The Mother Wound and the Women We Become

The mother wound is one of the quietest and most pervasive wounds a woman can carry.

It doesn't announce itself. It shows up in the way you shrink when you need something, in the way you over explain your feelings before anyone has even questioned them, in the way you love people who aren't quite available and then work twice as hard to close the distance. It lives in the nervous system long before it ever makes it to the conscious mind, shaping the way you love, the way you receive love, and the way you talk to yourself when no one is listening.

It gets handed down through generations, woman to woman, usually without anyone meaning to pass it along. A mother who carried wounds she never fully healed from. A mother who learned to survive by expecting hurt and built her life around that belief. A mother so consumed by her own unmet needs and pain that she didn’t always know how to make space for yours. These women weren't villains. They were wounded daughters themselves, doing the only thing they knew how to do with pain they never had help processing. Understanding that doesn't erase what you needed and didn't receive. It just changes the story you carry about why it happened.

For a long time I thought healing the mother wound meant arriving at a place where it no longer hurt. Where I could look back at everything that was missing and feel nothing but neutrality. Where the little girl who went to prom without her mom and figured out her own way through every tender teenage milestone had finally made peace with all of it. That's not what healing looks like though. Healing looks like feeling it fully and choosing to remain open anyway. It looks like sending a text to the women in your life on Mother's Day because your heart has grown spacious enough to hold both the grief and the gratitude at the same time.

The mother wound taught me something I now carry into every coaching session, every book I write, every conversation I have with a woman who's trying to understand why she loves the way she does. The love we didn't receive in the way we needed it has a way of becoming the love we're most determined to give. The absence of something we desperately needed has a way of making us extraordinarily intentional about making sure the people we love never feel that same absence. Your wound has been shaping you. So has your survival of it, and so has every moment you chose to stay soft when the world gave you every reason to harden.

I spent most of Mother's Day receiving. Receiving love from my children, receiving the thoughtfulness of my husband, receiving the presence of women in my life who each carry their own complicated history with me. There was a time when receiving felt dangerous because I'd learned early that good things had a way of disappearing. Sitting in the middle of a beautiful day today, I realized something has fundamentally shifted in me. Safety doesn't feel foreign anymore, peace doesn't feel like something I have to earn or brace for losing, and love doesn't feel conditional.

That shift came from doing the deep, patient, unglamorous work of healing the places inside me that were still waiting for them to show up differently. If you're carrying a mother wound today, whether it's with you front and center or sitting quietly in the background of an otherwise beautiful day, I want you to know that the longing you feel is evidence of how deeply you were created to be loved and how courageously you've kept your heart open in spite of everything. That kind of courage is rare, and it's also the very thing that will set you free.

Some of the deepest wisdom we carry is born from the places that once hurt the most.

When Your Reality Gets Turned Against You - Understanding DARVO

 

There’s something important to understand about what happens in that moment when you bring something real to someone. Something honest. Something that mattered. Something that hurt. You come forward with it in a way that’s open, not trying to fight, not trying to control the outcome, but simply trying to be met in something that felt significant to you. Then instead of being received, it gets denied, turned, and handed back to you in a way that leaves you holding something that no longer feels recognizable.

It can feel deeply personal when it happens. There’s a sense that it was intentional, that they chose not to hear you, that they saw you and decided to dismiss you anyway. That’s often the part that lingers the longest, because it touches something deeper than the moment itself. It reaches into places where being unseen has carried weight before.

What’s happening underneath that interaction usually runs deeper than a conscious decision to dismiss you.

DARVO is a pattern. Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. It’s often described as manipulation and in some cases it is, but more often it’s something that lives in the body. It moves quickly, often before conscious awareness has time to come online, and it tends to be rooted in experiences that were learned long before you were ever part of their life.

When you bring forward something that names harm, even gently, it requires the other person to stay present with a version of themselves that may feel uncomfortable. It asks them to hold the reality that they caused pain, to sit inside that awareness without immediately escaping it, and to remain connected to you while doing so. For someone who has the capacity for that, it can feel difficult but still workable. There’s space for repair, even if it’s imperfect.

