Why Does the Mother Wound Surface During Awakening? (Transcript)

Episode transcript, ShelbyRADIO · 26 minutes

Short answer: The mother wound surfaces during a spiritual awakening because awakening increases your awareness. It doesn't create the wound; it reveals what was already there. We all carry a maternal imprint from the woman who carried us, and it shapes how we love, how we do relationships and how safe we feel. When you stop living on autopilot, those patterns become visible, so you can understand them and choose differently. This isn't about blaming your mother. It's about seeing the pattern clearly.

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Key takeaways

• Working with the mother wound is not about blaming your mother or labeling anyone good or bad. It's about understanding patterns.
• We all carry a maternal imprint, formed energetically and emotionally while we lived inside the body of the woman who carried us.
• The mother wound is often not what happened to you, but what didn't happen that you needed: emotional absence, control, inconsistency, conditional love or unmet emotional needs.
• Awakening doesn't create the wound. It reveals it, because you stop operating on autopilot and begin to see your patterns.
• It can show up as stronger triggers in relationships, feeling unseen or misunderstood, questioning your worth, and anxiety.
• You are not responsible for how you were shaped, but you are responsible for what you do with the awareness.

Full transcript

Lightly edited for reading.

When old emotional patterns surface (00:00)

Have you ever felt a calling, something deep, something you can't quite explain, that's urging you to step into a higher version of yourself?

As you move deeper into your awakening, something starts to happen that most people do not expect. It's not just your life changing, and it's not just your relationships shifting. It's your emotional patterns that start to surface, and for many people, this leads back to one place: the relationship you had with your mother.

Welcome to ShelbyRADIO. I am Shelby Carino, and we are going to have a conversation about the mother wound, the awakening process, and why the mother wound shows up when you begin to change.

This is not about blaming your mother (01:24)

I'm glad you're here, and I'm going to start by saying this is not about blaming your mother. This is not about labeling anyone who may be the mother figure in your life as good or bad. What this is about is understanding patterns.

The fact of the matter is that we all come from a maternal imprint, and that imprint shapes how we see ourselves, how we do love and how we do our relationships.

Why women hesitate to look at the maternal piece (02:20)

I want to settle with this for a moment, because I have an entire course built around this one topic, all about healing the maternal bond. As I have moved through this work with clients, they're always a little hesitant, especially women, to dive into the maternal piece.

Either they have a really good relationship with their mother, and they're scared that if they bring awareness to this maternal imprint, it will undo something in the relationship. Or they are estranged from their mothers, and they don't want to bring up the wound because they think they've healed it, and they don't want to open things they believe are already closed.

What I gently remind them is that nothing is ever going to show up for you that you're not ready to have show up.

The energetic imprint from the womb (03:44)

We all have a maternal side to us, male or female, whatever body you're in. Whether your biological mother raised you or an adoptive parent did, and whether or not you even know who your biological mother is, is really beside the point. At the end of the day, we all have an energetic foundation in the female who carried us in her body for an extended amount of time.

We all lived within that female's body energetically, emotionally and physically. We heard that mother's thoughts and felt her energy of fear, joy, sadness and anger. That is where the entire structure of our body of energy formed. We didn't just form a physical body with arms and legs, eyes and ears and hair. We were also formed energetically and emotionally.

So it's only logic, paired with some common sense, that we are going to run patterns the way our mother did, the female who carried us into existence. We are going to play out those patterns.

Understanding the pattern instead of labeling it (06:32)

This isn't about blaming the woman who carried you onto the planet for why things happen in your life. And we don't need to label a pattern as good or bad. We just need to understand what the pattern is, so we can reframe it energetically, emotionally, physically and spiritually.

That way we can get to the imprint we want for ourselves: how we want to do love in our world and how we want to do relationships. When you come at it from that perspective, there should ideally be a desire to dive into the maternal bond, really look at it, pick it apart, see what the patterns are and compare them to the patterns in your life now. What works and what doesn't work?

