A Mother’s Internal Cues Matter to Our Children’s Evolution
While listening to this short video by Dr. Gabor Matte called “The trauma of abandonment”, I heard him say: “For the child to feel wanted, the mother has to be emotionally happy. The mother has to be emotionally present.” The truth of that statement penetrated my being like a spear full of Truth that has long lived inside me.
I have always been deeply attuned to the perceived loss I experienced as a child, growing up in a world that felt inherently unsafe. It wasn’t communism or starvation that I noticed; it was the chaotic internal state of my mother that I saw reflected back to me through her eyes. It was that inner state of being that I sought to escape, numb, and eventually transform, my whole life.
I hadn’t fully realized just how everything was interconnected in my life, but I always knew that it was. Without delving into the details, what I’ve come to discover recently in my life is that the fear of loss has been driving the bus of my life for as long as I can remember. Growing up, I was never really aware of the undercurrent of fear – I much preferred righteous rage, to be honest, because it made me more powerful, more in control. In that state, I felt like I was doing something (even if it was killing me while accomplishing nothing else in the process).
In that state of outraged distraction, I would intelligently ignore the deep undercurrents that ran the show of my life, out of my awareness. I say intelligently because to face it then would cause me too much pain, and given that I didn’t know how to handle the pain, I would dissociate further and try to numb myself with more drugs, sex, and rock n’ roll.
Children (maidens) respond to their world as if everything is about them. They take things unfolding personally. Why? Because that’s how the brain works. I don’t know the details, I just know the facts. Ask any child whose parents divorced, and you’ll see that they consistently believe that they are to blame!
The bottom line is this: that which we internalize at a young age becomes the platform from which we build into our adulthood.
I know that recently I have witnessed myself turn into a 4-year-old child in the presence of my mother gaslighting my child. I have witnessed myself turn into a fearful child the moment my husband takes “too long” to get back from …wherever. I have witnessed that my first response when my husband leaves the house is to yearn to numb myself with drugs (check out).
Why? What’s the intelligence of all of that?!
What all these scenarios have in common is the undercurrent of ‘loss’ from feeling abandoned (aka unwanted).
How many children grow up to feel unwanted by their mothers? And then spend the rest of their lives trying desperately to “be somebody” while perpetually battling a perpetual inner war of never enough.
How many mothers mean to abandon their children?
What is abandonment, anyway? Perhaps we’ll start here. Because abandonment is a nominalization. It isn’t about what the official definition is; it’s about how it feels inside our being.
I don’t believe that to feel abandoned by one’s mother the mother has to have a malicious intent to leave her kid behind. I believe that more often than not, mothers abandon their children out of necessity.
That which I’m calling necessity could be anything from escaping communism and seeking a better life to escaping violence in the home to seeking to escape her own life because it does not map to what she had hoped for. Necessity ranges and it manifests differently for different people.
What remains the same is the process of abandonment, not out of maliciousness but out of a desire to escape the moment, and therefore check out. The nanosecond the mother checks out of her moment, the child feels abandoned. Because, as Louise likes to say: lights on, no one home. Children are particularly acute when it comes to the absence of the Presence of their mother (in other words: their safety).
If you are not Present, then you are absent.
When we are not present inside ourselves, our bodies are physically there but the I AM that we each are is not.
What that looks like is different for each of us. Some of us leave blinded by rage and outrage; others dissociate through distancing; and others detach from the moment. Some daydream. Some become depressed and yearn to die. Some are addicted to fill-in-the-blank.
What I’m saying is: lack of presence can be characterized as anything that removes our attention from the moment we are in and from the inner cues of our body.
Children are intimately fine-tuned to the inner state of their mothers. It is the state of our mothers growing up that shows us the appropriate responses to the world. So if the mother dissociates (the I AM that she is disappears), children sense that and respond accordingly by developing their adaptive strategies to cope with their environment.
When the environment does not support the full emotional maturation of the child, the child learns to cope in whatever way is available to them. Rage was easy for me because I associated it with power. Yet rage was only the mask I was wearing to protect myself from the deep pain of feeling that I had been abandoned, and then gaslighted about that.
This is why I feel so passionate about the process of ‘mothering’. I know, wholeheartedly, that mothers are the key to the evolution of our species. More than that, mothers are the key to the evolution of their own child.
But...
"You can't give what you haven't got!"
- Louise LeBrun
So perhaps it is time for you to awaken to your potential and become who you want your child to be. After all, modelling is our greatest teacher.
Mothering can be such a tough process because of the intergenerational gifts that keep on giving! Until someone steps up and declares: Enough!
So, how do we become awake and aware enough to know when we have drifted off to sleep? How do we maintain our connection to our Truth/essence/Signal/Self/godForce when we are facing a relentless external push to give up and comply?
How do we remain Present in our moment when we are overwhelmed by our habits?
How do we reclaim our moment when we are distracted by the past or the future?
I don’t pretend to have your answers for you. I do, however, know what worked for me and thousands of other women seeking to reclaim their power: the process and context outlined in the WEL-Systems® body of knowledge.
Who are you? Really.
RESOURCES TO CONSIDER
If you are new to this way of living, I encourage you to:
Download this free Parenting for Potential ebook and journaling guide and delve into the questions that explore where you are now. I am available for email coaching throughout, should you choose to engage. I will be creating a workshop around this in the near future, so stay tuned!
Listen to the Cultural Crones: The Power of Permission audio files on what it takes to reclaim our personal power. To create a new, first, we must let go of the old. What is that, for you?
Listen to the first free hour of the Decloaking and Living Authentically audio files. And then, when you notice how potent this stuff is, purchase the whole set and dive in! I’m here for support.
Read this chapter on parenting from When the Horse Dies, Get Off and Stop Dragging it Around! book, then purchase the book and read the whole thing.