Our relationship with our mother serves as a template for our relationship with ourselves. As daughters we absorb from our mother information about how she felt about herself, how she felt about us and how she felt about the world. We learned to treat ourselves the same way our mother treated herself. Our task as conscious women lies in transforming the inner mother within our psyche created from our biological mother, with her human limitations, into the mother we always needed and wanted. We can become the mother we always wanted for ourselves. In this way we are able to accept the limitations of our external mother because our internal mother becomes the primary mother we can count on, in ways we may never have been able to count on our external mother. Our mother could only love us the way she could love herself.
Our mother could not and will not be able to meet our needs in the way we needed and wanted. This means going through a grieving process. A mourning for the way we had to compensate and suffer the maternal wound. In the grieving process, we have the opportunity to realize the fact that if we feel loved or abandoned it was not our fault. Only then can we give up the struggle to prove our worth in the world. In the grieving process we can also have compassion for our mother and the burden she carried. By healing your inner mother, you transform your life beyond anything you can imagine. By confronting this pain, we can realize that what we thought was our pain is actually part of our mother's pain that we have carried out of love. Now we can choose to let go of this burden. In this way, instead of lessening our sense of guilt, we can feel the confidence in our bodies and in our hearts to develop a sense of authentic wholeness and self-love.
By becoming the mother who is good enough for ourselves, we free not only ourselves but also all those in our lives.
It is a challenge to acknowledge to ourselves how unloved we were in our relationship with our mother. As we remember and see how burdened and overwhelmed she was, we may think that we were the source of her pain. This daughter guilt can keep us stuck. One way to release our guilt is to recognize the innocence and legitimacy of our childish needs. It is a way to free ourselves from shame and baptize ourselves in our goodness and divinity. Once we grieve for ourselves, then we can begin to grieve for our mothers and for all women.
Grieving replenishes and strengthens us.
As women, we can heal and give ourselves what our mothers could not give us. We can become our own source. And as women's bodily pain is a source for us, we can begin to mourn our mothers and for all women.
