The Mother Wound
God created us to be relational beings. We long to know and rest in the love of God, as a child resting in her mother’s arms. But many of us are broken in our ability to receive and hold the love we’re given. Our parents were to teach us about love but because they were wounded, this teaching was impaired.
Imagine water being poured into a Styrofoam cup. The water represents love and the cup our ability to receive and hold that love. When we’ve been wounded, we’re like a cup that has holes in it. The water pours out and we need a lot more filling than the cup that has no holes. The more woundedness, the more holes; the more holes the more we need to keep receiving. This was illustrated for us with various degrees of hole-filled cups until finally we were shown a cup with no bottom and the water/love poured right through without even a pretense of staying in the cup. This is an important illustration and one I’ll come back to. But even as I watched, I knew that I’m like the cup that’s completely full of holes. I didn’t think I was the bottomless cup but I later began to wonder, but for sure I’m at least a cup full of holes.
Mothers provide us with our primary relationship. Their bodies are our first home. I was surprised to learn that our tastes are formed by their tastes, even when we’re in the womb, and if they are under stress during their pregnancy, we absorb that stress, affected by the chemicals it produces. And so trauma can occur before we’re even born, trauma that affects us for the duration of our lives.
I think of my mom during her pregnancy with me. She had just turned 18 when I was conceived. My father was 16 years her senior and they weren’t married. In the extremely conservative church to which they belonged, this was a very shameful thing. In fact, she was ex-communicated from that church, a state she remained in until I was 8 and she left my dad. But she loved that church. She hadn’t grown up in it, she had, on her own as a young teenager, embraced that church and everything it stood for. Imagine the turmoil she must have endured during her pregnancy! The mid-1950s was not a time to find oneself pregnant out of wedlock. What disgrace! She had at least one offer to adopt me. (I met that family when I was 15.) She declined. How did that stress and her turmoil affect me?
During the first three years of a child’s life, bonding with her mom is critical. It is during this time that a child learns that it’s safe to trust others by the mother conveying affection and awakening the infant soul. But babies who have stress in these years can develop hyper-sensitivity as well as brain damage and chronic illness. I don’t think I’m brain damaged and my chronic illnesses didn’t appear until my marriage but I’ve always been hyper-sensitive to things like rejection, lack of worthiness, etc.
It is only as a child develops a sense of being, and indeed WELL-being, that she is able to go out and care for others. She is the cup without leaks, peacefully existing without having to do anything, unconditionally loved. As a baby (and older), she’s able to deal with crises because of the core of safety and love within her. Her mother is aware of her needs and meets them. The child is nurtured and well cared for. As she grows, she is motivated to go out and to love others well.
As I think about this and look back on my childhood, I don’t recall having that motivation to love others. I think I was detached, fearful of not belonging and very needy. I don’t remember ever having friends to my place. I don’t remember doing things for others except the Christmas I turned 7 or 8, a few gifts were being given out and I felt badly I didn’t have anything to give so I ran to my room and found an old bent doll dish, a peanut and I can’t remember what else, and gave those as gifts.
A wounded mother, instead of giving her love and meeting her child’s needs, might turn to her child instead to meet HER needs. If, when a baby cries and isn’t picked up, eventually it will become too painful for that baby to long for what’s unavailable. The loss of mother becomes loss of self. The baby detaches from mother, suppresses her feelings and desires and erects an emotional wall. Now, no matter how much love is poured in, the capacity to receive is blocked.
I’m told that my mom nearly died in childbirth and was very sick for a while afterwards. The doctor apparently gave strict instructions for her to get lots of sleep. Well, as you know, newborns don’t sleep through the night. My father, in a misguided attempt to teach me otherwise and to protect my mother, reportedly spanked/beat me (whatever he did caused bruises) when I would wake in the night crying for my mother. How did that affect the bonding I needed with my mother?
Symptoms of the mother wound are:
--fear of nonexistence, emptiness, nothingness, shattered self
--deep rejection, fear of abandonment, aloneness
--no connection
--high levels of anxiety
--feeling of repressed pain that can’t be accessed
--depression, angry, negative, hostile
--emptiness, disconnection to life
--inability to be still and quiet before God
--restlessness
This wounding moves us into sexual brokenness. Our search for mother’s love becomes sexualized. We become emotionally dependent, trying to connect with someone who will love us. This was very much what was happening between Pearl and me for both of us. (See story here.) It also results in gender-identity problems with either a search for love from women or a rejection of women.
We were encouraged however. Just as a tree appears dead and lifeless in winter, there is the capacity to bring it back to life. We CAN heal. We have to acknowledge the wound before the healing happens. Denying it is a way of avoiding the pain but it also blocks the healing. Beyond the emptiness is God. We need to allow God to heal the vacant places. We need to allow ourselves to be needy. Of course we don’t want to because it makes us vulnerable.
At this point we broke into small groups. The small groups were composed of a leader, her assistant and 4-5 participants. Men and women were segregated into their own groups. Group time is not a time of counselling but rather described to us as prayer-ministry time. That made sense to me and yet that description surprised me despite the 25 weeks I had spent in the course two years ago. I had never thought of it as prayer ministry.
The format was this. Each person would be given a chance to speak about how they had been touched or impacted by the teaching that had just happened. After they were finished and the leaders had asked clarifying questions, the leaders would come and stand (or kneel) by the participant and bring the issue to God. Often they would simply wait in silence. Then one or the other would begin praying. Sometimes one of them would get a picture and ask if that made any sense or the participant would be asked if God was showing/telling her anything. It was often a very powerful time accompanied by the use of anointing oil for sealing a work God had done or water for symbolic cleansing of things confessed. The ideal situation is that each participant gets a portion of the time during each small group time. In our group, what happened was that it took both small group times in a day to give each of us a chance though at that first session we all got the chance to say just a couple of sentences introducing ourselves and naming the issue that brought us to the program.
I know that it’s hard for people to disclose very personal things about themselves but as the teaching had pointed out, it is only as we acknowledge the wound that we can begin the healing process. In this case, if a participant didn’t share deep things about herself, she would miss the opportunity to be ministered to deeply through the form of prayer that is employed. For that reason, I made a point to be one of the first to speak. Usually when one person has been bold enough to speak out, the others follow suit.
I began speaking about my mom, how I was an unwanted pregnancy; the beatings at night; how, after my mom left my dad and then he died and she went back to school, I became her partner more than her daughter, helping to look after my three younger sisters and the house and how, when I really needed her protection, she didn’t provide it. When I was 12, a young man became very enamoured of me. I hated him and the romantic attention he gave me. Mom should have banned him from the house. Instead, she encouraged his visits and even admitted to letting him into my bedroom when I was sleeping so he could kiss me. Later, when I had broken up with a boyfriend because I no longer wanted to be his sexual object, instead of respecting my wishes (and not knowing why I had broken up with him) she insisted on bringing him on the 900 mile trip to visit me at the school I was attending. How can one fight one’s mother?
I have never hated my mother. For years I considered her like a best friend. It is only as I have begun to look at the roots of the same-sex attractions I battle that I have begun to see some of the things my mother did and how they affected me. I’ve begun to see how broken SHE has been.
It was as I was being prayed for that the image came to me of my mom standing before me in a very inappropriate way. I spoke this out to the group. The scene I pictured was something I remember happening often. “Where is Jesus?” I was asked by the group leader. “Ask Jesus where he was then.” The answer he gave is that he stopped her. Stopped her from what?
What was going on? What was God doing? What was he showing me? Why did my mom stand so close to me like that? What did my sister see that angered her so much against my mom? What happened that I’ve been blind to? I’m still puzzling all these things.
Imagine water being poured into a Styrofoam cup. The water represents love and the cup our ability to receive and hold that love. When we’ve been wounded, we’re like a cup that has holes in it. The water pours out and we need a lot more filling than the cup that has no holes. The more woundedness, the more holes; the more holes the more we need to keep receiving. This was illustrated for us with various degrees of hole-filled cups until finally we were shown a cup with no bottom and the water/love poured right through without even a pretense of staying in the cup. This is an important illustration and one I’ll come back to. But even as I watched, I knew that I’m like the cup that’s completely full of holes. I didn’t think I was the bottomless cup but I later began to wonder, but for sure I’m at least a cup full of holes.
Mothers provide us with our primary relationship. Their bodies are our first home. I was surprised to learn that our tastes are formed by their tastes, even when we’re in the womb, and if they are under stress during their pregnancy, we absorb that stress, affected by the chemicals it produces. And so trauma can occur before we’re even born, trauma that affects us for the duration of our lives.
I think of my mom during her pregnancy with me. She had just turned 18 when I was conceived. My father was 16 years her senior and they weren’t married. In the extremely conservative church to which they belonged, this was a very shameful thing. In fact, she was ex-communicated from that church, a state she remained in until I was 8 and she left my dad. But she loved that church. She hadn’t grown up in it, she had, on her own as a young teenager, embraced that church and everything it stood for. Imagine the turmoil she must have endured during her pregnancy! The mid-1950s was not a time to find oneself pregnant out of wedlock. What disgrace! She had at least one offer to adopt me. (I met that family when I was 15.) She declined. How did that stress and her turmoil affect me?
During the first three years of a child’s life, bonding with her mom is critical. It is during this time that a child learns that it’s safe to trust others by the mother conveying affection and awakening the infant soul. But babies who have stress in these years can develop hyper-sensitivity as well as brain damage and chronic illness. I don’t think I’m brain damaged and my chronic illnesses didn’t appear until my marriage but I’ve always been hyper-sensitive to things like rejection, lack of worthiness, etc.
It is only as a child develops a sense of being, and indeed WELL-being, that she is able to go out and care for others. She is the cup without leaks, peacefully existing without having to do anything, unconditionally loved. As a baby (and older), she’s able to deal with crises because of the core of safety and love within her. Her mother is aware of her needs and meets them. The child is nurtured and well cared for. As she grows, she is motivated to go out and to love others well.
