The Mother Wound Part Three - Lynne Jones Therapeutic Mentoring

The Mother Wound Part Three: The Grief That Sets You Free

In Part One, we explored what the mother wound is and why it matters. In Part Two, we looked at how it shows up in our lives, often in subtle and painful ways.

Now comes the most important part of this series: healing.

Healing the mother wound is not about fixing our mothers or waiting for them to give us the love and recognition we longed for. It’s about reclaiming ourselves -choosing to step out of silence, guilt, and old patterns, and into a new way of being.

For some your mothers will listen and want to repair, the relationship can heal and everyone can benefit. But I won’t pretend this journey is easy. For me, it involved finding out who I actually was, facing the grief I had buried for years, closing doors I had left ajar in the hope of reconciliation, and choosing myself even when it meant walking away from people I love. But it was also the most freeing and life-giving thing I have ever done.

“The Mother Wound is the pain rooted in our relationship with our mothers that is passed down from generation to generation in patriarchal cultures”

Bethany Webster – Healing the mother within

No Going Back

The hardest truth to face was this: there was no going back.

I couldn’t re-wind and have the mother I needed as a child. I tried to talk to her, but every word was taken as an insult I heard from others what she was saying to protect herself and discredit anything I might say.

The grief of acknowledging this was so painful and overwhelming at times, and the truth is, that for many years, I had secretly hoped my mother would one day see me, understand me, and be proud of me. Even when I had made the decision to live authentically, I kept an unconscious door open. Finally closing that door to keep my heart safe meant grieving for the mother I never had and also grieving mother I had, even though she was still alive.

This was painful but needed and it gave me space to finally meet myself.

“There is a direct relationship between our childlike desire to save our mothers from their pain and our fear of powerfully claiming our own lives”.

Bethany Webster

There is a conscious thought that things have moved on from the dark ages, but as women we are still subjective to the unspoken messages and collective conditioning, coming through family, culture, society and planetary influences; and we still struggle to break family patterns passed on to us without a get out clause.

The Need To Stop The Cycle

The beliefs are passed through generations via epigenetics and core beliefs and mostly sit in our unconscious minds until we start to make them conscious. The only way to stop this happening is through generational and intergenerational healing. In short – stopping the cycle.

The concept of the mother wound is something I came across as I searched for understanding about my own situation and reading about it helped me process the confusion, big emotions and fear I was feeling around my relationship with my own mother. It’s so hard to acknowledge that your mother was not able to give you the mothering you needed. There’s no way back, you can’t re wind and start again and the grief attached to that is deep and painful.

Breaking the Silence of Loyalty

Something else that helped a lot was learning to break the silence of loyalty. That voice in my head that whispered “don’t say that she sacrificed so much for you” and she had, but the concept that I somehow had to pay for that with unreserved gratitude had not only kept me small for years but taught me that accepting anything from anyone came with a price.

There is such a taboo about mother daughter relationships and the expectation to be grateful as you only get one mother is damaging. It is indeed true, you do only get one, however no child, no matter how old wants to walk away from the one they have, even where there has been abuse and neglect children still seek to be with their mothers and yet in society it is the ‘child’ that is expected to make amends or keep it quiet.

I began to gently release the guilt and fear stored in my nervous system. I learned that my loyalty to my mother didn’t need to come at the expense of loyalty to myself.

Reparenting Myself

Perhaps the most powerful part of it all was learning to reparent myself.

I began asking:

What did I most need as a child that I didn’t get?
How can I give that to myself now?

As the healing deepened, I discovered something unexpected: the mother within me.

For me, the answers were compassion, clear boundaries, and permission to shine. So, I started small: practicing self-compassion through daily affirmations, saying “no” without apologising, and allowing myself to create without fear of overshadowing anyone.

This work is ongoing it takes time to move from looking outside to inside for validation, but it works!

We all carry an inner mother – a wise, nurturing part of us that can hold us with love and acceptance. By connecting with her, I found the safety I had once sought outside myself. She became the voice that whispered: “You are enough. You are safe. You are free to live your own life.”

Healing the Mother Wound is not about blaming your mother; it’s about taking personal responsibility.

Breaking the Cycle

It may not mean reconciliation with your own mother as that isn’t always possible. But it does mean reconciliation with yourself. And that is where the cycle breaks.

For those of you already on this path, I applaud you. I know how hard it is. For those just beginning, I want you to hear this: there is no timeline, no “right way.” Your healing is yours alone, and every step is a victory.

Because when one person chooses to heal, generations are set free.

Healing the mother wound is hard, and the hardest part is grieving what we never got. For some of us, that means letting go of the mother we hoped for, closing doors we kept open, and finally choosing ourselves. It’s painful, yes -but also freeing, life-giving, and the moment we start to really show up for ourselves.

This work is about reclaiming your own care, reparenting yourself, and meeting the needs you never had met. When we do this, we break the cycle – not just for us, but for the generations that follow.

In many ways, grief journaling was my bridge from pain to peace – giving my emotions a place to land and my truth a voice. What began as letters I would never send became a powerful release, allowing space for healing to unfold.

Today, I help others walk that same path – guiding them to recognise and free the emotions held deep in their bodies, to reparent themselves with compassion, and to become the mother they always needed. In this transformation, the focus gently moves from what was lost to what can now be lovingly created within.