I shared some of my personal experience with estrangement from my mother, my mother wound, and triggers associated with Mother’s Day
Instead of posting it here, I am going to link to the article published on Medium so you can choose whether or not you read it. I hope you choose to read it at some point when you are feeling ready, either because you relate to being triggered by Mother’s Day and NEED to feel seen and understood, OR because you wish to open yourself up to a deeper understanding of what is a really common experience of triggered wounding, trauma, or grief/pain related to Mother’s Day.
To be clear, this is NOT intended as any form of shaming or begrudging of those celebrating Mother’s Day with feelings of gratitude and joy…
It is meant to demonstrate and normalize a more complete spectrum of emotions associated with Mother’s Day (and other holidays, too) because of the vastness of the human experience.
There is still a lot of stigma and taboo associated with this topic, especially where mothers and/or mothering is concerned and what motherhood *has to* look like…
I hope to contribute to bridging some gaps in our humanity, compassion and connection through understanding.
Here is an excerpt, in case you need a glimpse of what you’re getting in the full article:
“Because our human body’s hold our stories, I experience the triggers of Mother’s Day in my physical body as much as I experience the emotions and related thoughts.
I feel the triggers of this day as contradicting emotions of love, joy, rejection, abandonment, and insecurity. I feel the triggers of this day in my body as physical sensations like pain, aches, stiffness, and being ‘on edge’. I feel the triggers of this day in my mental patterns when my mind wanders into the darkest, most painful memories of my somewhat recent and far-reaching distant past and the voice of that accompanies those memories (my mother’s voice, I’ve come to realize, not my own…even though it *sounds like* me) and reminds me I wasn’t ‘good enough’ to have or keep my mother’s love…
I know that voice is not the truth/my truth now, but I didn’t always know that.
I am not feeling the triggers of this day as hard in my relationships now as much as I once did, though the affects still linger in the background a bit. The difference is that I’ve had that space away from my mother to heal and learn new ways to navigate the shadows of my past that are still cast into my present.”
If you wish to read the full article on Medium, click the following image:
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