17: When the 'mother wound' enters the marriage

This episode is a tender one.

Walk with me in a deeply personal conversation about the wounds we may carry from our mothers — and how those wounds can quietly enter our adult relationships, especially marriage.

Through the lens of my own separation, motherhood, therapy, and long arc of repair with my mother, I explore how conditional love, abandonment, rejection, and emotional neglect shaped the way I received love, tested love, pushed love away, and ached to be chosen.

It's an episode about what happens when an old wound enters the room of a present relationship — and becomes mature enough to finally be named.

To the woman who has done “the healing work” and is shocked to find another layer rising in love, partnership, or marriage — this episode is for you.

Not healed.  Healing.

RESOURCES

The Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health

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COMPANION READING FROM THE BLOG

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HERstory timeline

BONUS

Below is an affirmation/dedication I created (which may serve as inspiration) for myself as a loving reminder of my devotion to heal these wounds with grace... and speediness 🤞😅 

I release the intense feelings of rejection, abandonment, and conditional love. I see them. And I remember they are not the whole truth. They are separate from me, the person, or situation they may be rising in right now. I will pause and take time to tend to myself. To return to stability and truth. I will confide in the people I trust and care about, and let them know the wounds I'm actively healing. Co-regulation is supportive. I deserve loving support while I heal. I can hold myself with devotion as I return to what's real.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:09

