The Mother Wound
What is it?
Where did it come from?
And please tell me that I’m not alone!
“The mother wound is damage to the conscience of the child resulting from significant dysfunction or disorder in the relationship with the mother. In some cases, it is linked to the mother’s absence, due to death, sickness, adoption, or other situations that separate the child from the mother. Usually the mother wound is a complex set of multiple injuries to the child’s conscience received over several years, often as a result of the mother acting, consciously or not, out of her own selfishness. One of the most severe types of physiological abuse occurs when a child’s primary purpose in the relationship is to be used by the mother to meet her own narcissistic desires. And when that unhealthy relationship with the mother occurs, it causes the child to either be threatened by the influence of women later on in adulthood, or over-identify to become submissive to that influence.”
I came out of a highly dysfunctional family with all sorts of neglect, abuse, and trauma. My parents were not fit to be looking over the care and welfare of children. I am positive, if we were raised in this generation, we would have been taken out of the home. No doubt, it was a different time.
My father is an alcoholic, angry, and scary. As an outsider looking in, this would be what others would refer to as “the presenting problem.” However, through my healing process, I found my deepest pains were sourced a lot more from my mother.
She conditioned me to see her as “the good one.” Therefore, entering my late elementary/junior high school years, I started to feel the heaviness of the control she pressed upon me. I observed a lot of hypocrisy (what I describe as impression management) and she had a double-sided face to anyone that crossed our path. Being shaped that way was very confusing.
I typically was faced with a great deal of heaviness towards my dad because, most days, that was the situation that presented itself as the largest threat. He was either a slobbering drunk, angry and volatile towards us, or swinging at people who angered him. He has been in jail more times than a daughter would like to admit. He’s been pulled over numerous times finding a beer between his legs, and being let go with a warning. Small town authority figures handled those offenses differently then.
These scenarios made it very easy for my mother to focus our attention to pointing the finger at my dad for all of our family’s problems. It was a logical place for me to start looking at those father wounds through the eyes of my mother’s view point.
My dad carried a big voice and a big fist, and he went out of his way to present intimidating behavior. He demanded compliance, and made it clear who would be controlling the environment. He was a bully. His size helped him win physical fights. His time in the drunk tank was too much, too many. He has had several DWIs throughout his lifetime, and his aggressive authority spoke pretty loud over our lives.
Agreeing with my mother’s assessment of my dad for all of the problems we encountered as a family seemed like the safe thing to do. My mother didn’t have to try too hard to convince us of such.
At that time in our culture, more and more women were going to work outside the home and leaving their children with caregivers. More fathers were abandoning their leadership role; therefore, the breakdown of the family was happening at rapid speed. “Professionals” started to look at potential learning incapabilities of children in schools and started diagnosing them with mental disorders. The proposed solution for these disorders was medication. And for the first time, parents started embracing these practices.
I was one of the many children to be sedated with heavy narcotics unnecessarily. Because these “professionals” weren’t addressing what was truly going on at home first, it made it too easy for parents to over medicate their children to reduce symptoms of frustration or anxiety. The men in the church were deteriorating to the point of not standing in the gap for these families. Our society neglected to face the seriousness of what was happening to the next generation of children.
I have 2 younger brothers. We became codependent from an early age, not only because of my father’s addictions, but because my mother is a covert narcissist. The combination of those two destructive forces severely hindered my ability to be a successful, healthy young adult. It is so much easier to put into words the hurt the person who is physically aggressive towards you, whose harm was overt and easy to identify, and for the fact that we were conditioned to see my mother as “the victim” than it is to explain the phycological destruction of a child. When the relationship of mother to daughter operates under malice and manipulation, the damage happens before you realize there is something very wrong.
During my journey of healing, I had become so grieved that my mother never protected us from harm. She inflicted a different kind of pain, which became even more confusing to me. She placed us in harm’s way a lot. And she never wanted us to tell.
She had never displayed a time where she actually stepped in and said that she would protect us from my dad’s physical abuse and his volatile anger. Not one time. My mother’s parents did witness some things, but said they never felt it was their place to step in. We were to never tell them the severity (details) of things. My mother, if asked, would typically step in the conversation and gloss over anything that happened with something like, “Well, he just came in late last night.” or “He was just drinking again.” We knew “the look” and that was enough to shut the conversation down.
We had school principals ask my mother about welts that were on the backs of my brothers’ legs. We were not privy to those conversations behind the office doors, but we heard an ear full when she got into the car for the drive home. Again, it was a different time in those days.
