s10.19 | Healing the Mother Wound: Overcoming Childhood Emotional Trauma
In this episode, Carla Arges explores the impact of the mother wound—emotional pain caused by a mother who was unavailable, critical, or absent during childhood. She explains how this form of childhood trauma shapes our core beliefs, self-worth, relationships, and even our view of God.
Carla shares insights on how to acknowledge and grieve these wounds without shame, reparent your inner child, set healthy boundaries, and invite God’s unconditional love and healing into your life. This episode offers hope and practical steps for women ready to heal and thrive beyond their mother wounds.
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Key Takeaways
The Mother Wound Is Emotional Trauma
The mother wound stems from emotional neglect, criticism, or absence, and it deeply affects your sense of safety, identity, and worth.
2. Grieving Is Necessary for Growth
You must allow yourself to grieve the love, nurturing, or protection you didn’t receive in order to fully process and release the pain.
3. Your Worth Is Not Defined by Her Love.
Your value isn’t based on how your mother treated you—it’s based on who God says you are: loved, chosen, and enough.
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Resources:
5 Steps to Building Resiliency
Affirming Truths Facebook Community
5 Tips for Overcoming a Negative Body Image
Who You Say I Am Biblical Affirmation Cards
TRANSCRIPT
Carla Arges: [00:00:00] Hello friends. Welcome to the last episode. Of Season 11, and it is a tough episode. It is an episode. We're not, we're not ending the season on a light note. We are addressing something that I myself have experienced and that I see in a lot of women I work with in my one-to-one coaching and a lot of women that show up in my dms in on Instagram.
And it's this idea of the mother wound. What happens when the one who was supposed to nurture and protect you didn't. Maybe your mother was emotionally unavailable. Maybe she was overly critical, maybe she was absent, and those wounds run deep. They [00:01:00] form a type of childhood trauma. You know, trauma is not just blatant physical or sexual abuse.
The unavailable, the critical, the absent that mother wound. Shows up in your mental health and in your nervous system and in how your brain actually developed as a child Living in this trauma. Trauma in as a child is when you grow up in a household with caregivers where you don't. Feel safe and secure when you don't know what to expect, when you feel like you have to walk on eggshells all the time.
When you don't get that secure attachment with your primary caregivers, that is a form of childhood trauma. And so the mother wound looks really specifically at the role of mom. And it's emotional re pain resulting from that lack of nurture and [00:02:00] safety or unconditional love from your mother.
And it's, this isn't about blaming our mothers. Okay. I have a deep mother wound. I also have a relationship with my mom, who I love and who I'm in the caregiving role of for my parents. So it's not about blaming, this is not about keeping ourselves, victims to the mother wound. This is about learning to understand what has happened.
It's about naming what it is so that we can heal, so that we can take. Ownership and responsibility over what we need to do to heal from these wounds. Our moms can't heal these wounds for us. We need to, in partnership with Christ, work at healing the mother wounds. Now, how this wound shows up in adulthood.
Looks different for everyone, [00:03:00] but often it showed up as people pleasing and a really big fear of rejection. It can show up as low self-worth or shame, especially around having needs or emotions. Some of us with mother wounds grew up where we weren't allowed to have needs or emotions. And it, it makes us now feel guilty when we have a need or need to share a feeling.
Um, it can show up in difficulty trusting women or forming safe female relationships. Man, that one really resonates with me. It has been a struggle my whole life, um, and really felt it in my adult life, um, informing safe female friendships. Uh, it can show up in your own motherhood where you have anxiety and you get triggered easily by your kids.
Um, and it can [00:04:00] show up either as a hyper independence, I don't need anyone, or really emotional suppression. And so this has the effect of shaping how we show up in life. This has an effect of shaping what we believe to be true about ourselves. You hear me talk a lot about core beliefs. Um, if you are a one-on-one client with me, you know, we start off and do a lot of deep work on core beliefs because this has you believing untrue things about yourself, about the world, and about God.
Because when our prayer primary caregiver, when our moms don't reflect the nurturing heart of God, it can be really hard to believe that God has unconditional love for us and we don't have to perform for him. We may sometimes feel like God is cold and distant and disappointed or only loves us when we [00:05:00] perform.
So when we heal. Truly, not only does it heal our heart and our relationship with ourself and how we view ourself as we learn to rewrite the identity we got as a child of a neglected hard mother versus writing our identity as a child of God and who we are in Christ, it also rewrites our relationship with God as well as we learn to see him as safe and nurturing and consistently loving.
And so how do you heal this? It's not quick. It's not quick, but the first thing we have to do is like what I said, we have to name it. We have to acknowledge that we hold the mother wound, and we have to acknowledge that without shel shame or guilt, because that little girl inside of you probably feels like she's to blame.
And so we have to acknowledge that wound without [00:06:00] taking ownership over it. Over the wound. Over the healing, yes, over the wound. No. We have to grieve what we did receive. This is a loss. You lost part of your childhood. You lost maybe this, this vision of what a mother and daughter relationship would look like.
You lost part of your youth right now. You may even have a loss when you don't have that nurturing, supportive relationship with your mom that you would want. And so grief is a part of healing. Grieving what you didn't receive, grieving how you don't have that relationship you would've longed for. You have to give yourself space to grieve.
I. Next. You have to repair it yourself. And we do that through a lot of inner work. One of the ways that I work with my clients on sort of reparenting that inner child is going back, [00:07:00] having my client go back to that five-year-old I. Child or 6-year-old child and ask them what they need and reparent them and give them what they need.
Because now as adults, we can give our younger selves what our mothers couldn't. We can give ourselves love. We can give ourselves acceptance. We can give ourselves safety, and as we reparent ourselves, we invite God into the role of parent because he becomes our safe and stable attachment. To heal from the mother wound.
We also have to create new patterns of how we care for ourselves, and that includes healthy boundaries with our mothers, especially if they have not done the healing work and they are still critical and negative and distant and not nurturing or unconditional in their showing of love. You need to have healthy [00:08:00] boundaries for that.
You also need to have patterns of care for yourself where you're no longer striving for acceptance from the world and acceptance you never got from your mother, but resting in the acceptance that God has over you by the shed blood of Jesus and learning that you can rest. Learning that rest is productive, learning that rest is healing.
And of course we always say, I always say, we heal in safe community. What is safe community that you can get in? Whether that's a community of one with a therapist or a coach like me or a community of many in a church Bible study, learning how to relate in a healthy way with other women, but I want you to know that you are not alone if you carry a mother wound.
That it was not your fault, that your mother [00:09:00] acted that way and that God's love for you is unconditional and he wants to heal you. As you go through those steps, acknowledging the wound, grieving what you didn't receive, parenting your yourself, creating new patterns of care and plugging into community.
My affirming truth for you today is my worth is not defined by the love or care I didn't receive from my mom. My worth is defined by the God who created me. He's my safe place. And our anchoring Bible verse for this week is from Psalms 27. 10. Even if my father and mother abandoned me, the Lord will hold me close.
The Lord will hold you close. [00:10:00] Friend, he longs to see your heart healed. He longs to see you be the daughter of the king that he designed you to be. He longs to see you thrive and to heal from this wound. And friend healing is possible. I'll see you in season 12. I.