People Pleasing and the Motherwound
Many women who embark on a healing journey, whether it’s through counselling, yoga, energy healing, or somatic practices or bodywork often end up exploring their relationship with their mother. Our mothers are a significant (often primary) attachment figure who we depend on for survival. However many mothers carry with their own pain and trauma that is unconsciously passed down to their children.
What happens when our mothers haven’t embarked on their own healing journey? When they haven’t resolved their own traumas or created their own resources for coping with stress?
We can only parent from a place where we have gone ourselves.
At times, past trauma can make it challenging for a mother to show up for her child in the way that the child needs her to be. Beyond basic survival needs, this may include:
being able to regulate her own emotions
helping her child to regulate and express their emotions
meeting her own needs and setting boundaries
allowing her child to have needs and boundaries.
The inability to meet her own or child’s emotional needs does not make a mother a bad mother. It does not mean she doesn’t love her children. But it does mean that a mother may not be able to be a wise, safe guide for her child.
When we don’t have that wise, safe guide, dysfunctional patterns such as codependency, people pleasing, difficulty regulating or expressing emotions, difficulty expressing our truth and setting boundaries can arise.
When these patterns originate in our relationship with our mothers, they can be seen as the motherwound.
As a result of the motherwound, we may unconsciously see ourselves as an extension of our mother. We may take on her emotions as our responsibility, inherit her beliefs about herself as our own or take on patterns of relating in relationships that resembles our mother. If our mother saw herself as an extension of us, looked to us for emotional support, or lived her life through us, we often develop a co-dependent or enmeshed relationship. This can lead to a pattern of people pleasing, abandoning our own needs, and difficulty expressing ourselves. Many of my clients come to me with patterns of people pleasing, difficulty meeting their own needs, and a strong sense of guilt and responsibility for others’ emotions. Sometimes an additional stressor in their life such as a fertility or pregnancy loss, pregnancy, postpartum and early motherhood brings forth the motherwound even more.
The pattern of people pleasing is an ingenious survival method that helped us to adapt and survive the environment that we lived in growing up. However this pattern may no longer be serving us and in fact is often preventing us from living our life that way that we want to. Healing our motherwound is a journey of reconnecting with our wise, feminine self thorough training our nervous system that it is SAFE to set boundaries and let go of people pleasing tendencies and old survival patterns that are no longer serving us. It is a process of continually using mindfulness and self compassion to access our wise authentic selves and reparent our younger selves by being a mother to ourselves.
The journey of healing our motherwounds it is not an easy journey but with it comes a lot of freedom. This healing journey often involves giving ourselves permission to grieve our relationship with our mother and to acknowledge that she didn’t meet all of our needs in the way that we needed them while also finding gratitude and compassion for the fact that she did the best she could with the tools that she had.
The motherwound is a cycle that is passed intergenertationally until someone decides that its time to heal it and to live differently than her mother. Self awareness allows us to create this new pattern. The first step to healing our motherwounds is to become curious and self aware.
Some questions to consider might be:
Do you find it difficult to meet your own needs?
Do you feel a lot of guilt when you say no or set a boundary?
Do you feel a strong responsibility for others’ emotions
As a child, did you feel safe expressing all of your emotions in front of your mother?
Did you witness your mom expressing her emotions or meeting her needs in a healthy way?
Do you take on your mother’s pain as your own?
Curiosity opens the door for deeper work and healing. As a registered clinical counsellor and reiki practitioner, I offer holistic healing and counselling support for fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and reproductive conditions as well as for healing the motherwound including patterns of people pleasing, difficulty speaking your truth, perfectionism, self criticism and comparison, and insecurity with body image.