Episode 88: Healing the Mother Wound with Michelle Roberton

In this episode with returning guest Michelle Roberton, we…

share examples of how mother wounding shows up in our lives
discuss Good Girl Programming as a “symptom” of mother wounding
talk about how mothers pass on body image issues
discuss the subtleties of mother wounding, even in people who would say they have a good relationship with their mothers
discuss our responsibilities as adult women to recognize how our behaviors stem from mother wounding and what we can sovereignly do to heal
talk about the powerful shift in our own mothering of our children when we work with and heal our mother wounds
discuss the healing power of sharing with our own mothers
talk about the necessary grief we must feel about not having the mothers we needed and deserved
discuss how we as mothers may overcompensate or with our own children to “make up for” our lack of adequate mothering
discuss how mother wounding affects our sexuality

This Episode’s Guest

Michelle has shared with her work with many, for 19 years, specialising in Sexual Trauma & Intimacy as a Tantric educator, body worker and counsellor for adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Her passion stems from her own journey of discovering the medicine in the poison as she set it upon herself to reclaim her body, her breath, her sexuality and sensuality and express that in new, life enriching ways.

Michelle very much believes that our mind can only take us so far into any release of body trauma and healing of our sexuality. The discovery of who we authentically are is not hidden in our thoughts but in the sensuality and home of our body. Her touch has been described by many as her gift to others. Her gentle, authentically honest & calming approach, a comforting breath of fresh air.

Michelle lives in the colourful, vibrant city of Brighton with her four superstar children.

Transcript

Hello friends. Welcome back to the holistic trauma healing podcast. I’m super grateful. You are here. It’s been a minute since I’ve had the energy to put a podcast episode out into the world, but today is a special day because today it has been exactly two years since I started this podcast. So here we are two years and 87 episodes later. And what a wonderful free resource. This is like, I am so proud of this podcast.

I’m so grateful for all of the guests that I’ve had on the show for the past two years. And all the wisdom that has been shared. All the healing that has been shared all the, uh, personal journeys that have been shared that are hard, but that resonate with people. I’m just so thankful that I’ve been able to be talking into this microphone for two years.

And putting out what I feel is a really stellar show. So I’m really grateful that you’re here and I’m grateful for this podcast. And in this episode, I have Michelle Robertson returning. Um, this is her second time on the show. The last time she was on the show, we talked about sexual trauma and healing and why.

We’re not broken, quote unquote broken. Um, and that was such a powerful episode for me. Um, and I got a lot of really amazing feedback on that show as well. And let me see what episode was that just in case, just in case you want to go back and listen to it so you can get a taste for what. Michelle. And I talk about, um, that’s episode 73, episode 73 with Michelle Robertson is called you are not broken and embodied approach to healing, sexual trauma.

Um, and in this episode I had Michelle come back on the podcast to talk about the mother wound. And I, um, it’s interesting timing that I’m putting the show out right now, because I recently got back from. Two weeks in Texas, I was taking care of my mom after she had back surgery. And, um, Boy, was that an opportunity for me to, uh, work on some mother wound stuff?

Um, so my mom had back surgery, uh, as a really major back surgery. Actually, it was not, it was not a small thing. It was a big deal. And I have only seen my mom twice in the last four years. And COVID had a lot to do with that, obviously. Um, so I haven’t seen my mom since the fall of 2020. And so it had been two years since I’d seen her.

And only the second time I’d seen her in four years and holy shit, I am like. I’m a different person than I was four years ago, for sure. I’m even a different person in a lot of ways than I was two years ago. The last time I was with my mom. And so it was really interesting too. Be the observer of myself and of my mom and of my body. The entire time I was in Texas with her.

Um, Really interesting to see how I showed up and how my mom responded to how I showed up. And. It was hard. It was really hard. Um, I have a lot of mother wounds. Um, I have a lot of trauma from my mother. In fact, Um, I’ve shared on the podcast before. And my stepfather was like a narcissistic physically and emotionally abusive man. And he used to hit us with a belt and he would leave bruises and marks on our bodies.

And that was really shitty, of course, but it was like, I knew that that was wrong. Like I had an understanding that what he was doing was not okay. Even though I was too little to fight back or run away from it. But the trauma with my mom is actually a lot more complex. It’s the complex PTSD that Pete Walker, who’s the author of my favorite book, complex PTSD, which I’ll put in the show notes.

Um, that’s where my complex PTSD comes from is actually from my mom. And because the way that she interacted with me was not as it wasn’t as obvious as the abuse from my stepfather, like I could, I could see what my stepfather was doing and be able to say, this is abusive. I understood that it was abusive. But with my mom, she wasn’t chasing me around the house with a belt.

She wasn’t screaming at me. Um, she was kind of the opposite. She would go into a freeze response and her way of dealing with conflict or. Discomfort was to become passive aggressive and give me the silent treatment. And so that has stuck with me and stuck inside my body for a very, very long time. And I’ve done a lot of work around it, and I’ve even had conversations with my mom about

And she acknowledges that she was that way and that she doesn’t know why she was that way. And I have so much compassion because I recognize now, like my mom was totally disembodied. She was completely not able to regulate her own nervous system. She didn’t even have the language of dysregulation or trauma responses in her vocabulary.

Like there was no self-awareness, there was no consciousness being practiced. Like. It was on autopilot all the time. And so I have so much compassion for my mom because it’s like, I finally did get to a place where it’s like, it’s unfair for me to continue asking my mom for something that she doesn’t have.

Um, And so that was really healing for the mother wounds. And it was really interesting to go back to Texas and spend two weeks with my mom taking care of her. And to observe myself and her and the dynamics and you know, some of her passive aggressiveness did come back up. Some of her silent treatment did come back up and it was really.

I keep using the word interesting, which I feel is like a non word, but I can’t think of another word to use. It was just interesting. And I was so curious about it, even though there were moments of me feeling angry and me feeling hurt. And, um, my mom crossing some boundaries and me having to set those boundaries. Like that was all happening too.

And the biggest. Mindfuck for me during that time was on the one hand. I was like, okay, my mom has just had this big back surgery. She’s in a lot of pain. She has a long road of recovery and rehabilitation in front of her. She’s on powerful narcotics to help with this pain. And I want to give her a lot of grace, a lot of understanding. I want to give her a lot of space and like not have expectations.

That she’s going to be super functional or super healthy and regulated. Like I didn’t have those expectations and I was intentionally. Reminding myself to be gracious and to be patient and all of that. And then on the flip side of that, the other part of me was like, Uh, where do I draw the line? Like where does my graciousness run out? And I have to start setting boundaries.

Am I even allowed to set boundaries with someone who’s just had surgery and is on painkillers and is kind of loopy and not remembering everything like it, it was such a mind fuck for me to be kind of caught in this binary and trying to figure out, okay, when do I give her grace and patience? And when do I say, I don’t care how much painkillers you’re on.

I need to set a boundary. You can’t speak to me that way.

So after two weeks of that, which I never actually like totally figured out what that balance was. After two weeks of that though, I was just so tired and. I came home on a Tuesday. And on a Thursday night? No, I’m sorry. On a Friday night of that week that I got home, we had friends over and we took a sauna with friends.