As I think about this and look back on my childhood, I don’t recall having that motivation to love others. I think I was detached, fearful of not belonging and very needy. I don’t remember ever having friends to my place. I don’t remember doing things for others except the Christmas I turned 7 or 8, a few gifts were being given out and I felt badly I didn’t have anything to give so I ran to my room and found an old bent doll dish, a peanut and I can’t remember what else, and gave those as gifts.
A wounded mother, instead of giving her love and meeting her child’s needs, might turn to her child instead to meet HER needs. If, when a baby cries and isn’t picked up, eventually it will become too painful for that baby to long for what’s unavailable. The loss of mother becomes loss of self. The baby detaches from mother, suppresses her feelings and desires and erects an emotional wall. Now, no matter how much love is poured in, the capacity to receive is blocked.
I’m told that my mom nearly died in childbirth and was very sick for a while afterwards. The doctor apparently gave strict instructions for her to get lots of sleep. Well, as you know, newborns don’t sleep through the night. My father, in a misguided attempt to teach me otherwise and to protect my mother, reportedly spanked/beat me (whatever he did caused bruises) when I would wake in the night crying for my mother. How did that affect the bonding I needed with my mother?
Symptoms of the mother wound are:
--fear of nonexistence, emptiness, nothingness, shattered self
--deep rejection, fear of abandonment, aloneness
--no connection
--high levels of anxiety
--feeling of repressed pain that can’t be accessed
--depression, angry, negative, hostile
--emptiness, disconnection to life
--inability to be still and quiet before God
--restlessness
This wounding moves us into sexual brokenness. Our search for mother’s love becomes sexualized. We become emotionally dependent, trying to connect with someone who will love us. This was very much what was happening between Pearl and me for both of us. (See story here.) It also results in gender-identity problems with either a search for love from women or a rejection of women.
We were encouraged however. Just as a tree appears dead and lifeless in winter, there is the capacity to bring it back to life. We CAN heal. We have to acknowledge the wound before the healing happens. Denying it is a way of avoiding the pain but it also blocks the healing. Beyond the emptiness is God. We need to allow God to heal the vacant places. We need to allow ourselves to be needy. Of course we don’t want to because it makes us vulnerable.
At this point we broke into small groups. The small groups were composed of a leader, her assistant and 4-5 participants. Men and women were segregated into their own groups. Group time is not a time of counselling but rather described to us as prayer-ministry time. That made sense to me and yet that description surprised me despite the 25 weeks I had spent in the course two years ago. I had never thought of it as prayer ministry.
The format was this. Each person would be given a chance to speak about how they had been touched or impacted by the teaching that had just happened. After they were finished and the leaders had asked clarifying questions, the leaders would come and stand (or kneel) by the participant and bring the issue to God. Often they would simply wait in silence. Then one or the other would begin praying. Sometimes one of them would get a picture and ask if that made any sense or the participant would be asked if God was showing/telling her anything. It was often a very powerful time accompanied by the use of anointing oil for sealing a work God had done or water for symbolic cleansing of things confessed. The ideal situation is that each participant gets a portion of the time during each small group time. In our group, what happened was that it took both small group times in a day to give each of us a chance though at that first session we all got the chance to say just a couple of sentences introducing ourselves and naming the issue that brought us to the program.
I know that it’s hard for people to disclose very personal things about themselves but as the teaching had pointed out, it is only as we acknowledge the wound that we can begin the healing process. In this case, if a participant didn’t share deep things about herself, she would miss the opportunity to be ministered to deeply through the form of prayer that is employed. For that reason, I made a point to be one of the first to speak. Usually when one person has been bold enough to speak out, the others follow suit.
I began speaking about my mom, how I was an unwanted pregnancy; the beatings at night; how, after my mom left my dad and then he died and she went back to school, I became her partner more than her daughter, helping to look after my three younger sisters and the house and how, when I really needed her protection, she didn’t provide it. When I was 12, a young man became very enamoured of me. I hated him and the romantic attention he gave me. Mom should have banned him from the house. Instead, she encouraged his visits and even admitted to letting him into my bedroom when I was sleeping so he could kiss me. Later, when I had broken up with a boyfriend because I no longer wanted to be his sexual object, instead of respecting my wishes (and not knowing why I had broken up with him) she insisted on bringing him on the 900 mile trip to visit me at the school I was attending. How can one fight one’s mother?
I have never hated my mother. For years I considered her like a best friend. It is only as I have begun to look at the roots of the same-sex attractions I battle that I have begun to see some of the things my mother did and how they affected me. I’ve begun to see how broken SHE has been.
It was as I was being prayed for that the image came to me of my mom standing before me in a very inappropriate way. I spoke this out to the group. The scene I pictured was something I remember happening often. “Where is Jesus?” I was asked by the group leader. “Ask Jesus where he was then.” The answer he gave is that he stopped her. Stopped her from what?
What was going on? What was God doing? What was he showing me? Why did my mom stand so close to me like that? What did my sister see that angered her so much against my mom? What happened that I’ve been blind to? I’m still puzzling all these things.
posted by Magdaleine at 9:18 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home