This episode is a tender one. Tender in the way something feels when it has finally come close enough to the surface to be named. This is not an episode about blaming our mothers. And it's not an episode about excusing what hurt us. It's about what happens when an old wound becomes mature enough to finally be named. And I'm recording this in a very real moment of my life. I've got my tissues with me as voicing this episode will be revealing. Thank you in advance for holding space for me to share. My intention is to not dump on you, but invite you into reflection as a cautionary tale. And notice where you may have a wound from childhood seeping into your relationships that may benefit from some tending to. This week I received clarity around my part in my separation and potential divorce that I honestly did not have language for until now. And I want to say this clearly from the beginning. It was not all him, and it was not all me either, but there is a layer I can finally see. A layer that has lived inside of me for a very long time, that began long before him, before my marriage, long before I had the maturity or the language to say, Oh, this is not about this exact moment. This is an old wound asking to be seen. Which is why I'm calling this episode Healing the Mother Wound. Not healed, healing. Because I thought I had healed this, I really did. I've done a decade of dedicated therapy. I've done yoga, I've cried on the mat. I've been in the rooms, I've looked at the stories, I've softened toward my mother, I have forgiven so much. And then my marriage revealed another layer. A layer that said, I still don't know how to fully receive love. I still wonder if love has to be earned. I still wonder if I will be chosen. I still wonder if someone will fight for me. I still wonder if I am too much, not enough, invisible, replaceable, and easy to leave. And when I say all that out loud, I feel the younger version of me in the room, the little girl, the daughter, the one who needed her mother. And I'm gonna pause here before I go any further to name something important. I am not diagnosing myself or my mother. I am no psychologist, therapist, or clinician. I'm simply a woman living her life. I'm a woman who's curious, who researches, who learns, experiments, and pays attention, and is willing to stand in the flames of the fire of truth. I've spent decades inside the worlds of women's bodies, birth, motherhood, intuition, yoga, healing, and the sacred, complicated terrain of family. And this is what I know from living. Sometimes the body understands the wound before the mind has language for it. Sometimes your relationship shows you what your childhood buried. Sometimes the people you love most become mirrors for pain they did not create. And if you are brave enough or desperate enough or tender enough to look, you can begin to separate what is happening now from what happened then. That is the work. That is healing. Definitely not a glossy version, a raw and real version. When I say mother wound, I'm talking about the emotional imprint left when mother-child relationship does not provide with a child deeply needed. And I don't mean only food, shelter, clothes, rides to school, holidays, or appearances. Those can have an impact on wounds. However, here I mean attunement, warmth, protection, delight, consistency, being seen, being heard, being chosen, being emotionally held. For many daughters, this wound is layered. It can be personal, it can be ancestral, it can be cultural, it can be spiritual, it can come through a mother who was emotionally absent, a mother who was critical, a mother who was unpredictable, a mother who loved conditionally, a mother who was overwhelmed, a mother who was untreated in her own pain, a mother who did the best she could and still deeply hurt her child. Both can be true, and that is where this gets real, because healing the mother wound is not about making your mother a villain, and it's also not about pretending nothing happened. It's about telling the truth without being cruel. It is about taking responsibility without taking all the blame. It's seeing clearly enough that you stop making everyone in your life audition for a role they never agreed to play. For me, I can now name two enormous mother wounds. The first is conditional love, the belief that love has to be earned, that I have to be good enough, pleasant enough, useful enough, pretty enough, but not too pretty, not too honest, not too sharp, not too expressive, not too inconvenient, that love comes when I perform correctly. The second is abandonment and rejection, the feeling that I can be left, replaced, ignored, forgotten, not chosen. And these two wounds have been living inside my body for a long time. I knew they existed, but I did not understand how deeply they were affecting my marriage. One of the memories that keeps returning to me is so simple. My mom would be reading in bed, that was her coping mechanism. She loved to read. She would disappear into books, and I would come in and lay next to her. I just wanted to be close. I'm a cancer moon, so if you know anything about that energy, I have always had this deep need for closeness, nurturing, softness, home, emotional connection, especially for my mother. And in my memory, nearly every time I would lay next to her, my little brother would come in between us, and he's only 18 months younger than me, so it was all my memories. And my mom never fought for me. She never said Elise was here first. She never said, You can cuddle with me after. She never said, Right now I'm with your sister. She didn't make me feel like I was a priority, or that I had a protected place beside her. And I know that may sound small, but to a child it was not small. To a child, that is the whole world. Our mothers are our whole world, and we learn to regulate our nervous system from our mothers. The lessons I learned were that I can be replaced, my place can be taken, my needs can be interrupted. No one will protect my closeness. No one will