“If I don’t own it, she can’t steal it from me.” Revoking the bargain to stay blind to your value in order to preserve your connection with your mother.

Note: This is my first article on Living Undaunted on the topic of Healing the Mother Wound and gradually moving into the integration phase of that work. See the About page to learn more about the four pillars of writing I do here on Substack.

“If I don’t own it, she can’t steal it from me.” I remember reading this statement while going through one of my old journals. I lived with a double bind in the relationship with my mother. In the moments when I was proud of myself, confident or unashamed about something, my mother would retaliate with a vengeance or “knock me down to size,” as she would say.

It was as though my mother had a sixth sense for this; if I expressed even the slightest whiff of confidence, it seemed she could feel it and would react swiftly to put me in my place. Over time, my expressions of confidence were always followed by a sense of menace or dread about her subsequent reaction to it. It felt like there was some kind of “hammer” that would inevitably come down on me and rip that moment of confidence away — a huff of disapproval, a silence when there should be celebration, a remark of humiliation, or even a slap across the face.

Feeling my own value got closely associated with shame and expecting punishment.

If I shrank in compliance with her unspoken mandate to stay small, I lost myself, but I still somehow retained some measure of connection with her. If I shined instead of shrank, I lost her — and through the pain of her retaliation, I lost access to myself too.

There was no way to have connection with myself and connection with my mother at the same time.

Publicly my mother would praise me because my successes reflected well on her. But privately it was a different story. I learned to hide and shrink around my mother to prevent triggering her insecurities, resentment or jealousy. This felt like survival, and also like I was being a good daughter. As a child, she became my focus, and I learned it was safer to not have needs, or to hide them best I could. Self-abandonment became my default as a byproduct of trying to create a bond with my mother, who saw me less as her child and more like a competitor. Her ego was satiated when I groveled to her and didn’t display too much confidence. That cost me years of struggle and having to learn from scratch how to see myself clearly as an adult, like wandering through a series of fun-house mirrors.

As a coach who has helped women heal the Mother Wound for over a decade, a powerful point on the journey is witnessing women come into the shock of realizing how beautiful, amazing, valuable, and exceptional they actually are — and the grief of realizing how actively their mothers, out of their own pain, had tried to prevent them from seeing it.

After many years of inner work, there’s the beauty, joy and freedom of finally seeing yourself clearly without your mother’s distortions and projections. It can feel like: “My mother was wrong about me. I am capable of seeing myself clearly now. And I love what I see.”

And there’s the deep grief that comes right behind the joy — the grief of how long you lived in defense and resistance against knowing your value as a means to protect yourself from someone who was supposed to protect you.

Many daughters learned to disconnect from their own value as a way of preserving connection with their mothers. It’s a real tragedy that some mothers feel so deprived that they see their daughters as competitors rather than innocent, vulnerable children who depend on them for survival. And to make it more complex, many of these daughters believe their mothers’ projections and distortions for years, if not their entire lives.

What’s really going on is that the mother is blended with her own wounded inner child much of the time, and sees her own rejecting mother looking back at her disapprovingly through her daughter’s eyes. Every win for the daughter (a graduation, an engagement, a flash of confidence) is interpreted by the mother as her own loss, confirmation of her own mother’s judgment that she was never good enough.

To avoid those painful feelings, the mother punishes her daughter, erroneously seeing the daughter as the cause, rather than an innocent catalyst, for her own past pain to be felt and healed.

It’s natural and normal to feel triggered by one’s child. This is part of parenting. The problem arises when a mother avoids doing the inner work around it and instead lives out the projection — seeing her daughter as someone to defeat, conquer, and take vengeance upon to relieve her own shame and sense of not-enoughness.

Coming out the other side of a Mother Wound like this takes tremendous courage and tenacity, because it’s still so taboo to name how mothers can be abusers, sometimes even sadistic ones at that. As children, we were invested in not seeing how damaging and unsafe our parents are — that was a matter of survival. Our compassion for our mothers initially outweighs compassion for ourselves, as the hope of the innocent child is that someday doing “enough” for mom will finally make her feel like “enough” herself, so she’ll stop abusing us and start actually mothering us.

One place it’s easy to get stuck is waiting and hoping for your mother to change.

I remember a strange hesitance in my early days of therapy. I finally articulated it as: “If my own mother can’t see my value, then it must not exist.”

This makes sense from an early developmental perspective. Children build a “self” from what the parent reflects back to them. That’s why positive mirroring and unconditional positive regard are crucial elements of child development. The parent is the expert on reality from day one until the child develops a stable sense of a separate self. For me, it felt like a massive shift to realize, as a young woman, that my value is real, stable and substantial, even if my mother cannot or will not see it.

The new paradigm is this: My value exists even in the absence of my mother’s validation. Getting to this place can take a long time. It takes the mother off the pedestal as the arbiter of one’s reality, and one starts to become the primary authority of one’s own reality — the expert on oneself. This is a necessary milestone in the healing process. A lot becomes possible after we turn this corner.

This takes so much effort and psychological grit because we are revoking the original bargain we made with our mothers as little girls: I stay safe and hold onto mommy as long as I don’t own my value.

As women healing the Mother Wound, we break that contract and say: I am ready to own my value and see myself clearly. I am the expert on my reality now, not my mother.

In a healthy mother-daughter relationship, the mother can readily and eagerly praise, encourage and validate the daughter, reflecting back her strengths, qualities and talents as stable and valid in her as a separate person, without experiencing that as a threat or a loss for herself. There’s enough space for both mother and daughter to be lovable and powerful.