Even close relationships carry an imprint (07:28)

I have spoken to so many women who say, "Oh, I have a great relationship with my mom. I talk to her every day. She comes for every birthday, every holiday." Yet there's always that "yeah, but." "We're a little too close." "I don't feel like I can tell her things." "Sometimes I just don't answer the phone, because I need a minute and she's calling me all the time."

We do this little mental thing to make ourselves okay with something we may not be okay with. Even if it looks fine, internally we go, "This isn't really healthy for me. It's a little too much. I want some separation. We're a little too emotionally codependent with each other."

Then there are women who have no relationship with their mothers and don't even know who their mothers are. Maybe they were adopted. I've had many clients in that scenario who wish they could learn who their mother is or what her genealogy was. So there are two sides of the spectrum, depending on your life around that maternal imprint, and it's unique to each person.

Behind every imprint is a wound (09:20)

So awareness of this mother imprint is what's important. And yes, behind the imprint, guaranteed, there's going to be a wound. There always is. That's the point of this entire waking-up process: discovering what that is.

Just because the maternal imprint carries a series of information for you, it doesn't always mean there's trauma or abuse attached to it, especially directed at you. The mother wound can show up as a feeling of emotional absence from your mother, too much control coming from that maternal figure, or inconsistency in how your mother has shown up in your world.

Sometimes there's conditional love: "I will give you this if you do this." And there can be unmet emotional needs. So the mother wound is not always what happened to us. It's often what didn't happen that you actually needed, and that affects how you attract certain people into your world in the form of relationships.

My story with my mother (11:12)

I have spoken a lot about my mother and my relationship with her over time. I even forgave her in my books Soul Freedom and Soul Freedom Companion, when I was on my 48-day forgiveness journey.

At 52 years old now, looking back on my life with different perspectives, yes, I went through an initial period of being mad at my mother without knowing I was mad at my mother. A psychic told me I was very mad at my mother, and I said, "No, I'm not." I was living at my mom and dad's house after my divorce from my first husband when I was 30.

When I was living inside the family home, I knew I wanted to pull away from my mother, because I didn't ever want to go back to the family home. Basically, I got married the first time to get away from my mother. But did I know all of this at the time? No. I didn't know it until I went down the spiritual awakening path and this mother imprint opened up.

Of course, reflections of my mother started to come up. I could see my mother's life and what she went through. I could even remember certain things from when I was in utero, because I could see and feel back to that time.

When a mother chooses to stay in her patterns (13:04)

Even though my journey took me to being estranged from my mother, that wasn't because I was seeking to be estranged. I was seeking better alignment with my mother, to create a better foundational relationship with her.

What I realized as I went through my awakening journey was that my mother chose to stay in her patterns. She did not become a willing participant alongside me to do the mother-daughter work and keep the relationship going. If anything, she began blaming me for everything going astray.

That is where I went into a deeper maternal wound and a deeper healing. How could my mother blame me, when I'm just walking out what was imprinted within me? That led me to learning about emotional manipulation and emotional control, the inconsistency of conversations, and the conditions: "If you come in, I'll give you this. If you don't, I'm not going to give you that."

And I realized these emotional needs weren't met for me because they weren't met for my own mother when she was growing up. So I had to get to a place of acceptance in that awareness. It wasn't that I didn't try to bring her back in. It just wasn't good for her to come back in, because of the imprint her mother left on her. That was hers to be in now, and it no longer had to do with me. True unconditional love, even for your mother, is respecting her journey while you're waking up in yours.

How the imprint shapes your identity (15:52)

That mother imprint does shape our identity, because that's where we learned how to be loved, how to be accepted and how to be safe. And this creates patterns like people-pleasing, over-giving, fear of rejection if we don't do something, and emotional shutdown.

So we need to remind ourselves that we didn't just grow up within this. We adapted to these imprints.

Why it shows up now (16:48)

The question I had to ask myself when I first started waking up my energy and consciousness was, "Why is this showing up now?" Then I got to a place of, "Oh, it's always been there. I just wasn't ready to see it, or I didn't have the right tools yet to address it."