For someone carrying unprocessed shame, that same moment can feel overwhelming in a different way. It can feel like exposure. It can feel like a threat to how they understand themselves. It can feel destabilizing in a way that their system isn’t equipped to hold.

The nervous system responds to that kind of internal threat quickly.

D is for Deny.

The first response is often denial. If the event can be reshaped into something that didn’t really happen, or something that wasn’t what you’re saying it was, then the emotional impact of it doesn’t have to be felt. The system moves toward removing the source of discomfort rather than processing it. If it didn’t happen in the way you experienced it, then there’s nothing to sit with, nothing to feel, and nothing to take responsibility for.

When the conversation doesn’t end there, when you stay connected to your experience instead of abandoning it to restore comfort, the pattern tends to move into the next phase.

A is for Attack.

The focus shifts away from what was brought forward and begins to center on you. Your tone, your delivery, your past behavior, or something else that redirects the attention away from what’s happening internally for them. This often lands in a place that already feels vulnerable, which can make it feel precise and personal.

What’s happening in that moment is less about accuracy and more about regulation. If the discomfort can be moved out of their body and into yours, they no longer have to carry it. The attention shifts, and with it, the emotional weight shifts too.

Over time, this leads into the part that creates the most disorientation.

RVO stands for Reverse Victim and Offender.

The roles begin to shift in a way that can feel subtle at first and then increasingly confusing. You may find yourself explaining, defending, or trying to clarify something that initially felt clear. The original point becomes harder to hold onto as the conversation continues, and there can be a growing sense that something has moved out of place, even if you can’t immediately name how.

You walked into the conversation holding a hurt. Now you’re the one being questioned. Now you’re the one being explained to. Now you’re the one trying to make sense of how everything turned. That feeling of confusion is a reflection of the pattern completing itself.

At the center of this dynamic is someone who has learned, for one reason or another, that being in the wrong is not safe. For some, that learning came from environments where mistakes were met with overwhelming shame or punishment, where accountability didn’t lead to repair but instead led to disconnection or pain. For others, it came from environments where accountability was never modeled or required, where harm wasn’t acknowledged and repair wasn’t practiced, so the capacity to move through those moments was never developed.

Different experiences can create a similar outcome, which is a system that experiences feedback as a threat instead of something that can be worked through.

Understanding this doesn’t make the behavior acceptable, and it doesn’t mean you stay in situations where your reality is repeatedly distorted. What it can begin to do is create some separation between what’s happening in that moment and what you make it mean about yourself.

Patterns like this tend to pull you into self-doubt when they aren’t clearly seen. They can lead you to question your memory, your tone, or your intentions, and over time they can create a subtle pressure to disconnect from your own experience in order to preserve the relationship. That’s often where the deeper impact occurs.

When you begin to recognize the pattern, something shifts in how you move inside of it. You may still feel the pull to explain or to restore connection, but there’s also a growing awareness of what’s actually happening beneath the surface. You can begin to notice the limits in the other person’s capacity without immediately turning that into something about your worth.

You’re allowed to stay connected to what you experienced, even if it isn’t acknowledged by the other person. You’re allowed to step out of conversations that begin to move away from reality and into distortion. You’re allowed to choose not to continue engaging in something that requires you to leave yourself in order to maintain connection.

Your healing comes from staying connected to yourself when understanding isn’t available.

That shift is often quiet. It doesn’t always look dramatic from the outside, but it creates a different kind of steadiness on the inside. One that allows you to remain with yourself even when the dynamic around you hasn’t changed.

I Couldn’t Unsee It

I was sitting at my kitchen table reading that CNN article, my coffee beside me, the morning light coming in the way it always does. Soft and familiar. The kind that usually lets my body stay settled without effort. Everything around me was ordinary, predictable, safe in the way routine often is in the home we’ve created. Nothing in my environment had changed. Then I read the sentence and something in me immediately refused to let it land. My eyes moved across the words but my body didn’t follow. There was a pause. A kind of internal resistance that felt almost protective. Like my nervous system was trying to intercept what I was seeing before it reached me. I read it again, slower that time, and I could feel my body beginning to react before my mind had fully processed the meaning.

