How To Heal "The Mother Wound"

"When you are not fed love on a silver spoon, you learn to lick it off knives." - Lauren Eden

Welcome to Good Enough, a weekly subscriber newsletter where I help you work through your family drama to create more meaningful adult family relationships. We’re on Week 2 of the series on Mother + Daughter Relationships. If you want to catch up on Week 1 first, read this.

---

This Email Is For:

• daughters who feel unloved by their mothers

• daughters who want to understand how a critical, rejecting, unloving mother can impact you in adulthood

• anyone who wants to learn about the mother wound

What’s In This Email:

• A definition of the mother wound

• A quiz to help you identify if you have a mother wound

• Why the mother wound exists

• Strategies you can use to start healing the mother wound today

• An invitation to join me for a live + recorded Q&A on April 24 at 11:30 AM ET about Mother Daughter Relationships.

read time (10m)

“Mother Hunger is the term that describes what insecure attachment feels like—a hunger for belonging, for affection, and for security that doesn’t go away despite all kinds of psychological gymnastics.”

Kelly McDaniel

The Mother Wound Defined

I want to start this email with an important reminder: sometimes the mother wound is caused by an abusive mother with ill-intentions who intentionally manipulates and withholds love, affection and protection from her child. And, many of you who are healing from the mother wound had mothers who were unsupported, traumatized, trapped in oppressive systems, and/or who were wounded by their own mothers.

This doesn’t change the pain that you feel, but it does change how you come to understand and relate to your mother. You may set the same boundaries or make the same changes in your relationship with your mother, but the story you tell yourself will be wildly different.

I believe there is a difference between how each of these mother wounds feels and in how you will approach healing from them: