How the Mother Wound Shows Up In Adult Female Friendships
How the mother wound can shape adult friendships through trauma bonding, emotional labour, and enmeshment - a psychotherapist’s reflection. *all names have been changed to protect identity.
The Core Wound
Let me start at the end. The end of my Amma’s (Mum in Tamil) life was sudden and therefore carried additional trauma – four months of ‘symptoms but no signs’ metastatic breast cancer, followed by a quick, breathless demise a week after diagnosis, felt like sudden death by car crash. Especially given that our relationship had only just started to improve in the last three years of her life, after I’d moved out. Before that, it was a case of me inheriting the weight of Amma’s unprocessed trauma – nearly dying at three from appendicitis, her father actually dying when she was seven in a farming accident and her favourite sibling being murdered by the Tamil Tigers when she was pregnant with me (a whole other blog article).
She survived as an immigrant from Sri Lanka to the UK, no easy feat during the ‘80s, but it was psychologically surviving rather than thriving; in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy, self-actualisation and processing the aforementioned trauma was not high on the list of priorities when you’ve arrived in a strange land, having to learn a new culture and improve language skills asap, whilst contending with frequent bullying and racism at work. And, as is the sad tale for many Asian girls growing up around this sort of unprocessed trauma, daily life looked like walking on eggshells, managing eruptions, taking care of emotions whilst not having one’s own heard or validated, always being told they are a “bad girl” and that God, the highest power to exist, would punish them one day. It was a general maelstrom of emotional abuse.
Of course, the message then internalised from a very young age was that I was fundamentally bad to my core – why else would my mother be shouting at me and erupting at me so frequently. It was not even a plausibility that there was something wrong with her – it must be me, as is the unconscious magical and polarised thinking of any child. We needed our parents for survival, so they could not be fallible in any way. And the only way to counterbalance this “badness” and to prevent Amma rejecting me further was to always ensure she never got upset, or at the very least, never give her reason to get upset with me. I was silenced into being the carer and “good girl”, managing her emotions so that I could then be worthy of love. It wasn’t all oppressive, but it certainly felt like it, and the uncertainty of what I was going to get on any particular day made things worse. This was my mother wound. My Asian mother wound. It is important to note at this point that I am only writing about the shadow - more articles to come on how my mother did show love and how my father psychologically saved me, amidst the chaos.
The Projection
Fast forward to my late twenties when I met Alexis* at the start of my psychotherapy training. Unbeknownst to me, my mother wound was about to show up in this adult friendship and teach more a lesson that would span over a decade. We became friends almost too intensely – at first I thought this was because of our experience on the course, and of how friendly and open she was. I now recognise, since the recent and necessary implosion of the friendship, that we were trauma bonded. Not just one of the romantic lovers, folks.
The first few years of our friendship were peppered with fun nights out, sleepovers and a shared army crawl through the trenches of the first part of our psychotherapy training. Even when Alexis exited the course at the counselling stage and I continued to complete the full psychotherapy training, we stayed in constant communication, our friendship ‘deepening’ with incessant communication, this acting as a mirage of something deeper. There was an intensity to it that felt all too familiar, not an exact blue print, but a flavour of the intensity of the relationship I had with Amma.
This was only exacerbated by my very unconscious need to ensure that Alexis was doing ok through her trauma and the way it manifested through a variety of behaviours. Or rather, that I was being the ‘good friend’ just as I needed to be the ‘good daughter.’ There were exchanges where it felt like I was Alexis’s therapist, and yet I had co-created the toxicity in the dynamic by endlessly validating and reassuring, looking after her feelings and mental health as I did my mother’s.
As I grew and had my own therapy, I started to feel able to put boundaries in place. One time, as Alexis started offloading on me about her difficult day, as soon as we met up, and how distressed she was, I found myself spontaneously bursting into mindful breathing in front of her, just to create a protective field against the bombardment of energy. That was the start of me seeing myself, even if she could not. Of course, the protection of my energy upset her, as it would with anyone who emotionally offloads. I was communicating that it was too much, and because there was a part of her that unconsciously saw me as a therapist, this would have of course felt like, on some level, that I was failing her or not living up to ‘my role’ in the dynamic.
Another time, time, Alexis called me in distress and began offloading a complex and triggering experience without checking whether I had capacity to receive it. This was a lot to receive, especially with no check ins about whether I was ready to receive said information, the way a therapist has no warning about what is about to come up. What added to the feeling of being unseen was that I had told her of my own difficult experiences with a family member that might have required even more of a trigger warning before the offload. As had been the dynamic in our friendship, I had previously allowed myself to consistently take the back seat and not be held in mind. This time around, I told her I needed space and that I would call her back later. I was learning.
