To further illustrate a profoundly dark truth that is often forbidden:
Severe mother wounds are not necessarily caused solely by a mother’s anger or violence—though faults and the human factor are real, such anger usually emerges later, not in infancy. The anger/idealization loop typically surfaces during moments of separation, particularly when the child attempts to reclaim or engulf the mother, seeking reunion with the source of life. Such demands can feel overwhelming for the mother, who must protect her own autonomy and boundaries. In response, she may express anger or rejection, which the child experiences as a profound wound. She was forced to traumatize the child with separation, which becomes her guilt shadow. This dynamic underscores the paradox that the deepest mother wounds often arise not from neglect or cruelty, but from the very intensity of the bond and the mother’s need to maintain her separateness.
Unintuitively, the most severe wounds can actually arise from highly attuned, loving care, such as: a hand placed over the heart with reassurance, the light rubbing of nose to nose, kisses on the forehead, reassuring touch where life force is felt through the hand, or heart-to-heart holding. When this brilliance is lost, the child experiences despair or rage at the absence of such connection. Yet, paradoxically, this wound is necessary for the child to “become the other.”
If one is flooded with high-current love, the loss of this love can create the most intense wounds.
When the current is that pure and complete, the child does not perceive the mother as a separate person; instead, he experiences her as the entire universe of safety and aliveness.
If you observe your adult style of intimate relational affection, the gestures you gravitate toward (the examples listed above) are the living template of your mother’s love, carried within you through imprinting. These are the echoes of your time with her in infancy reverberating into your present and future.
The shadow is the psychic space where the fear and pain of existential separation (the internalized experience of “death” when the nurturing connection is lost) reside. If left unintegrated, it perpetually replays the same oscillating script whenever one experiences affection that reactivates the original circuits formed before the sense of a separate self emerged.
To distill its essence: She engulfed me in the highest current of bliss I had ever known, and I resented her when she forced me to separate and face the death of our union. Love can wound just as much or perhaps more than neglect. It felt as though it was existence itself that betrayed me.
The deepest wound comes not from neglect or abuse, but from the collapse of a perfect relational unity that once felt like the whole universe. I was banished from heaven.
Life is ‘hell’—suffering, death, and the world itself—because it is measured against the state from which we emerged: heaven.
The layer of the abyss represents the symbols the psyche uses to convey the horror of that separation.
So when the infant (inevitably) tries to crawl back into the original oneness (physically clinging, emotionally flooding, refusing any boundary), the mother is faced with an impossible choice:
Whatever volume she uses, the child experiences it as cosmic betrayal and annihilation, because from the infant’s side the attempt to return was literally a bid to stay alive. So the spectrum is not “some mothers are good, some are bad.” It is every mother being forced to choose between: her own sovereignty and the child’s illusion of eternal oneness.
There is no clean exit from that dilemma. Every solution wounds someone. That is the original tragedy written into the hardware of being a mammal with a separate body.
The only variable is the degree and flavour of the wound:
But the wound itself is built into the design of individuation. No one escapes.