As I approached junior high my mother bought me a journal to write my thoughts down. What I didn’t know then was that she would read it, twist my thoughts, and later use my words against me. It’s called gaslighting.
Starting at a very young age, she manipulated our conversations to justify their behavior and responses of any given situation. I was trying to make sense of our life as I journaled facts, not my feelings. My writing soon changed, almost verbatim, to her view on the abuse going on. I didn’t want to be reprimanded or blamed anymore, so I wrote what she told me, like someone who reprograms your brain and rewrites the script.
I learned to take up her causes, and quietly had animosity towards my dad with a lot of coercing from my mother. She created more dissension between him and me than necessary, and I fell right into the trap of having a lot of fears about my future. As I got old enough to start thinking logically on my own, I learned to stop being sucked into her version, and started to seek out Truth and eventually how to heal.
I could hardly take the constant chaos around me. I felt like I was going crazy and nothing made sense, not my parents and certainly not my surroundings. It was a recipe for crazy-making. I just really wanted to survive whatever this was. I wanted everyone to be happy; I wanted to somehow fix it. I wanted someone to tell me it was going to be okay. I just wanted the hurt to stop.
I had no one to turn to because no one knew. I had such loyalty to both of my parents that I carried a lot of shame and feelings of guilt when I would think about reaching out to someone for help. I never wanted anyone to think ill of my parents.
I was still protecting both of them, but yet, who I felt pain for vacillated based on the damage done from day to day. One day my dad would be drunk and hurt everyone. A different day, my mother would use her tongue to slice your heart in half.
Consistently these things would happen, and my brothers and I would end up in our beds crying. I felt sorry for the one brother that seemed to be the brunt of my dad’s anger and then, at times, I would feel sorry for my mother. My heart would tug at the other brother who was called a “mistake” and a zero.” It was exasperating, and a roller coaster of emotions. Little did I realize, I had a great deal of pain and turmoil inside me, but I was so conditioned to taking care of my mother’s perceived pain (clinically referred to as malignant selfishness) that I overlooked the wounds that I was carrying around.
The sadness I carried was unimportant to her, and a child can only hold their parents’ burdens for so long before they find a safe person to confide in. She would often “gaslight” me and tell others I was “just not a happy person” which was not true. She said these things to make an excuse of why I may have been tearful over… say something like her hatefulness towards me. She expressed many times throughout our lives that she was unhappy with her job, with my dad, with her hair, with her clothes, with her weight, you name it. I was finding she would accuse me of the things she was doing. It’s a provoke-accuse game they play.
The older I became, I started to catch inconsistencies when my mother would blame my dad for things that I saw in her. As I got braver to communicate about those things, she quickly shut me down and brought it to my attention that I was taking my dad’s side, betraying her, and she would completely withdraw from me and pout. For days, she would punish me with silence. I was sat down in my room as she shut the door behind her, as if I did not exist. It was not only difficult to understand, but it was torture to be ignored. I was not taking a side; it wasn’t about sides. I was confused.
I have come to understand as an adult, that this is a game narcissist play to gain control over their victims. I learned quickly not to bring up any type of logic because she only wanted to be right. She spoke with authority, and we knew we had no voice because we were constantly told we were wrong. Ya know, like the saying goes… “Mother knows best” and we lived by that code.
I self-examined constantly and re-examined the experiences around me just to make sense of the impact that it was making on not only me, but watching my brothers respond with tears and anger was burdensome.
What was interesting about this process for me was the door I opened to work out my hurts with my dad and his anger, was really opening up a deep, suppressed pain to mother wounds I never knew existed.
As I came into adulthood, I saw my dad start to treat me a little more like a human being and that I could possibly have a place in this world. He actually stated that he wanted me to succeed and he started to be encouraging in any direction of my life that he approved of. This was something I had not experienced before from either parent.
During this time, my dad started going to church regularly and got involved with a few different trusted men. This was life-changing for him and for me to witness. Life started to be less heated with my dad when my mother was not around and that was very noticeable.
When my mother observed he and I actually communicating on a level that was healthy, like him stopping by my apartment from time to time for a short chat, he told me she scolded him for spending more time with me than her. Her accusations became more bazaar during this season of my life. There is definitely a weird insecurity there.
My dad started to confide in me the things my mother would accuse him of and I felt caught in the middle of their turmoil once again. He would come to my house to nap in the middle of the day because she would get upset if she caught him napping at their place. (We later on found out that he had sleep apnea and struggled to rest well.)
