As some of you may know, I’m on a program called the No Woman Diet. This is stirring my pot big time. One of the reasons is that I entered the NWD partly with the intention of allowing the bonds of emotional dependency between my ex and me to sever completely. That in itself is cause for some emotional distress. But the big thing – which I hadn’t anticipated AT ALL – is that the Diet is triggering some deep mother wounds in me.
I have realized now that I felt deprived of physical intimacy with my mother in very early years and that this made me feel unsafe and unlovable. This is pretty vulnerable shit, which is probably why I’ve covered it up with all kinds of distractions for all of my life, even using elements of machismo to avoid it. This mother wound also in part defined my choice of relationship partner: A healing, nurturing woman.
The heart strings that connect me to my ex are getting fewer and fewer. Every one that drops hurts a little. I’m in this strange situation where I’m encouraging and inspiring her to move on and find the next man while at the same time feeling some hurt from knowing that I will see her with another man very soon. There is this dual nature of mourning that which was and celebrating that which is allowed to take its place. It confuses me.
And while I’m on this No Woman Diet – totally deprived of feminine sources of comforting myself – and in the absence of a healing, nurturing woman as my life companion, I have become acutely aware of how much I desire validation and recognition from women, while I at the same time don’t want to work for it. This is fucking with me.
I don’t want to need that which I desire. Is that messed up or what? Maybe you’ve experienced it the same way: You are in the presence of a woman and you want to feel more intimate with her, but you feel that your need to be intimate with her disempowers you. This I’ve come to understand is a mother wound. You need her to empower you and make you feel whole and in that you recognize your own inherent lack of wholeness, which pretty much sucks to feel.
And when the woman, who I in a moment need for validation, starts moving away from me, I need her to stay, but I don’t want to belittle myself by begging for attention. So I become aloof, pretending I don’t care about her. This rabbit hole is deep!
It’s hard to become aware of this dynamic, but now that it’s in my awareness, I can enter into relationship with it, as Bryan Bayer of the Authentic Man Program keeps inspiring me to do in the teleseminars that are part of the NWD-course.
Anyone else care to share about their mother wound?