And at the end of the sound I had like this horrible tension headache. And I’ve gotten headaches when I’ve come out of this on, in the past. And usually it’s because I got too hot or I was a little bit dehydrated. And so I cooled off and I drank a bunch of water and I put electrolytes in my water and the headache just was not going away. So I ate some food. The headache was still not going

I went to bed that night. Normally when I fall asleep with a headache, I wake up and the headache is gone, but that is not what happened. I woke up on Saturday. The headache was still there. And there was just a lot of tension, like up in my neck, in between my shoulder blades, my Delt muscles. It felt like there were like fish hooks, like underneath my shoulder blades and along the sides of my spine and those fish hooks were just being pulled upwards into my head. And it was just very, very uncomfortable.

So I laid on a, I have a traction device that is like supposed to be really good for the curve and your neck. And so I would lay on that, that wasn’t helping the headache. I laid on my acupressure mat that wasn’t helping the headache. I even took aspirin, which I never do and not temporarily got rid of the headache, but then lo and behold, by Sunday night it came right back.

Woke up and still had the headache on Monday. And I was so tired and it was hard for me to focus. I had a couple clients that day and like, it was really difficult for me to power through with those clients, with that headache. And finally on Tuesday morning, I woke up and I was like, this is enough.

Like I need to go to the chiropractor. And my chiropractor didn’t have any openings that day. And so I literally just started calling around to all the chiropractors and the first one that was able to get me on that afternoon happened to be an hour away, which all chiropractors are an hour away from where I live, because that is the nature of living in the woods of Minnesota.

But I go to the chiropractor or this brand new chiropractor that afternoon and, um, you know, sure enough she’s new. So she wants to know my whole health history and my family health history, and like all the things. And then she was asking you about the headache and she’s like, so what’s been happening in your life recently that would be causing this headache. And I immediately knew, like I just spent two weeks with my mom that were intense and I was happy to be of service.

And to be there for my mom, but also like I was under a lot of stress to try to stay in awareness, to try to stay calm, to stay regulated in my own nervous system. Even when she was dysregulated. And like, I wasn’t always successful at that co-regulation process. And. Definitely like my inner teenager and my inner child were triggered at points. And so I was trying to meet my own needs while meeting my mom’s needs at the same time. Like it was hard.

And, you know, Sharon now she’s like, yeah, that sounds like a headache. And I’m like, yes, it does. So she did the adjustment. And for the first time in my life, I felt immediate relief. Like I walked into her office with a headache and I walked out of her office and the headache was gone and it hasn’t come back.

And now I have since decided that my body responds really well to this chiropractor and I decided to switch. And so she’s my new chiropractor. Um, which by the way, chiropractic is amazing for the nervous system. So any of you who already see a chiropractor who are thinking about seeing a chiropractor, please know that when you’re seeing a chiropractor, you are taking care of your nervous system in a really, really powerful way. So.

There’s my plug for chiropractic, I believe in it and have always believed in it. It’s amazing. So anyway. Interesting. That that is the experience I just came out of. And this podcast episode is about healing. The mother wound, like, it feels very personal for me, it feels like I can actually speak to this issue. And I do share more about my mom in this episode with Michelle. So I’m excited for you to hear this episode.

Um, I love having Michelle on the show. Her voice is like so ASMR. Um, she did have dogs in her living room while we were chatting and. And so at certain points, the dog like made some noise, um, cause he really wanted to play with a toy. But that is life. I have dogs as well, so I’m totally understanding of dogs and they’re part of the family and they have needs too. And like, we just have to go with the flow. So if the noise is distracting or whatever, just know it’s temporary. And we do overall have a really powerful conversation about healing, the mother wound.

And I hope that it is supportive of all of you out there. Who are still trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. With you on your mom. Um, the struggle is real. So I validate that and I hope that this episode is supportive in whatever you’re going through with your mom Hello, Michelle. Welcome back to the show. It’s so lovely to see you again. It’s lovely to see you too, Lindsay. So anything new in your life since the last time you were here? No. except the sun is showing in the UK oh, new and that’s wonderful. Yes. Yes, here too. That’s amazing. So we’re gonna talk about mother wounding today.

I’m excited. So let’s just dive in. What is mother wounding? I feel mother wounding is parts of ourself where we may have not been mothered in a nourishing nurturing. Way a wholesome way. And therefore we carry those wounds energetically within our psyche that may prevent us from experiencing certain things as a fully grown woman, receiving experiences, how we feel about ourselves can affect so much of who we are as a woman, even though they are resonant to the child, we were.

So what are maybe some specific examples of the way that mother wounding shows up in someone’s psyche or in their life? It may be through the simplicity of not being touched eye contact. It may be that our mother wasn’t emotionally available. It may be beliefs. We were told about ourselves.

And also while I’m saying there’s a lot of good girl syndrome, it comes from mother wounding. The way we have been informed of what it is to be a woman without us having, or a little girl without us having time to explore and express that for ourselves. A mother may have been absent in some areas of our lives or at the very worst abusive, and that may be physical or emotional or mental abuse.

As there’s many layers to how abuse can show up in our lives indeed. And of course, because we’re children, then we are really gonna absorb that’s truth. Because particularly with mothers they’re our sole carer, they’re our source of information, our source of love. And so we define ourselves upon the information that we’re getting from our primary caregivers.

Without ever checking in whether that’s truth or not, because we don’t have that available choice to us. Yeah. Our mothers are literally our first relationship, right? That’s the first relationship we’ll ever have. yeah, I respond. For anyone listening out there who is a mother that’s not to apply pressure to us because mothers are under extreme pressure in being perfect and juggling many hats in our lives.

Particularly these days where we are more than mothers, we’re business women, and so many other things in our lives. But I’ve coming from a place of sexual abuse particularly, and coming into our own womanhood and knowing what that is for ourselves. Mother wounds come up a lot in this And it may also have been nothing abusive.

It may have been just watching our mother, how she shows up in the world, how she is a as a woman, how she treats her body so there’s many layers to mother wounded. yeah. Is it okay with you if I share some of my own personal experiences with my mom? Yeah. Do okay. Of course. And so I’ll just preface this by saying that my mom and I have been able to talk about these things openly And so I’m not saying anything here that I wouldn’t say. In front of her or to her face . Because it’s like sacred to me in our relationship that before I go airing out, anybody’s dirty laundry that I’ve already dealt with it and had the responsibility and the communication and all of that involved.

And so my mom and I have had that we have an incredible relationship. She’s more a good friend to me now. But I do still text her and say, remind me how long to cook the brisket. So she’s still very much like I need her as a mom still. But a couple of my experiences as you were sharing that so one is, I remember my mom.

Always having a poor image of her body and of her appearance. And so she was always on a diet. I think one of the first diet foods that I remember was she had cases of, I don’t know if they had these in the UK, but cases of weight loss drink called slim fast yes. Do you remember that from the nineties?

yeah, so I remember my mom having cases of chocolate slim fast, and like doing weight Watchers and counting points. And at one point she did the Atkins diet and was counting carbs and just, she never wanted to be in pictures because she always thought she looked terrible or she looked fat or and to this day, if I show her a picture Hey mom, check this picture out.

And she’s in it. The first thing she says is, oh my God, I look horrible. And I always have to remind her. No you don’t. And even if you do, I would rather have you in the picture looking horrible, which you don’t, but I would rather have you in the picture looking horrible than not have any pictures of you at all.

So that’s one thing that I’m remembering about my mother, and it’s interesting that I didn’t experience body image issues. As a child or as a teenager I never had an eating disorder until I was in my late twenties. And that’s when I struggled with orthorexia. So I was never anorexic.

I didn’t starve myself. I didn’t force myself to throw up. I just had a very perfectionistic mindset around how to eat. I never connected it to my mom. And I wasn’t ever super interested in like weight loss. But then once I hit my thirties, I saw some of those things come in where I was like questioning, my weight, my appearance.