say, this is Elise's time. And here's the part that became so clear this week. I wanted my husband to fight for me in the way my mother never did, and that was not fair. That was not his burden to carry. I married a gentle man. I did not marry someone who was going to storm the castle, break down the door, and prove my worth through pursuit. He is a protector, but he didn't need to prove anything. And yet there was a younger part of me that kept wanting to know. Will you come get me? Will you choose me? Will you fight for me? Will you prove that I matter? And when I did not feel that, I pushed, I tested, I created distance, I created the conditions where I could feel abandoned again because that wound knew that story so well. It's a devastating thing to witness in yourself. And on the other side, it is also liberating. Because once you see the pattern, you are no longer fully possessed by it. And I have to tell you, it felt like my mother was in the room from time to time throughout my marriage, even when she wasn't there. Not literally, but energetically, emotionally, somatically. It felt like this ancient wound was living between us. And I didn't even know it. My husband would be responding as himself, and my body would be responding as the little girl who was not chosen on the bed. That is the kind of thing we have to become mature enough to name, because otherwise we just keep calling it the wrong thing. We call it he doesn't care, or she's too needy, or I'm just angry, or this relationship isn't working. And maybe some of that is true. But sometimes underneath the adult conflict is the inner child saying, Please don't leave me, please see me, please choose me, please make me feel like I matter. And if that younger part is running the room, the adult relationship cannot breathe. Now I want to give some context around my mother because it will help understand the soil something grew in. My parents knew each other for six months before they got married. I was a honeymoon baby. My mom never wanted to have children. She wanted to be a career woman. She wanted a life that looked very different from the one she got. Instead, she became pregnant right away, became a stay-at-home wife and mom. She was home with one car while my dad worked forty five minutes away, and then when I was only nine months old, she became pregnant with my brother. And now as a mother, as a woman who has worked with mothers for decades, I can look back and say, that was a lot. That was a woman in a life she may not have consciously chosen. That was a woman without the support, the language, the nervous system capacity, or cultural permission to say, I am not okay. And to be clear, that does not excuse the harm, but it does widen the lens. And for me, widening the lens has been part of the medicine. I have had to sit with the reality that I was not a planned pregnancy, that I was unwanted. And I don't say that dramatically. I say that because for me it explains something my body has carried for a long time. The fear of not being wanted, this fear of being too much, and an ache around rejection. The sense of, did my life interrupt someone else's life? I cannot prove what I felt in the womb, but my body has always known something about unwantedness. In the show notes, I'll link a resource if you'd like to dive into the amazing, incredible, miraculous world of cellular and spiritual memory and how we are feeling beings first and only become into our thinking minds years after birth. We are feelers first. With no way to verbalize or make sense of experiences we received in preconception, conception, pregnancy, birth, and the first three years of life. And I have had to mother that part of me with a kind of tenderness I did not receive then. My mother also really believed I was a boy. My grandmother, her mother, was absolutely a soulmate of mine. She knew I was a girl. And because my mother's relationship with her own mother was complicated, my mom resisted that. And then here I came, a baby girl. Her mother was right, my mother was wrong. And from some of her writings that I've had access to as an adult, I do believe she started to love me deeply. I believe she started to accept her life as a young mother. I believe she found happiness in that new season. And then she got pregnant again. And when my brother was born, I think she went into a deep, deep depression, overwhelmed, under-supported, living a life she did not choose. And I don't think my dad had the emotional capacity at the time to understand what was happening. He's a wonderful man, but this was a different era. They did not have the language we have now. They did not have the access we have now. They did not understand postpartum mental health the way we are beginning to understand it. They did not understand women's bodies the way we are still fighting to understand women's bodies. And honestly, women's bodies have been under-researched for a long time. It wasn't until the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993 that women and minorities were required to be included in NIH funded clinical research unless there was a clear reason not to include them. I was 12 in 1993. So when we talk about our mothers and grandmothers not having language, not having support, not having information, this is part of the context. We are living now in a time of almost too much information. They were often living with almost none. Too little information can leave women isolated. Too much can become deafening. And in both cases, women can miss the actual medicine needed for their own peace, their own repair, their own soul. When my brother was born, I was moved into a full-size bed down the hall. And when I go back as far as I can in memory, not even visual memory, but body memory, feeling memory, what I feel is crying and not being heard, ignored, rejected, not prioritized. And those are all feelings I have felt ebb and flow in my relationship. That is why I'm bringing up my marriage into this conversation. Because the relationship is