motherwound

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 […]

Cities. Home to millions. Situated at the crossroads of the world’s trade routes and natural harbours. Centres of learning and technology. Glittering jewels of human achievement. The pinnacle of civilization. Or not? This perspective is flawed, self-serving—more accurately, self-avoiding. Cities are nothing more than glorified, brightly lit, wealthy refugee camps. Cities are refugee camps for […]

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 […]

In Trauma exists as a series of ripples, I describe the multiple, interconnected sources of trauma that may exist in our lives. This trauma is inside our minds, our psyche, our physical cells—our DNA. Yet even this doesn’t help us comprehend the full extent and impact of human trauma. Once we raise our children in […]

In mid-2018 I wrote a blog titled The 3 layers of trauma – ancestral, generational, current-life, in which I ascribed all trauma to one of these categories. Fast forward 18 months and the 2021 Intergenerational Trauma Conference (ITC). I’m now seeing trauma in a much more nuanced way. There are key layers—5 of them—but it’s […]

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 […]

I have long wondered why some people talk about their issues while others don’t. I’ve often mistaken ‘can’t talk’ for ‘don’t want to talk’. More recently I’ve started to explore the realm of pre-verbal trauma. The fog is lifting. Pre-verbal trauma is trauma that occurred before we developed the capacity for language. The talking cure Before […]

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 […]