I. and I’m not gonna blame my mom for that, but that was definitely what was modeled to me. And my mom was in her thirties, whenever that happened. So that’s the first thing that comes up for me is like the way that our mothers pass on body image stuff and the wounding that creates in us and it perpetuates even the generational trauma of like women hating their bodies.

And the second thing that comes up and my mom and I actually had a conversation about this less than two years ago. So this is pretty fresh is my mom was only physically abusive to me a couple of times. And those times pale and comparison to the times when she was. Passive aggressive towards me.

So it’s I would, I can look back and see how her passive aggressive behavior. And I talked about this on the podcast before. So for listeners, who’ve heard my story here. It is again, and for those who haven’t here, it is for the first time. But we were taught to come straight home from school and ask, is there anything I can do to help?

So before we played, before we did homework, before we did anything, you came in, you got off the bus, you put your stuff down and you said, Hey mom, is there anything I can do to help? Usually she was already in the kitchen making dinner or preparing dinner. And so the expectation was is that I would jump right in and I would chop or mix or do whatever I needed to do.

But I would say honestly, probably 30% of the time I would get off the bus and come in and say, mom, is there anything I can do to help? And she would have her back turned to me because of the way our house was laid out. And instead of turning around and being like, oh, hi, welcome home from school. How was your day?

Did anything exciting happen today? Whatever. She would keep her back turned to me and she wouldn’t answer. And then I would think maybe she didn’t hear me. And so I would say again, mom, is there anything I can do to help? And she would give these very short emotionless, flat answers and be like, no, but she wouldn’t turn around and look at me.

So then I would approach her and get next to her at the counter and be like, is everything okay? Cause like my little nervous system was sensing. Something’s not right here. My mom isn’t responding to me the way, like in a nurturing nourishing. Type of way. So my little nervous system picked up on that.

And so I immediately was like, oh my God, there’s something wrong. I have to figure out what’s wrong. So I would say, is there is everything okay? Is there anything wrong? And she would often do the same thing again. No, everything’s fine. Just like very short, but she still wouldn’t look at me. She still wasn’t asking about me.

She wasn’t hugging me or offering me any kind of reassurance or affection. And so that was usually the point at which I would begin to feel like real anxiety in my body. My stomach would feel sick and I would feel like a lump in my throat and I would start replay my day. And the last time I would’ve seen her, would’ve been in the morning before school.

And so I would go all the way back to the morning and be like, did I do anything that would upset her? What did I do wrong? And then if I couldn’t think of anything that I had done wrong, then I would get really paranoid. And I would think, oh my gosh, I must have done something bad at school. And the school called my mom and now she’s waiting for me to confess.

And if I couldn’t think of anything bad that I had done at school, then I was like, really at a loss oh my gosh, whatever, this is she’s waiting for me to figure this out and make this right. So it’s on me to figure out why she’s not speaking to me, why she’s giving me the cold shoulder, why she’s behaving passively and aggressively towards me.

It’s on me to figure that out. And so to this day, Michelle, what that created in me was this hypervigilance towards the way people respond to me to the point that. And I am an awareness about this now, so I can work with myself in a much more conscious way, but to the point that if I text someone and they don’t respond to me in a few hours, I’m immediately replaying my last interaction with them.

Did I say something wrong? Did I do something? Did I offend them in some way? Did I hurt their feelings? And it goes right back to that, like activation in my body and the hyper vigilance about my behavior. And second guessing myself and always believing that I am the source of whatever is wrong in this situation.

And as a child, I now know that most of the time, the reason she was acting that way had nothing to do with me. She had a really dysfunctional relationship with my stepfather, who was her husband, and he was very abusive, physically abusive and narcissistic. He was an alcoholic in recovery, but he never did anything about his recovery.

So it was technically a dry drunk and our whole family revolved around. Tiptoeing on eggshells to keep him from being explosive. And my mom was certainly part of that. And my mom very often was like the middle man between me and my stepfather. She tried to protect me from him in certain ways.

Not very successfully, but she tried, I think anyway, it’s just so interesting to me how that behavior of hers that really had nothing to do with me has continued to echo and reverberate throughout my life. And now I’ll be 40 next year. And I still feel myself revert back to that nine year old coming home, asking my mom, if I can do anything to help.

And her giving me these like flat. Short answers, not making eye contact, not offering me hugs or not answering my questions. If I ask if something was wrong, I was like, I knew something was wrong, but she would say that there wasn’t. So that was very confusing, so those are my two reflections as you talk about, it’s like the body image thing.

And then also this hyper vigilance because of her passive aggressive behavior, which I now know her nervous system was dysregulated. She didn’t have tools and resources to deal with that. This was the nineties. Like nobody, you didn’t talk about mental health in the nineties. It was very stigmatized.

Couples didn’t go to couples counseling because it was very stigmatized. Like it was just so much stigma around talking about these types of things. And of course, nobody was talking about the nervous system in the nineties. Yeah, I guess I’m just curious after sharing those couple of stories for my own life, what are your reflections?

It just shows you sharing that how subtle the messages are. And even people who say I have a good relationship with my mother. There’ll be something subtle that the body has picked up and stored in the, as in your example, the simplicity of how you were greeted when you came home from school, because I believe as children, there’s such an innocence about us, that there is this expectation, I that because we are so happy to see someone, the person we love and want to tell them about our day and want to hold them after being a part that would be reflected back to us by that person.

And when it’s not. Then when we’re not having that reflected back to us that we are lovable, then there’s something in us that instantly goes into, it must be me. I must be wrong. I must be unlovable. I must have done something. So it’s quite challenging. as mothers. But the subtle and we, there’s an element of, we have our own stuff.

We can. There’s a, but there’s a responsibility that we have to take on when we’re adult women into going into our system, our nervous system our bodies, and really recognizing where our behaviors come from how we treat ourselves, how we see ourselves and where that information originally came from.

So your original information, I’ve done something wrong. If someone doesn’t respond to me and therefore I go into panic, if someone doesn’t answer me was a very subtle. Message obviously took you quite a while to work out oh yeah, I was in my late thirties by the time I figured it out.

yeah, exactly. So there are many patterns that we live from almost like they’re running our lives behind the scenes that we it’s important for us to tap into. And what, see where this thread of behavior is coming from when there’s something in us that is causing us to stress causing us not to be receptive to others or the nurturing of ourself.

We can unravel how this is invisibly run in our lives. And it tends to come unfortunately from childhood and the messages we received from our primary caregiver. And you touched another thing there about our mothers being mothered. And so often this can go back quite a long way. And there is an energetic line in the body called the mother line where we tend to store this from solar plexus down to the top of our pelvic bone, where we tend to store this ancestral line.

Of mothering. And what’s beautiful about that is when I’ve worked with that in myself and with clients that, and a pattern has changed. I’ve noticed something shift from my daughter as well. And it just goes to show how powerful that it’s, that as soon as we shift something energetically for ourselves, there’s a ripple effect to our children where they have subconsciously CA carrying the pattern as well, because they’ve grown within us.

and also they’re watching our unspoken behavior in a way we move the way we care and the way we care for ourselves. That’s beautiful. So we can very much for example, always making sure our, our children eat and are well fed and nurtured and nourished, particularly, for many of us who have had challenging mother relationships within maybe over mothered mother, our children, and they will feel you do so much for me, love me so much take care of me, but they will still be picking up on how we are mothering ourselves.

