Hope and Love for Undermothered Women

By Soonja Kim

In the hearts of many undermothered women there is a deep longing to be seen and loved for who they are. They carry an innately healthy desire for close emotional connection and an unconditional sense of belonging that they needed from their mothers but could not get. Close emotional connection with the mother allows the child to feel safe, comforted, cherished, and fulfilled.

Without adequate mothering, the child does not have a secure emotional base from which to freely explore and make a mark in the world, that expresses their authentic self. Consequently, believing that they have to earn love, people who did not receive adequate nurturing from their mothers may develop a false-self to obtain the attention and care for which they hunger. They often suffer a deep sense of insecurity and shame that renders them vulnerable to life's many stresses and challenges.

It is not that many undermothered women are incompetent or unsuccessful in the world. On the contrary, many are quite independent and accomplished. Yet how they present themselves on the outside does not always match how they feel about themselves on the inside.

"Why am I so needy?" they ask." Why am I so insecure and anxious, so sensitive?" "Why am I so dependent on others to love me?" It is hard for them to ask these questions in a truly self-respecting , exploratory way. These questions may be loaded with a sense of painful shame about what they feel is lacking in themselves, as if the lack is their fault.

For such undermothered women, the very popularized antidote, "You must love yourself" can be dangerously interpreted and applied. Instead of accepting their need to be loved and reaching out safely to suitable others, they often galvanize themselves to become even more independent, self-sufficient, and outwardly successful. They do not realize that much of their shame and suffering from insecurity and anxiety originated in early wounding relationships with mothers and other caregivers. As such, a majority of their healing has to come from the relational, interpersonal arena of close emotional connection. In order to heal, they need the actual, newly imprinted positive experience of being loved and accepted by others. Being loved and accepted, not more false-self improvements, is the powerful medicine for healing the shame and anxiety that rule their lives.

Nevertheless, to seek emotional closeness with others can feel very threatening and painful for them. It entails re-examining and dissolving the fears and defenses they had to erect to survive the lack of loving connection as children. When these undermothered women reach out to others now, they once again have to become vulnerable to and dependent on the behavior of others. They do not want to revisit the feeling of powerlessness and helplessness they once felt in negotiating their care from their unavailable mothers.

So, how can these undermothered women proceed to obtain the needed emotional healing?

My first advice is to take your need for love seriously. Your need for the mothering kind of love and nurturing is innate, and you do not outgrow it when you become an adult. Your longing to be loved is the seed of a universal belonging and oneness, our inseparable connection to humanity, nature, and the cosmos.

Secondly, I encourage you to go seek help to safely dissolve defenses around loving and receiving love from others. If you are considering therapy, seek therapists who are emotionally, somatically, and relationally oriented. Find therapists who will not shame you for wanting to be loved and adored by an outside source, including the therapists themselves.

There are spiritual reresources that emphasize the Divine Mother and the feminine Shakti principle. As long as these resources do not encourage you to do a spiritual bypassing of your legitimate limbic brain, emotional/relational needs, they can be helpful in reminding you of, and connecting you to the Big, Ultimate Love.

Finally, reach out and seek people and organizations that value close emotional connection and will support you for wanting attention, care, reassurances, acknowledgements and loving kindness.

In conclusion, do not give up your longing to be loved and mothered, just because you are a grown woman. You do not have to just love yourself, or even to love yourself before you can be loved. You can learn to love yourself in relationships, not outside of them. Also, being mothered does not have to come only from your own mother. Mothering can come from both females and males. There are people out there who would want to come towards you in your vulnerability and emotional neediness. They are drawn to do so, because they accept or want to learn to accept their own neediness, and experience the healing power of love and connection, right beside you, rather than independently, away from you. You do not have to be alone and isolated, feeling ashamed of the parts of you that have not been accepted by others. You can seek to be loved by others, and lean on one another to learn the challenging but beautiful process of how to give and receive love unconditionally.

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