 The beliefs we develop about ourselves and life around us arise from our earliest childhood experiences. Our wounding, which we are taught to deny is there because our culture thrives on denial.
Unprocessed pain, unmet and unfelt grief crystallizes into "negative" belief patterns and shame. It contributes to and is easily and steadily fed by our emotionally dysfunctional culture. A culture that is incredibly illiterate in one of the most healing and important aspects of the human experience. Grief. Grief is potent healing energy. Without it, the unmet, unfelt wounding within us reaches out into the world to find soothing, to find "mother" in order to experience some kind of inner resolution that will lead to peace, safety and goodness; to feel connected to the feminine face of God. Love. Unprocessed wounds are running the world. They are what has us picking the same relationships over and over again, doubting ourselves, not trusting life, running from one addiction to another, looking for the "one" or hiding from ourselves. What we see as co-dependence, seeking our wholeness in the external world, is at the root, a symptom of spiritual and emotional disconnection from love itself, also known as trauma.
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 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.  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.  Peace of mind will come from calling your heart home.
The inner nourishment we seek via the purest of inner freedom It will come when we stop enslaving the heart to the mind; using the mind as the body's task master and the primary source of our conscious focus. The body is the container of the subconscious mind. The mind constantly repeats what the heart has not released. Fear, scarcity and negative thoughts will be soothed and transformed in the most miraculous way when we recognize they are reactions to flags being sent from the body, the subconscious, so we will pay attention to our hearts. These flags are the inner self-fragments vying for your loving attention, seeking a mother who will finally offer them what they need so that the wounds, the stuck emotional energy, the tension patterns can release and you can finally be free.  A big barometer of self-love is how well we are able to parent ourselves through difficult times, mistakes, disappointments, grief and other challenging emotions.
All too often, this is where our wounds are triggered and we enact ways of being that perpetuate the cycle of wounding within our psyches. If we keep treating ourselves and our inner worlds the way we internalized, the way we learned to treat ourselves, then we continue the cycles of pain in our lives without realizing it. This is the realm of the death mother and one I see most common in clients and my own soul life. Grief is a very common reaction not only to loss but heartbreak or rejection or disappointment. We make mistakes. We are human. Life has its ups and downs. Things happen. We feel things in response to it.  Living in a world that values what image we project over who we really are, what we can produce over what we express, how we look over how we feel is a culture that is emotionally and spiritually neglectful. It is a culture that values the external to such a degree that we have become codependent this culture, a death mother, in an attempt to receive the nourishment our psyche is so deeply craving and getting ourselves lost in the process.
We have been split in two...our inner nature and our rational nature. Animal and divine has become animal OR divine. The splitting creates a deep chasm in the in-between, a place that rests in our hearts...where we are actually meant to embody the in-between...to be both instinctual and divine, logical and filled with the creative loving energy of eros; to hold a safe container, respect knowledge and wisdom equally and to navigate through the world fully alive in our cells with feeling, wisdom and grace. We should feel safe to be whole. Yet most of us do not. This is the essence of the soul wound, the split between our two sides; logos and eros, masculine and feminine, animal or spirit, spiritual or science, dark or light, love or hate, good or bad...and on and on.  There's a saying about resentment that goes something like resentment is like drinking a poisonous substance and expecting the other person to die from it.
It's anger and hurt wrapped up in a frustration that our mind projects onto others but an energy we attack ourselves with. It's painful living inside the trance of resentment, a trance we get so used to that we don't even realize how much we are punishing ourselves and attacking life on a very deep, subconscious level. Beneath resentment is often trauma or grief over needs that were never met. Trauma means disconnection. It is a broken form of trust in life, love, others and in our ability to meet our innermost emotional and spiritual needs. Where we have resentment, there is an inner wounded one that didn't get needs met, has a hurt that was never expressed/acknowledged, or there is simply grief over what never was. These kinds of disappointments are real and not to be glossed over. In order to truly individuate into our true sovereign adulthood and move into our highest potential, we must soothe the inflammation of resentment through watering it with our tears of grief.  Grief does not need to be healed, it IS the healing itself.
It’s the range of love that weaves its way through the cracks in the walls built around our hearts...walls built to protect us but only serve to keep the grief and love inside. It is the wildness of love that explodes our hearts open, reconnecting us with compassion and connectedness to all the things in this life. It is the seeds of sanity and self-love. It is the waves of great letting go, mourning the passing, inner wailing at disappointment, the peace made with taking refuge inside the walls of impermanence that everything will eventually change.  In a trauma culture it’s incredibly important to become aware of ways that we make the aftermath of symptoms of trauma wrong. It is not true that the universe only gives us what we can handle. If that were true, trauma woudn’t even be a thing since the very definition of trauma is an experience that is too much for the system to handle, metabolize or make sense of whether it is physical, sexual, emotional or spiritual. (Note that most physical and sexual trauma also involves emotional and spiritual dimensions).
. Indifference to the truth creates complacency and shaming of trauma survivors, people suffering with symptoms of trauma like addictions, anxiety, eating disorders or depression. Isolation. We are wired with needs that need to be met by others. If we start to program this out of us, it is supporting trauma at its core. We aren’t supposed to get used to not needing anything from others. . People are not addicted to their trauma. Nervous systems wired via fear because environments were not safe run on adrenaline, which creates a deep feedback loop. There is a deep disconnect to one’s own vital life force energy. It’s not just physical. It’s also emotional, spiritual and impacts the quality of consciousness through which life is perceived. . Awakening out this trauma trance can be quite intense as our whole inner (and outer) world must shift. We must learn that safety and joy are okay, that our own energy is safe because trauma at its most basic level impacts the very way we experience life. That it’s safe to be here in a real way, rather than the mind yelling at the inner one trying to convince it is safe when it doesn’t even know what safe feels like. |
Dr. Nandi Hetenyi
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