Feeling Not Chosen by Your Mother? This Is What Changes It
- Jun 15
- 6 min read
If you’ve ever been told to “choose yourself first,” you may know how impossible that instruction can feel when feeling not chosen by your mother has shaped your whole sense of self. And what makes it more cruel is that you did choose yourself. You chose yourself when you survived the rejection, the abandonment, the criticism, the silence, or the version of love that made you work for your place.
But survival is not the same as feeling chosen. Which is why you can set the boundary, leave the country, build a life, choose the partner, pursue the ambition — and still feel as if something in you is waiting to be picked. Feeling not chosen by your mother is not only a painful memory. It can become an old organising principle in the body: the place from which you try to earn belonging, prove your worth, and make yourself desirable enough to be kept.
This blog explores why “choosing yourself” is not always enough, what feeling not chosen can do to your body, and how healing the mother wound opens a different route back to yourself.
BEFORE I get into it, I’ve got news.
AND this happens in ten days...
Wednesday, June 24th, I’m offering a FREE workshop:
The Invisible Weight of Undermothered Women
.
Why Feeling Not Chosen by Your Mother Follows You Into Adult Life
One of my old, familiar mother wound experiences is a feeling of not being chosen.
For each of us, the ruptured relationship with our mother will impact one life area more than others.
For some women, it shows mainly in intimate relationships, whereas for other women, it shows up mainly within themselves, with physical challenges or denigrating voices.
For me, familiar mother wound patterns happen mainly when I come out of hiding and put myself out there publicly with my work.
Over the years, I’ve unpacked it many times, each time revealing another layer of healing and insight.
Though the feeling of “not being chosen” is no longer a frequent visitor, after unpacking it for a few years, it can still pop up.
A few months ago, it was a bit different.
I pitched myself to a few podcasts I really wanted to be featured on. Most of the time, I get some kind of a response—yes, we’d love to have you, not right now, try later, etc.
But that time, I had absolutely no response. Even after I got over my fear of them thinking I’m a nudge and reached out again.
The experience got to me more than usual.
The voice didn't just weigh me down — it triggered a memory I hadn't been conscious of until that moment.
A few years ago, my sister told me something I hadn't known.
On the night our mother left — I was 16, she stole money from the family and disappeared without a word, without any clue as to where she'd gone or if she'd come back — she had offered my sister the chance to come with her.
All this happened while I was deeply asleep.
I had never connected that night to this feeling before.
Never seen it sitting there underneath all those years of feeling diminished by a feeling of not being chosen — because until my sister told me, I hadn't even known it had happened.
And when she did tell me, I buried it just as fast.
Still, making the connection between a familiar, debilitating voice and an event from my chaotic childhood — didn’t take the pain away.
And it didn’t resolve the voice either.
And that’s why I work with a different therapeutic modality than talk therapy.
The Mother Wound Isn't Something You're Born With
The urge to feel chosen and taken in by your mother is as natural as the sun rising in the morning, no matter where you are in the world.
You get a clear message about how desirable your presence is to your mother by the way she talks to you or about you, and your talents, your body, or your mistakes.
You make unconscious inferences about how much she chooses of you through her moods when you’re around, her eye contact, or her touch.
The mother wound happens through an ongoing rupture in your relationship with your mother. A rupture that informs you that who you are, as you are, is not really welcomed.
The mother wound is a rupture in your relationship to yourself, others, and the world, rooted in the rupture with your mother.
This rupture is not something you're born with — it's something that formed in the gaps.
The gaps between feeling connected and feeling invisible.
Between being attuned to and being overlooked.
Between being lovingly cared for and being left to manage alone.
You sense those gaps from the very first day of that relationship.
You've Already Been Choosing Yourself — Just Not in the Way You Think
The popular saying, “choose yourself first, then others will choose you,” is tricky terrain for undermothered daughters.
If only the promise of a linear if-then had worked.
Because you have chosen yourself many times over and still:
🍒 You left your homeland to start a new life away from your mother, only to be haunted by her criticism right inside your head
🍒 You married someone who seems to be the loving and caring person you’ve longed for, only to discover later that you married someone just like your mum
🍒 You invested yourself in your ambitions and dreams, yet no matter your accomplishments, you still feel easily invalidated and unworthy
You had already chosen yourself when you were a rejected, outcast or abandoned daughter.
You did that instantly, as a matter of survival. So you could integrate with your mother, so you could create whatever piece of belonging was allocated to you.
What you really need is to feel chosen by the people whose company you desire, by the professional circles you dream of belonging to, and by the life rhythm you want for your body.
And this happens when you no longer make an effort to earn your place — to be chosen by yourself or by others — but when you integrate the unspoken, even if unremembered, missing pieces of your relationship with your mother.
The belief underneath this efforting is this: “If I just choose myself hard enough, consistently enough, it will eventually land.”
But choosing yourself isn't a decision the mind makes and the body obeys—it’s discovering a new pathway your body never got to learn in a ruptured relationship with your mother.
What Embodied Healing of the Mother Wound Actually Looks Like
After many years of hearing this phrase thrown at me and feeling like the joke was on me, I finally had an embodied experience of choosing myself, in the session with Caroline.
A picture of me as a baby in a cot was invoked into my consciousness, and Caroline asked me, “what do you see in her?”
What had before looked like shock had transformed into a twinkle in the eyes of a curious baby who was now reaching her arms toward me, no longer frozen in time and space.
I could literally sense her weight on my body as I reached out to pick her up in my imagination.
I hadn’t thought about that phrase, “choose yourself,” or even mentioned it to Caroline before that moment.
For the first time, choosing myself didn't feel like an effort to perform some reconnection with my inner child. It emerged from spontaneity, connection, and joy — as a natural possibility rather than a survival move.
When you go beneath the words, beneath the effort — you find a different route. One that opens when familiar voices show up, rather than one that runs from them.
Your Body Can Learn What It Was Never Taught
You were never given the conditions to feel chosen — that was never a failure of effort.
But your body can learn at any time what it was never taught.
And that's the path I want to show you in my upcoming workshop.
The Weight of Undermothered Women
Three Mother Wound Efforting Patterns & How to Move Beyond Them
Wednesday, June 24th, 5-5:45 PM CET
(4-4:45 PM BST / 11-11:45 AM EST)
In this workshop, you’ll:
🍒 Discover what the three efforting patterns look like in your life
🍒 Understand what it means to move beyond them
🍒 Receive an efforting-release practice and time for Q&A
P.S. "Choosing yourself" starts being a cliche when your body finally discovers what you need in order to make it yours. If you're looking for the how 👉 Join the FREE workshop.
P.P.S. And if you're ready to bridge the gap between feeling chosen by others and working hard to choose yourself, I have open spots for 1:1 👉 Book a free call
Got any questions about the works?
You can reply directly to this email or DM me on IG
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If you need more reassurance that you & I can make a genuine difference to healing your mother wound, here's something you'll enjoy:
Learn how to stop making an effort to fill in a hole in the heart with healing the mother wound in my private podcast, BirthRite. Add your details below, and you'll get immediate access to your free episodes 👇
Shelly is a trauma-informed, certified Hakomi therapist helping women who've had a complex relationship with their mother discover the hidden impacts of the mother wound 👉 so they can recentre back into the life they're meant to live
