Why the “Mother Wound” Term Wounds Mothers and Daughters
The term ‘mother wound’ has become a popular catch-all description of the disempowering messages daughters inherit from their mother and the pain daughters feel when their mother cannot emotionally connect. Articles and videos on how to heal your ‘mother wound’ are all over the internet, including goop.com and YouTube, even though the term is not a clinical diagnosis.
In Psychology Today (October 2019) Sherry Gaba writes that the ‘mother wound’ is about not feeling mothered. Gaba explains that daughters may suffer from a ‘mother wound’ when their mother did not provide emotional caregiving, even though she provided physical care. In her article, Gaba lists symptoms of low self-worth, repeatedly seeking your mother’s attention and approval, and feeling emotionally responsible for your mother as stemming from a ‘mother wound’. Bethany Webster, a strong proponent of the term ‘mother wound’ defines the term on her website as “painful patterns originating with our mother that cause us to unconsciously limit or sabotage ourselves.” Webster lists a similar range of ‘mother wound’ symptoms like; not feeling good enough, perfectionism, self-sabotage, eating disorders, depression, shame, and guilt.
Terms like ‘mother wound’ find their place in our daily language with little reflection and examination, and its suggestion that ‘mothers wound’, that ‘mothers wound their daughters’ is inaccurate, harmful, and a gross over-simplification of the dynamics between mothers and daughters. It is also not corroborated by mother-daughter attachment research. The term ‘mother wound’, even if it is used to describe how sexist and patriarchal beliefs are passed down from mother to daughter, speaks the age-old playbook that patriarchy uses to blame mothers for anything and everything, from being too controlling and over-protective to being emotionally distant and neglectful. And whilst daughters are focused on blaming their mother, and mothers are steeped in guilt, the true reason for their relationship difficulties remain hidden, as I explain below through Cynthia’s story.
In her book The New Don’t Blame Mother, Paula Caplan reveals how mothers are set up to never being able to get it right because deep in our patriarchal society lies a rarely challenged sexist belief that it is normal and reasonable to blame mother when something goes wrong because mothers are expected to be the main and perfect caregiving parent (p.13). Even when a mother tries to live up to the ‘super-mom’ ideal by putting her child’s needs first and neglecting her own, she will still be blamed when her daughter is angry, suffering from low self-worth, depression, or an eating disorder, to name a few mother blaming conditions. And this patriarchal mother blaming belief is enshrined in counseling and human development theories, including the popular Attachment Theory by Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby. Attachment Theory is used to blame mothers for having caused life-long trauma to their child to the exclusion of other factors that influence a child’s development, and that mothering is limited by the practical, emotional, and financial support that a mother receives. Caplan writes in The New Don’t Blame Mother how in scholarly journals “mental health professionals overwhelmingly indulged in mother-blaming. In the 125 articles, mothers were blamed for seventy-two different kinds of problems in their offspring, ranging from bed-wetting to schizophrenia” (p.45).
Mother-daughter attachment research reveals that the underlying causes of mother-daughter conflict and why a mother cannot emotionally connect with her daughter in the way the daughter needs are found through an in-depth analysis of the socio-cultural environment mothers and daughters relate in. This analysis includes an exploration of how women are emotionally and relationally impacted by the sexism they experience every day, including gender role stereotypes like being selfless and self-sacrificing behaviors. As I explain through my work with Cynthia (not her real name), the mother-daughter relationship tells the story of how women are treated in their generational family, and when women are not heard or emotionally supported, mothers and daughters are set up for conflict and lack of emotional attunement.
Cynthia’s story reveals that mothers do not mother in a cultural vacuum. How a mother mothers is influenced by the emotional, practical, and economic support she receives from her partner, family, culture, and society, and mothers do the best they can with the resources they are given. And standing in the mother’s life story does not in any way silence or dismiss the pain daughters feel when their mother was emotionally unavailable. The mother-daughter connection is a story of both the mother’s and daughter’s truth, needs, and emotional reality. And through my thirty years working with thousands of mothers and daughters from different countries and cultures, I have come to recognize that daughters who are fighting for a deeper emotional connection with their mother are pioneers and generational change makers, who are fighting for a different way of being female, mother, and daughter. No mother wants to hear that she has wounded her daughter, and most mothers do the best they can with the resources they are given. I have found that when a daughter is yearning for a deeper emotional connection with her mother so too is the mother. The problem is, they come from a generational family that does not speak the language of emotional connection that inquires after what women feel, think, need, and desire.
