Healing The Mother And Father Wounds That Run Through Your Lineage

Our feelings are the gateway to our subconscious mind, our nervous system, our healing and the healing of others. Until we recognise their importance, we will never truly break free from the patterns or pain we currently live in. 

The reason I draw your awareness to your emotions and feelings is that for the majority of my life I have felt the Mother and Father wound so strongly inside me, yet felt guilty about feeling them. You may relate to having these mixed emotions, they can warp the very way we view the world. 

As my parents would have said, they provided ‘a roof over my head, food on the table and the financial security many grow up without’. And as I say those words, I can feel the pride my father felt throughout the majority of my life because he did just that, yet I also know the sadness he felt towards the end.

He had created society's view of a ‘successful man’ he had built a business from nothing and created a great legacy, yet towards the end of his life, as he reflected, he felt great sadness, for all the things that had a much deeper meaning. His parents were a massive part of why he achieved. Through pure determination, he (energetically) showed his father how a man should provide, and gave his wife and children the security he never felt.

Unfortunately, with such a strong presence of ‘what a man should do’ in my life, it pushed me to prove ‘what a woman can do’.

The struggle between the masculine and the feminine has always existed, now is the time for a sacred union. To stop this push and pull and the struggle between them and to find harmony and balance. 

Our emotions and feelings are so complex. 

We live within the reality in which we were raised, yet our soul knows so much more and desires so much more for us. 

Being true to ourselves means we desire to unravel the emotional neglect and abuse that is seeded deep in the very essence of our physical being.

It doesn’t mean we dislike or hate those that help create the wound, on the contrary, we love them deeply, which is why it’s so hard to accept that something they did or didn’t do has created such pain within us. 

Recognising the Mother & Father wounds are purely for our own healing, not to lay blame. 

If this is something that feels very familiar to you, you may also want to read my article on developing emotional skills we didn’t learn from our parents. I talk about how we learn behaviours both actively & passively from our parents. 

The first step to healing our wounds is to recognise and acknowledge they exist and how they make us feel. 

THE ROLES OUR MASCULINE & FEMININE PLAY WITHIN OUR GENERATIONS

As we start down the path of healing our mother and father wounds, it’s common to believe that our mother wounds are represented by feminine energy and our father wounds are represented by masculine energy. However, the more we unearth the wounded and divine (or the healthy and unhealthy) the more we begin to recognise that within each wound is both the masculine and the feminine. 

While growing up our subconscious mind receives an imprint about how the masculine and feminine energy feels and behaves based on the presence of our father and mother and how they treated us. This happens unconsciously and since we’re unaware of this, we unknowingly project what we've experienced with our role models onto those around us. 

Regardless of our gender or the gender we identify with, we are all made up of masculine and feminine energies. They nourish each other, it’s part of the duality that makes everything in our world.

However, through my determination to prove ‘what a woman can do’, I now recognise that  I’ve raised my children and lived most of my adult life creating the energy of the dis-empowered masculine and the over-empowered feminine.

As I say this, I feel pain within my body for my 3 boys who are now young men. My daughter grew up seeing her empowered mum and knew she could do anything, but what did my boys grow up learning? Did I unconsciously dis-empower them? And did I teach my daughter to be over-empowered or can she surrender to an empowered man? These are questions we all need to ask ourselves. 

It’s time to recognise that the fight for equality evolved into the squashing of the masculine and the overcompensating of women to meet masculine needs. 

It’s never too late though to shift our perception and energy. We can begin now by creating a healthy masculine and feminine energy within our families to help us all feel the healthy behaviour of both.

When the masculine and feminine counterparts within you are no longer at war it feels like you can finally come home to yourself. This inner wholeness generates radical self-acceptance and feelings of being supported, worthy, and open to receive.

HAVE OUR FATHER WOUNDS DIS-EMPOWERED OUR SONS?

It’s time to start looking at the other side of the spectrum. Has our push for extreme independence for women meant we have embodied the masculine (but the wounded masculine due to our father wound) and ignored the emotional inner journey of our healthy feminine?

This has led to the imbalance of masculine and feminine energy within us. It’s led to the destruction of polarity. It led to more and more empowered women remaining single and also more emasculated men.

I don’t believe this was ever our intention (it certainly wasn’t mine), but I can now see how my overcompensation from my childhood and my necessity to provide for my children after my divorce, has led me to allow the pendulum to swing way too far in the other direction.

Do you recognise any similarities? Does anything I’ve mentioned resonate within your body?

Perhaps it’s time to ask yourself this question ‘has becoming the strong independent powerful woman that I am, meant I have energetically pushed away masculine men or unintentionally emasculated the men who are around me by my refusal to hand over any power?’

Restoring the trust in the protective and supportive nature of the masculine is necessary, but impossible without healing and integrating the father wound.

But just as important, is healing the mother wound, so we can learn to allow the masculine to support the feminine, instead of needing to prove we don’t need him to be whole.

We both need to surrender.

And remember, what we experience externally is simply a reflection of what is unfolding internally.

We must acknowledge and allow the different roles to create harmony. Just like Yin and Yang intertwine to create the whole, so too do our masculine/feminine. 

The natural feminine way is to nurture and love, while the natural masculine way is to support and protect. Together they create a sacred union. 

Sit with these words and see if you can feel a softening as the magic of the masculine and feminine are unveiled. 

HAVE OUR MOTHER WOUNDS DIS-EMPOWERED OUR DAUGHTERS?

I grew up with my mother in a completely submissive role to both my father and my brother. Not only did it make me push against how my father dominated my mother and the patriarchy, but also how my mother submitted to my father. 

This meant I could have learnt passively or actively how to access my heart (my source of feminine openness and receptivity) by either finding my own truth and voice by doing the opposite to my mother or by submitting and following in my mother's footsteps.  

I feel I was the lucky one, to passively learn from this experience, but there are many women who have learnt actively to follow in their mother's footsteps (and that is their lesson). By continuing this way, however, we embody the wounded masculine and learn the only way to achieve is by manipulation and control (the wounded feminine due to our mother wound).

Please know I do not hold my mother responsible or blame her in any way. I simply use this as an example from my life. My mother did the best she knew how and I love her unconditionally.

If we embody the wounded feminine (mother wound), as we grow older we tend to get what we want through manipulation, while harbouring resentment and punishing others around us with the silent treatment. 

Manipulation and control are the perfect identifiers of our unhealthy feminine. They drain our emotions, energy, and vital life force. We overwork ourselves to experience the love and connection that should be available to us naturally and organically just for being who we are.

I wish for every woman to know the happiness that comes with leading with her feminine essence. This is something I embodied in my earlier years and am re-learning to embody now. 

Our essence is designed to honour our heart's desires and to be a beacon of light. 

The feminine represents the gentle power that arises from mastering our inner world and the connection to our heart.

Nothing left to prove, only a world to enjoy, beauty to admire, and relationships to be grateful for.

The world opens up for us when we start shifting the focus of our own masculine energy from external achievements to inner support and healing.

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