Healing Connections with Your Mother

Feeling connected gives us a feeling of security, abundance, being loved, cherished and wanted. Our main connection is the mother/child bond—it is through her that we were nourished, fed and grew when we started our life in her womb, and through her we obtained our first beliefs about ourselves. Connectedness is how we bonded with her and its through her that we felt valued, adored, cosseted and loved beyond measure. Or not.

Some of us may have experienced a break in that bond, through either physical or emotional separation, at birth or later on in life. Perhaps we experienced a birth trauma, were ill in hospital as a toddler and mum couldn’t come to visit because she had to look after your siblings, or she died. Maybe we were given or taken away at birth to foster or adoptive parents. It might be that you feel emotional separated from your parents as they fought with each other and ignored you.

Perhaps one or both of your parents were alcoholics which was the case in my experience, as my mother took to the bottle for whatever reasons only she knew. I was emotionally abandoned by her to the bottle and I was physically abandoned by my father because he died of cancer of the throat in hospital.

By experiencing this too early separation we find it difficult in life to connect or to make friends and keep them. A significant other relationship may fail because we are unable to connect with them in a truly deep, intimate way as we find it so difficult to connect with ourselves. We struggle to find inner peace; we live life going through the motions but without feeling part of it. We desperately want to feel that connection, which somehow eludes us, out of reach and unattainable.

For those of you who feel that disconnection, separation, aloneness and abandonment, you might find yourself repeating certain DA's—Deep Attachment Sentences which describe those feelings.

• I feel unwanted
• I´ll be rejected
• I won´t exist
• I´ll have nobody
• I don´t matter
• I'll be abandoned
• I'm not enough
• I'm too much

With those of you whose bonding was never complete or was broken; you may say some of the following things:

• My mother was always too busy for me
• My mother and I don’t have a very good relationship
• My mother is very selfish
• I felt much closer to my aunt. She was always there for me.
• I was scared of my mother.
• My mother was never maternal.

By examining our beliefs surrounding our connectedness, we can start to make more sense of our lack of it in our everyday lives and change it.

Where our mother/child relationship's very foundations are either disrupted or even torn apart, the pain which comes from it are like splinters of glass which cut us to the core. By experiencing separation, we may well withdraw into ourselves, taking care not to be hurt further, wanting to desperately protect ourselves from more hurt or pain, we lock ourselves into a repeating and continuing pattern of self-doubt and frustration. The indescribable pain of abandonment becoming all-consuming and life shaping.

One question you could ask yourself is, “Does what I am experiencing with my partner, actually mirror what I felt when I was a small child with my parents?” One of the invisible dynamics which runs beneath our everyday understanding and manoeuvring through the day is the experience of a break in our maternal bond which can lead to anxiety when bonding with our mate and it may well increase as our relationship with them deepens because we start to find fault with them or create conflict which then manifests itself in such a way that we start to feel either clingy, jealous or deeply insecure. It can result in us doing the exact opposite of that whereby we reject any type of relationship, or we seem so independent to the other person that we never or rarely ask for anything because we have decided we can't risk being dependant on anyone. By rejecting a parent, it can stop us from becoming successful in life.

The very fact that we are able to make these connections allows us to make profound changes in the way we look at and deal with life so we can avoid repeating the same mistakes they made, because sometimes, the unconscious bond we have with them limits us without knowing or realising that we are doing it.

Act to rectify the situation. One way to heal if you were abandoned is to write down the sort of mother you would have liked your mother to have been, regardless of whether she is alive or not, or if you haven’t met her. You could write, “My mother was a loving, kind, and caring mother who was strict but fair.” Go into specifics saying what she did for you every day and really build up an imaginable picture in your head full of love and caring.

Think of an event where you felt she really let you down. Have a conversation with her out loud or journal it and allow her comfort and support to come through. Forgive and understand her. Build a relationship with her like the one you should have had.

Take one DA sentence which resonated with you most from the list above, say it and recognise it for what it is, a sentence which has no hold or power over you anymore. Recognise those thoughts, feelings and pictures you have in your head, then acknowledge the fear which saying that DA sentence released.

Acknowledge it, then place one of your hands on the part of your body where your emotional pain is coming from and breathe deeply in and out very slowly and become in touch with what you are feeling and let those feelings flow through you and out again.

Having a healing ritual of lighting a candle every night for three months and speak to your mother, even though you might not know her. Be comforted by her, speak to her, tell her the things you would like to say to her. Imagine that the candle is burning a path through which you can both travel, meet in the middle and reunite. Allow the presence of her to comfort you, allow those feelings of connection and love to expand inside you.

Write a letter to her, telling her how sad it is that she left you the way she did, tell her you understand how difficult it must have been for her as no mother easily leaves a child behind that they love.

You may feel very angry towards her for having abandoned you and find it difficult at first to do any ritual. Keep trying, come back to it when you feel ready because trauma needs to be given time and it needs us to acknowledge it and work through it. Our brains can cope with the change it brings because every time you do something towards your health and well-being, it accepts that change and slowly shifts towards healing.

Allow yourself to feel your anger, don't try and push it away or push it down deep inside you where it festers away and poisons your core being, affecting your relationship with yourself and with those around you. Don't do this to yourself because the only person it's going to hurt is you.

The more you repeat these rituals and visualisations, the more you will alter your neurons creating new, better neural pathways to cope with your trauma. Do it, do it today, do it now, do it because you deserve the love you never had. I call it reparenting from a place of love, compassion and understanding which contains no judgement, shame, or blame.