Which was a, which is a big thing for daughters and mothers. They’re not so much watching how your mother in them, they’re watching how you are mothering yourself. Because they’re going to follow that yeah, absolutely. So couple things that came up for me as you were sharing that one is when I did have a conversation with my mom a couple years ago about her, the way that she passively aggressively behaved towards me and the hyper vigilance that, that created in my body, I had already done my own work around that.

And so when I had that conversation with her, I didn’t feel anger. I didn’t feel blame. I didn’t feel resentment. It was like, here’s this thing that happened. And I need you to know that, like I’ve worked through this and I don’t Harbor any unforgiveness or anger, resentment towards you. I just am curious to know what your experience was at the time in my life, when I was having this experience.

And when I, so I shared all of this with my mom and she just said, oh my gosh, Lindsay I don’t even remember that. And it wasn’t like I did not feel at all, like she was trying to Gaslight me or pretend that it didn’t happen the way that I said it happened or anything like that. Like it just because I did have language of trauma and nervous system and body and all of that at the time I had this conversation with my mom, whenever she said, oh my gosh, Lindsay I don’t even remember that.

I’m so sorry. I instantly felt an even deeper level of compassion towards her because I have forgotten a lot of things from my life because they were traumatic. There’s a lot, I don’t remember. And it made me realize this was probably like, my mom was probably checked out too. Yeah. As a self protective mechanism.

And it had nothing to do with me. It had everything to do with my stepfather and this abusive relationship she was in and the dysfunctional dynamic of our home. And it wasn’t just the dysfunctional relationship of my mom and my stepfather’s behavior and all of that. It was, we didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so there was always like financial lack and shortage.

And I knew that. And so that affected me and there was a lot of different Dyna, there was religion as well, fundamentalist Christianity. And so there was that expectation of good girl and goodness, and submission as a woman and who you’re supposed to be as a godly little girl and a godly woman.

So there, there was a lot there. But it deepened my level of compassion for my mom, because I was like, wow. Her nervous system was really dysregulated too. And she was holding a lot in her body that had nothing to do with me. So that was the first sort of thing that I felt and I was reminded of, as you were speaking.

And then the second thing is I wanna go backwards a little bit. And you said that as children, there’s this innocence, and when you’ve been separated from your mother all day, you get home and there’s this desire to be back in her arms. And you have this affection that you want to give and you have this innocent belief that it’s going to be reciprocated because that’s how it’s supposed to be.

And I got tears in my eyes. Whenever you said that, because I realized that’s a part of my inner child that I haven’t quite tapped into is the level of, yeah. So what my mom did, I didn’t deserve it. It was unfair. Like it was traumatizing to me. It created hyper vigilance in my body, all of that, but there’s like a deep sadness that I had all this love I wanted to give and she couldn’t receive it.

And that brings up tears for me, even now, as I’m saying, it is that’s something that I haven’t grieved is that it made it and I think it made it hard for me to give and receive love as I got older, because I saw obviously subtly and subconsciously that I had this eagerness to be with my mom to share my day with her and to be back in her arms and, back under the feathers of the mama hen.

And it, it didn’t happen that way a lot. And so thank you for that. That was really powerful for me. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Where you said there was grieving and I think, I feel that is a lot. I don’t, maybe we don’t recognize it, but we do grieve for these lost parts of childhood. And the natural experiences of childhood.

And that’s a huge part of the healing is the grieving of those lost aspects of child. Absolutely. And the other words are used with forgiveness because as an adult, we can have the per perception to see that, as you said, at the time your mother was checked out and so there’s compassion and forgiveness for our mothers, even when, personally, when it’s being there there’s an abuse there.

Because it’s, that’s the way to clear the pathway to clear the wound. Those words, grieving compassion, forgiveness. There’s toxic energy in us, but the lack of forgiveness, but the grieving part almost allows us to mourn that last part of us and notice ways in which we can start to bring an aspect of that back but the grieving has to happen at the loss first before we can start to re collaborate ourselves and that comes from parenting ourselves. Yeah. So I briefly touched on how we seem to be I watch mothers and I know myself as a mother and I watch clients and we have really over mothered our children, if you can, over mother.

But it’s almost like comp overcompensating. Yes. That’s what I was. I was gonna use the word overcompensating. Yes. Yeah. I made the conscious choice. Oh, I’m sorry. I think there was a little bit in that we still forget that it’s so important to re mother ourselves and come to the, that our mothers can’t do that.

Especially when it’s childhood stuff, it’s something that we have to go within and re mother the inner child and that’s the healing and it gives us agency and it really, and it gives us choice, as choice in who do I choose to be. As a woman today. And do I want to carry this thread of behavior that is invisibly present in my life and creating these loops, these patterns I definitely did the overcompensating thing. There was a lot I did right as a mom, but there was also a lot that I did wrong as a mom and my kids are older teenagers now they’re 17 and 18. And so I have, I’ve had one that’s moved out in the last couple months. And so that’s been interesting. But I, you mentioned like making sure your children are well fed and I definitely did that.

I still do that to this day. My kids are 1718, and my son will come home to visit. And he’s 18 years old and I’m like, what are you eating every day? Are you feeding yourself? Are you feeding yourself? What are you eating older? They’re like 31 and 27. And I still say, are you eating properly?

And as soon as they come home, I just that’s, I won’t feed them. Yep. Me too. Me too. I’m like, this might be the only vegetable my son’s had since the last time he was home. So I’m gonna make, gets. Yeah. And I did, the over mothering as well. Goodness. I keep hitting my keyboard. I should probably move it is I never wanted to be separated from my kids.

And so I homeschooled them all the way through school and. That was hard in a lot of ways, but I don’t have any regrets or anything like that, but now I have the awareness to see that I did have that fear of separation. And that probably came from that separation from my mother.

And I didn’t want my children to experience that. And so the way that I solved that problem was we never have to be separated. I will be your mom and your teacher yes. Still no regrets it, there’s a yin and a yang to everything, even if I was overcompensating and never wanted my children to be separated from me.

The bright side of that is I got a lot of extra time with my children that a lot of mothers don’t get, so it’s has its ups and its downs. And another, the in tension behind it, where’s that coming from? Yeah. So homeschool. Li’s wonderful. I did the same, but like you picked up you’re in the subtle message behind that was separation.

Yeah. And so it’s noticing where is our behavior coming from? Is our behavior coming from a wound that we’re looking to the outer world and our outer relat ships to heal and fulfill and repair that wound rather than going within and resource that wound for our, for ourselves know where, what did I need, where do I need my room within me?

So it’s our way of deflecting onto our children in wanting to give them so much and share with them and hold them so much and protect them from the things that we, that caused us pain. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We wanna protect our children from pain at all costs and we can’t always no, another way I overcompensated was with communication.

And I do now I do believe that goes back to the way that my mother passively aggressively communicated with very short, flat answers. And the pendulum for me as a mother swung to the opposite end of that. And it’s we’re just gonna over talk about everything, so like we’re gonna sit down as a family and have these long drawn out conversations because we’ve gotta make sure that it’s all out on the table and we can talk about everything and everyone’s okay.

And like and so that was another way that I overcompensated. Yeah. And the beauty is that you are aware of this. And that’s the beauty of it, that through the awareness, something can change. A pattern that may have been carrying on through generations can energetically shift for our children.

