Meeting the Mother Archetype In Grief

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

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.

Sometimes it helps to understand the relationship between Mother and Mother Shadow by writing down the answers to, or reflecting on, the following questions:

• Do you see your Mother figure in your mind? If not your biological mother, is there a Mother figurehead that you relate to?
• Do you experience the Mother as forgiving, remote, loving, or protective? Do you experience her connected to some specific emotion?
• Do you hear her messages as consuming and shrewd, or nourishing and kind? So often, a consuming message plays, and an internal repetition cannot be shaken.
• Identify your responses to your loss and trauma. Are they the same as your mother’s response to you, or are they different? How are they different? Do you seek out the “Mother” in others? Are these mothers male or female? Are they caretakers? Are they harsh?