Hating Your Mother: Mother Wound Intense Emotions
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Hating your mother is not something most women say out loud. It arrives in a whisper, if at all — and usually followed immediately by guilt, shame, or a rush to qualify it. "But I know she did her best." "Others had it worse." "I shouldn't feel this way." In over a decade of working with women on healing the mother wound, I've heard this emotion more times than I can count. And every time, I say the same thing: it's natural. It's not who you are. And the path through it is not forgiveness — it's something far more honest than that.
REGISTRATION TO THE WORKSHOP OPENS THIS FRIDAY, APRIL 17
First 8 women to join within 24 hours receive a FREE 1:1 with me
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The Emotion Undermothered Women Are Ashamed to Admit
I remember the day Irina sat in my practice and told me in almost a whisper: “I hate my mother.”
“I used to hate my mother too,” I told her. “I want you to know it’s natural for undermothered daughters to carry emotions like this.”
Charged emotions like hate are difficult to admit even to ourselves.
I could empathise with Irina, knowing what it’s like to feel trapped between holding such deep emotions and suffering from having them at the same time.
When Understanding Your Mother Isn't Enough
Irina grew up only with her mother, after her parents’ divorce.
After her dad remarried, he erased Irina from his life, and set up a new family.
None of his new children knew of her existence.
Irina’s mum suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts, so Irina was stripped of childhood in order to be present for the only parent she had—to protect her from taking her own life.
She chose to stay at home with her mum instead of playing with friends in the afternoons, haunted by images of finding her mum bleeding from her veins if she left.
Irina really wanted to forgive her mother as an adult.
Like many of my clients, she has a big, caring heart and a great capacity for compassion. She could understand her mother’s difficult circumstances and that she had done everything she could for Irina.
And yet, regardless of understanding her mum, Irina hit resentment and disgust each time she turned towards forgiveness.
But Irina didn’t come to me because of her desire to forgive.
She came to work with me 1:1 because she had gotten into a new intimate relationship with someone she cared for deeply and, unexpectedly, been ambushed by intense jealousy.
She didn’t recognise herself as a jealous woman.
Irina had a warm, conquering smile and a joyful personality, and ran a successful business she’d set up from scratch.
Yet, no matter what she had achieved, she constantly compared herself unfavourably to her new partner’s girl friends.
In our sessions, we focused on processing jealousy, and soon enough uncovered a hidden connection between her current experience and her relationship with her mum.
Growing up as her mother's sole companion—where going out to play with friends felt like a betrayal, even a danger—had played a huge role in how she approached other relationships in her life, especially intimate ones she cared deeply about.
This instilled a deep fear of making mistakes, and a terror of being replaced the moment someone else entered the picture.
The fear of losing her only protector as a child—however shaky and dysfunctional that connection was—had shaped her relationship to herself and others more than she knew.
This discovery was a turning point for Irina.
The weight she had placed on forgiving and accepting her mother was replaced with the capacity to embrace herself.
Forgiveness had been a goal only because Irina was caught between two extremes: hating her mum, and suffering from having such intense emotions towards her.
Why Hating Your Mother Is Not the Opposite of Forgiving Her
It’s expected that the most intense feelings you’ll have are towards your mother.
The mother-daughter relationship is very intimate. It’s the longest relationship you’ve had in your life.
When it’s fraught with challenges and chaos, it will naturally carry some complex, often layered, and charged emotions.
It’s natural that you’d feel rage, deep frustration, hate, a sense of betrayal, disgust, terror, shame, guilt, and other intense feelings.
Some of these feelings surface at a very early age—when the competition between needing your mother and the instinct to reject her is so overwhelming that these emotions are buried, only to surface at a later stage, projected onto others in your life.
And yet—forgiving your mother, accepting or understanding her doesn’t resolve the push-and-pull and is not the opposite on this spectrum of any of these intense feelings.
What Happens When You Process Intense Mother Wound Emotions
Shifting the focus from forgiving, accepting or understanding your mother doesn’t mean becoming bitter, resentful or a mean and hateful woman.
It means tuning your focus on embracing yourself—-which begins in processing the repressed, intense emotions.
These intense emotions seek a resolution in forgiveness, acceptance and understanding because that’s the direction society offers—one that doesn’t know what to do with intense emotions, especially when they’re directed to a mother.
This only results in intensifying difficult emotions rather than dissolving them
Once you process those intense emotions, you might find that you have also lost the intensity of feelings you had towards your mother.
This is where anything becomes possible.
You might find, like I did, that you no longer feel angry at her or frustrated by her.
You no longer hate her or wish her dead, and at the same time, you’re not preoccupied by her—you’re naturally focusing on your present life and your future.
Shifting the focus beyond forgiveness means devoting your energy, time and attention to that which can genuinely grow the peace of mind, sense of completion, confidence and clarity you’re looking for.
What Healing the Mother Wound Actually Looks Like
The mother wound is a rupture in your relationship to yourself, others and life itself rooted in your complex relationship with your mother.
Family members, friends, therapists and society at large often suggest a repair via forgiving, accepting or undressing your mother.
But the truth is that this repair starts within you.
Healing the mother wound starts when you’re able to centre around the way you want to feel—first, and then what actions or responses flow from those feelings.
You have the capacity to choose how to shape this repair and what you want it to look like.
And if you want to finally heal your mother wound—by leaving behind sadness, resentment, anger, frustration and other charged feelings so you can fully embrace yourself—then my next workshop could be a great step towards that.
YOU ARE INVITED:
It’s Not About Forgiveness
A Relational and Somatic Workshop for Undermothered Women
Who’ve spent years trying to understand, forgive, or fix their relationship with their mother
And want to find what's possible when they centre around themselves instead
🌻 Happens on: Friday, April 24th, 5:30 to 7:00 pm CET
(4:30–6:00 pm BST, 11:30 am – 1:00 pm EST)
🌻 Registration opens on: Friday 17th
🌻 Early bird bonus, limited to 8 women:
Sign up within the first 24 hours and receive a FREE 1:1 WITH ME
(to be used by May 15th at the latest)
In this workshop, you’ll be offered 2-3 somatic practices to:
🌻 Gain the energetic shift that comes from restoring emotional safety that lets you focus, guilt-free on your own life
🌻Discover some of the habits and patterns that keep you looping back into trying to understand, forgive or accept your mother, so you can U-turn towards yourself
This is a great space for you if:
🌻 You’re done centring your healing process around your mother’s wish-list and ready to recentre around your life force
🌻You want to gain a first-hand experience of the immediate shifts somatic, Hakomi work offers so you can integrate your insights on the spot (rather than try to apply later what's in your notes).
The waiting is filling up quickly.
So make sure you're on it if you want a chance
to be one of the eight women who get a free 1:1 with me
When you're on the list, you get the first email to join in.
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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
