Healing the Mother Wound: Lessons from Community and Tribal Child-Rearing Compared to Modern Day Parenting and How to Meet Your Mother with Compassion.

Can healing your mother wound transform your life? Explore how our unique four-week mini mind program can guide you through the journey of addressing deep-seated emotional pain, freeing you from the chains of perfectionism and persistent emotional turmoil. Learn from experts in teaching, coaching, and mentorship as they share transformative rituals designed to foster healthier relationships with both your mother and yourself.

Imagine a world where children are raised not just by their parents, but by a whole community. Discover the remarkable benefits of collective child-rearing in tribal societies through our in-depth look at the San people, indigenous Amazon communities, and Native American tribes. We uncover how shared responsibilities among women create nurturing environments that reduce parental stress and enhance social connectedness, highlighting the stark contrast with today's overwhelming pressures on mothers.

Finally, we'll guide you through the emotional journey of healing the mother wound and the profound ripple effect it has on personal and collective well-being. Acknowledging the limitations of our mothers, often shaped by their own traumas, empowers us to break the cycle and create lasting change. Your feedback is crucial as we introduce the Mother Wound Mini Mind launching this October. Share your thoughts and experiences with us through Instagram, LinkedIn, or email. Lots of love, and we can't wait to hear how this episode resonates with you!

Chapters

• 0:00 Healing Mother Wounds Mini Mind
• 9:06 Collective Child Rearing in Tribal Societies
• 19:55 Healing the Mother Wound Ripple
• 23:10 Seeking Feedback on Healing Mother Wounds

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

When I talk about mother wounds, I'm talking about the relationship with your mother. If it's left you feeling all types of ways in terms of, like, lack of self-confidence, always critical, always seeking perfection, there are things that are really really blocking you and you don't know where they come from. It's likely to be from your mother. So it's time to heal, right? If you want to feel like you're not triggered every time your mum calls you and leave the phone feeling completely depleted, angry or sad. You want to leave the phone not feeling like that. You want to nurture a better relationship with your mother now. You want to connect to her and you want to stop her trauma impacting you. If you want to feel proud of who you are, feel more connected to yourself and if you want to give yourself permission to have the grief and to feel the grief for the mother that you lost or for the mother that you didn't have. Accepting that you didn't get everything that you needed as a child like this is such a perfect container for you. So, if you are interested, literally head to the link in the description below to find out all of the detail. There's currently an introductory price in, but it will will be going up very, very soon. So, if you're interested in joining this container, it's a four week mini mind. We are going to be doing four live teaching calls. We will be having Q and A's healing sessions that are live, live meditation, live regression. We're also going to have a bonus live grief ceremony as well. You only get access to. Not only do you get access to all of that, you have access to your own learning portal, so if you miss a call, you can always catch up in the learning portal, which you have a lifetime access to. Not only that okay, so not only do you get all of that, you also get your Telegram channel, where you will be in there with a group of other women who will be on the live teaching calls with you, where you can create this beautiful community and connect with one another, which, when you listen to my episode now, you're going to be like, fuck yeah, community is so, so important. And as an extra, extra bonus, you also get access to me for one-to-one support all around healing your mother. Okay.

Speaker 1: 2:05

So what is a mini mind? It is a mini mind because we it's a short container. It's focused on one specific topic. There is group access, but also access one-to-one for me. I'm including teaching, coaching, mentorship, healing session, regressions and ritual practice. So this is not your typical mini mind. There's nothing like it on the market. We have a four-week structure which is all on the website, and at the moment, the introductory price is ridiculous, is ridiculous. So, yeah, do head to it and I um, yeah, I'm really gonna drop it in the link below, but let's get into today's episode, because I'm so excited to talk about this one. Welcome back.

Speaker 1: 2:57

Today I'm going to be talking more around ancestral trauma and all of this type of stuff, because people seem to love it when I talk about this stuff. So I just really wanted to talk about this more and, yeah, have a better understanding. You know, give people a better understanding. So I want to talk about the concept that it takes a village to raise a child, and here's my unpopular opinion that you're likely to agree with. You may have seen this as an Instagram post which I put on my Instagram, but obviously, but I'm going to talk a little bit more in detail about it because, like, I truly believe, like it takes a village to raise a child and we let our women suffer in silence. Okay, so when we talk about before. When we're talking about things before. Okay, we're talking about how, like women always used to live together in tribes, this is still seen across the world today as well, by the way. Like women still live in tribes together, there are still some uncontactable tribes that exist, which is so, so amazing to me.