The article was describing men lifting the eyelids of their drugged wives on camera to prove they were fully unconscious before they raped them.

I read it once and my brain stalled. I read it again and there was still a disconnect, like the words were too violent to integrate on the first pass. There was a moment where I heard myself say it out loud, because I knew that was the only way it would actually enter my body. My voice didn’t sound like mine saying it. Like I was speaking something that shouldn’t exist in a human world. The second I heard it, something inside me tore open. The reaction was immediate and physical. My hand came up over my mouth without thought. My chest tightened. There was a wave that moved through me that wasn’t just shock, wasn’t just horror, but something deeper and more ancient. It was rage. It was grief. It was recognition all at once.

I heard myself say, out loud….. what the fuck. What the actual fuck. 

Because there weren’t softer words for what my body was trying to process. The anger rose fast and it was clean. THIS was sacred rage. This was the kind of rage that comes from the body when something is so clearly not okay that there’s no confusion left. It didn’t need to be explained. It didn’t need to be justified. It was my body telling the truth in the most direct language it has.

What was moving through me wasn’t only about what I was reading in that CNN article. My body knew that and that’s why the reaction felt so big. This landed on top of everything else. It landed on top of every story I’ve ever heard from a woman who trusted a man and was harmed. It landed on top of my own experiences. The moments where I felt the shift from safety into something else and had to override myself to get through it. It landed on top of the quiet, unspoken knowing that I’ve known more women who’ve experienced abuse at the hands of a man than women who haven’t. That isn’t abstract to me. That isn’t distant. That’s my reality, my community, the conversations that happen behind closed doors when women finally feel safe enough to tell the truth.

So when I read that, my body didn’t receive it as isolated. It received it as confirmation. It received it as an extreme expression of something that exists on a spectrum I already know too well. That’s why it hit the way it did.

It landed on top of Epstein, abusers in the church, on top of every policy and every headline that’s chipped away at women’s safety, autonomy, and humanity in ways that are both loud and subtle. It’s all layered in my system and that moment was where I could feel the weight of it. Not just intellectually. Physically.

That’s what cumulative trauma feels like in the body. It’s not one moment. It’s everything that hasn’t had space to fully process stacking on top of itself until something breaks through.

I could feel the part of me that wanted to shut down. The urge to close the article, to look away, to go back to my coffee and pretend I hadn’t just read something I can’t unsee. That response was immediate and familiar. My nervous system was trying to protect me from being flooded by something it couldn’t quickly metabolize. There’s nothing wrong with that response. It makes sense.

There was also another part of me that refused to disconnect. The part of me that knows that looking away is how this continues. The part of me that knows my reaction matters, that the anger in my body isn’t something to suppress but something to listen to. So I sat there and I consciously stayed in my body while the rage moved through me.

My breath was shallow. My chest felt tight, almost constricted. My shoulders were lifted without me realizing it. I dropped them slowly, even though they rose again. I pressed my hand into my chest, grounding myself in something real so I wouldn’t leave myself inside the intensity of what I was feeling. I reminded my body that I was here, that I was safe in that moment, even while I was witnessing something that wasn’t safe at all.

That is the work. That’s what it looks like to feel something this intense without abandoning yourself. The rage didn’t disappear, and it shouldn’t. There’s nothing wrong with rage in the face of harm. Rage is a boundary. Rage is clarity. Rage is the body saying NO in the strongest possible way. What mattered was that I didn’t get lost in it, and I didn’t shut it down. I let it move. I let it inform me. I let it exist without letting it consume my ability to stay present.

As I sat with it, I could feel how deeply this connected to the world we’re living in. A world where disconnection has been normalized. Where empathy isn’t consistently modeled. Where women’s bodies have been objectified, controlled, dismissed, and harmed in ways that are often minimized or ignored. That CNN article wasn’t an outlier. It was an exposure. It was a magnified version of a pattern that already exists.

My body knows that because I’ve lived enough and I’ve listened to enough women to know how common this is in different forms. The details may vary, but the underlying violation, the disregard, the absence of care, the lack of accountability, is something I’ve seen again and again. That’s what made it so hard to hold. It wasn’t just what was being revealed. It was how familiar the root of it felt.

