our relationship.
So maybe that's off limits from now on.
Maybe we don't discuss it, not even maybe.
That is off limits from now on, we won't be discussing that.
Boundaries are spoken about a lot, right?
But they are so important in healing these wounds.
I think it's equally important to review the other relationships that you have in your
life and whether that original relationship you have with your mother is influencing
how the behavior that you're accepting from these people, like friends, like partners,
like colleagues are there boundaries that need to be set with them as well that you previously
didn't because of this people pleasing wound because of this kind of self sabotaging wound,
this self abendement wound that has directly come from your mother being or a bearing or
being absent or training you to be very passive and a bit of a people pleaser.
My final tip is that it's also valuable to address your inner critic.
That voice we talked about in your head that sounds like your mother or your father.
If you can recognize that it's your mother's critical voice, notice when that speaks up.
Notice where you are feeling it when that voice comes into play.
What is it about?
What is it directed towards?
Do you hear that critical voice when you are perhaps not feeling as productive as you
usually are?
Are you hearing that in a voice when I don't know.
Do you don't fit into the genes that you used to fit into or when you feel like you've
let somebody down or when you're not pushing yourself hard enough at work, it's really
important to identify your inner critic and what it speaks up in response to because that
is normally where the wound is located.
Secondly, replace that inner critic with your own voice.
One that builds you up.
One that is not going to scold you, one that is not going to tear you down for simple,
small mistakes or parts of your reality that you like and that you accept.
It's also important I think that when you feel angry, when you get frustrated or you're
feeling misunderstood or you're taking on the criticisms, the anxiety, the thoughts
of your mother to separate yourself from that feeling by grounding yourself, doing your
repetitive doodle, listening to your favorite album, going for a quick walk, take
in a warm shower to touch from the emotions that you have implicitly absorbed from her
through your experiences.
That doesn't mean that you need to suppress all your negative emotions, more so that you
make them manageable so that when you can kind of take a step back and really identify
why you're feeling the way that you are, where that is coming from and how you can process
that without having that kind of cloud of confusion over you, without just being compelled
by anger.
So, finally, there are some books that I would really recommend from people who have spent
a lot more time with this subject matter than me.
The first one is titled It Didn't Start With You by Mark Wallen.
This book is phenomenal and I honestly think that it's a better version of the classic
The Body Keep the Score.
It's much more modern, it's much more thorough.
He essentially discusses how trauma is essentially hereditary, which we know and how the legacy
of those memories has passed down to us by way of emotional inheritance, usually from
our mothers and their mothers and theirs.
It's super accessible, I would really recommend it.
The other one is what my mother and I don't talk about.
That is a collection of 15 essays by 15 different writers.
It's very, very revealing and very honest and really examines how complicated our relationship
with our matriarch and our maternal-creating kind of being.
So, the reason that this series of essays came to be was that the person who essentially
contacted all these women to contribute and who edited the entire anthology Michelle
Philgate, she wrote this essay a while back that went super viral about her coming to terms
with her stepfather abusing her.
But it actually really turned into like an exploration of how that changed her relationship.
With her mother and she spoke to 14 other women around what that experience or a different
experience was like for them that kind of changed their perspective towards their mom.
So 10 out of 10, I would really recommend it.
And as a concluding reminder, a concluding affirmation, it's okay to have mixed feelings
about your mother as you come to terms with the wounds that she may have unintentionally
left.
She is kind of and may still be the center of your universe.
You may want her attention and love her as much as you have ever loved anybody else and
still feel angry and still feel hurt for her not being able to fulfill your maybe emotional
needs as a child or for getting it wrong.
You can feel both things at once.
That is like the complexity and the nuance of human relationships that we hold multiple
feelings for somebody at one time.
It doesn't necessarily mean that like this relationship is over that your mother was a
terrible person that she meant to hurt you.
I think a lot of healing when it comes to healing our mother wounds stems from a place of
forgiveness and empathy and realizing why this reality was the one that you have to endure
and that you experienced, where that came from for your mother and stopping the ball there,
making sure that if you choose to have children it doesn't get passed down or it doesn't
get spread around that you don't end up kind of contaminating your relationships with
the unhealthy patterns that you've learned from her.
So I really do hope that you've enjoyed this episode.
I hope you got something out of it.
I hope you learnt something new.
I hope that you this has helped you heal.
If you have any like further questions, further contributions, further experiences that you
want to talk about, please feel free to message me at that psychology podcast on
Instagram.
Make sure that you're following us over there so you can vote on future episodes so you
know what's kind of coming out and that you're following us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts,
whatever you are listening right now, leave us a five star review or subscribe if you would
like and make sure that you're taking care of yourself, be kind to yourself, be gentle
to yourself.
The fact that you have, you know, sought out this information is wonderful and I think
it kind of proves that you're on a great journey, so I'm super proud of you and until next
week, be kind, be gentle and we will talk soon.
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