And I think that’s the greatest gift we can give our children is by attending to our own mother wounds, father wounds and shifting the dynamics within ourselves and you in ourselves so that they don’t follow. To our children’s children. It the most wonderful gift we can give our children is to own our stuff.

yes. And tend to the healing of us. Yes. But particularly as a sexual trauma therapist and abuse, sexual abuse therapist mother wounds do affect how we are in our sexuality. Very let’s talk about that. Yeah. It’s just energetically. If we find it challenging to sit in our pelvic bowl and we find it challenging to sit comfortably in what I call it a yawny, but some people may call it a vagina or whatever term you use, but we can feel discomfort in being in that part of our body.

It’s almost as if we don’t inhabit that part of our body. And so things like pleasure. And expressing our femininity and creativity, all those things can be suppressed through our mother wounding, just because of energetically, where we hold that. And so we’ll pull ourselves out of our own mother center our creative center.

So sometimes when we are thinking about sexual trauma or sexual abuse, we won’t really consider that there may be a mother wound that’s going on there. Which I think is important to have that knowledge, that something may not always be as clear cut. I have a challenge with sexuality.

We won’t necessarily look beyond that into how we were mother. And for, for me personally and clients, I see that’s been such a big step of owning sexuality, owning womanhood and being at ease in the pelvic bowl, in our mother’s center. Cuz if we have challenges with our mother, then we are not gonna sit into our womb space as an energetic space.

We’re going want to pull ourselves away from that. I also feel that because with them not really in our roots that we may have a dysfunctional relationship with the earth because mother earth is the greatest mother. And so if we have. Challenging relationships with our mother. Then we’ll have some kind of disconnect with the mother earth as well.

And it’s not intentional, but it’ll be happening there where we’re not allowing ourselves to completely be grounded and soften and connect in a trusting way. So if we have distrust with our mother, for example, then there may be some distrust in the earth that we’re walking upon. So it, it affects our way of being in the world in so many hidden facets.

And it really is about coming back to their child within and asking the child within where it needs to be mothered and often giving ourselves things that we wanted as a child. But didn’t have, when we really wanted them for example, I years ago went out, I always wanted like a girl’s world and it was like my biggest thing, and I really wanted one.

So I went and got myself one, but it was just to appease that child of asking and being able to receive, rather than just asking and always getting a know, even when something really mattered to me. And so there’s little things like little examples of that, of how we can give to the child, what it felt it didn’t have didn’t receive.

And it really needed in a child really needed them. Yeah. So messages about sex as well? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I have so many directions. I could go with question . Our mothers, we, they inform us about sex or they don’t. And so we will really pick up on whether sex is something we can talk freely about express freely or whether it’s something that’s quiet and not spoken of.

Yeah. You know what, something that’s super interesting is my mom wasn’t raised as an evangelical Christian. Like I was raised as an evangelical Christian she wasn’t raised like, she would go to church every once in a while, but her family were not avid churchgoers, actively involved in the church.

The way that I was growing up and I remember my mom, I can look back now and I can be like, wow. She was actually pretty embodied in her sexuality. Like I remember before my mom dated my stepdad, like she had other boyfriends and I have little snippets of flashes of memories that I can’t quite pinpoint, like how old I was or where I was or whatever.

But I just had these flashes of memories of my mom being sensual and I, at the time I didn’t have the conscious awareness to be like, oh, my mom is being Sensu. But now I can look back and okay. She was embodying that. That’s cool. And I’m not saying that she was always embodying her sexuality.

In a functional way. Like I do think that, and I think my mom would admit, like she used having a boyfriend or a husband as a way to fulfill a hole in herself. And she used her sexuality in manipulative ways sometimes. I think she would admit to that. However, my mom didn’t have the same good girl messages from the church, like I had And so I feel like my sexuality was actually more hurt by the church through suppression and repression and quote unquote purity and virginity and all of that. And I wish though that I could have seen some of the ways that my mom healthfully embodied her sexuality, because I think in a lot of ways, she actually set a really good example for me, but because.

What my mom, like I remember going out to eat a few times and my mom might have had a drink or two or something. So maybe she was buzzed, but I remember her like holding her arms out and shaking her boobs back and forth. And I remember being like, oh mother, like I was so embarrassed because the church told me that was bad.

And so like here, my mom was doing this thing freely, expressing herself without shame. and me, her daughter was actually the one shaming her and being like, you’re not supposed to do that. And along the lines of the conversations I’ve had with my mom as an adult, another really healing conversation that I’ve had with my mom in the past four years is my mom has large breasts.

She always has. And she wears shirts sometimes that show some cleavage. And for the whole of my childhood teenage years, even in my twenties, if my mom wore a shirt that showed cleavage and I was with her, I would reach over and pull her shirt up for her to let cover her up. and I had a conversation about that with her.

And I said, look, this is a pattern that I know I’ve had in our relationship. And as I heal my sexuality, I’m realizing the ways that I’ve demonized your sexuality and your body . And I’m sorry that I did that. That was inappropriate. That was me violating your boundaries. Like I’m really sorry. I did that.

It just was coming from my own place of like shame from the church. And you were embodying something different than what I was being taught by religion. And I believed religion over you. Or I valued religion over your example. And it was a really healing moment for my mom and she like started crying and she was like, Lindsay, thank you so much.

I always thought that you thought there was something really wrong with me. you were always trying to get me to cover up and and I was like, no mom, there was nothing ever wrong with you. It’s just that. I was trying to make you fit in the box that the church wanted you to fit in and you didn’t go in it as easily as I did.

And I was intimidated and threatened by that. And my way of responding or reacting unconsciously was to shame you and try to cover you up. And so that was a really healing conversation. So it’s interesting. I do believe that. So I think my sexual my relationship with my own sexuality in how my mom is involved in that is that I think my mom in a lot of ways did set a good example for me, but I rejected it.

And then I did the pendulum swing of going the opposite direction, where I wasn’t embodied in my sexuality. I wouldn’t show any part of my body that was supposed to be like off limits, like cleavage, or even like spaghetti strap dresses, or like my belly in a bikini, like it was certain things like that because of the church.

And I don’t really have a question. It’s just, I feel like I’m getting a coaching session right now. Honestly, because you’re bringing so much up and I’m like, oh, I see how that relates. And here’s how I felt about that. And yeah, so I still feel that’s, that is a form of a mother wound, but it’s conflicting.

Yeah. I, in, as you said, you shamed your mom around her sexuality because of a conf a conflicting. Message from another form of authority. So it is still a wound within the mother line, but not all our wounds within our mother line are caused by our mother. There are, they are a disconnect within our relationship with our mother.

So even stuff with your stepfather, I don’t, that information just came into my head. I was like, whoa, that’s good. Tell me more. It just feels like even times where your stepfather may have come into the connection between you and your mother. That’s a disconnect. That’s the mother wound. So it’s not always looking at things our mother did wrong.

I don’t think that’s very helpful. It’s really being able to listen to mother wounds where we disconnected from our mother. And why what was the cause of it? And it could be yes, that she wasn’t showing up for us, or there was no nurture or nourishment, but it also could be a disconnect because of another authority figure such as yourself as well.

So it’s still a wounding. That’s so true. Yeah. It’s so true that the church, the teachings of the church that I valued more highly than the example of my mother created a disconnect with my mother. For sure. Because I couldn’t hold both of them at the same time because they were completely conflicting.

No, exactly. Conflicting messages. Yeah. Yeah. So there there’s still a wound in there around the sexuality that does involve your mother. But as you said you spoke to her and that’s such. A wonderful thing for you to be able to do, which kind of brings up for me that, and maybe others listening to that.