I reminded myself, sitting there at the table, that I didn’t have to carry all of that at once. I reminded myself that I’m allowed to feel it without drowning in it. I reminded myself to stay connected to my body, to my breath, to the present moment, even as I held awareness of something that was deeply disturbing. That’s what sacred rage asked of me. It asked me to feel it fully, to let it sharpen my clarity, to let it anchor me in what I know isn’t acceptable, while also staying regulated enough to remain present and connected.

I finished reading the article and everything around me was still the same. The light hadn’t changed. My coffee hadn’t gone cold. The world outside my window continued as if nothing had shifted. But inside me, something had.

I sat there for a moment longer, letting my body settle, letting my breath deepen, letting the intensity move through instead of getting stuck. What I knew was that I can’t control what exists in this world, and I can’t unknow what I had just read. What I can do is refuse to disconnect from myself in response to it. What I can do is stay in my body, stay aware, stay connected to other women who understand this reality and not carry it in isolation the way we’ve been taught to.

That’s where we begin. This is why I do the work that I do. Not from a distance, not from theory, but from inside a body that knows what it feels like to override, to stay quiet, to carry experiences that were never meant to be held alone. This is why I care so deeply about nervous system healing, about helping women come back into their bodies, about creating spaces where the truth of what we’ve lived is allowed to be spoken out loud. So many of us were taught to minimize it, to question ourselves, to keep it contained so we wouldn’t make anyone uncomfortable. That silence is part of what keeps all of this in place.

What shifts things is when we start telling the truth. When we stop carrying it alone. When we sit together and say, this happened to me too, and we don’t look away from each other when we say it. There’s something deeply regulating about being witnessed in what we’ve lived without being dismissed, fixed, or rushed past. There’s something powerful about women coming back into connection with each other instead of isolating inside what hurt us.

This work is about that. It’s about helping women feel safe enough in their own bodies to stay present with their experience and safe enough with each other to not have to hold it alone anymore. I’m not willing to stay silent about what so many of us have lived through and I’m not willing to keep pretending that we’re meant to process it in isolation. We heal in connection. We heal in truth. We heal when we stop abandoning ourselves and start showing up for each other in a way that is real, present, and honest.

The Silence Around Abuse Isn’t Accidental

 There is a quiet kind of violence that doesn’t leave bruises you can photograph. It lives in systems. In courtrooms. In institutions that were supposed to protect. It shows up in the moments where women and children speak the truth and are met with doubt, dismissal, or consequences for saying it out loud. What we’re witnessing right now isn’t new. It’s becoming harder to ignore.

Across the United States, research continues to show that allegations of abuse in family court are often minimized or reframed. Studies have found that when mothers report abuse, particularly in custody cases, they are significantly more likely to lose custody than fathers accused of abuse. The narrative shifts quickly. The focus moves away from the harm and onto the woman who named it. She becomes the problem. She is labeled hostile, uncooperative, or accused of alienating the child. This creates a kind of internal disorientation that is difficult to put into words.

The nervous system knows when something isn’t safe. It does not need external validation to register threat. It tracks tone, unpredictability, pattern, and power. When authority figures deny that reality, something deeper happens. A woman begins to question her own perception. A child begins to learn, often without language, that truth depends on who is listening. This is how silence is maintained. It is reinforced through confusion more than force.

Patriarchal systems rarely present themselves as obvious control. They often appear as procedure, policy, and neutrality. They position themselves as objective while quietly reinforcing structures that protect those already in power. Harm becomes reframed as conflict. Fear becomes labeled as overreaction. Survival responses become interpreted as instability. In these moments, the system is not failing. It is functioning within the design it was built from.

Women who have experienced prolonged emotional or psychological abuse often enter these systems already carrying dysregulation. Their bodies have adapted to chronic stress, hypervigilance, and unpredictability. When they speak, their words may come out urgent, emotional, or fragmented. This is not a lack of credibility. This is a nervous system that has been living in survival. When that expression is used against them, it deepens the injury rather than addressing it.

