Our relationship with our mother shapes how we experience ourselves as women — our worth, our safety, our capacity for love. If you’ve sensed the complexities of it without having the language for it, this conversation names what’s going on and why.
This is Part 1 of a three-part conversation with Bethany Webster. Part 2 goes into the Parentified Daughter. Part 3 explores when no contact with our mother is the healthiest option.
What Is the Mother Wound?
“What many people do not realise is that the core issue at the centre of women’s empowerment is the mother wound.” — Bethany Webster
Bethany’s work grew out of her own journey — working on her own mother wound for almost two decades. And what she found, the further she went, was that the more she healed it, the more she felt reconnected to life itself. More located in her body. More connected to the earth and to all beings.
She defines the mother wound across three levels.
The Personal Level
The personal mother wound is anything — any limiting beliefs or patterns — that we’ve internalised as a result of painful dynamics with our mothers. The mother wound is something that’s in us, and it’s something we heal from the perspective of being a daughter.
It can be the pattern of caretaking our mothers, overfunctioning, always being the responsible one. It can be feelings of abandonment or neglect. It can be the way we developed a limited sense of self through the interactions we had — or didn’t have — with our mothers.
The Cultural Level
The mother wound is also a product of the patriarchy. We live in a world where women have been taught that we are less than. And so the mother wound is a product of that — how women across the generations have had to metabolise and cope with the pain of living in a world that doesn’t fully value them.
This creates a distorted dynamic between mothers and daughters — a feeling of scarcity. Not enough power or love for all of us. A competitive, unconscious tension that gets passed down. Not through intention, but through the wound itself.
The Spiritual Level
In the first days and weeks of our lives, we are one unit with our mothers. There is no separation. Whatever pain, whatever limitation, whatever fears are present in that space gets deeply embedded in us. And we begin to project this outward onto life itself: Is life trustworthy? Do I belong on this planet?
The impacts are existential — they shape not only how we see ourselves, but our sense of place in the cosmos.
The Evolutionary Gift
The good news, Bethany says, is this: as we heal our personal mother wound, we also help to heal the culture. And on a spiritual level, we help to heal our species.
This wound is so vast in its ability to limit us — it’s also vast in its ability to liberate us.
As we do this work, we reconnect on a very deep level with life itself. We become capable of feeling our interconnectedness with all beings. And it becomes, Bethany says, a deeply sacred journey — one she finds profoundly exciting.
The Taboo
Difficulty and challenges between mothers and daughters are rampant and widespread — but not openly spoken about. The taboo about speaking about the pain of the mother wound is what keeps it in place and keeps it hidden in shadow.
In our culture, mothers are either idealised — can do no wrong, always right, never to be questioned — or they’re at the opposite extreme: devalued, blamed, dumped on. Women and mothers aren’t seen as whole, complex, multifaceted beings. We’re either deified or devalued. And so we have no models, no space for authentic relationships with our mothers. We have to hide and pretend.
When women contemplate looking at any pain they have with their mothers, there’s this immediate sense: but I’ll be blaming her. We’ve all seen our mothers struggle. We don’t want to be part of that.
Bethany’s response to this is clear: yes, your mother tried her best. And your feelings matter. Both things, held equally. Not: she tried her best, therefore I should suppress what I feel. That is what women have done for generations. And whatever we suppress does not go away. It seeps in in insidious ways.
“We are the women now stepping up to consciously rework these wounds — not as bad, ungrateful daughters, but as healing pioneers, change agents working with wounds that have been passed down for centuries.”
This Is Not About Your Mother
One of the most important things Bethany clarifies: this work is ultimately not about our mothers.
It’s about using whatever pain we feel with our mothers to heal it — so that we can have a healthy, true relationship with ourselves. To see ourselves clearly, without the cluttered and limiting beliefs that our mothers passed down to us, often very unintentionally.
“We can’t really embody the divine feminine as women if we haven’t healed the unfinished business with our mothers. And by that, I don’t mean we need to have a healthy, happy relationship with our mothers — oftentimes that’s not even possible. But what we can do is mother ourselves in the ways that we long to be mothered. And that is one of the most empowering things we can do as women.”
Healing as Initiation
In other cultures, there are initiation ceremonies — moments where a young person takes ownership of their sovereignty as an individual, and is acknowledged as no longer a child. We don’t have that in our culture.
Bethany sees the process of healing the mother wound as that initiation. It functions that way. We do the sifting and the sorting of what is mine and what is not mine. And in that process, we create space and access to our true, authentic self — and we begin to embody it.