huge, the overlap is overtly impactful. And I promised you in the first episode of this podcast that if I'm going through something, I'm going to take you on the journey. This is me keeping that commitment. I learned early in life that love was conditional, that I had to earn it, that I had to perform, that I had to be on, that I had to act a certain way, dress a certain way, behave a certain way, speak at the right time and not speak at the wrong time. And listen, I have a sharp tongue, I have truths that need to be named. I have always had truths that needed to be named. And when a child's gifts are treated like problems, something happens. When a girl's clarity is shamed, something happens. When her voice is too much, her body becomes a place where the truth goes. I've shared before in the labels episode about trichotillomania. I started pulling out my eyelashes when I was twelve in sixth grade, and by eighth grade, I didn't have any. And I really did not have much of anything throughout my twenties. And by the time that I was 31, after I had given birth to my daughter, within three months postpartum, all my eyelash that I had worked really hard to grow were gone again. My body was speaking. For me, hair pulling became one of the ways my body showed me I was under stress. And research on trichotillomania describes how stress or tension can precede pulling and the temporary relief afterward can reinforce the cycle. And at that time, I thought I was healing the mother wound. I put myself right into therapy with a humanistic approach. My therapist was amazing. I went weekly for a long time, then every other week for a long time, then monthly for a long, long time. For almost a decade I worked. I also had a powerful yoga practice, real in-person yoga. Teachers who did not flinch when I cried on the mat. They didn't need to know the details, they just held the space. I went to practices and gong baths and let the tears come. Just let them move. And that somatic work, connecting with my mind, body, feelings, breath, really made a difference. It gave my body somewhere to tell the truth. But there was another layer. When my son was four and a half months old, he was hospitalized. And I share about that experience in the previous episode of Mom's Health Care Compass. My mother went with me to the hospital, and afterward, because she didn't ask, she didn't try to understand, she didn't agree with all the medicalization that was necessary for my son. She had stopped talking to me completely. And I need to pause there. Because I was a new mother. I had a baby who had just been very sick. I needed my mother. She did not have to agree with me, but I needed her to walk with me, and she couldn't. A few months later we met for lunch. It was my son, my mom, and me. We had ordered food. I told her she looked really beautiful, and I complimented her, and she replied, You're such a fucking bitch. And my mom does not have a habit of swearing at me. It was really unusual and weird and caught me off guard, and I was shaken. And then she got up, went to the bathroom, walked out of the restaurant, and left. She abandoned me again, and saying that out loud still feels unreal, especially now as a seasoned mother, because no emotionally well mother does that to her daughter while her daughter is raising and having babies. That is how I know she was not well. She was hurting, she was untreated, uncared for. She was living inside pain she did not know how to metabolize, and her pain became pain I inherited. After that, my mother did not speak to me for five years. She moved to Denver without saying goodbye, and we live in Michigan. I did not even know if she knew she had a granddaughter, and during those years I was in therapy. I was emotionally and mentally preparing myself for the phone call that my mother had died. I worked through what that might feel like. I imagined the grief. I imagined the finality. I imagined all of it. I imagined receiving her remains at my door in a fucking box. But the phone call I eventually received was different. She was alive, but she had had a massive stroke. She would need twenty four hour care for the rest of her life. And suddenly, the mother who had abandoned me became someone I was responsible for. That is a different kind of death. The person is still here, but the relationship you thought you were grieving has gone in a completely different direction. My brother and I flew to Denver. We had nine days, two days of travel, seven days to walk into a hospital room and see our mother after five years of no contact, figure out what had happened, empty her apartment, find a facility for her, make decisions no adult child is ever fully prepared to make. When we walked into the room, my brother ran right to her, and she held him. And I stood at the foot of the bed like what the fuck do I do? Because even then she did not say come here, thank you for being here. Come here. She did not reach for me in the way some part of me still needed, and that would have gone so far, even then, even after everything. That is the ache of the mother wound. You can be a grown woman, you can be capable. You can be the one handling the paperwork, the care, the logistics, the money, the medicine, the facility, and still, some part of you is waiting for your mother to say, Come here, I missed you. I'm so sorry I did this to us. I see you. Thank you for coming. In many ways I became the mother, she became the daughter. I became the one making sure she had clothes, care, oversight, advocacy, medical support, financial support, someone checking in, someone making sure she was not forgotten inside a system where people can so easily disappear. I hired a nurse case manager who's been with her since day one, and it's been eleven years. I visit her, I FaceTime her, I show up even when I do not want to, and I want to be very honest, most of the time I do not want to. It is still weighty, not as heavy, but weighty, and it's still complicated. But I show up because this is part of my real