She was behaving like she didn’t want our lives to be better. Didn’t she want his drinking to stop? Didn’t she like seeing him read the Bible and trying to be responsible? Didn’t she like seeing him be accountable to healthy men? Didn’t she want my dad to mend his relationship with his children?
I became aware that his addictions and anger were not the only problems that were causing our family turmoil. I observed that the chaos was the same as before, but it just looked different.
I thought maybe the difference was because I was an adult, I was living on my own, and had a healthier, more mature perspective. I examined it quite a lot before I came to understand what and whom I was dealing with. The difference was, my dad was changing for the better and my mother was starting to lose the control she had on our family.
I was growing up. One brother was headed towards the military, my mother threatening the other the same future. My dad was going to church regularly, becoming accountable to two men. Life was changing rapidly for everybody. For the first time, I started to see the self-righteous, superior attitudes she was presenting. It was like the veil was being lifted and I could finally see it for what it truly was.
At this place in the story is where I met my husband, Jason, who brought clarity to my world. He stated that when my dad began to change, then that meant my mother would have to change too, becoming a healthy wife and mother. But that was not what my mother would do. She takes her superiority very seriously and wasn’t willing to lose any control she had.
One particular time, my brother was back in town on leave from the military and we spent the evening at my parents’ home. My mother scheduled a conversation where my brothers and I would speak to our dad to tell him all the sorrows and woes we felt about the abuse he had inflicted upon our family. It was unknown territory for all of us. (This kind of drama is why my brother often referred to coming home for a visit as a visitation.) We were uncomfortable having a sit-down because we had no idea how he was going to react.
I tried looking at it with the hope that we could all just talk about life calmly as grown adults. I knew my dad was trying to appease my mother and willing to place himself in unfamiliar territory. It gave me a glimmer of hope into him possibly changing from volatile to vulnerable.
To no surprise, as we sat down, after mother got everyone situated in the living room, she exited, completely walked away, and left us in awkward silence. My brothers and I just looked at each other as if to say, “Now what?”
Even my husband, who thought talking was a great opportunity to be on the same page, was surprised my mother had taken herself out of the equation. That was not what we thought was going to happen. We were all supposed to talk, right? We are all supposed to heal. I desperately needed to move forward as a family, not be stuck. That was my hope.
This is where I praise my God and am so grateful for Jason’s help in my life. He has patiently walked me through my pain, my abandonment, the lack of relationship with my mother, and has given me as much time as I have needed to heal without any pressure, or have an expectation of a particular outcome. He has been not only life-changing for me, but the true face of Christ.
I know I had been in a confusing, wearisome space at one point in our marriage because trauma has a way of making you deal with your past. I had been very frustrated with the pain I continued to carry around, but I couldn’t put into words why. I started to notice that I had triggers over small things (to Jason) but they were huge to me.
I don’t think either of us realized how deep my pain was until he would bring something to my attention and I would just burst into tears. I think because of my personality as a determined, motivated, move-forward-quickly kind of girl, that deep pain went unnoticed for a long time, too long.
I held onto a lot of hope that my family’s dysfunction would only get better and I thought I had enough grit that I was going to hurdle the hurts coming against me. During that time, I buried my past and denied my reality. Move forward quickly, right? As I continued to remind myself to live in a constant state of hope, my pain had caught up with me when I least expected it. I knew if I didn’t deal with it, it was going to start dealing with me.
That process of realizing what my triggers were, was unbelievably slow. Not only did I not understand why I was having so many triggers, I had even less ideas about how to reduce their effects. I ended up treating Jason with the level of frustration that were continuous open wounds from my parents. I would re-experience daily hurts from my mother that I wanted to tend to, sort of like salt being poured into a wound, but felt loyal to her life over mine. I cringed and swallowed what she dished out.
At the same time, I didn’t want to wound Jason in the process (transference). He had done nothing wrong, and was only trying to help me work through some of the continued hurt that he was witnessing my mother bring towards me and my children.
Everything inside me was saying “Stay loyal to her cause.” But instead, coming alongside Jason to work with him, not against, was the best decision I could have ever made. He saw me experience a lot of pain with both my parents, and God used him to become my biggest support system. Jason has been the face of Jesus at a time where I thought I lost myself and everything I had ever known to be truth.
Click the link here to continue Part 2- The Mother Wound.
Natalie