Cynthia was thirty-two when she called me for help with her anger about her mother’s emotional unavailability. When Cynthia joined her first Zoom session, it was obvious that she was spitting angry at her mother. When I asked Cynthia why she was seeking my help, she said; “I am suffering from a mother wound. I’ve done a lot of reading about the mother wound and my mother and I check all the boxes. Even though my mother was great at taking care of me, emotionally she was never there. She made sure that I had what I needed, but she never asked me how I was. I don’t think she really knows who I am. And I have spent my life trying to make mom happy, hoping that one day she’ll be interested in me and ask me about what’s happening in my life. Reading about the mother wound helped me see that my mother taught me not to trust people. I never know if someone likes me and I’m addicted to pleasing people because that is what mom taught me to do.”
Cynthia continued to describe a childhood and a mother-daughter relationship in which she was emotionally neglected, but as mother-daughter attachment research shows, blaming her mother for causing Cynthia’s pain does little to help Cynthia understand why her mother couldn’t be emotionally present, heal her connection with her mother, or empower her to claim her needs and voice in all her relationships. Cynthia needed to understand what had happened to her mother and uncover the true reasons for her mother’s emotional unavailability.
The “Mother-Daughter Attachment Model” emerged from my research and clinical work with mother-daughter attachment, and the main exercise in this model is “Mother-Daughter History Mapping”. This exercise maps out the stories of what has happened in the daughter’s life, her mother’s life, and her grandmother’s life. It connects the dots between what has happened to the daughter, mother, and grandmother and how their life experiences and generational experience with patriarchy, sexism, racism, and violence has impacted them as women and as mother and daughter. (Directions on how to map your mother-daughter history are in my book The Mother-Daughter Puzzle.)
I suggested that we map her mother-daughter history, which Cynthia was eager to do. We began the exercise with Cynthia telling stories of how her grandmother clothed and fed her six children on her own because her husband would disappear for months, usually without warning or telling his wife where he was. And as the eldest daughter, her mother was expected to help take care of her siblings and provide money when she was old enough to get a job. Cynthia’s father continued the generational theme of unavailable and uncaring men by ignoring his wife and daughter and spending his evenings drinking with his friends.
As we finished mapping the stories, emotional experiences, and role stereotypes, Cynthia saw the severe emotional neglect that her mother and grandmother had suffered from. As she pointed out that no one had ever asked her mother and grandmother what they needed her demeanor changed. The anger she had brought into the session evaporated. Cynthia said; “So my mother isn’t really to blame. How could she ask me what I am feeling or needing when no one asked her those questions? And no one asked my grandmother either. It feels unfair to blame mom for not being this emotionally available mother when no one was emotionally available for her. It feels wrong, cruel even.”
The ‘wound’ that Cynthia and her mother were suffering from was how the women in their generational family were severely emotionally neglected by the men in the family and by a patriarchal culture that expected mothers to be selfless and self-sacrificing. The culture and society that Cynthia had grown up in did not acknowledge that mothers are people with lives and needs of their own. In Cynthia’s family, the language that inquires after what women, and especially mothers need, think, and feel was not spoken or known. How could Cynthia’s mother have known how to inquire after what Cynthia felt if no one had taught her how to speak this emotional language?
For Cynthia and her mother, and for most mothers and daughters, the original wounding to their mother-daughter attachment is the way patriarchy silences women’s voices, feelings, and needs and treats mothering as a selfless, self-sacrificing, and self-neglecting role. Cynthia’s tendency to put herself last in her relationships and to be a ‘people pleaser’ was not inherited solely from her mother. It was a behavior trait that Cynthia and her mother and grandmother had internalized from the patriarchal culture that they lived in.
Labeling Cynthia’s pain as stemming from her so-called ‘mother wound’ is unhelpful, harmful, and inaccurate and a more accurate label would be that Cynthia, her mother, and grandmother suffered from a ‘patriarchal wound’. We need to reflect on how the term ‘mother wound’ is being used as a catch-all term to hide the lack of training in the counseling and coaching professions about how to uncover the complicated dynamics between mothers and daughters. We need to reflect on how patriarchy has co-opted the term ‘mother wound’ to direct blame away from how sexism and patriarchy harms women generation after generation. And we need to reflect on how imprecise and wounding the term ‘mother wound’ is for mothers and daughters. The term ‘mother wound’ needs to come with an emotional health warning and be replaced with a more accurate description like a ‘patriarchal wound’.