life spiritual work, my soul work, not the spiritual work that looks pretty online. The real kind, the kind where you return to the relationship if it is safe enough, and you tell the truth in your own body. I am not encouraging you to return to a relationship where repair is not possible or where harm is still actively happening. Discernment matters and safety matters. Your nervous system is vital to protect. What I am saying is that sometimes healing spaces can accidentally or overtly encourage avoidance. They can tell you to cut everyone off, start over, leave, choose yourself, only be around people who feel good. And sometimes, yes, that may be necessary. And sometimes that becomes another way to not face your real life, your real wounds. I may be a broken record about this because I believe it deeply. Return to your real life to do your spiritual work. Return to the people who have shaped you. Return to the patterns that keep repeating. Return to the places where you are still outsourcing your healing, like relying on external people or quick fixes to heal. Not because everyone deserves access to you. They do not. But because wherever you go, there you are. New house, new relationship, new city, new job, new healing circle. There you are. There you are. You still are there, and until you face what is living in you, it will keep traveling with you. Through the years, the tension between my mom and me has softened immensely. It was not quick or beautiful. It was slow, painfully slow. At first she would apologize in a vague way. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And I would say, Okay, mom, thank you. But eventually I got braver. I asked her, What are you sorry for? Or can you tell me what you're sorry for? And slowly she began to name things. She would say, You take such good care of me, I don't deserve this. I wasn't a good mother to you. And that was medicine. Not because it fixed everything, it didn't, but because there are some sentences the body waits decades to hear, the affirmation of your truth. She wasn't a good mother to me. I don't deserve to have to be caring for her thousand miles away. She should have taken better care of herself. But when you receive some pearls of comfort and affirmation, when they arrive, something unclenches. I would tell her, thank you for saying that, mom, I needed to hear it. I would name it. I let her know it mattered because it did. And in the last few years, I have brought my daughter with me to visit her. Three generations in the room. I didn't know if that would ever happen. But it does, and it has. My mother, me, my daughter. And one day, a few years ago, I told my mom, This ends with me. The maternal dysfunction that lived between you and your mother, and between you and me, it does not live between me and my daughter in the same way. My daughter and I are close. We are honest. We repair, we talk, we know each other. And as I told my mom, you do not have to carry this anymore. And I let her know that her mother, my grandma June, is with me. That she sees this. She knows that this line is changing. And I want to say this carefully. Ending a pattern does not mean you become a perfect mother. I am far from a perfect mother. My children have had to walk through hard things with me. But there is a difference between perfection and repair. There is a difference between never hurting your children and being willing to own what happened. Repair is the new inheritance. That is what I want to hand my children. Not perfection. Repair, truth, humility, presence. And this is why my marriage is part of this episode, because I really thought I had healed the mother wound. But this year has showed me the places where I still expected love to be conditional. The places where I could not receive. The places where silence felt like rejection. The places where distance felt like abandonment. The places where gentleness felt like passivity. The places where I wanted to be fought for, but did not know how to ask for closeness without creating pain. I see my part now. I see it with grief. And I see it with compassion and with responsibility. It does not mean everything is mine to fix. It means I am willing to tend to what is mine. And that is the most honest kind of healing I know. So if you are listening to this and something in your body is stirring, I invite you to ask yourself gently, where do I believe love has to be earned? Where do I test people instead of telling them what I need? Where do I interpret someone's quietness as rejection? Where do I become jealous, afraid, controlling, distant, or sharp? Because an old part of me is terrified of being replaced. Where am I asking my partner, my friend, my child, or my community to heal a wound they did not create? And where can I begin to name the wound instead of acting it out? Because this is where real healing begins. Not in perfection, in naming. Let's pause here and welcome a deep breath in and out and breathing in deeply and exhaling completely. And maybe another one. Witnessing your breath as it arrives in and witnessing it leave and just feeling the rhythm of your breath. If this episode is touching something in you, I don't want to just open the wound and leave you there. That is not care. That's not the kind of space I'm here to create. So before we talk about what it sounds like to name the wound to someone else, I want to talk about what happens inside your body first. Because when a mother wound rises, most of us do not become our most mature self. We become younger. We become the little girl who was not chosen, the daughter who was ignored, the child who learned to perform love, the woman who feels the silence and thinks, I am being left. So before the big conversation, or the long text, or you making the meaning up yourself, or before you decide the relationship is over, there is a quieter place to begin. Regulation. Self-regulation is the practice of helping your own nervous system return to enough safety that you can respond instead of react. Probably