The mother wound – why we confuse nurturing and sex

During the long and painful journey to heal the mother wound, we often encounter issues around nurturing and sex. Whether we’re single or in a committed relationship, our needs feel unmet. Our attempts to meet them can result in confusion and painful situations and separations.

Confusing love and sex

The first issue is that our need for nurturing is often disguised as a longing for romantic love. Yet the two are not the same. In my first-ever blog post on this site, Pink Floyd’s The Wall – a rock opera on sexual shame, I describe the confusion I experienced in my 20s:

“Stumbling from one relationship to another, I looked for love when sex was offered and looked for sex when love was on offer.”

In reality, I was looking for neither love nor sex. I was looking for the emotionally available mother I never had. I was looking for genuine emotional nurturing—the kind that undoes the arrested development of the mother-child circuit that’s damaged from conception in the current human paradigm, the Patriarchal Operating System.

We seek nurturing to backfill missing adolescent development. It’s the prerequisite for genuinely thriving, non-dependent romantic and sexual relationships.

Another issue is that current social rules see nurturing and sex as only coming from a single person—our significant other. Yet the healing game does not abide by such narrow restrictions.

The basic principle of ‘like attracts like’ ensures that our level of arrested development will be close to our partner’s. Sex with them may be gratifying but they may not be able to provide the missing backfill of genuine nurturing we desperately need.

Life energy

Whether single or failing to receive the nurturing we crave from our prime relationship, we project our unmet need onto the world at large.

Here another problem arises. We often lack the language to communicate our needs because we don’t know what those needs actually are. The traumas associated with them happened before we acquired the capacity for language.

We can clear this by understanding that both needs relate to life energy.

In The Function of the Orgasm (1942), psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich describes the “fundamental identity between sexual process and life process.”

Life energy is the energy that creates and animates life, which science has no agreed definition of (according to Wikipedia).

Sexual energy is the strongest/clearest manifestation of life energy.

Confusing nurturing and sex

Nurturing and sex are very close cousins. The longing for one can be interpreted as a longing for the other. A strong urge for sex can drown out a softer desire for nurturing, leading to us seek the right thing from the wrong person, or vice-versa.

The reason we confuse nurturing and sex is that we’re not conscious that both are facets of life energy, manifesting in subtly different ways:

• Nurturing is a historical demand for a necessary action that did not take place during adolescence (mother-child development circuit)
• Sex is a current demand for life energy management (compression and discharge of stale life energies; invigoration through fresh life energy)

The longing for nurturing is the desire for life energy to unfold correctly within us. In How to allow nurturing into the mother wound I write:

“The pain we experience at the core of our being is the stalled mother-child process pressing against the trauma, fear, and shame that inhibits its proper unfolding.”

We may frame sex in terms of expressing love, experiencing pleasure, or procreation. From an energetic perspective it’s a regulatory process that compresses and discharges high-voltage life energy through our being, much like an internal combustion engine compresses and ignites fuel to produce energy.

Reich writes: “Biologically, the healthy human organism requires three to four thousand sexual acts in the course of the thirty to forty years during which it is genitally active.”

So, the urge for sex continues throughout genitally active adulthood.

The urge for nurturing, however, disappears once we fulfil it enough to restart our arrested development. Genuine emotional nurturing creates the right conditions for the appropriate unfolding of life energy. Once we can nurture ourselves sufficiently, we no longer need to resource it from others.

Restarting this stalled development process is the one and only method of root cause resolution of the mother wound.

Next steps

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

Photo by Erke Rysdauletov on Unsplash