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Your Mother Wound Archetype is the “Black Sheep”
Before we dive deeper into this archetype,
I want to share some important context.
There are three main archetypes of the Mother Wound that we carry as adult daughters:
The Good Girl, the Rebel, and the Black Sheep.
All of us have elements of every one of these archetypes, but we tend to be dominant in only one of them. Read your results below to learn which archetype you most resonate with based on the answers to the questions on the quiz.
About the “Black Sheep”
You are perceptive, insightful, and ahead of the curve. You see things other people don’t. This is a gift but it has also left you feeling misunderstood by others in many moments of your life. You value community and connections and yet are very discerning and slow to trust people sometimes. You have big ideas and visions and yet may feel hesitant to be more visible with them in the world. You may feel conflicted about wanting to belong more deeply but also about the importance of protecting your heart from those who seem unconscious and unaware. You may have a pattern of over-functioning in relationships or accepting less than your worth. You may be an introvert or simply isolate yourself sometimes as a means of self-protection.
Your Dynamics with your Mother as a Child:
Your mother may have been neglectful, abusive, or emotionally absent. She may have been well-meaning but unreliable, or she could have been overtly cruel and unkind. Your mother may have been unpredictably warm or cutting toward you, which was understandably confusing to you as a child. Your intelligence and perceptiveness protected you a bit, as you could see what was happening from an early age. People in your family may have targeted you with abuse, shaming, or ridicule. You were resourceful and had to be strong as a little girl. You may have had other siblings that were favored, and this made you feel less-than, somehow forsaken, or unlovable. You may have struggled with wondering why your mother was so rejecting or harsh towards you. Life seemed unfair, and you had many lonely moments as a child. You may have escaped into books, nature, music, or other interests.
Your Dynamics with your Mother as an Adult:
Your relationship with your mother has been conflicted and complicated. It’s been a struggle to feel seen by her as a separate person and to actually feel that you fit in with your family much at all. Your mother seems to assume that she knows everything about you and expresses little curiosity or interest in your feelings or your life in general, which is frustrating. Your conversations with her tend to be superficial, and she may bring the subject back to herself quite often. At times you feel ignored. You may be used to being “talked at,” meaning having one-sided conversations in which you’re expected to be the listener. This feels draining and exhausting, but you feel stuck and unsure as to how to shift this. Other people in the family take up more space, and you seem to fade into the background. You may have started to speak up and use your voice which was met with shaming or backlash from your mother or other family members. You may have already gone no-contact with your mother and are now trying to figure out how to heal and thrive now that she’s out of your life.
What is the Mother Wound?
Before going further, I’d like to share a brief explanation of what the “Mother Wound” is.
The Mother Wound is the pain rooted in our relationship with our mothers that is passed down through generations of women in patriarchal cultures and has a profound effect on our lives. When left unresolved, we pass on the Mother Wound that our mothers and grandmothers before us failed to heal, on to the next generation.
The Mother Wound is a combination of unhealed childhood trauma and the patriarchal beliefs that say women are inferior and should remain small, silent and self-sacrificing in order to be loved. Often our mothers passed down these beliefs either with the intention to protect us and help us fit in to a patriarchal world, or due to their own unconscious projections of their disowned pain. As little girls, our basic human needs for love, safety and belonging (most acutely felt with our mothers) became blended to some degree with the toxic belief that we must be “small” in order to be loved. Thus, the Mother Wound sets us up to struggle as women with perpetual feelings of low self-esteem, low self-worth, shame, self-doubt, guilt and never feeling good enough.
This is NOT about blaming our mothers or making them wrong; it’s about taking radical responsibility for our own healing, owning our inner gifts without shame, and doing our part to liberate women as a whole.
Symptoms of the Mother Wound
for the BLACK SHEEP include:
- Over-functioning, emotionally exhausted, and feeling unseen in your relationships
- Difficulty setting boundaries, speaking your truth, or asking for what you want
- Feeling anger or resentment about not being appreciated or reciprocated to
- Comparing yourself with other people and strive for external validation to feel loved
- Push-Pull: Longing to belong more fully in your family but you also struggle with shock or disgust at some of their behaviors and values
- Feeling fear, shame, and bewilderment at why your mother is resistant to bonding more deeply with you and having curiosity or more of an interest in your life
- Feeling despair and frustration at how dysfunctional your family has been and how resistant they are to change and feeling ready to step away from them for the sake of your own health and well-being
Benefits of Healing the Mother Wound for the “BLACK SHEEP” if you commit to the healing process…
- No longer settling for relationships that drain or exhaust you
- Saying No respectfully and directly without guilt
- Speaking your truth even if it bucks the crowd
- Liberated to be creative, free, and uninhibited
- No longer settling for crumbs of attention or lack of respect
- Higher standards for relationships overall
- Feeling fierce about what you deserve and creating a great life for yourself
- Quality, deep connections without entanglement, codependency or drama
- More rest, relaxation and nourishing solitude (instead of isolation)
- More loving and empowering self-talk that opens new possibilities
- Seeing oneself as a perceptive leader, ahead of the curve, rather than as an outcast
The Mother Wound isn’t something we need to avoid or feel shame about, it’s a doorway to our full power and potential.”
