A Woman with a 'Mother Wound' Walks into a Bar...
"Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes." Carl Jung, Letters
I’ve been a fan of “walks into a bar” jokes since I first heard one. For ex., a horse walks into a bar. Bartender asks, “why the long face?” But, the more of them I hear, I realized they are all really corny. Another notable thing is there don’t appear to be any with “a woman walks into a bar…” I may have outgrown them, though not the animal or string ones.
So hypothetically, a woman is walking into a bar to meet a friend to catch up and have a drink after a challenging day. She’s early. Her friend isn’t there yet. But, in the interest of this piece, play along with the following. She’s looking around, playing an old game, “if I had to go out with someone here at gunpoint, who would it be?”
Who do you think she’ll immediately be attracted to:
A. a man who’s appears available, attractive, conversational, and centers her, listens with interest
B. a man seems sort of available, who’s attractive, talks about himself, makes some eye contact, listens distractedly to her
C. herself and the book she brought to read while waiting for her friend who’s often late
Well, it depends on if she has worked through her ‘mother wound’.
Your next question may be what’s a ‘mother wound’ ? Well, it begins early in the mother-child relationship, where the mother doesn’t attune to the child for whatever reason - she didn’t want children so resents them, is self-absorbed and too emotionally immature to parent a child, she may still long to be a child herself - whatever the reason, the mother is unable to cross the divide of parenting a child in a loving way, creating a secure attachment for the child. There is so much written on this topic, as well as video’s, trainings, etc., one can Google ‘mother wound’ for much information on it.
The girl grows up wondering why she isn’t loved, what is wrong with her? A natural response with an indifferent primary caregiver. It’s a great source of pain and confusion for the girl. She’s fed, well-clothed, lives in a nice home, so the basics are taken care of. Later, she may go to therapy to untangle the knot, to find a way to see it objectively, to eventually learn that it has nothing to do with her, but it’s been silently handed to her as her legacy with no acknowledgment, so she has to figure all of this out on her own or with a gifted therapist, to truly get that it means nothing about her own value.
The problem for the single woman in the bar is if she hasn’t done some trauma work with a therapist looking at her repetitive patterns, she’s likely to find men who mimic her mother’s unavailability appealing, again and again. If she’s unaware why she’s attracted to unavailable men (because they are most like her unavailable mother), then subconsciously, she’s trying to heal that old relationship now in a new relationship, trying to change the old outcome in the present.
But, that is not going to work for several reasons.
One, she needs to heal her own relationship to her past, and not via (an unsuspecting) proxy.
Two, with a man who is also unavailable, he may appear available at first, but as soon as his fear of vulnerability gets triggered, he’ll pull back, remaining just as out of reach as her mother had been. So it’ll be just as gut wrenchingly frustrating as it had been with her non-committal mother. That’s repetition compulsion illustrated: she’s compulsively drawn to less available men because they feel like home (“I feel like I’ve known you forever)”), it repeats, and nothing truly changes for her.
You see, the unavailable guy has his own unconscious core wound driving his avoidance. From a young age he learned to disconnect from his emotions as a survival instinct, having grown up in an environment where his emotional needs were not consistently met, so in a way, it mirrors her experience. But, he adapted by suppressing his needs to avoid the pain of unmet expectations. Over time, that behavior became second nature. numbing him to deeper emotional experiences leading to wounds that exist beneath the surface, outside of his conscious awareness. So, unless a life event triggers him to want to awaken, he’ll always be out of reach to her, and sadly, to himself, too.
He adapted by disconnecting from his feelings, being in his head, and she adapted by attuning to others and their needs, not to her own. She struggles to find her own feelings.
Girls who were raised with a mother-wound learn to read people very well, because their survival depends on it. They are extremely good at sensing if someone is authentic or not, bullshit detecting, because they had to learn how to read their primary caregiver. The mother may appear caring publicly, for anyone who may be looking, but privately has little love to spare, which is very confusing for a child, so detecting and attuning becomes part of the girl’s typical experience. If there’s a silver lining to all this, it’s that she can easily read people.
Let’s highlight the dark side that pops up for the girl, too. Problems erupt for the girl as she hopes to be loved for herself, so she may over-give, having learned from her mother that relationships are transactional. She feels she has to earn love. She can’t fathom “why someone would love you just for who you are,” because she wasn’t. She may feel that she can save one of these avoidant men, by understanding him and showing him to himself, but that’s a fools errand. You can only be met by someone who has willingly gone beneath their own surface, to learn who they are, in order to become who they want to be.
So, if she’s done the work of moving through her own trauma, “at gun point” she’ll choose
A. a man who’s available, attractive, conversational, centers her, listens with interest.
Having taken the necessary steps to recognize her own dead-end patterns, she no longer notices unavailable men on her radar - their appeal has evaporated because their unavailability tells her she can’t be met. So B. isn’t an option.
I’m a hypnotist and a certified coach. If you’d like my help to advance in a part of your life, the first step is to have a 45 minute consult call to talk about what you want to change and to see if we are a good fit, too.
https://calendly.com/allison_evans/consult-call