Speaker 1: 3:50

And what would happen is women would come together and they would give uh children security. They would give each other emotional security. They would always be there to support each other. So, for example, if a woman got sick, there would be multiple mother archetypes and mother figures in the group that would be able to take care of the child. If, um, one woman's breast milk dried up, there would be multiple women that could breastfeed, and they would often breastfeed each other's children. Their cycles would often sync as well, so they would go through the same thing at the same time and be able to come together in that collective and closeness energy. Right, it's why our cycles sync when we spend a lot of time with other women, because, yeah, we sync with one another and the energy just means that we're ovulating at the same time, we're menstruating at the same time, so women would collectively care for the children, they would teach them. They would, you know, be storytelling. They would bring their own unique gifts as women to these children.

Speaker 1: 4:47

Right, there would be rituals, there would be ceremonies, there'd be rites of passage, there'd be so many things that would happen in this tribe situation. You know, in some tribes, like, not only are we in mothers and caregivers, where they you know they include nurturing and the well-being of the children and everything that they do, because the well-being of the women and the children contribute to the entire well-being of the tribe. Okay, it's a collective well-being. Okay. And women would have specific jobs, like, they would be economic contributors, so they would have significant roles in food, farming, crafting and other economic activities as well, to support their family and bright and wider community. They would be cultural transmitters. So these would be the women who would be your plant medicine women. They would be a ritualist, they would be the women who are responsible for passing down the cultural practices and traditions, the stories and everything that are in line with the tribe. So you're all kind of working from this one one place, right?

Speaker 1: 5:50

I often feel like this is why cults are so, so desired by some people, because they are looking for this sense of belonging. Okay, they're looking for their sense of belonging, and this is why people end up in cults, because they are wanting that belonging of a tribe. Okay, and this is how the cultural transmitters work. Right, you need a strong leader or strong healer. So in some tribal societies, women would hold the spiritual and healing roles. Okay, they would act as your midwives, your herbalists, your even community leaders okay, and they guide the next generation through the spiritual and cultural teachings. Like, how fucking amazing is that? Like, this is what used to happen and what still happens in these tribal communities.

Speaker 1: 6:31

Okay, and in tribes, children are seen as belonging to the whole community, not just their immediate family. So this encourages us like a strong sense of identity, belonging and security. Why do you think we have so many modern day problems? Because why are we having our children in gangs? Why are we having people in cults? They are all searching for this sense of identity, belonging and security, and when people don't have that, it becomes they become vulnerable for exploitation. That's ultimately the key. Okay, children would often be given freedom, like more freedom than modern society. They would often like observe adult tasks and, you know, learn the skills in order to prepare them for adulthood.

Speaker 1: 7:13

Everybody here that's listening to a podcast can think about maybe one mother that does everything for their son and their son does fuck all, or for their daughter, and like they do fuck all and they have no independence, identity or like ability to, to like fend for themselves. You know what I mean? Because the parent has become overbearing, because of something that we're going to talk about later. So the collective childcare as well. Like you'd have extended family structures, you'd be living really close to your grandparents, your aunts, your uncles, cousins, other people, other children. So the collective childcare would be huge. There would be a shared responsibility across more like across more than just one mother.

Speaker 1: 7:55

And you know, with mothers, we, I feel like now in society and I'm going to talk about this more in like the second half of the podcast but we, we expect one person to meet our entire needs, and I often hear this in the relationship space we expect one person to meet all of our needs to be a best friend, to be this, to be that, to be whatever. But actually we actually need a village around us to support us as community beings. And you know what? Evolution doesn't fucking lie. If we didn't need community connection, evolution would have got rid of it. We wouldn't need it, but we do because we're social animals and that's just it, and I know that pisses people off.

