motherwound

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 […]

Bringing the unconscious to light is never a random process. Inflexible processes rule our journey. We only identify these processes as we repeatedly experience them. One of the rules is that we uncover issues in sequence from the least to the most buried. This accords with the homeopathic principle known as Hering’s law of cure, […]

In a lecture shortly after the end of World War II, German philosopher Martin Heidegger asserted that, “The dreadful has already happened”. I would like to borrow this phrase, as it’s a very succinct way of describing the significance of the mother wound to humanity, both past and present. The mother wound is the core […]

In the personal healing world, we talk about the ‘healing journey’. What does that mean? We’re on a journey to healing. Yes, obviously—but where’s it taking us? What’s the destination? At this point, words like ‘wholeness’ and ‘wellbeing’ often emerge. These are concepts, not destinations. A destination is a place on a map you can […]

My journey into unconscious shame began with porn addiction and ended with the mother wound. And here it is—the blog that ties together the two ends of a very long thread. In the gazillion porn images I was only ever looking for healthy nurturing. The image for this blog, a stunning mosaic by Napoleon Cole, […]

In What is the mother wound? I’ve written about the single, multi-faceted wound at the core of all humanity. It’s the cause of our bloodthirsty history—what we like to call ‘civilization’—and our current world in crisis. It’s the hidden objective of all personal development and emotional healing work. Trying to ‘fill the hole’ Knowingly or […]

I used to work at the largest cannery in the southern hemisphere. Back in the 1980s, the cannery sold vast quantities of tomato sauce, baked beans and tinned fruit. It knew how to price them to make a profit—but it didn’t know what they actually cost to make. I was part of the team given […]