not perfectly calm, not spiritual perfection, enough safety, enough breath, enough ground under your feet to say, I am here, this is now, I am not back there. For me, that can look like putting one hand on my heart and one hand on my womb space below my belly button. It can look like stepping outside and feeling the air on my face. It can look like walking, not to escape, but to move the charge through my body. It can look like breathing out longer than breathing in. And talking to myself helps too, saying, This is a wound. This is a younger part of me. I do not have to act from this place. I can pause. I can ask for what I need without testing love first. And then, when steady enough, I can move toward co-regulation. Co-regulation is when a safe, steady person helps your nervous system remember safety through their presence. Co-regulation is when you identify a steady person in your life who can help your nervous system remember safety through their presence, their tone, their breath, their eyes, their touch, their reassurance, their willingness to stay in the room emotionally. And this is not weakness. It is not dependency either. It is biology. We are wired to regulate in relationship. A baby learns safety through the body of the mother. And even as adults, we still need safe people. Not people who rescue us or carry what is ours, but people who can say, I'm here. We're okay. I need some space, but I'm not leaving you. I'm quiet because I'm processing, not because I hate you. I love you and I'm overwhelmed. I want to understand, but I need a moment. Can you hear how different that is? That is not someone fixing your wound. That is someone offering enough steadiness so you can stay with yourself. And if you are the one with the wound, your work is to name it without making the other person responsible for curing it. Something like, I can feel an old wound getting activated right now. I'm noticing that I'm telling myself I'm being rejected. I know that may not be true, but I need a little reassurance so I can come back to what is real. That is such a different energy than accusation. It's different than you always leave me. You never care. You don't love me. Fine, I'll just go. One creates defense, the other creates a doorway, and not everyone will be able to meet you there. Some people do not have the capacity to co-regulate. Some will shame your need. And others will use your vulnerability against you, which is why your discernment matters. When there is enough safety, enough maturity, enough love, this is where relationships can become healing. Not because the other person becomes your parent, but because the relationship becomes honest enough for the younger parts of you to stop running the whole room. Then, from that steadier place, you can begin to name the wound. You can begin to bring language to what used to come out as accusation, withdrawal, testing, jealousy, sharpness, or silence. And it may sound something like this. You know, I'm working through an abandonment and rejection wound right now. It's old. It did not begin with you, but sometimes it gets activated. And if I reach out and ask if we're okay, it's not because I want to burden you. It's because I'm practicing naming the story instead of believing it. A simple reinsurance helps me come back to the present. Or with conditional love, maybe I'm working through a wound around conditional love. There is a younger part of me that believes I have to perform, I have to people please, or be easy in order to be loved. So if you notice me asking if I did something wrong or if I seem anxious when there's space between us, I'm practicing telling the truth instead of spiraling and making up stories. I don't need you to fix it, but your clarity helps me stay connected to what's real. And in a deep partnership, it might sound like I'm beginning to understand some of what I asked from you came from a wound you did not create. I wanted to be fought for because there were places in me that never felt chosen or protected. I am so sorry for the ways I pushed that pain onto you. I'm working on naming it now instead of making you prove something to the wounded part of me. None of this is weakness. It's maturity and devotion. It's a woman coming back into her own hands. If you are a mother listening, this episode is not here to terrify you. All of us mothers are going to wound our children in some way. No one walks this earth unscathed. I know that may sound awful. It is true. Not because you are bad, because you are human, because we are human and they are human, because family is intimate, life can be hard because we do not get to mother from some untouched place of perfection. I don't know any woman who had the perfect mother. This is the human experience. But what you can do is repair. You can listen. You can own your part. You can say, I see that hurt you. Or I wish I had handled that differently. Or tell me more. I am here now. You do not have to earn my love. And if no one said those things to you, maybe you begin there with yourself. There are multiple mother wounds, and they are not healed in a one-time ceremony. It is not a breakthrough in one therapy session, and it's not just one conversation in your partnership or other relationships. It is not finally understanding your mother. It is a devotion. A devotion to stop abandoning yourself in the ways you were abandoned. A devotion to stop making love a performance. A devotion to stop handing your old pain to the people who are trying to love you now. And maybe for some of us, it is also the devotion to become the mother we needed, not only for our children, but for the little girl inside of us who is still waiting on the bed, hoping someone will say, It's your turn now. You're not too much. You're not being replaced. You do not have to earn this. You are loved. And that is where I am right now. Not healed, healing, still extremely tender, still learning, still returning to myself, to my real life, to repair, to love that does not have to be earned.