What if our mother isn’t available yeah. To have these wonderful conversations with that you are having, or we know that our mother would be resistant or defensive or in denial of these conversations. And then what do we do if we can’t have these conversations and it’s still really important. So I have an absent mother, so it’s really important that I’ve become the mother.

I want, I would’ve wanted , we had this thing I wish my mother was like, or I wish I had, or I wish my mother had done. And so I’ve really had to rewind and treat myself the way. I would’ve loved to have been loved, and sometimes that’s been challenging because my message, and I see this with lots of people who’ve been at the consequence of in incestual sexual abuse.

It, it can be conflicting cuz that we’ve been told by our caregiver, that’s the way to be loved. And yet this is adult person who knows that’s not the way we were meant to be mothered or loved. And it’s always returned. The only way I could given his support in that was how I managed was if it wasn’t good enough for my daughter, it wasn’t good enough for me because I almost needed something to reflect upon because sometimes I would go down and I see this with my clients going down the.

The abusive love root rather than the actual love that they want and need at this moment and wanted needed at that point in their childhood too. So if we’ve got some, one that we love unconditioning in our lives, it’s very important. If it’s good, not good enough for them, it’s not good enough for me.

And to bring ourselves back to that questioning in that inquiry all the time. And then we know what direction our behavior needs to be going, that it would, we would not want our daughter, for example, our child to go down the abusive love route or the abusive sex route. So we can really check in with how we are treating ourselves by that kind of reflection.

If we don’t have. Availability to have conversations with the people we need to have conversations with. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve something that I’ve done with some of my clients, whenever they either don’t have relationships with parents or parents have died or something like that is I have my client write a letter that they won’t send.

Yes. Most suspect say the same thing, offering it. A voice is really important. Yeah. Yeah. And can write loads of red letters and them really good. Yeah. Even posting them to an invisible person, but the child, those points wouldn’t have had a voice to be able to say. So voice is really important in all of this checking in with our own behavior.

Where the intention is coming from, why are we treated ourselves in a certain way? What is the message there and offering voice, because back then, as a child, we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to express our voice or our pain, or even our know. Yeah. Yeah, all essential things that we can give ourselves.

It’s self rescue, it’s self parenting, giving ourselves all the time, these things that we need to support us to come into wholeness. I do wanna talk about re mothering. It feels appropriate and maybe I’m just overthinking it, but it feels appropriate to talk about the mother line and the body that you mentioned that goes from the solar plexus to the top of the pubic bone can you talk more about that because I’m wondering if this has been your experience in your work as well, because it’s certainly been mine that women who have fragmented, disconnected, fractured relationships with their mothers almost always in my experience have some sort of. Womb issue.

So a period issue something like endometriosis things like that. And I’m curious if you have seen a connection as well. And if you can talk about the mother line from the perspective of what we might experience in the physical body, and then also from the perspective of what we might experience in the energetic and emotional body.

Yeah. People listening to your podcast the body contains cell a memory so often what we can believe or think is a problem. When we listen to the body, it may not be, and we hold a, we can hold a lot in our mother line, which runs from the solar plexus. And you can hold like fingers of holding your fingers, creating a line to the top of your belly button.

And it goes all the way through your belly button. So the umbilical energy there to the top of the pubic bone, and it’s just spending time with that energetic line. And you can imagine you’re sweeping it and then needs to be a flow, like an energetic flow. And the way we can support ourselves with that is with our breath so that our breath really comes down into our belly.

And we can really feel ourselves plugging into our root almost as if we’re gonna kiss the earth beneath us, and then Thele can come up. And that really supports the line to clear. It’s not necessarily in the body work I share. It’s not necessarily looking for a problem. It’s allowing the body to reveal what it needs and to speak what it needs to speak.

So often just laying our hands and our fingers in that part of our body. If there’s something, the body is feeling that there is there’s trust there because the body is innocent, then it will, something will rise up. And that may happen that a memory comes to us of, I don’t know, falling over and our mother not being there to wipe on ease and hold us, or it may be something very subtle where we don’t have a memory.

We can just feel the energetics of that. And then there’s a release. But it’s really, as I said, this mother line and clearing it is an it’s got generations of staff in it. And the more we clear it, the more we can feel safe and at ease in our own womb, in our ovaries, in our femininity, in our sexuality, in our creativity.

It, they feel safer places to be. Otherwise we tend to be up here. There’s a disconnect. We’re very up in our body and not wanting to breathe down and all the way in. And this happens with people with sexual trauma and sexual abuse, but it also can happen with how we have been mothered all things that we are carrying for our mothers.

Sometimes if our mother wasn’t there for herself, so we can, as children, we take on their stuff and almost become the caregiver for our mother at that time. And so we really absorb. Sob the stuff. But in, in the body, this is where it be held in the pelvis, sub pelvic bone wo over his, and this mother line that I speak of.

Oh, sorry. That’s I have two dogs myself. They’ve barked on this podcast before. Okay. To really Elsie, to really be supportive of our ourselves. With moving forward mother wounds, body work is great. Because also at the same time, our body is receiving some nourishment and it’ss been held and it’s been listened to and it’s being met.

So all these kind of wound ins it’s not, communication verbal helps us a lot, but these are as school sponges with children. Yeah. Sorry. And can you into our body? Yeah. This isn’t let’s blame our mothers. This is about us. Being able to take responsibility. For what we are holding within our energetic system and our nervous system, but it is related to that time of our life when we weren’t mothered or we were disconnected from one mother because it’s very important that we own these wounds and we feel them and we know the stem of them, but it’s also not very healing to then project blame and cause another sh another shift of responsibility.

Yes. It’s important to recognize what happened then was maybe wrong or unloving or not what you needed, but the way to self-agency and healing our body. To meet ourselves in a way that we need to be needed, meet to be met right now. Oh yeah. Is your dog playing and growling? yeah, I was just, it sounded like there was like furniture being moved across the floor and then I was like, no, her dog is playing that’s okay.

It’s fine. There’s two of them. And they’ve decided it’s cool down here. So they’ve decided tug of war okay. That’s totally fine. Yeah. So do you see women experiencing a lot of wo health issues when they have either sexual trauma and, or mother wounding stuff? Energy to clear from their mother line?

Yes, but I also see this in men as well. Yeah. Let’s talk about that. The SAC, the pelvis, any kind of past childhood stuff is usually down there. Down in our pelvic bone, on our sacrum and energetically, no of course men don’t have a wound, but there isn’t energetic wound. There is a mother center, a resource center that we all have.

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. There is. And of course, if, if there’s mother wounding with men, then that makes it quite challenging for them to move into trust of their own femininity. But also women, how they relate and the vulnerability they have in relationships with wo women . So mother wound’s quite a key.

Yeah. A key thing. Yeah, I was actually wanted to ask, cuz I know you primarily work with women. I primarily work with women, but I did wanna ask about how mother wounding shows up in men as well. Yeah. I would say for myself as a is equal how many women I work with to men and the way these shows up in a body’s a body.

There’s not really much difference energetically in how these things show up for us. And of course, many of us may have wounded with our fathers, but they will show up in a different way. And they’re not there’s something about mother wounding because we’ve grown inside her and there’s something very core about mother wounding whereas father wounding in the body feels tends to feel less ingrained.

That’s the only way I could describe it when I, when I’m sense in the energy and body, if it seems to be less ingrained. Yeah. I think I would agree with that from my own experience and my own connection to my body. I mentioned at the beginning of the interview that I can only really remember my mom, like physically being abusive towards me a couple of times, but honestly, the physical abuse I experienced by my stepfather and by my mom this couple of times is preferable to the passive aggressive silent treatment, cold shoulder experience that I had with my mom.

