Mother wound

In What is the mother wound? and other blogs, I describe humanity’s single point of failure—collective arrested development of the mother-child bond (and the resulting psychic growth process) that leaves us in an emotionally immature and irresponsible state. This wound destroys our inner compass, creating humans who are psychologically oriented to seeking validation and direction […]

Just as there is a life cycle, an ascending cycle that nurtures, develops, and raises us to new heights, there is a contra-rotating cycle. A downward, descending, dead-end cycle: the cycle of abandonment. It’s why we litter the planet’s oceans with fishing tackle, its deserts with rusty cars, its city streets with the detritus of […]

In We have no language for pre-verbal trauma, I wrote how difficult it is to articulate the experience of trauma when it occurred before we developed the capacity for language. The acquisition of language doesn’t extend to language around pre-existing trauma. Perhaps the first place such trauma can manifest is in the communication between mother […]

When I was young, living in southern Switzerland, we used to make long holiday drives through the Italian countryside. The smell of manure was a frequent presence. We used to crumple our noses and cry, ‘Il buon odore della campagna’—the good aroma of the countryside. Fast forward half a century. I now know that wincing […]

I’ve spent the whole of my life looking like the child in this evocative photograph from Jordan Whitt—feeling unprotected. Until recently, I never knew why. In The mother wound – “The dreadful has already happened” I describe the crisis of nurturing that enveloped humanity after long-term drought, desertification and famine from around 4000 BC onwards […]

In What is the mother wound? I describe the way that the wound at the core of humanity causes six key separations (or fragmentations). Of these, however, there is only one that ensures the mother wound passes from one generation to the next: lack of emotional nurturing. Note that I specifically reference a lack of […]

I’ve been circling the ‘hole’ for a while now. It’s the black hole behind humanity’s unsustainable urge for acquisition or consumption. Unsustainable consumption Acquisition or consumption of what? Well, pretty much anything and everything. The madness of deforesting the planet’s lungs, the Amazon The voraciousness of drilling for oil in the pristine wilds of the […]

In 1899, Edward Carpenter wrote a book called Civilization: its cause and cure, in which he argued that civilization is a disease no society has ever survived. Civilization is a disease Carpenter (1844-1929) was a social theorist, an early vegetarian and gay rights advocate. In the Edwardian world of increasing specialisation, he was a great […]

In the world of warehousing in which I once worked, there are various stock rotation policies. One is called FIFO—First In, First Out. The oldest stock is sold first. Another is called LIFO—Last In, First Out. Our mother wound is FILO—First In, Last Out. To heal the mother wound we have to strip away everything. […]

In What is the mother wound? I describe the psychological wound at the heart of humanity, an inability to nurture healthily that I term ‘the mother wound’. This wound has many ramifications, one of which is a fear of mothering itself. History of childhood Until recently, very little had been written about the history of […]