Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself

Having an internalized negative mother is very much like living with a curse,

If we can gain consciousness about our reactions, we will often find that these disagreeable traits are our disowned and projected qualities.

who most gets under your skin. What about that person irks you the most? It is likely to be that quality that you have repudiated in yourself.

Occasional disruptions in our connection with our kids are normal. The bonds between a mother and her children are strong and elastic. They can be stretched a great deal and then snap right back into place. Even years of blocked care can be healed and repaired,

to change in my daughter was, in fact, something that needed to be addressed within myself.

When we have had damaging experiences in childhood with our parents, these become internalized and continue to affect us as adults. It is as if our early experience of our parents becomes the pattern for how we treat ourselves and how we unconsciously expect others to treat us.

Joseph Campbell noted that hero stories usually involve a visit to the abyss where the protagonist must face a frightening ordeal.

Your internalized negative mother may be especially potent if your actual mother was absent, depressed, critical, or emotionally or physically abusive.

This is analogous to the hard work that one must undertake to recover from childhood trauma or emotional abuse. It may take us years to break the spell.