Like I would’ve rather had the actual physical, spanking, hitting, yelling, stuff like that versus this subtle covert, thing that feels a lot more intangible. Yeah, it’s probably because we can’t it’s an unspoken message really isn’t it, there’s, they’re being smacked is something that you can feel, what, why it is and what direction it’s coming from.

Whereas something that’s quite a, it’s a message that seeps in . It is seeps into our system and we don’t really rec we can often recognize these patterns and where they’ve come from. Cuz they that’s why I say they run our lives in the background and our life will be going in these patterns and secular and we’ve no bloody idea.

why and how, and it’s because they’re quite deeply ingrained into our our early years. Yeah. And sometimes even our time in the womb . Yeah. Yeah. So for example, one of my big things has always had a distrust of water, even though I love the sea, but it’s a big distrust. And upon meditating with that and working with my body, I didn’t feel safe in the water of the womb.

So it’s lots of things that maybe we don’t like, you can remember the smack in and what that felt but there’s sometimes messages. We don’t know where they’ve come from. And they are usually very loud in the body if we take the time to listen. Yeah, I think it was always easier for me to I don’t wanna say I’m gonna use the word disconnect, but I don’t mean that in a dissociative kind of way.

It was always easier for me to disconnect. The physical abuse that I experienced from myself, meaning I always knew it was wrong. I always knew I didn’t deserve it. I always knew I always knew that the stuff with my mom, the more subtle stuff, the messages, her body language, her energy, when that was off I didn’t have I internalized that much more.

I wasn’t able to disconnect from it as much. No, that’s we internalize information without having a direct, it’s not, it’s very subtle. that’s all I can say. It’s just very subtle. It is. And we absorb the world around us and the way people relate with us into our bodies and it affects the way we move.

It affects the way we receive it affects the way we relate, affects how safe we feel in the world. All these subtle messages that our body remembers, but we don’t necessarily, I would love for you to elaborate more on how it affects the way we receive. Only because receive is one of my words for this year.

so it’s written over here on my board. I look at it every day. And so I’m especially interested in how healing mother wounds and re mothering ourselves helps us to open and receive because you touched on it right at the beginning, the way you walked into home and. You were open and you were vulnerable and you were innocent and your heart was wide.

And bounded in, at home, I expected joyful wanting to share your day and you weren’t received. If we reached out for love, if we reached out for touch, if we reached out for food and then nothing comes back there’s a disconnect with our skin, if with our bodies or with our language, for something that we need.

And then there’s nothing coming back, eye contact, all those kind of things can affect us in receiving. And then they’re the nonverbal messages. and then the verbal messages, don’t ask, it’s rude to ask. All these other things that we’ve been taught is improper to ask . Don’t ever ask me for anything, all these kind of things that inform us receiving is wrong.

But also receiving can be other ways. If our body is carrying armor, it’s our way of protecting ourselves, preserving ourselves. And there’s nothing coming in protection serves a certain point in our life in our body, but then it is, it become, it begins to keep us small rather than protecting us. So when we can be over protective, nothing can come in, nothing can go out and nothing can come in.

So receptivity is softening, allowing, inviting such a beautiful word. When we invite in. And that’s how we receive with boundaries rather than protection. Cuz I believe protection seems to keep out, whereas boundaries, their firm within us. And we know are yes or no or maybe are no way oh yes please.

Yes. So all those kind of things receptivity grows. The more we have trust in ourselves, to know what we want and know what we need and until we check in to the truths of what we’ve grown up, up on, how do we really know what we want and what we need? Cause a lot of the time we are told what we want and what we need about actually really ever asking ourselves that’s certainly true for me.

The more, my self trust is deepened. The more I am open to receiving. Yeah, receptivity has a lot behind it, our value, our worthiness and then what’s behind our value who measures our value. It’s our role to know our value and take our value out into the world, not go out into the world and demand that the world values us.

And yet we’re in a, we’re in a culture where we get our value from the external world and our likes and all those kind of things. more than I am more value and I’m going to share my value with the world. So there’s so much there that can be in the way of receptivity. Plenty of self in inquiry. oh my gosh.

Self inquiry never ends. So let’s talk about re mothering because this is a concept that I have struggled with myself. , it’s really difficult for me to. I have the awareness of like my mother’s passive aggressive, silent treatment sort of behavior programmed, my nervous system and my pain body to be hypervigilant.

And to always assume that something is wrong and that I am the reason something is wrong that I need to figure out what I did wrong and hurry up and make it right so that everything can feel okay so I can have that awareness, but yet I still feel those feelings in my body whenever I text someone and they don’t get back to me in a few hours or when I have a difficult conversation with someone and things don’t quite feel okay, I feel that same hypervigilance.

And so I have an awareness of it. I know how to respond versus react to it. I’m aware of the pattern in my body, but I don’t exactly know what re mothering myself through that looks like. Okay. The way I teach and share that is that we are constantly asking other people what they want and what they need.

And we go out of our way to fulfill that. But do we ever turn that question around on ourselves? So when you are feeling that. Thanks. When someone isn’t responding to you, where is that in your body? And if you could lay your hand on your body and ask that part of your body, what do you need? How may I love you?

We ask that question all the time to others. How may I love you? Turn it around? How may I love you and really listening to what you need right there. And then, and it usually isn’t, the response is just, it’s a trigger to what? How can you support that part of you to feel loved? And it’s okay. And it’s safe and you don’t need validation from someone else.

And usually the inner child or that part of your body will give you some kind of signal. Of what it needs. you may need to move. You may need to go lie down. You might need a hot bath. You might need to just rub that part of your body and take some long, deep breaths. It’s how we self soothe, how we self regulate, how we parent that part of ourselves.

How can we love that part of ourselves? So rather making that part of you wrong, it’s not wrong for needing a response from someone, right? But how can you respond to that rather than putting the power on someone else to respond to Cause your validation, your self worth your love and who you are.

Isn’t dependent on someone responding to you. To the more and more you ask yourself, how may I love you? the more enriched. That inner world will be, and the less you’ll be dependent upon the love signals from others. So whenever you were saying, what do you feel in your body when that happens?

I instantly knew and I actually began to feel it. So for me, it’s a little bit of a radiating between my throat and my solar plexes. Okay. But then this is pretty specific to, I don’t experience the sensation often, but it’s a very strange sensation and I, it’s hard to describe, but it’s in my armpits and it’s okay.

Inside my armpits. And it feels like a, like it’s not on the skin it’s like inside. And so it feels like a strand of like scratchy slightly warm, but an irritated feeling. Like under the skin, as a thread, like maybe from the side of my breast until the middle of my bicep or my tricep, but inside like not on the skin. , I don’t have that. I don’t get that sensation very often, which is why I’m able to identify it so quickly because it is such a unique sensation. But I, that one of the few times I experience it is whenever I am feeling that hypervigilance around others, communicating with me and me wanting to have that openness and that receptivity with them.

And then if I feel like I’m not getting that, so it’s the throat to solar plexus, like radiating feeling, and then that weird itchy thread in my armpit. it kinda makes sense because if you reflect upon how that would’ve been going home, maybe it would’ve been wanted to put your arms around and then to have that hold in.

So the stress response is being stored of that. Not being met is being stored here in your arms and then your cell Apexus in your throat. Excuse me. Is that disempowerment? , when that’s not being met, that’s your power there. Being knocked and the throat also not having a voice, not having a voice, not being able to understand, not being able to communicate what was going on, not being communicated to so you know, much work is just being with those parts of the body, holding them like tenderly as if you are holding the child, giving them warmth and cares and touch and tenderness, all those things that we need.

