The mother wound happened through depersonalisation

In What is the mother wound? I describe the failure of genuine emotional nurturing that created humanity’s blindly rapacious, self-destructive psychological paradigm—what we call ‘normal’ but I call the Patriarchal Operating System. The mechanism that caused the mother wound was depersonalisation.

What is depersonalisation?

Depersonalisation Disorder (or Syndrome) is the experience of not being fully plugged into our own bodies. We are physically present yet emotionally remote.

Because of that, we’re unable to ‘show up,’ cope with life and live purposefully. Hannah Ewens describes depersonalisation as “one of the body’s stress responses. You can’t deal with a situation, so it almost ejects you…”

Depersonalisation has a high correlation with low self-esteem, self-harm, anxiety and panic attacks—all shame-based and shame-inducing issues that both conceal and compound the underlying disorder.

The World Health Organisation’s ICD-10, the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, describes Depersonalisation Syndrome as follows:

“Among the varied phenomena of the syndrome, patients complain most frequently of loss of emotions and feelings of estrangement or detachment from their thinking, their body, or the real world.” 

Climate change

Notice the phrase “loss of emotions and feelings.” This is exactly what happened during the climate change that caused the mother wound around 4000 BC.

Long-term drought in the Sahara, Middle East and Central Asia led to desertification, famine and competition for resources. Peaceful Neolithic fertility cults gave way to the first patriarchies, who eventually spread their toxic psychology around the globe. This event, which spanned several thousand years, is recorded in the Bible as ‘The Fall’.

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.

Depersonalisation and the mother wound

In Saharasia, geographer James DeMeo describes the psychological breakdown that led to depersonalisation and the mother wound:

“A passive indifference to the needs or pain of others manifested itself, and hunger, feeding of the self, became their all-consuming passion.

The very old and young were abandoned to die. Brothers stole food from sisters, and husbands left wives and babies to fend for themselves. While the maternal-infant bond endured the longest, eventually mothers abandoned their weakened infants and children.”

DeMeo goes on to describe “a pattern of famine-induced emotional contraction and contactlessness [sic]” that perfectly matches depersonalisation, creating the break in transmission of genuine emotional nurturing that resulted in the mother wound:

“Adults would necessarily become less attentive caretakers, and dependent infants and children would thereby suffer not only from malnourishment, but maternal and sensory deprivation.

The effects of somatosensory deprivation of infants are carried into adulthood and can be transmitted to the next generation: Mothers and fathers, deprived of maternal affection and physical touching during their own infancy and childhood, will as adults raise their own children in a similarly affectionless, cold, and uncaressing [sic] manner.”

Just a single generation of mothers unable to transmit genuine emotional nurturing to their children was all it took for the mother wound to become embedded.

Healing the mother wound

Humanity’s problem is that it can’t feel that it can’t feel. Every single problem we face stems from this.

When we understand depersonalisation as the root cause of the mother wound, its resolution becomes apparent: restoration of our lost capacity to feel—and that means feeling the pain of all that which was lost, right back to its inception point at the Fall.

Only when we fully feel the anguish of our own genetic lines can we fully inhabit our bodies and end the depersonalisation at the core of the mother wound.

Next steps

For further resources on the mother wound, both free and paid, please click on this image.

Photo by Sunguk Kim on Unsplash