Anyone with an unMothered heart is left feeling a sense of emptiness that is a profound loss that only gets expressed in the unconscious behaviors of adulthood.
This kind of heart often has a difficult time seeing his/her own innate goodness; an embodied knowing the divine nature of soul that feels connected and a part of the goodness in life (regardless of how much is accomplished). In search of soul, of a connection to innate goodness and love, the adult with an unMothered heart projects this out onto others and searches for soul, love and ultimately Mother or a higher power in another, in the world or in behaviors and substances. A good enough mother, according to Winnicott, is a mother is who is attuned enough. She loves her children, she enjoys being a mother and while she has her moments of anger and frustration, she tends to her children, protects them, nourishes them, nurtures them and provides enough of a holding container for their experience to be mirrored back as lovable, workable (through maternal guidance and demonstrating through her own being) and human. For an infant, Mother is everything. She is, essentially, God and this experience of her is wired into the psychic system in the first seven years of life, before any verbal or meaning making skills have taken effect. All future thinking, meaning making and belief systems that are formed arise out of an internalized structure of life experience that by then is so far out of conscious, mental awareness but is living there, inside the body. The body is the home of our consciousness. She is the ground and home of our soul.
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Consumerism is wrapped around everything from the food we eat, to the clothes we wear, to the way we are taught to approach our own healing.
If we want to make more money, we must heal our trauma. If we want more of this or less of that, if we want a different lifestyle, we must heal ourselves. If we don't have the things we are taught we are supposed to "want" or "have" to match the ill-fated picture of the American Dream, then we haven't done enough healing or "work" on ourselves. This is the negative mother parenting us through our cultural paradigm in spades. It's a negative mother who will not let up because she controls us through our internal sense of lack and not enoughness that drives our desire to satisfy what is truly a spiritual hunger for reconnection with the elemental feminine. But instead, we get distracted with trying to construct some picture of "perfection" to the point that we are now attacking our internal psychic life if there are wounds or emotions that do not measure up to what the negative mother (outside world) expects of us. Healing is not a weapon to be using on ourselves, or each other. Spirituality a not competition of how perfect and of the light we appear to be. The weight of a painful childhood can be a lot to bear. Its consequences seep into so much of our lives. It never feels right that the pain we experienced at the hand of another impacts us so deeply and now we must do work of healing, grieving and recovering ourselves so we can thrive.
This is how we internalize this death mother energy, where Athena cursed Medusa for being raped and cast her out into a cave where she was feared for turning others into stone. Her rapist went free. Medusa punished for her trauma. This happens every day in our inner worlds. We punish ourselves for what has happened in the past. We continue to treat ourselves this way because, especially as children, we learn how to mother ourselves through the way we were treated. We adapt, becoming more like Athena, safe in the patriarchal world that perpetuates abuse while denying it and gaslighting people, even using spirituality to shame victims of trauma into thinking it was somehow their fault or projection. Spiritualized truths do not fly in the face of recovering from any kind of trauma. This is not what healing our relationship to our soul is about. Belief systems develop out of lived experiences of life and the meaning the mind makes of them.
Personality and identity becomes a strategy that is unconsciously developed in order to get one's needs met. This is a very intelligent mechanism of the psyche. As children, it is the only strategy we have that can help us split off from what is overwhelming, intolerable or painful. Soul loss protects us from feeling more pain. The psyche builds around this and it serves us in surviving our early life. This is what becomes our path of awakening back to true self when we are adults, when we realize it no longer works to live a life from inside that loss. Feeling unworthy of love is such an extremely common phenomenon in Western culture where there are a lack of devotional spaces or honoring of the sacred inner sanctum of the human heart. The beliefs that stem from this come as not being worthy of love, feeling disconnected from the rest of life, feeling that it's not okay to be here or to be human, not deserving love all the way. It can trickle all the way down to "I don't matter," which is common and normal if we had a death parent who resented us, envied us, criticized us or otherwise created a lack of safety in our inner and outer world. The belief that we are not worthy of love is not healed through repeating opposite affirmations that are a lie to the nervous system. Scarcity is not a mindset but a lack of love.
It is a symptom of the wound of separation that is passed down the mother line. It is the way that the collective wound of patriarchy is transmitted into our bones through thousands of years of building a world idolizing the rational, provable and profitable. Scarcity is a lack of connection, primarily to the elemental feminine soul, but mostly also it is a disconnection from love and the source of life itself. Nature. The earth. Our natural world we are meant to be a part of. One of the major symptoms we experience through the influence of the death mother culture is scarcity. A scarcity of internal resources, a scarcity of feeling connected to love, nourishment and trust in the nature of life itself. It is a symptom of a broken heart. |
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