Without having done that work, we remain unconscious of much of it, and can end up passing it on in different ways.
What Happens to the Relationship With Your Mother?
This is where many women hesitate. What will happen to my actual relationship with her if I start this?
Bethany is honest: we can’t know that at the beginning. And that’s the scary part. Get support, she says. Don’t try to do this alone. This work requires a container.
The truth is that when we get to a certain point in this healing, the relationship with our mother could improve — or it could devolve. But the point of healing is not an outcome either way. The point is that wherever it lands, you are okay.Centred. Safe within yourself, regardless of what your mother is doing.
Some mothers adapt to new ways of relating. It’s beautiful when that happens. Others refuse to do their own inner work — and it becomes like talking two different languages. And the most powerful moment in the process is when we can grieve that our mothers aren’t going to change.
Letting go of the impossible dream — that your mother will finally change one day. When we really let that settle in, we get so much of our power back. We get a sense of self. We’re more capable of seeing our own magnificence. More grounded. More in reality.
Your mother becomes less and less critical to you feeling okay. And instead of tension and shame around her not showing up for you, you become capable of feeling compassion — non-attachment, and a genuine peace with how things are.
Melanie’s reflection on her own journey: “Working with this has really helped heal my relationships with other women. As I don’t expect my mother to be in a certain way, I don’t expect other women to be in a certain way. I don’t spread that blueprint out into the world — it shifts internally. That’s one really lovely benefit.”
How to Begin — The Mother Belief Inventory
One of the exercises Bethany invites women into as a starting point: look at your mother’s beliefs.
What were her beliefs about her body? About sexuality? About food? About her career, her potential in the world? What were her beliefs about relationships, about women, about men?
This isn’t necessarily about what she said overtly — it’s what you can surmise through her choices and decisions. Bethany calls it the mother belief inventory.
It does two things: it gives you clarity on what beliefs shaped you as a child — what you internalised simply by living in that environment. And it gives you the opportunity to see where you may have taken on beliefs that aren’t yours. Beliefs that don’t sync up with how you want to be in the world. Beliefs that were absorbed not because they were true, but because they made you feel safe.
“A lot of this work on healing the mother wound is ultimately about healing the ways that we feel safe in the world. Safety is one of our most primary needs. And what I’ve found is that for many of us, struggle became fused with being safe — the more we struggled, the more we felt safe, because there was an absence of a strong mother figure to help us. The transformation is: safety equals ease. How do we change that so that we can feel safe in a place of ease and openness?”
A Practical Exercise — Working With Tension
Bethany offers a simple exercise to begin — ten minutes, right after listening.
Bring to mind the situations with your mother that cause the most tension. If your mother has passed, recall when she was alive. What were those situations? Flesh them out in detail.
Typically, Bethany has found, a lot of the tension is about our mothers needing us to be a certain way — and the suppression of our authentic needs, observations, and impulses that comes from that.
Look at the source of tension. And then ask: what is one step I can take to be more authentic? One tiny baby step. It might be waiting a day before you call her back. Saying what you actually think when she expects something different. Letting go of the pressure to be immediately available.
“A lot of this is about boundaries and being real. Many of us are craving authentic, real, honest connections — including with our mothers. If we can take a step like this to be more authentic with our own mothers, that translates into all these other areas of our lives.”
And if it doesn’t go well — that’s more information. You are always capable of soothing and reassuring yourself in that moment.
What Becomes Possible
It’s like a new birth — you are becoming consciously aware of your power and realising yourself as much more vast than you ever imagined. You are revolutionising your own blueprint for your sense of self.
What Bethany sees in herself and in the women she works with: the more this healing deepens, the more your mother becomes less central to you feeling okay. You develop inner resources — a felt sense of safety, of being seen, of being enough — that doesn’t depend on her.
And from that place, the most surprising thing becomes possible: compassion. A sense of non-attachment. Peace with how things are, whatever they are.
“This is one of the most empowering and transformational things you can do in terms of inner work. I think all else is like preparation for this really big, powerful healing journey.”
If this is touching something in you, the deeper work — resolving these patterns in the body, at the root — is what 1:1 womb healing work is for. You can also explore the free womb healing resources to begin.
This is Part 1 of a three-part series with Bethany Webster. Continue with Part 2: The Parentified Daughter and Part 3: When No Contact With Our Mother Is the Healthiest Option.
