Healing the mother wound – from transactional to relational living
One of the most damaging aspects of the mother wound is that it changes our way of interacting with others from relational to transactional. Instead of our interactions being led by a heart-based desire to relate to others, they are governed by a mind-based desire to maximise the gain of our exchanges (or minimise their cost).
Transactional living
Our whole world, from our immediate families to the global economy, is significantly based on transactional living. Every interaction is a transaction where each party tries to maximise gains and/or minimise losses to obtain what it needs or wants.
This applies whether dealing with external (physical) or internal (emotional) needs/wants. We have a price that we’re willing to pay, a threshold above which we will not pay—whether it’s hard money or soft feelings—or a line that we will not cross, a low point we will not stoop to, to get whatever we want.
We extract and exploit every opening, every connection, every revenue stream until they’re exhausted—and explode when we don’t get what we want.
Transactional living goes hand-in-hand with an external value system where all we need or want is perceived as being outside ourselves, requiring us to negotiate for it, giving up what we must to get what we need—be it money, love, sex, recognition, whatever.
The result is what psychoanalysis calls the false self—a psychic layer of coping mechanisms designed to navigate the pitfalls of transactional living.
Prostitution
Transactional living creates co-dependent relationships where each participant unconsciously agrees to give the other what they want in return for getting what they want (love, sex, feeling valued, etc.)
Both in these relationships and in our external dealings (money/career-based) we constantly prostitute ourselves to meet our needs. I use the term in the secondary meaning as found in the Collins dictionary:
- a person who engages in sexual activity for money
- a person who offers his or her talent or work for unworthy purposes
In The Politics of Experience (1967), psychiatrist R. D. Laing writes: “We are all murderers and prostitutes.” We give our very souls away for the unworthy purpose of transaction-based survival.
This self-prostitution originates in the infant’s first interactions with its mother. As the mother wound creates a fear of mothering, the infant detects the mother’s—and other caregivers’—anxiety around breastfeeding, crying, sleeping habits, and toilet training.
Instead of a naturally synced relationship between mother and child, the infant adapts its behaviours to meet its needs in a hostile environment. (Any environment where the mother wound is unhealed will be experienced as hostile to some degree.)
The infant ultimately forgets it conditioned its own behaviour. This sets the pattern for lifelong transactional living as ‘normal.’
Relational living
Like everything mother wound-related, relational living is founded on nurturing.
Relational living begins with a healthy mother-child bond where the mother is at ease with motherhood and attuned to the vagaries and rhythms of the individual child (as opposed to one-size-fits-all mothering practices, which are designed to ‘cost’ the mother as little as possible and still raise socially passable offspring).
In this environment, the child learns that it is accepted just as it is. In return, it offers its gifts to the world from a place of genuine love and desire for relatedness, rather than to satisfy unmet needs and wants.
Reaching adulthood, such a child is incapable of the self-prostitution of transactional living. Instead of creating co-dependent relationships in a vain attempt to meet its unmet infant (as well as adult) needs, relational living creates well-bounded relationships with healthy independence and mutual support.
When push comes to shove
I see many people around me practicing relational living to a degree. They seek genuine relationships, whether in the personal or business sphere. Yet when push comes to shove people can snap. For a second the underlying transactional programming can be glimpsed before it gets smothered over by the veneer of the false self, pretending that everything ‘smells of roses.’
The image above hints at these unconscious dynamics. While the storeman is all smiles—suggesting a desire for genuine relatedness—the word ‘grab’ (grab food, grab pay) points to the underlying grasping, taking by force, nature of transactional living. If the storeman overcharged, or the customer made off without paying, the smiles would soon disappear.
I also see a lot of wellbeing modalities pushing towards relational living; again, without necessarily having worked through the underlying mechanics.
What I don’t see is a conscious awareness of the two modes of living and their impact.
From transactional to relational
How do I shift from transactional to relational living?
The question itself is misplaced, reflecting a transactional mindset: if I ‘do’ this, I will get relational living in return. What will it cost me? What will I gain?
Relational living is a way of being, not doing. A stance, not an action. We must consciously choose to prioritise the relationship over the outcome in every single interaction. To embed this takes time, practice, and patience. It’s a process that I’ve only just begun.
Healing the mother wound is a journey right back to its inception point. We must energetically return to our own infancy and satisfy our unmet emotional needs to begin again, safe in the embrace of life, the wellspring of relational living.
Next steps
For further resources on the mother wound, both free and paid, please click on this image.
