The Mother Wound in the Body
Definition
The relationship with the mother is the first relationship the body has with another body. It is registered somatically before it is registered mentally. The nervous system learns in the womb and in the early months what physical presence means, what contact means, what it means to be held or not held, nourished or inconsistently nourished, responded to or left to cry. The mother wound does not stay in the story you can tell about your childhood. It lives in the body as posture, as breath, as the size you allow yourself to be in a room, as your relationship to food and hunger and appetite and pleasure. You may not know what the wound is. Your body knows.
Origins & Context
Christiane Northrup in Mother-Daughter Wisdom documents in clinical detail how the mother-daughter bond affects daughters' physical health, immune function, and relationship to their own bodies. The daughter whose mother was at war with her body absorbs that war. The daughter whose mother related to the female body as shameful, dangerous, or something to be managed, learns that her own body is those things.
Clara Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves identifies the body as the territory where the wounded feminine most needs to be reclaimed: the instinctual, embodied self that was disciplined out of the daughter by a mother who had her own wildness disciplined out of her.
Bessell van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score and Resmaa Menakem in My Grandmother's Hands both document how relational trauma is stored in the body, not only in memory. The early relational wounds live in the nervous system. The body holds what the mind cannot fully process.
The mother wound does not stay in memory. It lives in the body: in the posture, the breath, the size you allow yourself to be. The body holds what the story cannot fully tell.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
It shows up in the relationship to food. Daughters of mothers with disordered eating inherit complex relationships to hunger, fullness, appetite, and the female body's needs. Sometimes they restrict. Sometimes they cannot stop. Sometimes both, in alternation.
It shows up in the posture: the curving inward, the shrinking, the making-small that was learned from a mother who made herself small, or who required the daughter to be small.
It shows up in the relationship to touch: the difficulty with physical intimacy, the hyper-vigilance in being touched, the hunger for physical closeness that cannot be satisfied. The body is still orienting to the original contact, or its absence.
It shows up in the relationship to pleasure: the guilt of pleasure, the sense that the body's enjoyment of itself is illegitimate. The mother who could not let herself have pleasure trained her daughter to distrust it.
Generational Transmission
Through the maternal line: The body pattern travels through the female line directly. A grandmother's hunger, her self-erasure, her complicated relationship to her body as a woman in circumstances that required she minimize it: these transmit through her daughter's body into the granddaughter's. The posture of a woman who was not allowed to take up space becomes the posture of her daughter, then her daughter's daughter. The daughter who heals this pattern heals it backward through the line as well as forward.
Through the paternal line: The father's relationship to the female body shapes the daughter's relationship to her own. The father who admired the mother's physicality, who treated the female body with respect and warmth, modeled a relationship to the body that offered the daughter a corrective. The father who criticized the mother's body, who treated the female body as something to be managed or judged, transmitted that relationship to his daughter's self-regard. The daughter learns what her body is worth, in part, from what her father communicated about female bodies.
Nikita's Note
The body work and the psychological work meet here. The daughter whose mother wound lives in the body cannot think her way out of it. The healing has to include the body.
That means movement that is not punitive. Rest that is not earned. Food that is not justified. Touch that is allowed. Breath that is not held.
It means, most fundamentally, practicing a relationship to the body that the mother could not model. Not because the mother was bad. Because she did not have it to give. And because the daughter can find it elsewhere, and she can learn it, and she can pass it forward.
From the work
The mother wound does not stay in memory. It lives in the body: in the posture, the breath, the size you allow yourself to be. The body holds what the story cannot fully tell.From Healing the Mother Wound by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Daughter's Lexicon
See all in The Daughter's Lexicon →I wrote about this in Healing the Mother Wound — available on Amazon.