There is great interest these days in balancing our inner masculine and feminine parts, to for example attract the right partner or unlock higher levels of spiritual consciousness as well as higher levels of income. The missing piece however in most teachings is undoing our patriarchal conditioning and healing our patriarchal wounding.
Healing the Masculine & Feminine series is an eight-article series by Sabriyé Dubrie of Soul Teachings on healing our patriarchal conditioning and truly balancing our inner feminine & inner masculine parts within ourselves. As a society, we are only starting to understand how deeply our patriarchal wounding still influences us today; and how it wreaks havoc in our romantic relationships, our relationship with our parents, our relationship with the opposite sex, our relationship as women amongst ourselves, and in what it means to be a woman or a man in our own lives.
The teachings shared are gleaned from my own healing journey on a Soul path level and my experience in working with over a thousand clients using the Soul Embodiment® Therapy method. For those interested in learning this method as a therapist, I run a yearly Soul Embodiment® Therapy Certification Program to train therapists worldwide in this revolutionary healing modality.
In this Soul teaching on the mother wound you will learn:
- Why the mother wound is more than a strained relationship with our mothers
- How women have perpetuated patriarchy throughout history
- How the mother wound is keeping you from stepping into your power
- What the mother wound looks like on a Soul Path level
- And more…
It’s not just about a difficult relationship with your mother
Most resources online when they refer to the mother wound, refer to a strained or dysfunctional relationship between a man or a woman and their mother and the mother wound can certainly play out that way in a mother-son or a mother-daughter relationship, whether that is through neglect, overprotectiveness, abuse, parentification, etc.
But as a woman, you do not have to have a dysfunctional or painful relationship with your mother to suffer from the mother wound in the way we will discuss today.
Of course, the mother wound can also play out as a painful dynamic in the relationship with your mother if you are a woman, in the same way that men can have very wounded relationships with their mothers. However, even if this is the case, for women there is an extra dimension to this wound that is based on our patriarchal conditioning that is passed down through our female lineages.
In this Soul Teaching on the mother wound, we will explore this deeper facet of the mother wound and how the mother wound plays out on a Soul Path level for both men and women. To fully understand what we will discuss in this Soul Teaching, it is recommended first to read Part I of this series on Healing the Masculine & Feminine where we look into the true origins of the patriarchy. Without the understanding we gained, in Part I of this series it will be difficult not to make wrong conclusions in this second installment of this Healing the Masculine & Feminine series.
If you are a man reading this, I encourage you to keep reading as there are also important insights for men in this Soul Teaching regarding your own healing journey as well as your spiritual advancement. Our patriarchal programming is the biggest obstacle in our quest for enlightenment or Ascension, as we need to truly balance our inner feminine and masculine in order for Shakti or the Kundalini energy to rise up through the chakras and reach the crown chakra.
As long as we subconsciously believe that the feminine is inferior to the masculine (even when we consciously think we have already reached this equality), we cannot reach true enlightenment and Soul liberation.
This is the difference between mentally grasping concepts and actually embodying them, we may mentally grasp what it should look like when our inner feminine and masculine are in perfect balance and harmony but that is not the same as actually taking the necessary steps to embody this perfect balance and harmony in the physical.
The Soul Teachings are designed to embody your spirituality, rather than merely theorize or conceptualize this. Healing is an intrinsic part of this embodiment, as it is our unresolved pain and trauma that is keeping us from fully being able to embody the truth of who we are on a Soul level in our everyday lives. This unresolved pain and trauma has created the psychological patterns and subconscious programming that keep us stuck living out our unresolved past.
How women have perpetuated patriarchy throughout history
Although patriarchy is a system that oppresses women, women have been the biggest perpetuators of patriarchy throughout history. They have done this not by choice, but through their internalized patriarchal conditioning. In fact, if women had stood together they could have ended the patriarchy millennia ago but as I explained in Part I – The True Origins Of The Patriarchy the patriarchy was a collective survival mechanism to ensure the survival of our species, which is why their internalized patriarchal conditioning (reptilian brain survival programming) prevented women from revolting against the system that disempowered them.
As the patriarchal conditioning got a stronger hold within our subconscious, it was no longer a question of collective survival for women, but individual survival that depended on the man or men that ensured this for her and her offspring. This is why women have continued even the most barbaric practices to increase the survival chances of their (female) offspring, family, and tribe members.
One such practice, that is still being practiced in Africa today is FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) where women are to various extents vaginally circumcized to make intercourse more pleasurable for the man and/or remove the clitoris of the woman to prevent her from cheating on her husband.