Speaker 1: 8:27

And this is where, like people will get really angry with me, because I'm very firm about gender stereotypes and where I firmly believe that we should have masculine and feminine stereotypes and they should be men and they should be women, and I know that's really going to fuck some feminists off. I know that's going to upset, you know, some other people, but the truth is, when we don't have them, we have a society that's completely dysregulated. We have men that are not really sure on how to behave. We have women who are overly independent and burnt out to a fucking crisp. Okay, but I'm gonna talk about this more in the second half. I'm gonna try and stay focused today because I got loads I wanna say about this.

Speaker 1: 9:06

You know, children as well would have massive peer support and they would be, you know, looking after younger children, but they'd also like be learning from their older siblings as well. Right, and women um would play a significant role in that. They were role modeling and you know they would have cooperative child rearing, where it's common for women to share child rearing duties, you know, in the community living set, you know living setting, which you know. Can you the community living set? You know living setting, which you know? Can you imagine living that like? Well, you're not entirely responsible for the young people that you live with? Now, I honestly do admire the women who are having children, and they're having two or three children, and they're doing it by themselves.

Speaker 1: 9:46

Imagine what it's like to be a single parent and having to do all of this when before, previously, there would just be this collective being around you. Okay, um. So other practices and support with child care would be like co-sleeping and close physical contact. So this would happen with like mothers. It would happen with other mothers. It would happen with children. They would all like sleep with like in the same bed as one another, and this would help to foster secure attachment within the child. Okay, but in terms of rites and rituals of passage, um, there would be ceremonies to mark stages of life and this really does foster a sense of belonging, to ensure the children are really integrated into the tribe's social fabric. It would be mentorship. Guess what? There will be elders there with so much life experience that they would be able to mentor children in survival skills, spiritual practices and, just like the tribe's oral history, being able to pass down those stories. You know so, even if you didn't have anybody in your immediate family, there would be a woman in there where you could go to and you could receive mentorship or advice from and confide in.

Speaker 1: 10:50

Okay, you know some examples of collective child care in. You know, child care in tribal societies is the, the sand people of southern southern africa. So these are the sand or the bushmen, and they are in the kalari desert and the children that are raised in a really close-knit community. The mothers breastfeed other babies for several years and children are allowed to pay freely and learning from their surroundings and community members. There are indigenous communities in the Amazon where they cooperatively child rear. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, all pay a kibble in raising the tribe. Children often, you know, live in close proximity to shed, you know, shed home. And then we have Native American tribes as well where we have communal child rearing is really, really common and the idea of clan extends far beyond the nuclear family. So nuclear family is often like your mum, your dad, the children. This is about us engaging with the wilder family network and community again. So we have these tribes in existence today that still do the collective child rearing.

Speaker 1: 12:03

And you know research says that collective child rearing reduces stress and anxiety for for the parents. Okay, so when we're looking at the benefits of this, we're talking about resilience and security. With many strong caregivers in the community, there's such a big, deep sense of social connectiveness and security, the skill sharing. They learn how to become adults, they gain perspective on survival, culture, social interaction. You know it's more balanced workload for mothers, like the sharing of responsibility. You know they get to balance their roles as mothers, workers and community members. But you know you don't have that now, like and this is where I'm talking about going into the second part of the podcast, because I feel like it's beautiful like how this collective well-being would be and how the well-being of the women and the children would be intertwined with the entire tribe's well-being, like and decisions around child rearing would be made collectively, ensuring that the needs of the children are met and in alignment with the cultural values and communal norms of the tribe.

Speaker 1: 13:10

Right, but now we don't really have that. We have so much stuff where we are literally doing so many things. We're having to really try hard to do all of these things which I just talked about, as one person. Well, you know, we live in a world now where women have the most rights that we've ever had, but we're also the most fucking miserable too. This is what us research says. Okay, it's not me just making shit up. This is based in research. Why? Because not only are we having all of these extra rights which we wanted which is great we also have the expectation that we need to do everything as well. And guess what? Our nervous system is not built to fucking do everything. We are not built to work nine to five for a star, let alone have a side hustle, have two kids, have a car, have a house, have a husband, have the dog, do all of the things. Take your kids to all of the, the after-school clubs and be the best mum and do all of this like it's just absolutely fucking impossible.