Those who didn’t have mothers capable of this have a long road: first deconstructing the false beliefs, projections and distortions her mother placed upon her from her own history, and then, with enough clearing work done, eventually meeting the reality of her own separate goodness, lovableness and worthiness. It’s a bittersweet, long and worthwhile journey.

It’s enormously freeing to finally see that the version of yourself you believed (not good enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough) was never real. It was a projection of your mother’s insecurities that you’ve been carrying, not the truth. It’s like taking off glasses that were darkened by your mother’s past pain that had nothing to do with you. It can feel like taking a big gulp of air after holding your breath for eons.

The good news is that it’s never too late to differentiate from our parents’ projections and discover who we really are.

The grief and joy of seeing our own true value usually arise when four specific things come together:

1. Seeing the negative, critical narrative of your mother and how it functions in your own mind — how it pressures you to constantly second-guess yourself and shrink in compliance with it rather than express yourself openly and confidently. Watching closely how it drains you, causes you to doubt, even despair in yourself and about life. (This is the internalization of what Marion Woodman calls the negative introject, or the “Death Mother.”)

2. The positive feedback you get from people (friends, even strangers) that directly contradicts everything your mother told you. Allowing yourself to receive and believe that feedback as data about yourself.

3. Seeing the direct evidence in your own life story of your value — your actual qualities, talents, skills, your innate and unique way of being. Taking in the human being that you are, and feeling proud, happy, compassionate toward yourself. Letting your goodness be real, and tolerating the discomfort of that, rather than collapsing into dismissing it to preserve your mother’s story.

4. Helping your inner child bond with your adult self more than with your mother’s narrative as an anchor for what’s real. That transfer of inner attachment (from outer mother to inner mother) takes time, and happens by showing up for the inner child consistently. (This is what I teach in my courses and coaching.)

When these four things come together, they create the necessary tension for a new view of oneself to emerge, and a break from the old conclusions, pain, and attachment that anchored the past reality.

One can be sad for one’s own mother (her lost, unlived life, the suffering she endured) and let that be her own separate journey, without it coloring or burdening your entire life. Our mothers are not children who need our rescue. They are adult women who have made certain choices and are experiencing their own challenges as a result.

There can be a real shock in realizing that one’s mother indulged her darker impulses to hurt in response to her own pain, rather than taking steps to get the help she needed to protect her daughter from it.

The fact that mothers have not had much support from society, medicine or psychiatry is real, and yet that doesn’t diminish the devastating impact that gets passed down anyway. Daughters pay the price for the support that society refuses to give mothers, and the pain moves down one more generation.

For daughters who do the necessary inner healing work, it is unglamorous, private, and can be brutally slow-going. But each layer recovered is a massive win for your soul.

One day not long ago, I was walking down the street and saw a pigeon with one stump for a leg. Somehow it lost its foot, and it limped along. I noticed myself watching this pigeon and appreciating her tenacity; I saw the dignity in her struggle. She didn’t give up. My thoughts struck me as curious. In earlier stages of my own healing, I would probably have felt distress, empathy and the impulse to help her, or simply felt her devastation, her misery. What I felt instead was respect rather than rescue — awe and faith in her determination to continue on.

To me, this view of the pigeon was an expression of my differentiation from my own mother, and healing from the parentification and savior complex that came from it. As a child, I believed if I was codependent and my mother’s savior, I would be safer as her servant, and not a separate being who could spark her jealousy, rage and competition.

I had made my mother’s suffering my own. And saw my own value as an enemy just as my mother did, because being my own enemy meant I could prevent maternal rejection.

Our evolution demands personal separateness as a necessary developmental step, one that starts to feel increasingly urgent the more we grow into ourselves.

Our needs for agency and self-determination are essential to healthy personhood — whether suppressed or not, those needs are there.

I recall one day, in the midst of this process, discovering (not just intellectually, but as a felt experience in my body) the value I hold in my being, as truly something to behold. I remember how my bare feet felt on the carpet as I paused and breathed in gratitude for my own life, for the strength I had to continue to finally get to a place of seeing myself clearly and lovingly. Seeing my value as real and solid, not from a place of inflation or superiority, but rather as a neutral fact. I could finally take it in and feel the joy that came with it. And I could feel sad, too, that my mother and grandmothers never got to feel this feeling, without letting that fact diminishing the joy I felt.

That tenacity to continue healing was a fight for the child inside myself to feel safe and whole, to keep going until I got there. And the light at the end of the tunnel came. Life isn’t perfect by any means, but it is definitely different. There’s a flow now, a higher baseline of safety and joy that feels like a new world, a new me, with new possibilities.

I share this because when you’re inside the healing process it can feel never-ending, and I want women to have more models of coming out the other side of this devastating wound. The depth and expansion that emerges makes it all worth it.

If you’re struggling to see your value clearly, know that it’s not your fault. If you grew up with an emotionally immature, resentful or jealous mother, your nervous system became laminated with her insecurities, and you adapted the best way you knew how.

It isn’t possible to heal our mothers or make them feel secure. That work belongs to them alone. As we let our mothers have their own struggles and choices, we become free to embrace our own journey, our own selves, and all the joy that comes with it.

The truth is your value can never be stolen from you. That is not something that another person can take away. Your mother may have attempted to obscure your relationship to your value by, preventing you from claiming it, trusting it or feeling it. But your value was never your mothers to give, nor was it hers to take away. Your value is always yours and yours alone.

Now back to you:
If this resonates with your own journey, Where are you in this process? What would it mean for you to fully own your value, on your own terms? Have you engaged with any of the four items I mention above? I’d love to hear where you are with this.



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