What the Dragon Showed Me About My Mother Wound
Understanding the Mother Wound: A Personal Story
There is a lot of talk these days about the "mother wound" — the pain, patterns, and psychological imprints that many of us carry from our relationship with our mother, and with mothering itself. I want to share my own story with it, not as an expert, but as a woman who has spent years untangling it, and who is still, in many ways, on the path.
Becoming My Mother's Support
I grew up as the only girl and the youngest in my family, raised by a single mother who was overwhelmed and deeply unhappy with the life she had been handed. I couldn't bear to see her suffer. So, without ever deciding to, I stepped into the role of her emotional support. In psychology, this is called being a "parentified child" — a child who takes care of the parent, instead of the other way around. In my case this was me trying to ease her burden by taking over her feelings, making her happy, make sure that she was doing alright.
I don't blame my mother for this. That understanding didn't come easily — it took years of healing, and becoming a mother myself, before I could see her through a different lens. I can see now that she was in an impossible situation, doing the best she could with what she had been given, including the mothering she herself had received. I don't blame myself either. It simply happened, the way these things do, out of love.
I tried to be the good girl. The perfect girl. Most of all, I tried to become someone other than myself — anyone who might keep her satisfied, or bring her some relief. And in doing that, I lost the experience of being truly seen, heard, and accepted exactly as I was.
What I Didn't Know I Was Missing
It took years for me to understand what this had cost me: I didn't actually know what it felt like to be mothered. I didn't know how to mother myself. I didn't even know how to love myself.
This realization is what set me on my healing path — spiritual, emotional, all of it. I was searching for love. Trying to understand what I could possibly do to feel better, to accept myself, to become more compassionate toward the person I actually was.
For me, the mother wound showed up as a persistent sense of not being worthy. I felt cut off from my own feelings. My self-esteem was low enough that it tipped into self-deprecation. In response, I became a perfectionist — trying to control myself, control my world, hoping that if I just did enough things right, I might finally feel okay.
It Isn't Only Personal
The more I've learned, the more I've come to believe the mother wound isn't only about our individual mothers. It's also structural — passed down through generations of women who were themselves left without support.
Patriarchal structures pulled women out of community and isolated them inside nuclear families, placing the entire weight of raising the next generation onto one woman's shoulders. How can a mother be nurturing when there's no one holding her? So many of us descend from a long line of un-mothered mothers. It wasn't always like this — in clan and tribal cultures, mothering was shared. In matriarchal systems, it is still sometimes the case today that children are not even sure who their biological mother is, because the role is fulfilled by so many women. Mothering was never meant to rest on one person alone.
I've come to believe that, in some form, we all carry this wound. It doesn't have to trace back to our own mother specifically. Sometimes it's simply the ache of disconnection from the first mother of all: the Earth herself. We are living with the intergenerational imprint of systems that severed so many of us from the sacred feminine — generations taught to seek guidance only from a distant, male authority, rather than to recognize the sacred in the feminine, in all her forms and phases.
Healing this, I think, starts with releasing our mothers from what they weren't able to give us — and learning, instead, to cultivate that loving mother within ourselves. To offer ourselves the same reverence, patience, and compassion we spent so long hoping someone else would give us.
Motherhood Cracked It Wide Open
I found real healing in the women's circles and retreats I attended over the years — something in being witnessed by other women, without judgment, that let me finally receive the nurturing I'd been missing. But nothing brought the wound into sharper focus than becoming a mother myself.
I had absorbed the modern message that we can "do it all" — be a present mother, work, still have time for ourselves. I thought motherhood would be hard, but manageable. I had, after all, done real work on my emotional wounds already.
What I didn't understand was that becoming a mother meant stepping into an ancestral field I hadn't fully reckoned with. My grandmother lived through war and the loss of her first husband. When my own mother was seven, my grandmother and her children had to flee their homeland and rebuild life somewhere entirely foreign. And somewhere in all of that history, I already existed — as a small cluster of cells inside my mother's body, present for everything, long before I had any conscious memory of it.
In the institute of feminine arts, where I am currently studying, the Motherwound is defined as the emotional and energetic pain-body imprint of our mother, and the ancestral maternal pain of her lineage. I can deeply relate to this definition. Because when I became a mother, I re-activated an imprint I had inherited simply by being my mother's daughter — an imprint shaped by real, unresolved trauma - expanding over generations. For me, mothering initially meant hardship. It meant sacrificing my own needs. It meant trying to control everything, because how else could I possibly manage? It meant exhaustion, overwhelm, and losing myself in service of my child.
Despite all the inner work I'd done before pregnancy, motherhood revealed just how much was still unhealed — and, more than anything, it showed me exactly where I needed to start mothering myself. Unconditionally. It showed me where I needed to build that inner mother-force strong enough to actually nourish me.
The Dragon
In one healing session, I came face to face with a part of myself I'd been carrying for a long time — a pressure in my head, like a blockage, something holding on tightly and refusing to let go. As I reached toward it, trying to bring it into view, a black dragon appeared in front of me.
It felt frightening. Overpowering. Too close. So I sent it further away, to the back of the room, and told it that it was giving me headaches. I didn't want it there.
The dragon seemed almost sorry. It apologized. And then it transformed — into a woman, lying on the floor, wet and exhausted.
My mother.
In that moment, I understood: the weight I'd been carrying in my head all this time, that pressure — it was hers. It was what I had inherited from her.
It also explained something I'd never fully understood about myself — why becoming a mother had been so hard for me. I struggled to trust my own body, to believe I could conceive, to believe I could give birth naturally (I was born by cesarean myself, and I carried a quiet, almost inherited fear that my son would face the same). It's strange, looking back — before pregnancy, I had felt more deeply connected to myself than ever. But this fear lived somewhere deeper than that connection could reach.
The moment I became a mother, I stepped into a completely different field, flooded with anxiety. I often felt depressed in those early months. Cut off from my own intuition, living in my head, trying to calculate whether we'd made the right choices instead of trusting my gut.
Eventually, the anxiety loosened its grip, and I found my way back to trust and joy — but it was hard-won. Even now, parenting often feels like a constant negotiation. I treasure so many moments, deeply aware of how fleeting this time is and very grateful for the time I can spend with my child. And yet there are moments when I feel so overwhelmed and reach my limits. Children are truly our teachers; they bring us face to face with the deep feelings and experiences we carry within us and have not yet processed.
I spent my teenage years carrying feelings of guilt for my mother’s difficult fate. I spent much of my thirties trying to understand why I was so unhappy. Therapy helped. Family constellations helped. But nothing truly transformed me until I discovered womb work – until I began to work consciously with femininity, with my menstrual cycle and the archetypes that dwell within it.
There I found the grief and pain that I had carried with me, both inherited and drawn from my own life. And that is where this story continues – with my exploration of what I have learnt about building up this nourishing motherly power within myself.
This is the first in a two-part reflection. In the next piece, I'll share what I've learned about the Mother Archetype itself — its qualities, its shadow, and the practices that have helped me reconnect with this force in myself.
Foto von Milo Weiler auf Unsplash