The Stickiest Hurt of the Mother Wound

This makes us isolate and hide when we need to connect…

In a recent therapy session, the experience of suffering hunger because my mother didn’t know she didn’t have enough milk to breastfeed me came up.

I’ve revisited that experience and how it influenced and shaped me many times before.

But never before had I felt shame about it.

I was really taken by surprise. Not only did I feel the pain of being put in that position as an infant, I now had to deal with the shame of it.

It felt very strange to feel shame. Why would I even have shame? It’s not that I did something wrong. It’s not that I had any way of standing up for myself as a newborn or saying something to change the situation.

I started wondering whether shame had always been there, and I just hadn’t noticed it, or that a new thorny overgrowth had somehow found its way to colonise my memory of the incident.

I was both burdened and curious.

Shame makes us want to disappear or hide aspects about ourselves so we often lose our curiosity about it