Women who are well aware of the physical, mental, and emotional pain that they are inflicting because they have endured this pain themselves perform such circumcisions on young girls.
It’s not men that perform these painful circumcisions on young women and girls, it’s women within the family and tribe that subject the young girls to these often outlawed and illegal practices. Women who are well aware of the physical, mental, and emotional pain that they are inflicting because they have endured this pain themselves. Yet they feel they have no other option because they believe that doing so will give their daughters (granddaughters, nieces, cousins, etc.) good marriages and comfortable lives. In such cases, women are asked to sacrifice their sexual pleasure and empowerment to be provided for and protected by a man. It will come as no surprise then that girls in poor families are more at risk of being subjected to this barbaric practice, as their families need their daughters to be married off more than families that have the financial means to support their adult children. Even cultures that are not accustomed to this tradition have adopted it, to increase their daughters’ chances of getting married to men in cultures that do value this tradition. In many cases, marriage is the only safety net these women have as there aren’t the social systems we have in the West for women to fall back on. Like all traditions whether cultural, religious, etc. the pot roast story shared in part I of this series applies where these traditions are no longer questioned and are simply upheld because this is ‘how it’s done’. Although this may seem like an extreme example, it’s just one of the many ways that women have throughout history perpetuated the patriarchy. Other examples are blaming women for being sexually assaulted or raped (an ongoing issue in for example India), blaming the female child for incest by male family members instead of holding those male family members accountable for their actions, or blaming mothers for unwanted or criminal behavior in their offspring but letting the father off the hook.
This next example happened to one of my clients where she was made the family secret keeper because her mother didn’t want to lose the father’s protection and provision. Another variant of this is where the child is made the black sheep of the family or the scapegoat so that the mother doesn’t have to leave her partner and with that lose her status and the financial comfort that the partner provides. But it can be even more subtle, when I was almost seventeen I moved in with my later-to-be first husband due to a difficult relationship with my stepmother. I was in a big city school but had to travel three hours a day to get there and back because we lived out in the sticks. I transferred to a school closer by in a nearby town where my living arrangements weren’t as accepted as in my big city school. A female teacher stopped me in the hallway shortly after I had started there and said ‘I don’t know why you are here, you already have a man to take care of you.’ To her, I didn’t need to finish my education because I had already achieved financial security at such a young age and that was all that I needed according to her, why would I need an education if I had a man to take care of me? I immediately transferred myself out of that school again and chose an adult school instead where my living arrangement wasn’t an issue even though I was the youngest student in the class. I graduated two years later. It’s interesting to see how survival is the red thread across all of these examples whether this is direct survival of the person themselves or indirect survival by sacrificing the wellbeing of the victim or child for the mother or other’s comfort and survival, the theme of survival is what connects them.
The subtle or not-so-subtle ‘favoritism’ of mothers
If you grew up in a household where the sons of the family seemed to receive preferential treatment in comparison to the girls, this is another way that patriarchal conditioning has played out in our families of origin. It’s highly likely that your parents and especially your mother weren’t doing this consciously, but rather that her reptilian brain and her internalized patriarchal conditioning were driving her actions. If you were on the receiving end of such behavior, it can be helpful to know that this wasn’t because your male sibling(s) were more loved or more valued, but that it was something your mother most likely wasn’t even aware of doing. Your mother or your parents weren’t alone, this has happened throughout history, here is some research data that sheds some light on it: In a research project called “Missing Girls” which included the whole of Europe, researchers examined whether discriminatory practices increased female mortality rates during infancy and childhood in Europe from 1700 to 1950. This is what they found: ‘Girls have a natural biological advantage when it comes to survival from the fetal stage onwards. The majority of stillbirths and miscarriages are boys. Baby boys are also more vulnerable to stress than baby girls, and more prone to diseases. Females are also better equipped to survive famine and epidemics.
An international research team established this by studying historical data from seven different crises that have occurred over the past 250 years. Despite this, the source material collected during “Missing Girls” shows that more girls than boys died during certain periods in some European countries and regions.
Boys were prioritized and given more food during difficult periods of poverty and famine.
The reason is that boys experienced better living conditions and were prioritized by their parents during difficult periods of poverty and famine. Boys were given more food than girls, mothers tended to breastfeed boys longer, and boys received better care and living conditions.’ Source: phys.org
This research project showed that many mothers had to choose whether consciously or subconsciously between their children in times of famine, drought, war, or other crises, and when given that ‘choice’ they ‘chose’ their male children not because they didn’t love their daughters but because the boys and young men in the family were needed to survive. In other words, when the survival of the family was at stake their reptilian brain took over and reverted to the successful survival strategies that we adopted at the beginning of humanity as discussed in Part I – The True Origins Of The Patriarchy.
