How Maternal Archetypes Can Help You Grieve
A Personal Perspective: Finding balance on the grief journey.
Originally Published on Psychology Today
KEY POINTS
- The relationship to the Mother archetype influences our ability to engage and disengage.
- The Mother Shadow can be an unconsciousness consisting of what you don’t want to see or engage with.
- The Good or Nourishing Mother helps to conjure self-evident traits that might seem cliche and ineffective.
The relationship to the Mother archetype influences our ability to engage and disengage. It prompts the need for others to see your pain as a means to validate it, and it forms lasting impressions that can help you or hurt you.
The Mother Archetype
While in everyday cycles, as well as cycles of bereavement, the wish for the archetypal, “Good Mother” may be present. If you have internalized a consuming Mother, you might hear her voice echo in the conscious and unconscious aspects of your psyche, saying, “Get over your grief, so I can have you back. Your grief creates distance between us, and I don’t want you to leave me. Your grief is less important than our relationship.” This response shatters the hope for the “Good Mother” to be…
