Body and Brain Integration for Healing the Mother Wound
- Shelly Sharon
- May 30
- 5 min read
If you’ve ever sensed that talk therapy alone couldn’t touch the depth of your pain around your mother, there’s a good reason. Many women carry an invisible wound that lives not just in the mind, but in the body—and to truly heal, we need to include both. In this post, you’ll learn why I didn’t go into conventional psychology and chose the embodied path of somatic healing. You’ll discover how learning to seek and find—two powerful somatic skill sets—can support your own healing from the mother wound, and how body and brain integration offers a compassionate, grounded way forward.
I was never able to get into psychology studies because of two things:
I was held back by the disappointment I experienced as a child, meeting many psychologists and psychiatrists who treated my mother for her mental health problems, witnessing how they failed her and failed to consider any merits in my intuitive wisdom about my mother’s state and needs, which now I know is called body and brain integration
I was very attracted by the body’s abilities and capacities. Long before I became a somatic therapist I was a ballet dancer and learned how to be and move in the world with my trauma by learning the art of communication, contact and space through dancing
Now, quite a few decades later, I’m thrilled to see that body and brain integration in trauma healing is the cutting edge in training, and that more and more research is being done to understand how brain-body trauma treatments are helpful, especially with childhood trauma and CPTSD (complex post traumatic stress disorder).
Yet, we still live in a world that separates brain and body on a daily basis and a culture that admires old fashioned concepts of brain dominance. This shows up for example in:
Public places that overstimulate our senses with bright neon lights and pop music, as if our body’s processing mechanisms can stay balanced with such an overload of information (hello to all my fellow neurodivergent people);
Or school curricula, structures and tests that are designed to cultivate or evaluate mono-typical brain function;
And prevailing psychological practices and therapies that pathologise and label unique body-brain integration mechanisms that many individuals possess inherently.
There are two healing skill-sets that I teach my clients in my practice to address body-brain integration for healing the mother wound:
Seeking and Finding
A seeking skill set helps you be attentive to nuances in your experience which lead to trusting your inner guidance, discovering new possibilities to living life and letting go of limiting beliefs.
Anne, who I worked with on healing the mother wound, was haunted by a sense of responsibility for her mum, knowing that her mum suffers from undiagnosed mental illness and that she was the only one in the family willing to acknowledge it.
The repeated question was “how can I get rid of the sense of feeling responsible for my mother?”. While this is a concrete and real question, it was more an expression of the pain and frustration Anne was experiencing.
As we worked towards cultivating her finding skill sets she said one day: “oh yes, my father actually helps sometimes, and my brother as well.”
We can have all the help we need, all the answers we’re looking for, but body-brain integration means that we can finally see them and accept their contribution.
The finding skill-set leads to emotional maturity, and this is where our healing keeps on evolving and deepening until such a time when we no longer feel that piercing pang of the heart resulting from our mother’s physical, emotional or spiritual absence, when the past doesn’t manage our behaviours, choices and beliefs, and grief does’t separate us from our daily life.
We move between seeking and finding throughout our lives. These are two healing potentials that exist inherently in each one of us. In therapy we can cultivate these potentials so that they become skills for living a thriving life.
Here are a couple of inquiry lines you can meditate on:
Are you prone more towards seeking or finding? Which one do you intuitively feel you could strengthen?
Which questions could you rephrase to help you discover nuances of inner guidance? Which asks have been answered that you didn’t give credit to, pushed away or found it difficult to embrace?
One of the things I found in Hakomi therapy which makes me feel deeply aligned with the method is the therapist’s intention to recognise and acknowledge the client’s strengths, gifts and skills.
Often when we think about therapy we feel heavy because old-school therapy practice was to go right into the place where it hurts the most (with the idea that the therapist can fix it).
I delight in seeing my clients light up each time I point out something that I cherish about them. This is a way of helping women cultivate brain-body integration so the healing skills are a natural part of their life-style.
This blog post explores how healing the mother wound and childhood trauma requires more than just cognitive understanding—it calls for true integration of body and mind. Many women carry emotional pain that traditional talk therapy struggles to reach, especially when early experiences of being unseen or invalidated are stored in the body. Somatic healing practices offer a powerful way to reconnect with inner wisdom and restore a sense of wholeness. Through the development of two key skill sets—seeking and finding—individuals can learn to tune into subtle inner cues, shift limiting beliefs, and recognize the support that already exists in their lives. Body and brain integration becomes not just a healing method, but a lifestyle that fosters emotional resilience, presence, and lasting transformation.
Now, I’d like to share with you that I’ve got an opening for three new clients from June.
If you’ve been reading my emails and have had a sense that you’d like more of what I’m offering, if you’ve been pondering healing your mother wound but don’t know where to start or how it could actually look like for you, here’s what you can do:
Click the link below to schedule a complementary call with me
On the call we’ll have a casual yet focused conversation about your needs
By the end of the conversation there is no pressure to make a decision. You can either tell me you’d like to learn about the practical details of working together (all is transparently explained on my website) or we can simply part knowing we’ve had a nourishing and joyful connection
Not sure yet? No problem!
Here are a couple of ways to learn about healing the mother wound:
Sign up to my Museletter for regular, useful content on healing the mother wound
Take my video training on breaking free from mother wound limiting beliefs
Shelly's helping women who've had a complex relationship with their mother and want to unplack the way it impacts their current life challanges so they can become unlimited personally & professionally
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