Childhood Trauma and Forgiving Your Mother

With Mother's Day approaching, now is a good time to reconnect with your mother or at least find forgiveness from afar. While it will not be easy to get over your childhood trauma, it will be worthwhile.

Most of us who feel animosity towards our mothers because of neglect can find a way to forgive. Those of us suffering from physical and emotional childhood trauma will find it harder. The anger of a damaged childhood can often block us from forgiving our mothers. However, forgiving your mother for childhood trauma is a gift you give yourself. While it might serve to benefit your mother, it will help you much, much more. Just because you forgive your mother does not mean you need to re-establish a relationship. Forgiveness from afar is just as beneficial.

Choose to Forgive

The anger or blame we carry from childhood trauma holds us back from living a full life. These emotions can damage personal relationships with spouses and our own children. In addition, these feelings damage our self-esteem, causing us to make poor life choices. It is important to take responsibility for your own life and make a decision. Do you want to carry around this damaging baggage, or find forgiveness and freedom for yourself?

Motherhood and Mental Illness

It is important to understand that the childhood trauma you suffered were the unfortunate side effects of your mother's mental illness. No emotionally healthy person neglects or abuses her children. The way you were treated had nothing to do with your personality or your worth as a person. You did not ask to be born, nor did you create the unhealthy emotional state in your mother.

Almost everyone wants to have children. We want to create life; have a smaller version of ourselves that we can help and teach. Sometimes, we want to be parents just to undo our own childhood trauma. But parenting is much more challenging that the contemplation of it. Parents often realize too late that they are not cut out for parenthood. Your mother may not have learned this about herself until she already had three kids. The responsible thing to do is continue parenting and make do. Your mother does love you. She is just very bad and expressing it. The skills simply are not there.

Putting it into Perspective

Think about it this way. When you ask your neighbor to borrow a cup of sugar, and she does not have any, are you resentful? No. You simply go to the store and buy yourself some sugar. This concept applies similarly to the lack of nurturing you experienced as a child. Your mother simply did not have any nurturing to give.

There are specific things you can do to find forgiveness for your mother, helping you to recover from your childhood trauma. First, you must accept that your mother was not nurturing, nor will she ever be. You cannot change her, but you can change yourself. Accepting this about your life will be hard and painful. You are likely to have a good cry, but once you work through acceptance, you will be free from resentment.

How to Forgive

Once you find acceptance, you will need to find the nurturing you lacked. Until you fill the void in your soul, you will never be able to love yourself or anyone else fully. Visualization can be a powerful tool in helping you to forgive. In performing the following visualization, you should find a quiet time and place with no distractions. Lie down or sit comfortably and close your eyes.

Self-Nurturing Visualization

To give yourself nurturing, imagine yourself as a child, at an age when you really needed your mother's love but did not get it. Six years old is often a good starting point. Remember what you looked like then, what you wore, how you stood and moved. Picture your child-self in a place where you always felt safe.

Next, add your adult self to the image, as you are now. Walk over to your child-self and embrace her. Tell her you love her, that she is beautiful and perfect. Sit down next to her and bring her onto your lap. Rock her gently back and forth, while humming gently to her. Tell her repeatedly how lovely she is; how perfect.

This visualization is likely to bring tears. It is painful at first because you are mourning the nurturing mother you lacked but always wished you had. However, the love you give your child-self will begin to heal the wounds left by your childhood trauma. You will find a new outlook and a greater capacity for loving yourself and others.

Repeat this visualization whenever you feel exhausted, unappreciated or unloved. Be a mother to yourself whenever the child part of you is calling for mommy. In this way, you can find forgiveness for your mother and love for yourself.