How the mother wound breaks our sense of identity
In The Fall, Steve Taylor writes: “The main event in human history is a sudden, massive regression—a dramatic shift from harmony to chaos, from peace to war, from life-affirmation to gloom, or from sanity to madness” that occurred around 6,000 years ago. This “massive regression” fundamentally impacted our sense of identity then and still does so today.
Long-term drought in the Sahara, the Middle East and Central Asia led to desertification, famine and competition for resources. This event, which spanned several thousand years, is recorded in the Bible as ‘The Fall’.
Six-way fragmentation
As I describe in What is the mother wound? long-term famine created a six-way psychic fragmentation which jolted humanity out of the peaceful Neolithic age and into the era of violent patriarchy that we still inhabit:
- Separation from nature—The need to fight for food and water broke humanity’s respect for nature—plant, animal and human alike—and the responsibility to steward the planet for future generations.
- Separation from the cosmos—The mother wound manifested in the overthrow of peaceful fertility cults by tribes with male war gods. They legitimised slaughter and conquest for survival and accumulation, as antidotes to fear and anxiety. Humanity no longer revered Nature as sacred, meriting a capital letter. Divinity became an entirely abstract concept, leading to male-god monotheism.
- Separation from the breast—The mother wound manifested in early weaning practices. These created angry male children who grew into men with an insatiable urge for violence and sexual violence.
- Separation from the body—The mother wound causes an inability to fully inhabit our physical bodies. This manifests in difficulties with basic biological functions such as eating and elimination—and even death.
- Separation from loving nurture—Famine creates intolerance and aggression around body contact. This has catastrophic repercussions for the mother-child bond, with a failure to transmit genuine emotional nurturing to the child.
- Separation from our inner child—The mother wound prevents our inner child—the pure, playful, joyful, fully connected part of ourselves—from developing into our adult self through what is known as arrested development.
Identity
What’s left after all this fragmentation?
In a sense, the Fall created our modern sense of individuality—each of us a distinct personality—by jolting us off the ground of feminine, feeling-led creation into the masculine, thinking-led paradigm of abstraction, reason, and science.
Yet this came at a cost. In The Fall, Steve Taylor writes that, “the masculine psyche is… removed from the ground of organic creation.”
In The Alphabet versus the Goddess, Leonard Shlain describes the ego as “a selfish brat that will stop at nothing to continue breathing. To maintain the body, it demands food and drink. To ease its existence, it covets possessions; to reaffirm its identity, it hungers for human relationships. The ego… prevents one from combining the soul of the world within each of us with the soul of the world at large.”
What we see here is that the mother wound caused humanity to externalise its sense of identity from an internal connection to the world to an external one based on tangible, visible values rather than the intangible connections of genuine, organic nurturing.
Genuine identity is only possible with a genuine, emotional connection to the cosmos, to nature, to our own bodies, to our own families. The mother wound broke that version of identity and replaced it with a mechanical version obsessed with filling the ‘hole’ that Leonard Schlain describes.
This ‘masculine psyche’ makes many—perhaps even most—humans very adept at surviving and thriving in the cut-throat world of modern economics. Yet anyone can see that, from an emotional perspective, society is in steep decline with increasing anxiety and mental illness.
Sensitivity
The more sensitive you are, the more this fragmented identity will affect you.
Elaine N. Aron, PhD, has extensively studied human sensitivity. Her research is documented in The Highly Sensitive Person. She writes:
“One in every five people is born with a heightened sensitivity; they are often gifted with great intelligence, intuition and imagination, but there are also drawbacks. Frequently they come across as aloof, shy or moody and suffer from low self-esteem because they find it hard to express themselves in a society dominated by excess and stress.”
The reason HSPs suffer from low self-esteem is not because they “find it hard to express themselves in a society dominated by excess and stress.” Both the low self-esteem and the inability to express are symptoms. Neither is a cause. The mother wound is the cause.
Identity = value
Many successful people in the business world have a very high sense of self-worth. Yet this is a false, inorganic value based on their external success. Take away their money and their status, their fame and their possessions, the fawning lackeys who obey their every command, and they may have no sense of worth at all.
Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain was highly successful in the TV entertainment arena, highly paid, oversexed, and feted around the world. Yet he could not overcome a basic lack of self-worth and ultimately took his own life.
Identity and self-worth are flip sides of the same coin. Identity is value, and vice-versa. When we know who we are, we value ourselves; when we don’t, we feel worthless.
When we restore our organic connection to the cosmos, to nature, to our bodies and to our sexuality, our sense of identity and self-value begins to coalesce.
Check out The Mother Wound course for more information.
Photo by Amir Geshani on Unsplash