Speaker 1: 14:06

There's a reason why we used to have gender norms and why we had gender roles in society because it was based on our nervous system and our nervous system you know disposition. So our nervous system for men is a lot different to women. Men have a much wider capacity for trauma and stress when women don't. That's it nervous system. That's it. That's not me making it up, that's a scientific fact. Okay, we just do not have the same bandwidth.

Speaker 1: 14:33

Um, so with, uh, with mothers, this comes back to, like the oppression wound. Right, we have oppression wound in terms of like, so the oppression wound is something that we've had for a really, really long time as women. Okay, it's just mutated into something fucking different, okay, because now we're not oppressed through maybe we're not able to vote. We're oppressed through, like, our job opportunities. We're oppressed through the expectation on us as women. There is, you know, an unrealistic standard of women has always existed and it's, but it's just evolved through time, right when we've come into this modern society, rather in comparison to being in a community vibe, and I feel like you know the focus on mothers. Now we are like, we, like I talk like from a woman's perspective.

Speaker 1: 15:25

Women are really responsible for so much, which is both spoken and unspoken, which I think is really important to to acknowledge that. You know, yeah, there are some things that it's just expected of us and when we go back to like, I don't know, 1950s, where we had the housewives, you know, everyone kind of always associates this with oppression, and it was, but also there's a part of us as well where we were actually really valued and appreciated for doing all the cooking for the, the child rearing, for the washing, for everything that we did to run the household. Now we are expected to do that whilst having a nine to five, whilst being the best mum, whilst being all of these other things okay. And the idea that if you take fuck all from this podcast that you just take with you, is that it's impossible for one person to meet the needs of another 100% of the time. We don't expect it from anybody else in our lives, by the way, father comes close, so we expect him to meet some of our needs, but the woman is always held to a higher standard, especially as a mother.

Speaker 1: 16:23

So I have worked with thousands of mothers over the time and the most heartbreaking thing is that after obviously, I talk about this with my friends as well who are also mothers, but the thing that they reported the most after having a baby is isolations, feeling of loneliness, going into that postpartum depression, you know, and especially like feeling this even more when their partner goes back to work, experiencing massive anxiety when their partner goes back to work because they're isolated with their baby. Okay, this never used to be the case and I feel so sad that our women suffer in silence and they pull themselves together and they get on with it and they talk about the like, not even remembering the first year of their child's life, because they were just so busy existing and meeting the needs of their child and trying to do it 100% of the time, and I just kind of feel like that's really heartbreaking. You know, some of the women I've spoken to should never have gone through things and dealt with it in isolation. The amount of women I've talked to about baby loss, miscarriage, raising a child, where they are having postpartum depression, and part of me wonders like, would you have had that depression if we were in a community where you could allow yourself to have a night's sleep because your auntie is happy to take care of the child or you know you have that support around you in terms of like being able to know that, whatever happens, you are safe and secure and other people can take the lead.

Speaker 1: 17:48

When you can't, and where you have time to to go back and just recalibrate yourself because, don't forget, having a baby is a trauma. Okay, now don't slag me for this. Having a baby is one of the. Okay, don't slag me for this. Having a baby is one of the most amazing and beautiful things in the world, but it's also the most fucking traumatic thing that you can go through. Why? Because your body goes through a massive trauma of birthing a child. You also release an organ that you grew, which you know like fucking huge thing, and then you're expected to take care of that baby from day dot.

Speaker 1: 18:19

Guess what? In a tribe setting, that would not be the case. You would give birth, you would have time to recover. You wouldn't be expected to like be there on front ready to meet baby's needs 100% of the time straight away. There would be people there who could look after baby and could encourage you to have that secure attachment with the baby the minute that it was born. But no, we give birth and especially imagine like covid times where women were giving birth in isolation, not even with their partners present. You're giving birth in a room for the strangers, where there's no emotional safety.

Speaker 1: 18:49

Like this is trauma and it's important to acknowledge it as trauma. Okay, and if you don't define it as trauma or traumatic experience for you, I'm not talking about words in your mouth, but what I'm trying to say is when we're talking about trauma, we're talking about a situation that completely overwhelms you as a person, and having a baby does that. You give birth to this tiny human and you realize, fuck, I'm responsible for this tiny human that will never stop growing for the rest of my life. You know, it's not not just until they're 18, okay, okay. And you know, raising a human is hard, and I'm talking about this from a perspective of like, when you're a mother yourself, but also when you're dealing with your own mother wounds, where you're trying to heal the relationship with your mother. It's about meeting it in the context of like. It doesn't disregard their behaviours as mothers, but I hope it helps to inspire compassion because there weren't a community around your mother. There wasn't a community there. There was so much societal pressure on your mother and she was forced to be in isolation when actually what she really needed was a community around her to support you, and what you needed was a community around you.