The reason it shows up so much more during your awakening process is that awakening your energy and consciousness increases your awareness. I talk about awareness everywhere, because awakening brings awareness to things we may not have wanted to be aware of before. We stop operating on autopilot, where we're just doing this, and this, and this. We stop, and we begin to see the patterns very clearly.

Awakening reveals the wound (18:12)

So awakening doesn't create the wound. The wound is already there. Awakening reveals it. Let that sink in.

Your nervous system begins processing what is now waking up in your auric field, that spiritual energy of yours that was formed through the body of your mother. The nervous system wakes up and goes, "Oh, I need to start doing something with this." That's why old emotional responses begin to surface.

This can come through in the form of anxiety, like feeling someone is sitting on your chest. These are the moments when you really need to get into doing the work, and you don't have to do it alone. You just have to get to a place of accepting help and seeing a different way to understand energy and frequency. Anxiety didn't just happen, and there are ways to harmonize it. We have to get back to the energetic structure of healing and harmonization.

How the mother energy shows up in relationships (20:32)

When the mother energy comes in, you begin to feel triggered in your relationships. You react more strongly to people than you expected to. You feel like nobody sees you or that you're misunderstood all the time. You begin questioning whether you're good enough: "Do I bring any kind of worth to my job, my family, my relationships?"

None of this is overreacting. You're not overreacting. You're recognizing that something that's always been there is still there. Hence the awareness.

The hard truth about becoming a new version of you (21:28)

I even stumbled on the word "truth" just now. Isn't that what happens in awakening? We stumble on the truth.

So the hard truth is this: you can't really become a new version of yourself without understanding what shaped the old version of yourself, and that is directly linked to the maternal energy. This is never about staying stuck in it. We don't want you stuck. Absolutely not. This is about awareness leading to a choice, so you can harmonize the wound in your own maternal energy that stemmed from what you were born into.

Awareness is the beginning of the healing, and you don't have to repeat the patterns. You will until you don't, but you can choose differently. You are not responsible for how you were shaped, but you are responsible for what you do with the awareness of what shaped you.

It's not random, and it's not here to break you (22:52)

If this is coming up for you right now in your process, it is not random. It's not happening to break you. It's happening so you can see clearly. And when you can see clearly, you can choose differently.

If this really hit home for you today, I encourage you to look at the Healing Maternal Bonds course and just read about it. Even if it's hard for you just to click on the page, maybe that's your first step.

The mother is such a powerful energy within us that we have to want to address it within ourselves in order to address it outside of ourselves. That's what makes us stronger women and better mothers, because we're going where a lot of times we don't want to go. But that's what we have to do.

Thank you for listening. Remember, the journey doesn't end here. It's only the beginning. I'll see you on the path.

Frequently asked questions

What is the mother wound?

The mother wound comes from the maternal imprint we all carry from the woman who carried us. It can show up as emotional absence, too much control, inconsistency, conditional love or unmet emotional needs, and it's often about what didn't happen that you needed rather than what did.

Why does the mother wound come up during a spiritual awakening?

Awakening increases your awareness and takes you off autopilot, so patterns that were always there become visible. Awakening doesn't create the wound; it reveals it so you can choose differently.

Can I have a mother wound if I have a good relationship with my mom?

Yes. Many women with close relationships still notice signs like feeling a little too close, not being able to share certain things, or needing space from frequent contact. Looking at the imprint is about understanding patterns, not blaming your mother or damaging the relationship.

What are the signs the mother wound is surfacing?

Common signs include feeling more triggered in relationships, reacting more strongly than you expected, feeling unseen or misunderstood, questioning your worth, and anxiety, such as a heavy feeling on your chest. If anxiety or physical symptoms feel intense, please also talk with your doctor.

Where to go next

• Start here: my free 16-minute audio, When You Don't Feel Like Yourself
• The course: Healing Maternal Bonds, healing the mother wound
• Listen next: The Emotional Inheritance: What Happens When Parents Don't Heal
• Work with me one-on-one: private sessions