“The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”
– Ezekiel 18:1-4
By Melisa Gulsun Ozmen
Our first emotional and social relationship begins with our primary caregiver, who for the majority of us is our mother. The mother is the emotional bridge between the spiritual world and this world. It is the mediator of the body, mind, and spirit that brings the souls that intend to incarnate into this world from the other world. It is the first emotional bond established with this world, the first look, the first touch, the first consciousness.
However, before we open our eyes to the world, there is a stage of life which begins in the last three months in the womb. Starting from the last three months of pregnancy, the mother’s emotional and mental state, along with her fears, pains, worries and concerns, begin to be recorded in the baby’s subconscious mind and neural activity. Psychiatrist Thomas Verny writes, “From the moment of conception, the experience in the womb shapes the brain and lays the groundwork for personality, emotional temperament and the power of higher thought.” This development of the brain in the womb continues in the first nine months outside the womb and continues to take shape depending on the environment in the home where the baby first lives until the age of seven. During this development process, the person we are most affected by is again our mother, naturally. If the emotional bond between the mother and the baby is interrupted due to an unavoidable circumstance such as a long-term hospital stay or other physical separation or simply because the mother is emotionally and psychologically unavailable for the baby due to inherited traumas, it is a life threatening and devastating experience from the baby’s perspective, which in turn is a cause of difficulty in forming healthy emotional relationships in adulthood.
As we grow up and break away from our mothers and start moving out into the world, we experience many emotional traumas that we cannot make sense of. The first source of those traumas is usually based on the first emotional bond we established with our mother. This first emotional bond we established in life is automatically reflected in the emotional bonds we establish later in our adult lives, as explained in the theory of attachment styles. If we experience difficulties and obstacles in establishing emotional bonds, exchanging love, meeting our emotional needs, and expressing love and emotional needs in the close relationships we establish in adulthood, it demonstrates that we did not learn how to express emotional language properly in our first relationship with our mother because we grew up with the emotional absence of a dysfunctional mother. And before that, our mother failed to learn the emotional language from her own mother, as our grandmother failed to from her own mother. In his book It Didn’t Start with You, Mark Wolynn, an expert in the field of inherited family trauma, says that we receive aspects of our grandmother’s mothering through our own mother. He explains that, “The traumas our grandmother endured, her pains and sorrows, her difficulties in her childhood or with our grandfather, the losses of those she loved who died early ¬¬– these filter, to some degree, into the mothering she gave to our mother.”
Emotional trauma is inherited from generation to generation, but it does not have to be a pre-written destiny. A generation that has not learned these skills from their mothers can break this cycle if they wish to heal and transform the initial emotional traumas they experienced from their mothers. We may not all be lucky enough to come into this world through mothers who are able to transmit the essence of love to us and speak the language of love correctly. However, the maternal bond is the first bond we establish with our primitive brain. The emotional bonds we establish at a later age should be conscious bonds, ones that we must establish with our thinking mind. Transforming and healing the traumatic emotional bonds inherited from our mother is possible and it is an opportunity to reach emotional maturity.
If you are a mother, your greatest emotional responsibility from pregnancy onward is to heal yourself first, so as not to pass on your inherited emotional trauma to your child. Of course, this is not as easy as just saying it. It is a long-term learning process that requires patience, but perhaps this is the reason a mother becomes a mother. In her book The Emotionally Absent Mother, psychotherapist Jasmin Lee Cori highlights how to recognize and heal the invisible effects of growing up as an emotionally neglected child. She gives clues on how to heal the traumas inherited from mothers and to learn how to become the best version of your own mother. Being able to be your own best mother in adulthood, independent of your mother, is a great responsibility for yourself. When you do not take this responsibility yourself, you will unconsciously put the responsibility of motherhood on your children and raise what will end up being parentified children. And the unhealed trauma will pass to the next generation.
That is why the most difficult and responsible profession in the world is motherhood. The spiritual responsibility of this profession begins in the womb, continues until death and is then passed on to the children. If for any reason your mother did not take the responsibility to heal herself, it is no use for your own healing to blame her or to complain about her irresponsibility. Instead, take the responsibility of being your own best mother and build and strengthen the bridge to your spiritual world.