This ensurance of survival was not only in the short term to maximize male protection and provision for the family unit, but also in the long term when it came to taking care of the parents when they were old, as well as ensuring the survival of the family name as ONLY boys could keep the family name alive. The girls would assume their husband’s name and all the offspring born within that marriage would be named after their father and not their mother.
Not only has this preferential treatment of boys been passed down ancestrally, culturally, religiously and so on it was hardwired into our reptilian brain as a way to ensure the survival of our species. What I am not saying here is that because of this, we should continue to give men and boys preferential treatment above women and girls. What I am saying is that this is what has subconsciously driven us to do this up til now, to the degree that we were subconsciously conditioned to do so based on our own level of internalized patriarchal conditioning. This level of patriarchal conditioning depends on our own Soul history and experiences.
I want to reiterate that our current conscious belief systems are in no shape or form an indication of the extent to which we still subconsciously carry patriarchal wounds and conditioning. You can’t say based on your current life beliefs that you don’t have subconscious patriarchal conditioning that is canceling out your conscious beliefs because you don’t know until you actively go look for it.
I know this from my own healing journey and my work with clients, the problem with the subconscious is simply that we don’t know what we don’t know. We have to as psychiatrist and founder of psychoanalysis Carl Jung said in his famous quote make the subconscious conscious to be able to see how our subconscious is directing our lives as if it were our fate. I am paraphrasing him to help the quote land deeper. The actual quote is “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” which is more poetic, but perhaps less clear to those new to working with the subconscious mind.
The mother wound is passed down from mother to daughter
But what makes the mother wound so different when it comes down to the relationship between mother and daughter? On a personal level, the mother wound manifests similarly as it does in mother-son relationships, but according to Bethany Webster, author of Discovering the Inner Mother on a collective level, the mother wound is the dysfunctional coping mechanism that has resulted from generations of female oppression.
Patriarchy distorts dynamics between mothers and daughters that leave both disempowered. Bethany Webster
‘The patriarchal thread that runs through all dysfunctional dynamics between mothers and daughters is the demand for obedience in exchange for love. The patriarchal messages daughters receive from their mothers are more insidious and damaging than any of the cultural messages combined. Why? Because they come from the one person the daughter must bond with in order to survive.’ Source: bethanywebster.com
I would say it’s even the demand to sacrifice our power (aka keep ourselves small) in exchange for love.
When I was recently on a trip to Barcelona, I was shown the underlying bind that the mother wound represents for women and how we subconsciously pass this wound down to our own daughters and they will pass it down to their daughters until it’s healed. As children, we are dependent on our mother’s love and protection in order to survive. Because our mothers have had to sacrifice their power in order to be loved, out of loyalty we subconsciously sacrifice our power for our mother’s love and acceptance. Because this is a subconscious decision we made as a child, we perpetuate the disempowerment of the feminine and more importantly of ourselves into adulthood without even realizing it. When you examine this closely, we see survival again as the motivation to do so.
What does this disempowerment look like? It can manifest as:
- codependency in relationships
- people-pleasing
- failure to move up the corporate ladder
- making ourselves small, or harmless, not being able to take up space
- visibility wounding, wallflower syndrome, and imposter syndrome
- experiencing a glass ceiling in your ability to wield power/leadership or income
- low self-esteem
- and more…
It’s why 88% of all women-owned businesses generate less than $100,000 yearly and why there aren’t enough women in the boardroom. The biggest mechanism of self-sabotage in women above anything else is their own internalized patriarchal conditioning.
What I realized was that as women we continue to disempower ourselves and sacrifice our ambitions, goals, and dreams even in adulthood because of our unspoken desire to stay loyal to our mothers and the sacrifices they had to make to be loved and accepted. The child part in us needed to do so because she needed her mother to survive, but what I realized is that when we are adults this at some point is no longer true yet the subconscious belief and decision aren’t revisited or changed.
In my case, my mother is now 84 years old and her survival now depends much more on me and the care I give her than the other way around. Yet, subconsciously I realized I was still sacrificing my power to keep her love and acceptance because of my internal conditioning created as a child, in the exact same way that she had sacrificed her power in loyalty to her mother. It’s the collective female wounding of what it means to be a woman within the patriarchy that is passed down from mother to daughter.
This shows us that patriarchy like the Telephone or Chinese Whispers game has morphed into all these different ways we sacrifice the feminine and our feminine power in order to survive.