But what made this relationship notable challenging was the imbalance - there was very little reciprocity in our dynamic. I always felt that if I talked about my own stuff for too long, Alexis would begin to glaze over or get fidgety – she was not able to be centred and present for an extended period, as I felt I was for her.
I’ve used the word ‘offload’ a few times now – something Amma often used to do to me with her rage and raised voice; this is why I didn’t know how to or want to cut the tie with Alexis – it was all too familiar yet all too different. Alexis never got angry with me like Amma did – she was warm, smiley and friendly, much like my Amma was on good days/hours before the eggshells suddenly dropped. It was confusing – the similarities and the differences, the emotional demands that were the same in their intensity but different in their execution and packaged so neatly with a ribbon around it during the good times. And in the not so good times, before my boundaries started to strengthen, I went to the emergency kit mantra, which felt safe and familiar: other people’s dysregulation was my responsibility.
And when I finally stepped out of that role, our bond disintegrated and the trauma bond collapsed, as I became conscious of something I had been blind to for over a decade of friendship.
The Awakening
Our toxic dynamic came to an abrupt implosion, as dynamics that begin intensely often do, when both our experiences of grief collided one Autumn. I was approaching my 40th birthday, a difficult milestone in my grief journey, as it was the first decade Amma would not be a part of. Alexis was no longer able to attend the celebration, as she was going through a procedure following her own experience of grief
When I expressed that I wanted to support her through that, and at the same time, was going to be disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to make it, given that it was a challenging milestone birthday, I was told that I was comparing grief, and that I should have taken those feelings to my therapist. Well, of course Alexis felt that way, considering she was unconsciously projecting the therapist role onto me – no client would ever expect their ‘therapist’ to express disappointment. And all this only came to the fore after I questioned why Alexis had chosen to tell me that she’d muted me on social media when I first entered a relationship with my now husband – another example of me having to manage her feelings and make myself small so that she would be ok.
The irony of being told to take my feelings to my therapist filled with an anger towards Alexis that had been dormant for the entirety of our relationship. Something in me simultaneously broke and exploded. I snapped, after years of being the caretaker, the good friend, the support system that was mostly one way, the emotional regulator, and the container, I had finally had enough… “There’s no room for me in this friendship and I’M NOT YOUR THERAPIST!” I told her, with a raised voice; the old therapeutic adage of ‘where there’s heat, there’s history’ seemed to apply here – I was also raising my voice at my mother, standing up for myself and creating a boundary with both these dynamics where there had been none.
There was a bit of text back and forth after that, but I quickly realised that I was tired of seeing Alexis and not fully being seen by her. When I finally blocked her on social media so I could post freely about my grief, I almost immediately got a message stating, “I saw you unfollowed me” –post her own grief experience, there was a heavy survival response rooted in unmet attachment needs, but there had always been a flavour of this – that she needed to be seen by me. And I co-created that, being so used to seeing my mother.
The spell had finally lifted. What had caused that to happen? Was it my wedding a few months prior, my 40th birthday and the start of a new decade or being told by someone I felt I had carried for over a decade to take my feelings to my therapist? Maybe all three, and many more factors that likely contributed. All I knew and felt in my body was freedom. I cried many tears following the death of my mother and cry often in general; I cried once during the dissolution of the toxic dynamic with Alexis, and it was out of guilt of no longer wanting to continue the friendship and no longer being the good girl.
Let that be a sign to you, reader – if your body is not weeping post relationship break-up, it can often mean that something heavy has been broken and that ain’t a bad thing. Sometimes we are not grieving the person but we are grieving the identity we have to relinquish in order to grow.
The moral of this story is to try and notice when you are walking on eggshells in a friendship, when things feel imbalanced, when you constantly feel drained from the dynamic and when you can’t express your feelings without your friend becoming dysregulated. And in Amma’s case, without exploding. And this is where the story only really begins – Amma had been alive in Alexis, so I could never really grieve her fully, and now I felt free to do this. Goodbye, good girl, who felt like she had to work for female love, hello boundaries, balance, and looking after myself. Hello consciousness.
This is one example of how the mother wound can show up in adult female friendship. I share this not to assign blame, but to illustrate how unresolved early attachment wounds can unconsciously organise adult friendships. Perhaps you have your own version of this in your female friendships. The bittersweet thing is, I often wonder if my mother had to die for me to awaken to the mother wound. If Amma was still around, would I have done the work in therapy of processing how much I’d felt I’d had to work for love? Every ending holds a new beginning, as painful as that ending was.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." - Carl Jung.