BETHANY WEBSTER
Now that you know your Archetype, what’s next?
Now that you know your archetype of the Mother Wound, it’s time to talk about another, very different archetype that emerges in us as women as we heal it.
Introducing the archetype of the “SOVEREIGN”
The Sovereign is an archetype that emerges in us as we heal the Mother Wound and start to own our power and potential as women. The energy of the Sovereign is rooted in self-respect and self-love, and it transforms how we see ourselves and the world around us.
As we heal the Mother Wound, we shed the many layers of shame that we inherited from our families of origin and the culture. As we shed the shame, we embrace the innocence and worth of the child we were growing up in a dysfunctional family. We practice inner mothering, giving to this child what we did not get from our own mothers, creating a deep bond of trust with the child within.
As the inner child heals, your true power as a woman can come forward
Through confronting your past and grieving, allowing your anger a safe space to be lovingly held and processed, powerful clarity emerges, and your self-worth is more fully realized and embodied.
The Sovereign’s profound level of self-love and self-worth comes from having uncovered her true self from the old residues of childhood trauma, feeling deep self-respect and self-compassion, and claiming one’s inherent worth and goodness as the core of one’s being. The Sovereign has shed and continues to shed old, outdated limiting beliefs, value systems, and worldviews that she inherited from culture, family, and media. She defines herself for herself and is guided by a commitment to personal integrity, listening to her truth within, and serving that inner spark.
The Sovereign knows her worth and claims her space without shame
The Sovereign is unapologetically strict about who has access to her and has a high standard for people she is close to, valuing reciprocity, depth, maturity, and authenticity in others. This level of discernment in relationships isn’t ego or narcissism but an expression of solid self-worth. She shows up in her relationships with potent integrity, radical honesty, and authentic care. There is no longer a “false self” to protect or defend, so she is no longer pulled into power plays, ego, or drama.
She treasures the real, the true, and the authentic in herself and others. She trusts the larger plan for her life and follows her own organic unfolding process, feeling awe, gratitude, and reverence for the dignity of her journey. She honors others and their own healing journeys as well, not judging, carrying, or over-functioning for them but respecting them and knowing that they will get what they need along the way – when they are ready.
The Sovereign has discovered herself as the primary source of what she desires most
The Sovereign has discovered herself as the primary source of her own safety, love, and joy, and because of this, she is no longer seeking from the external world what she missed in childhood. This frees not only herself but the other people in her life. She is a channel for original thought, new energies, and solutions to come forward in whatever area of life she is active, whether that be as a mother, a home health aide, a community member, a CEO, or a political figure – or any combination thereof. The Sovereign radiates a frequency of possibility and inspiration for all around her. She is alive with the inner spark of her own being. She rejoices in the gift of her own existence, savors her one precious life, and blesses those around her just by being her true self and following her path.
The Sovereign Archetype emerges within us
as we Heal the Mother Wound.
As the Sovereign, you stop over-functioning and codependent behaviors:
- No longer live in constant response to others’ demands
- Cease emotional care-taking and over-functioning for others, creating space for yourself to flourish at the highest level
- Respectfully allow others to take ownership of their own lessons and journeys
- Start trusting your own impulses, desires, inner senses, and intuition
- Allow yourself to be human and make mistakes without shame
As the Sovereign, you release patterns keeping you stuck and small:
- Dissolve destructive unconscious patterns that are sneakily holding you back
- Take emotional risks, be open, undefended, and radically honest
- Own your physical presence with confidence and power
- Really take in that your greatest service to others is living your best life possible
- Cultivate an inner mother who unconditionally supports, comforts, and encourages you
- Bring forth a whole new level of depth and power to your workplace, and those you serve
- Viscerally feel the reality of your own infinite worth and goodness and allow that to flow into all that you do
As the Sovereign, you set healthy boundaries and become calmly assertive:
- Discover the life-changing power of a clean, respectful, unapologetic “No”
- Confidently set firm boundaries that support your highest self
- Powerfully hold space for others to know their deeper truths
- Easily make decisions from a place of inner alignment
- Break the illusory link between your mother’s suffering and your success
- Easily turn away from things, people, and projects that are not a match for you
- Let go of guilt and get in touch with the validity of your own needs, feelings, and longings
As the Sovereign, you experience more pleasure and feel safe bringing your gifts to the world:
- Experience more joy, play and easily welcome good things into your life
- Cultivate the inner safety necessary to truly innovate and bring forward new ideas and information
- Experience the freedom of being imperfect without self-recrimination
- Experience abundance as part of your own nature, not something outside of you
- Feel that it’s truly safe to succeed and flourish on every level
- Attract quality relationships that honor and reflect the maturity and depth that you have cultivated through your own evolving journey of growth
Are you ready to start embodying the energy
of the Sovereign archetype?
Not just in a conceptual way, but in a profoundly visceral way, embodying more of your full power
and potential as a woman at this time in history?
If you feel a full body YES to reading this, I want to invite you to join me in the online
course on Healing the Mother Wound.