Speaker 1: 19:55

And I think, like it's okay to acknowledge that a single person, even though that they tried their best, it wasn't good enough, and this is so hard for a woman to accept and even hard for a child to process, because you're like, why isn't my mum just showing up for me in the way that I need? Because she doesn't have the emotional capacity to, because she doesn't have the physical capability to, because she's been through her own trauma and she's reap, she's parenting you the way that she she was parenting, because that is traditionally what would have been passed down in a tribe. Okay, so she's following that and it's you that's realizing. Okay, this isn't right and I don't feel good about it, and that's okay as well. Okay, as an adult, you get to decide. You get to decide to heal your pain and to heal your family line and to change the trajectory of it.

Speaker 1: 20:37

Okay, you get to decide to accept what's happened has happened. You don't have a time machine, you can't go back and you can let go of the pain for you, for your mum, for the oppression, for the woman wound, for everything that's showing up for you. Okay, because that's absolutely it. Like, when you hang on to all of this stuff, the only person that is suffering is you. You know, we don't know how other people feel and we can guess and we can understand and understand by speaking to them, but it's your responsibility to take radical action to help yourself, because you deserve to heal. Your family line deserves to heal, because we don't live in that community vibe anymore. We don't. You know, we had we relied on one person to do it for like to meet all our needs for 100% of our time. Like that is mad. That is absolutely mad and nobody is perfect. Okay, and when we work with our mother wounds, we work with our healing on our ancestral line, we work to heal the women who walked before us. But, like, heal the daughters who will walk after us.

Speaker 1: 21:33

Okay, or even if you decide not to have children, you may decide to just influence people in your life. Don't forget, like, healing is a ripple effect. You do the healing, then you might be able to highlight something to somebody else. Then they go oh, I'm going to look at this, and then they start to heal and then they say it to somebody else and guess what? This creates a ripple effect across the world and across your society, across your community, where you start these ripple effects, where you end up healing so many more people because you've decided to take the step to heal.

Speaker 1: 22:03

Right, and we recognize, like you know, that good enough wasn't good enough with our parents, okay, with our mom, with our dads, but especially our mom. I really want to focus in on mom because my mother wound uh, mini mind is coming out soon and I really want to talk about why, why, why I'm so passionate about this. Okay, and this is a reason why and you know, when we recognize that good enough wasn't good enough, for so many reasons, because of how our mom was parented, for the way that she didn't decide to change, for the, for the community that she didn't have, like, this is the most powerful work you will ever do in your life, and this is the work that you do once and then you can literally put it to the side and then not worry about it again, because you would have pulled it out, you would have looked at it, you would have healed it and you get to put it back. So this is why I wanted to talk about this today. I really wanted to just acknowledge why gender roles are really important to me, why the community is really important to me, and, yeah, I feel like this it does take a village to raise a child and I just feel really passionate about this and I really wanted to sit down and talk about this for a really long time, so I'm really grateful to be able to sit down and talk about this.

Speaker 1: 23:10

If this has resonated with you in any way, shape or form, please do let me know. I always love to know your thoughts about the podcast. It just makes me like, well, it makes me feel recognized, which I obviously need as a fucking emotional projector in my human design. But also, like I want to know if I've helped you. I want to know if I've helped change your perspective on something like I just want to know.

Speaker 1: 23:29

So, yeah, if you want, if you would, let me know, that would be great. Um, you know where to find me. Instagram is the place I hang out most, but you can find me on LinkedIn, instagram, send an email. I would love to hear your thoughts on this podcast and, yeah, I'm going to leave it there for now. If you need anything at all, give me a shout. Lots of love. Hey guys, before we jump into this controversial as fuck episode, I really just want to talk to you about my brand new mother wound mini mind that is coming out in October. So this is going to be for you if you really want to work on healing your mother wound.