The mother wound on a Soul Path level
On a Soul Path level, the mother wound is the wound we have with life itself – the mother who has birthed us into each new incarnation. Just as we can feel that our Earthly mother has not protected and loved us in our childhood causing a strained relationship, distrust, and resentment later in life, we can feel the same toward – LIFE itself.
The mother wound on a Soul Path level is not being able to trust the great mother, life itself, to love and nurture us.
In fact, as a Soul Embodiment® Therapist, I have found that the mother wound in your current life relationship with your Earth mother is an attempt to heal your mother wound on a Soul Path level, which is your inability to trust life and feel safe and nourished by it. This of course stems from the accumulation of traumatic experiences throughout different incarnations that have made us feel that we can’t trust life and that life is not safe.
It’s not until we unravel our Soul history that we realize that life has always protected, provided, and nourished us to its highest ability given the experiences the Soul chose in each lifetime to heal what was left unresolved in the past. It’s important to realize that Earth is not a school and we are not here to learn lessons, rather we used trauma to densify our energy fields from light beings into physical beings as discussed in the Soul Path series Part I – Our Split From Source And How It Still Impacts Us Today and to return back to Source we need to heal the unresolved trauma that we used to take physical form so that we can fully embody who we are on a Soul level and return to our light being state.
On an even deeper level, it also represents our suppression of the feminine within ourselves and our ability to trust, flow, open, and surrender to life which directly impacts our ability to receive. The more we are in the grips of survival wounding, the more we will use control to keep ourselves safe. But control is an inadequate substitute for power, as we only need control where power is absent. As men and women, we need to seek our protection and provision not in the hands of a human being, but in the hands of the Divine. As this is how life was intended in connection with the Divine, not separate from it.
The mother wound whether you are a man or a woman offers you the opportunity to shift from the paradigm of surviving into thriving when we heal our relationship with life the great mother who has birthed us throughout all our incarnations and heal our relationship with the inner feminine.
How to heal the mother wound
As we can see in this Soul Teaching, the mother wound works through in different layers and needs to be healed within these different layers. These are what these different layers look like:
- Healing our relationship with our Earth mother and the childhood trauma related to the mother wound.
- Healing our childhood decision to be loyal to our mothers and sacrifice our power in exchange for her acceptance and love (care).
- Deprogramming our own patriarchal conditioning that subconsciously gives men and boys preferential treatment or teaches our daughters to sacrifice their power in order to be loved and accepted.
- Healing our relationship with the great mother life itself and understanding that she has always held, nourished, and protected us no matter what difficult experiences we were going through.
- Heal our relationship with our inner feminine so that we can come out of survival mode and surrender to the protection and the provision of the Divine.
We do this by focusing our healing on four different levels; our current life childhood, our ancestral lineages, our past life history, and our Soul Path experiences. Of course, it would be great if we could do all of this work on our own, but the simple truth is that this is so deeply baked into our psyche that we hold this wounding deep within the subconscious where we aren’t even consciously aware that it’s there.
Especially getting to our reptilian brain programming is not easy as I have previously written about in this Soul Teaching on Our Survival, Defense & Protection Mechanisms. We need to work with healers or therapists specialized in navigating past our survival, defense, and protection mechanisms and Soul Embodiment® Therapy is exactly designed to do this. It also helps us work on these deeper layers that other healing modalities don’t work on such as the Soul Path level and also the combination of the different timelines of the past, as most healing modalities focus on them separately.
Yet, it’s through seeing all the different expressions of this wound across our complete Soul Journey that allows us the deepest healing because simply healing our wounded relationship with our mother in this lifetime doesn’t address the actual root cause, which is our wounding with life itself. Likewise, even if we have a very good relationship with our mothers it doesn’t mean that we aren’t subconsciously sacrificing our power in order to be accepted and loved nor does it mean that we ourselves aren’t perpetuating patriarchy within our own families (or the world at large) by giving our son’s (boys and men) preferential treatment without realizing it or passing on the mother wound to our daughters by subconsciously teaching them that female disempowerment is inherent to being a woman or that giving up your power as a woman is necessary in order to be accepted and loved, not only by your mother but by men.
I pray this Soul Teaching serves you and has given you a deeper understanding of the mother wound, how it is created, and the multiple levels on which it plays out in our lives. This Healing The Masculine & Feminine Series comes with a series of Masterclasses that you can get exclusive access to for free – by joining The Soul Path Healing Tribe (click on the link to join). During the live round of these masterclasses, you can join live and ask questions about the patriarchy and how to heal the different ways it plays out in our lives. I look forward to seeing and getting to know you during the masterclass livestreams.
With my deepest love,
