Survive or Thrive in Your Well Being
Our habits can entangle us, even in matters of well-being. Distinguishing between surviving and thriving in our well being empowers us to break the cycle of ingrained behaviors stemming from the mother wound. By recognizing this difference, we can wholeheartedly devote ourselves to flourishing in all aspects of life. My last experince in gardening at our family home gave me some inspiring examples of the difference between surviving and thriving.
The very human condition of meeting life through habits and set patterns makes it sometimes difficult to know whether we’re caught in the spin of surviving or invested in thriving.
I’ve just come back from a holiday in our family house in Italy where I spent most days clearing the land around the house.
As I worked my way through the encroaching overgrowth of forest weeds I found myself more and more immersed in the metaphor of surviving vs. thriving suggested to me by all the ivy, brambles and old-man’s-beard smothering my favourite fruit trees.
The tenacity of the trees was quite extraordinary. Like us, the tree does everything it could to escape the suffocation of what dragged it down. I couldn’t help but noticing the similarity between gardening and therapeutic work, and how it tells a beautiful tale of learning the difference between surviving and thriving in life.
Reclaiming Vitality: Uncovering Nourishing Dreams
My first task in the garden was to clear the heavy mantle of old-man’s-beard that entombed the fruit trees, blocking the wind and the sunlight and making it very hard for the the tree to provide the fruit with proper nourishment.
This is how we too can get dried up and lose sight of what could become possible beyond our familiar painful stories.
Sometimes women ask for 1:1 work with me because they feel their zest for life has dried up, they find it difficult to make decisions or they lose their sense of vitality and vision in life.
This is a rather straightforward sign that we’re in a survival mode.
After many years, habits and patterns take over and obscure the fresh oxygen that fuels our creativity, passion, enthusiasm, spontaneity and confidence.
The tendency of weeds to grow up and around and over reflects the tendency of our habits and life-patterns—it becomes so dense that in places, where once you could see through the branches beautiful, wide vistas of landscape, nothing is visible anymore.
I’ve worked in the past with clients whose mother wound suffocated their original dreams and aspirations in life.
These women were able to pursue other plans and aspirations that came to fill the vacuum, mostly borrowed from other sources. They felt fulfilled to some extent, but the nagging tug of their original heart’s yearnings never completely left them.
With each cut through the thick screen of weeds I felt the breeze refreshing me, evoking the many joyful moments women experience in our work, and the huge sense of relief they get, right from the start of our process, from clearing away at last the parasites that suck the life out of their happiness and freedom.
It doesn’t take much to feel unburdened.
It doesn’t take long to uncover the nourishing dreams that are numb, but not yet dead. It’s a first step in the process of uncovering our potential and bringing in nourishment again. It’s what healing the mother wound looks like at the beginning of the healing journey.
Exploring the Impact of Emotional Legacy and Overcoming a Black and White Mindset
As I cleared the main layers of ivy and old-man’s-beard, I could see the price the tree paid for the uncalled-for tenants on its trunk and branches.
Broken branches still clinging to the trunk with a few warped sinews; tall new shoots speeding towards the light but no longer able to support themselves without the grip of the invaders.
The weight of old-man’s-beard is like the dead weight of our emotional legacy, which we can carry for many years.
One of the common confusions in healing come from a B&W mindset.
The B&W (Black and White) mindset is when we look at things as ‘all or nothing’, evaluating what’s possible for us in life using a narrow loyalty to cultural and social norms about motherhood.
Examples of B&W mindset are:
Dismissing the need for therapy because we feel we’re functional
Normalising an emotionally abusive mother because she fed and clothed us
Pinning the possibility of healing the mother wound on a necessity to forgive or accept
Avoiding continued support because we’ve done loads of therapeutic work in the past
Equating pleasing and conforming to other’s needs as being a good person
In life, and in wounds, it’s never ‘all or nothing’. We are constantly shifting between the edges.
In every dynamic there are parts that give and parts that receive; parts that are satisfying and parts that suffocate.
In order to know whether we’re invested in surviving or thriving we need to expose our core beliefs and learn whether they prevent us from breaking the cycle of dependancy on our mother wound or enabling in us an independent sense of abundance and sovereignty in our adult life.
Breaking Free from Effort-ing: Healing the Mother Wound
Effort-ing as a healing threshold between surviving and thriving.
Effort-ing is how we can teeter on the edge of surviving and thriving, never fully making it to a restful place. Many of my clients who are reading this are probably nodding along with acknowledgment and recognition.
The mother wound always comes with a tendency to effort. Some of the most common forms of effort-ing are:
The effort to get it right
The effort to be loved
The effort to be seen
The effort to feel enough
The effort to fix/change
In my jungle, I marvelled at the fruit that made its way into life despite the welter of weeds that furiously enveloped the trees. I could also feel the amount of effort that went into producing the fruit.
Some of the trees were producing much less fruit compared to previous years. The fruit was smaller as well. This is how we get accustomed to compromised needs and wishes.
Sometimes, a tree gives up and starts shooting a new trunk in another location. Anything to get away from what drags us down.
It’s reminiscent of women who, understandably, run as far as they can away form their mother.
When women tell me things like “I moved to the other side of the world, only to realise that I was running away from my mother,” I know that they’re turning towards thriving.
In certain cases, starting afresh by running away can provide the best opportunity for personal growth. The complexity of the mother-daughter bond can create obstacles to making substantial life changes without establishing a healthy level of separation.
Yet, just like the new shoot of the plum tree, we stay connected to our birth story and benefit from making a conscious and supported break in the cycle of generational trauma.
In healing the mother wound we cultivate the capacity to distinguish between making an effort to be or making an effort to flourish in spite of everything, and the possibility of being present to meet life from a restful and nourished place.
The three foundations of a thriving life with healing the mother wound
I must be honest, sometimes I just wanted to be shot of those annoying, clinging parasites taking advantage of the trees’ vitality.
In the process of hurrying for results it happened that I mistakenly cut a branch of the plum tree or shook off lots of viable fruit.
I stopped there to laugh at myself because I could see how a healing process that’s burdened by the pressure to get results, either from the therapist or the client’s side, is a process that in the long run is destined to fail.
The foundations of healing the mother wound process I offer women are: patience, care and compassion.
Patience is the steady rhythm of discovering what could become possible after we’ve taken care of the heavy drag of the mother wound.
Care is when a woman relearns (and in some cases newly learns) how to take care of herself, which includes learning what she needs in order to feel safe, seen and nourished in life.
Compassion is the capacity to move through discomfort with curiosity and genuine hope. Compassion is much more than self-love. It grows in widening circles of inclusion, able to witness more and more beauty even in the darkest moments and places.
Perhaps Evelyn’s words on our healing the mother wound journey can give a sense of how this looks like:
Drawing on the parallels between clearing a garden and therapeutic work allowed me to show a clear difference between tendencies to survive or thrive in our well being. We move away from the impact of our emotional legacy and the struggle to break free from the cycle of the mother wound by reclaiming vitality, moving away from a black and white mindset and shifting from effort-ing to an ultimately restful and nourished place in our life.
If you want a skilful healing-gardener to help you clear the density of your own mother wound, know that I offer a first complimentary call. This pressure free call helps us to get to know each other and explore the approach we can take for healing the mother wound that will benefit your own particular needs.
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Shelly's helping women whose relationship with their mother left a negative mark and want to become un-limited in their personal or professional life
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