Did You Get a Broken Mommy?

Don’t Let That Stop You From Loving Yourself!

Your mother was supposed to love you, teach you, and protect you, yes?

If she didn’t, you are not broken. She was.

That’s the whole thesis of Susan Forward’s “Mothers Who Can’t Love,” and it’s the same thing I tell clients every week. You can inherit a wound without inheriting a flaw. Those are two different things, and most people spend decades confusing them.

WHERE THE WOUND ACTUALLY STARTS

My own mother was a War Bride. One of ten children, raised in Australia, with seven brothers off fighting in Europe while her two sisters, both nurses like her, were stationed in Singapore. One died there. The other spent four years in a Japanese concentration camp.

Then my father showed up. Twenty-three, tall, handsome, a paratrooper who would be dropped into Japanese-held islands to kill boys he’d never met.

Two people built entirely out of survival, falling in love in the midst of hell. Call it romance if you want. I call it trauma bonding with a wedding ring.

Those two young souls didn’t have a chance, did they?

My older sister, Val, was born in officers’ wives’ military housing and bonded so tightly with my mother that she never fully separated from her. Enmeshment isn’t closeness. It’s two nervous systems that never learned where one person ends, and the other begins.

I didn’t choose that history. Neither did my mother. Neither did my sister. That’s the point.

LAST NIGHT’S CLIENT

I worked with a client last night whose parents were fifteen and seventeen when she was born.

Fine, if you’re in a tribe. If there’s a village around you to catch the baby everyone else helped make. A disaster if your mother hands you off and keeps partying as nothing happened.

Her mother couldn’t love her. Not because she was evil. Because she was a child who never got parented herself, having a child of her own. You cannot teach what you were never taught. You cannot give what you don’t have.

That client didn’t come to me broken. She came to me exhausted, from spending her whole life trying to prove she deserved something her mother was never equipped to give in the first place.

THIS IS WHERE PAST-LIFE WORK CHANGES EVERYTHING

I found my own way through unexpectedly in a past-life regression.

In one of my many past lives, I was a powerful Incan priest. My job was to behead a vanquished rival king so his tribe would know that they now belonged to ours. Four warriors dragged him to me, struggling. I pulled up his head by his long, black hair to finish the ceremony.

Voila! It was my mother! No wonder she hated me.

I don’t know if some part of me wanted her forgiveness for that lifetime. She never gave it, not in this life. Maybe that isn’t the point. The point is, I understood in my body that we have been circling each other across lifetimes, doing damage in both directions. That’s not an excuse. It’s context. And context is what lets forgiveness in the door.

THE NEUROSCIENCE OF NOT BEING BROKEN

Here’s what twenty-five years of hypnotherapy and Cognitive Behavioral work has taught me: the brain that grew up starved of maternal love adapted. It got hypervigilant, or shut down, or learned to perform for scraps of approval. That adaptation was intelligent. It kept you alive.

It is also not permanent. Neuroplasticity means the brain that adapted to a broken mother can rewire around a different truth: I was never the one who was incapable of love. She was.

A WRITING EXERCISE, IF YOU WANT ONE

Susan Forward’s work includes reprogramming exercises, and I use a version of this with clients:

Write a letter to your mother that you will never send. Tell her exactly what you needed and didn’t get. Then write the letter back, in her voice, but only the true parts: what she was carrying, what she never had, what she couldn’t hand you because no one had ever handed it to her.

You are not excusing her. You are locating her in your body, mind, and soul. Once she has a location, she stops living inside every relationship you’ll ever have.

READY TO PUT IT DOWN?

You did not get to choose your mother, her history, or what she was capable of giving you. You do get to choose whether her limitations become your identity.

Through hypnotherapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Past-Life Regression, we can find where the story actually started, so you can finally close the book on it. If you’re ready to begin your journey to heal, please call me:

(323) 933-4377

Sending hope,

Stephanie