Children are shaped by these experiences in ways that extend far beyond the moment. When a child discloses harm and is not protected, their system adapts. They begin to understand that safety is inconsistent. That authority may not respond. That their voice may not change what happens next. Silence becomes safer than truth. These are not temporary emotional responses. These are developmental imprints that shape how they relate to safety, connection, and trust over time.

This is why this conversation matters. It is not about isolated situations. It is about patterns that repeat within systems that were never designed with trauma in mind. Healing cannot be separated from environment. A nervous system cannot fully regulate in a space where harm is ongoing or truth is consistently invalidated. Internal work cannot override external conditions that continue to reinforce unsafety.

There is a growing awareness right now. More women are speaking. More survivors are refusing silence. More professionals are beginning to question long-standing assumptions within legal and mental health systems. That shift matters. It creates openings where there were none before. It allows truth to begin surfacing in spaces that once suppressed it.

What needs to shift next is how we listen. The focus cannot remain on how survivors speak, when they speak, or how composed they appear while speaking. The focus has to move toward examining the systems that make speaking unsafe in the first place. It requires a willingness to hold truth without distorting it into something more comfortable.

The body keeps track of what happens in silence. It remembers what was dismissed, what was minimized, and what was turned back onto the person who experienced it. It carries those imprints long after the moment has passed.

That same body also holds the capacity for healing. Not because the system made it safe, but because at some point, truth was allowed to exist without being punished. Even if that space began within.

The Life You Want Requires a Nervous System That Feels Safe Living Inside It

 

There’s a version of you who has everything you say you want. Not just in theory, not just in the quiet spaces where you let yourself imagine it, but in a real, lived way. A version of you who can receive it, hold it, and stay inside of it without bracing for it to disappear. A version of you who feels steady in expansion, who trusts themselves inside of it, who feels safe enough to remain.

That version of you exists as something you are growing into. It’s being built through your capacity, your awareness, and your willingness to stay present with yourself as your life begins to expand. It’s easy to look for answers in strategy or mindset, yet the deeper work lives in your identity and in the safety your nervous system feels when things begin to change. It lives in what your body allows you to experience and sustain.

The version of you who has what you want knows how to stay with themselves in moments that once felt overwhelming. When uncertainty shows up, they remain connected to themselves. When stress rises, they move through it with more steadiness and less reactivity. Their self trust has been developed through lived experience, built slowly over time, until it became something they can feel and rely on in real moments.

Growth often carries a certain level of discomfort, even when it’s leading you toward what you’ve been asking for. The moments that stretch you are part of the process of becoming. They’re where your capacity is expanding in real time. If you find yourself in seasons of doubt, in waiting, or in that tension between where you are and where you want to be, you’re in a place where your system is learning how to hold more.

Your nervous system moves toward what feels familiar. As your life begins to shift into something healthier, more stable, or more expansive, your body can register that change as unfamiliar. That unfamiliarity can feel activating, even when what’s arriving is aligned with what you’ve been wanting. The urge to pull back, to shrink, or to return to old patterns is part of your system trying to create a sense of safety.

Familiarity often carries a sense of safety, even when it keeps you within old limits.

Receiving more and remaining open to it require an internal sense of safety. As your capacity grows, your ability to stay present with what you’ve created grows alongside it. You begin to feel more at home in the very things you once had to brace for.

There’s a quieter, more supportive question that begins to open this process. You can start to notice what your experience is showing you about where safety is still being built. Sometimes that shows up in emotional regulation. Sometimes in the beliefs you hold about your worth, your lovability, or your ability to be supported. Sometimes it’s in the trust you’re continuing to develop with yourself, especially in moments that feel uncertain. Awareness brings these patterns into view, and your willingness to stay with them allows something new to take root.

The life you want becomes something you can live inside of more fully as your internal world begins to feel safer. That safety grows through repetition, through small moments where you stay present, where you support yourself, where you remind your system that you can be here.

Over time, that becomes your new normal. Your capacity expands to meet the life you’ve been asking for, and you begin to experience it with more steadiness, more presence, and a deeper sense of ease.