We may think we can work with this energetically, but the body needs something right now then needs to be held here, needs to be held here, needs to be held in the arms. Yeah. As soon as you said, like your arms going up, wanting to be held or embraced. The instant that dropped in into me was that’s where like you would pick a child up is from underneath their arms.

Yes. And so wanting to be picked up and held. Yeah. And not sens. Yeah. Yeah. As you were saying it, when you were explain to me, that’s what I saw. It’s just image of a child, just arms up, wanting to be picked up and held. And because there’s a reaching out for a response and the response doesn’t come.

Yeah. So the arms are still there carrying that stress or there I was reaching out. Sorry, Don. Don’t no, I’m like I’m having a it’s fine. yeah. and then they don’t and then there’s nothing coming in. So again, if you think about this lovely it’s about that’s receptivity. Yep. You’re talking about receiving, we hold our arms up to receive, we hold our heart out to receive.

Yeah. You’re so right. This is obviously something very prominent in you. Yeah. Where clearly yeah, your receptivity is being is I wouldn’t, I don’t particularly like the word blocked, but there’s a trauma going on there. Yeah. Yeah, this is actually, any fogginess that I had around this and that sensation that now feels much more clear.

So I appreciate that. a lot. Damn. You’re good. No appreciate that. It’s really listening and really listening to what you are saying things to me, but at the same time your body is I’m listening to your body when you’re talking to me. Yeah. yeah. And I’m still, I work with my clients and they struggle with this too.

Like when we’ve been disconnected from our bodies for so long, and we live like we’re heads walking around with bodies, but we’re not living in our bodies. We’re just living in our heads and everything is filtered through these thoughts that we’re constantly overthinking about that learning to listen to the body and to speak its language is.

A skill that takes some time to develop because it’s it’s like learning any foreign language, right? Yeah. And a practice that I do with my clients it’s just a somatic experiencing practice, but it’s just like feeling a sensation on your body and staying with it until it moves or dissolves or the volume goes down or the volume goes up or whatever.

And not really making up any stories about what it means, just sitting there listening and that you’re having a two-way conversation with your body when you do that, but you are the listener and your body is the speaker. And so I think because we’re such. We live in such a cognitive intellectual society that always wants scientific proof for every fucking thing.

And show me all the studies and as if that makes something more valid than what someone feels in their body. I think we expect that listening to our bodies means we’re gonna get some sort of like sentence for my bodies. That’s I need this and I need you to do this and I need you to do this.

And at least for me, it’s not that way. It’s more of my body just wants me to bring attention to that. And it wants me to listen to that and maybe put my hands in that part of my body. And if it feels good to massage or rub an essential oil on it or something like that, that just feels really nurturing and nourishing for myself.

But it’s not always about. Fixing a problem. No, if we approach our body as if it is a problem, it’s going to remain feeling, it’s a problem. We are born feeling creatures. We are sentiment beings. Yeah. And so we can think my head is absorbing this and I remember that, but our body has soaked that in.

Absolutely. I also think a lot of people get impatient if they put their hand on their body and they say, I can’t feel anything. Or I can’t hear anything, nothing’s coming to me. And what I always say is our child is our body. Isn’t innocent. Has to remember that it’s very childlike. And if you haven’t listened to your body for years, you can’t just say, go to your body on the first time, say, Hey, you I’m here.

I’m ready to talk, speak. Cause yeah, like any, a child wants to develop trust. Yeah. Before it speaks and then it will speak. And so we have to keep showing up for our body, keep holding our body, keep showing up to listen. Even if we don’t hear anything, we don’t know anything. And then over time as our body thinks, actually she keeps showing up here.

I can trust her. Now I can trust her. Yeah. So that line of communication with our body is really important to keep going and keep showing up for ourselves. It’s really important rather than this. Okay. I’m learning this thing and that’s a quick fix. Yeah. It’s not a, it’s not a quick fix. It takes you think about how we approach children when there’s something wrong with them or they’re crying.

There’s kind. There’s compassion we’re patient until they feel they can express what they want to express. And we do, this is what I mean about self parenting. We really do need to turn that around on ourselves and parent ourselves. Yeah. Who I feel, I just feel so settled and this has been wonderfully healing and then lightning for me.

So thank you so much, Michelle. It’s such a gift having you on the show. Is there anything else that you wanted to make sure you got to say and share? Before we end? Cause I wanna make sure you got to get it all out. anything that you wanted to share? Yeah, no, I’ve really loved talking with you and just the way it bounces and.

How things just arise into the conversation. Yeah. don’t feel, I need to say anything more. I feel the last thing I said about how we just keep showing up for ourselves and developing trust. The most important person to trust in the world is ourself. Yeah. And if we keep showing up for ourselves, keep laying hands on ourselves, keep holding ourselves.

And that trust will grow strong. It’s like a muscle that we’re remembering that, that trust. Yeah, I think that’s the most important thing for people to take away from this. Absolutely. Will you share with our listeners what it is that you do in your work and how they can find you and work with you?

If they would like. They can find me on my website and that’s simply my name, Michelle roberton.com. I share one to one body work which is my love. just laying hands on someone in, just in their body melt and speak. It’s just so honoring so do you only work with people in person or can people receive body work from you online?

There’s online, which obviously I can’t touch it’s my greatest pleasure is to touch cause it’s a whole language in itself, but there’s ways online, the way we’ve just been sharing. I know I wasn’t, we weren’t in session. We in a, I felt like it but yes it can happen online, but of course that means a lot more Self responsibility.

Responsibility. Yeah. Yeah. So this body work, this online stuff. I’m happy to travel and teach all those kind of things. Amazing. Yeah. We will link to all of that in the show notes of this episode. And again, I just, I appreciate you and your energy and your work. And I know I’ve told you this before, but I also just love the sound of your voice.

I can listen to you talk all day . It’s so soothing to me. Just thank you for being who you are and thank you for being here. Thank you, Lindsay.

Okay. I hope you enjoy that wonderful healing episode. I will have links in the show notes below for how you can find and follow Michelle, especially if you would like to work with Michelle. Um, her links to her website will be there. And it would mean, so, so much to me, if you would take a few moments.

Um, no matter what podcast platform or app you’re using to listen to this podcast, I would love it. If you could take a few moments and just leave a rating and a review on the podcast, so you can leave a star rating and then you can also leave a written review. And if you have time to do both, I would appreciate it so much.

Those reviews. Um, tell the gods of the algorithms that this podcast is being listened to, that people find it useful that people think it’s well done. And then as people are searching for this type of material, with trauma healing and stuff like that, then my podcast is more likely to show up in search results. So it actually

Uh, benefit me and the show. If you can take a few moments to leave a star rating and a written review on the podcast, you can just say that you love the podcast. You can share what your favorite episode is. You can share something you’ve learned from the podcast. Anything that would you think would be helpful? Um, if somebody comes across as podcast and wants to know like, Hey, what is this about? Is it helpful? Is it healing for people? They can go read those reviews. And, um, it would just mean so much to me. So links for everything are in the show notes below.

Or 📍 you can find the links at Lindsey lock-in dot com forward slash podcast. And i will talk to you next time

thank you for being

Holistic Trauma Healing Podcast

Episode 88: Healing the Mother Wound with Michelle Roberton

This Episode’s Guest

Links

Transcript