HEALING THE MOTHER WOUND

by Julie Cairnes

How does it go for the broken-hearted daughters of wounded and narcissistic mothers? How does she survive the psychological, emotional, spiritual and psychic onslaught from a mother who is her first love and also her first abuser? To the wounded or narcissistic mother, her daughter is seen as a major threat to her feminine supremacy. She sees only with jealous eyes an innocent child as her deadly rival.

Not only this, the mother also projects her issues with her own mother onto her child. Issues such as unwanted and denied aspects and traits of both herself and her own mother.   The wounded narc mother who completely lacks insight will project her own coldness, selfishness and self-obsession onto her child.

Thus, the daughter experiencing full-blown narcissistic abuse from her mother will be shamed and controlled and her identity development significantly undermined. The daughter constantly experiences a profound sense of insecurity as her self-esteem and any semblance of self-confidence plummets and vanishes.

She feels nothing she does will ever be good enough, too young to realise her mother is an emptiness that can never be filled or satisfied by anything she or anyone else does. She feels if she actualises her full potential she will be again rejected, and further lose her mother’s love and approval.

So in a sense, playing small and limiting her own growth is enacted as a form of loyalty, in order to not be seen as competing with her own mother, and also to ensure her own emotional survival.

If she should dare to become fully empowered, the daughter risks losing her mother’s love. And she also risks triggering her mother’s own deep rage and sorrow at not having self-actualised in her own life.

In serious cases of narcissistic mother abuse, the daughter feels she has no right to be here, to have been born, to take up space on the planet, and even to exist.

Here is where a pattern of loss of authenticity can begin, where the daughter feels who she is, is unacceptable, and tries to become the person she might imagine has more right to exist than who she feels she is.

Feeling unacceptable as herself, she feels her only choice is to sacrifice who she really is, and hide her light, or risk losing the love of her mother. The daughter will then also develop co-dependency behaviours to manage the unmanageable life of her mother. Often ultimately becoming the mother of her mother.

Of course, this still doesn’t feed her mothers emptiness, and the toxicity of the internalised shame spreads in the daughters’ psyche like poison. She feels totally unlovable, unloved and unacceptable.

Emotionally abandoned by her mother, the daughter continually recreates these patterns throughout her adult relationships to find a way to healing. Her life is one of striving to feel good enough and worthy for love, and constantly feeling she never is.

The utter lack of warmth, understanding, comfort and care is replicated throughout her life until she finds her way to true healing. The child who experienced an inexplicably competitive mother re-experiences this in adulthood from others around her.

So, recovery for a daughter of a wounded and narcissistic mother is a very deep, long and painful process. If the mother also self-medicated with alcohol and prescription medicines, these will bring other behaviours into the mix, of even greater violations and abuse of the child’s boundaries.

The adult daughter finally realises she cannot save her mother. She realises achieving her own dreams in life is not actually a betrayal or abandonment of her mother. Understanding the wound and brokenness of her mother and realising she herself cannot heal it is a huge learning for the daughter. The daughter grieves her mother’s wound as she grieves her own.

Realisation the full impact of her mother’s pain on her own life, the daughter is able to begin the process of separating her own feelings dreams and thoughts. Real freedom from the past comes as a fierce love for her own destiny is reborn.

The adult daughter needs to recognise how she has internalised her mothers shaming and toxic voice and remove it. Along with seeing and releasing her own co-dependent coping behaviours. Healing her inner child’s wound of abuse, rejection and emotional abandonment is deep work. Replacing the toxic voice with her own self-nurturing, caring and comforting voice is the work of her lifetime.

 ? Julie Cairnes 2018