Bethany Webster

Sure to become a classic on female empowerment, a groundbreaking exploration of the personal, cultural, and global implications of intergenerational trauma created by patriarchy, how it is passed down from mothers to daughters, and how we can break this destructive cycle. Why do women keep themselves small and quiet? Why do they hold back professionally and personally? What fuels the uncertainty and lack of confidence so many women often feel? In this paradigm-shifting book, leading feminist thinker Bethany Webster identifies the source of women’s trauma. She calls it the Mother Wound—the systemic disenfranchisement of women by the patriarchy—and reveals how this cycle is perpetuated by wounded mothers who unconsciously pass on damaging beliefs and behaviors to their daughters. In her workshops, online courses, and talks, Webster has helped countless women re-examine their lives and their relationships with their mothers, giving them the vocabulary to voice their pain, and encouraging them to share their experiences. In this manifesto and self-help guide, she offers practical tools for identifying the manifestations of the Mother Wound in our daily life and strategies we can use to heal ourselves and prevent our daughters from enduring the same pain. In addition, she offers step-by-step advice on how to reconnect with our inner child, grieve the mother we didn’t have, stop people-pleasing, and, ultimately, transform our heartache and anger into healing and self-love. Revealing how women are affected by the Mother Wound, even if they don’t personally identify as survivors, Discovering the Inner Mother revolutionizes how we view mother-daughter relationships and gives us the inspiration and guidance we need to improve our lives and ultimately create a more equitable society for all.

A Guide to Healing the Mother Wound and Claiming Your Personal Power

Discovering the Inner Mother

Laura Mei

It’s a tragedy that some mothers actively manipulate their daughters out of their own unconscious feelings of deprivation and fears of abandonment. And it’s a tragedy that some daughters miss the opportunity to step into their empowered selfhood out of a feeling of paralyzing guilt toward their mothers. The deprived child within a mother may be looking to her daughter for the emotional nourishment that she never received from her own mother. This is one of the ways that the Mother Wound gets passed down. Mothers are not served by their daughters’ self-sacrifice and codependency with them. It perpetuates their stuck-ness and denial.

It is precisely when women give themselves permission to feel their full anger and outrage on behalf of the little girls they once were that their power, authenticity, clarity, and confidence begin to emerge in full force. The empathy found there births a profound tenderness toward oneself that manifests as a fierce refusal to allow harm to come to that little girl within.

The “used child” within us longs to be loved for her real self, not just when she is wearing the mask of the “good girl” and demonstrating patriarchal values (productive, perfect, conforming to expectations, making others look good, sacrificing, suppressing, etc.). The used child longs to be loved when she disappoints you, when she is grumpy, when she is inconvenient, when she is messy, when she is confused, when she produces nothing, when she is inconsistent, when she is empty-handed, when she changes her mind, etc.

The more healed you become, the more trauma you become capable of processing. It’s a different form of progress than we typically imagine. We assume we will go in a straight line toward “better,” but in healing trauma, it’s more like a spiral or a wave. This spiral involves frequent regressions during which one repeatedly confronts echoes of traumatic material while very gradually developing the capacity to digest, integrate, and evolve beyond old traumatic narratives, beliefs, emotions, behaviors, and ways of being and relating.

When we go deep enough into our own pain and existential aloneness, we discover that we’ve actually never been alone.

Relief has come from surrendering to ever deeper levels, to accepting that I cannot control life or circumstances, no matter how hard I try. The nourishment that comes from Being cannot be achieved through work; it can only be felt and experienced in the now. And in the now is where all true creativity and knowledge reside.

In our culture, it seems that children are rewarded more for growing out of childhood as soon as possible, and not so easily loved for whatever stage they are in as children. Because of this, many of us grew up feeling punished or abandoned for the simple fact that we had needs: the need to eat, the need to be held, the need to be seen, the need to be listened to, the need to rest, the need to be understood, etc. Many of us learned to hate our needs and to hate ourselves for having needs. We may be carrying this self- derision within, and it can keep us stuck.

There’s a difference between despair and grief. Despair is when we are reliving the pain of our past as though it is happening in the present. It’s the projection of our pain of the past onto a current situation. It’s the pain of the inner child without a loving adult witness. You can tell when this is happening by looking at your mental narrative alongside the emotional pain you’re experiencing. In despair, the narrative is usually negative, focused on how bad things are and how there’s no hope. This is the narrative of a child experiencing pain alone without support. When we are in despair, the inner child is abandoned again and again as we replicate this childhood pattern within ourselves. Grief is different. Grief transpires when a loving adult consciousness is present alongside the pain, a narrative of loving presence, a feeling of “I’m with you in this pain. You’re not alone. This is the pain of the past. It’s safe to feel it now. I’ve got you.

Many of us have a feeling of homesickness deep within, a nameless longing and aching grief. Many of us experienced this feeling of being groundless and adrift as children in relation to our mothers. Embracing the homesick feeling within the Mother Wound leads us to eventually come to a place where we realize that we can never be truly abandoned. This becomes possible when we become a loving inner mother to our inner child as we embrace her deepest despair.

It’s not that love or good intentions don’t matter. It’s that loving someone and your intention to not hurt them are secondary to whether you have taken accountability for your own history. Our unconscious will override our conscious intentions unless we have attended to it. Whatever we refuse to see or prefer to ignore about the pain we experienced as children will show up in our adult relationships and be the biggest determining factor in the level of pain and dysfunction present in those relationships.

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