Healing the Mother Wound: The Freedom on the Other Side

The word “mom” doesn’t land the same for everyone. For some women, it means safety, softness, a built-in best friend. For others, it pulls up something heavier: absence, anxiety, a void that never quite got filled. That gap between the mother you had and the mother you needed has a name, and it shapes more than most people realize. 

It follows you into your friendships, your relationships, your career, and the way you talk to yourself when no one’s watching. On the latest episode of Let’s Try This Again, host B. Simone gets honest about her own version of this. 

Her mom wasn’t in the home. Her parents divorced young, her dad remarried, and she was raised largely by her stepmom and grandmother, with summer visits standing in for a full-time mother. For years, that void ran quietly underneath everything. 

What she’s talking about now is what changed when she finally chose to forgive both her mother and her stepmother, and the freedom she found on the other side of putting that pain down.

This post touches on childhood trauma and family estrangement. It’s meant as reflection, not a substitute for professional mental health care.

Healing the Mother Wound Means Holding Two Truths at Once

Here’s the tension at the center of the episode: You can acknowledge that something hurt you and still refuse to let it define the rest of your life. Those two things can live together. Healing the mother wound isn’t about pretending the ball never got dropped, and it’s definitely not about deciding your mom did everything wrong so you can stay angry with a clear conscience.

B. Simone is careful about this. As she puts it, acceptance is not approval. You can accept the reality of who someone is without cosigning how they treated you. You can love the mother you actually have instead of grieving the fantasy of the one you wanted, and you can still set boundaries in the same breath. 

The goal isn’t to win the argument about the past. It’s to stop reliving it and start moving through it as the person who gets to choose what happens next.

What Is a Mother Wound?

A mother wound is the emotional pain that comes from unmet needs in your relationship with your mother or a maternal figure. It’s the reminder of what you didn’t get: consistency, affection, protection, the sense that you were seen and safe. Sometimes it comes from something loud, like criticism or abuse. Sometimes it comes from something quiet, like a mom who was physically present but emotionally unreachable.

The tricky part is how invisible it is when you’re living it. You don’t always notice it as a kid. You just notice you’re acting out, or shrinking, or anxious, or bracing for something. It usually isn’t until adulthood, when you start doing the work, that the pattern comes into focus and you realize how much of your emotional life traces back to that early attachment wound.

What Causes a Mother Wound?

There’s no single origin story here. The mother wound manifests in a lot of forms, and most of them have nothing to do with a mother who didn’t care. More often than not, they come from women who loved deeply and simply didn’t have the tools, the language, or the safety to show it.

An Absent Mother

This is B. Simone’s story: a mother who was in her life but not in the home. Even with summer visits and a real relationship, the void of an absent mother still shapes a young girl. That ache of “why isn’t she here” gets internalized long before a child has the words for it, and it quietly informs how they attach to everyone else.

Emotional Unavailability

A mother can be fully present and still emotionally out of reach. Maybe you couldn’t get deep with her. Maybe there was no room to cry or share what you felt. This tends to show up in single moms running in survival mode, forced to be tough and independent with no bandwidth left for softness. The emotional unavailability wasn’t cruelty; it was a nervous system stuck in provide-and-protect.

Addiction or Mental Health Struggles

When a mother is battling addiction or her own mental health, the parenting she can offer gets rationed by whatever she’s fighting. That’s a different kind of unmet need, and it deserves its own grace.

Being Raised by Another Maternal Figure

Plenty of women were raised by a grandmother, an aunt, or a stepmom. A grandmother deep in survival mode, keeping food on the table, may not have had space for conversations about how to move through the world as a woman. And a stepmom situation can carry its own tension, jealousy, or friction. B. Simone lived this one too, and it took a real conversation in adulthood to get to the good place she and her stepmom share now.

Love That Was Never Expressed

Sometimes the wound isn’t that the love was missing. It’s that it was never said out loud. B. Simone shares a family member who asked her own mom to say “I love you” directly and watched her struggle to get the words out. “You know I love you” and actually hearing it are two different things, and some of us needed the words.

How Does the Mother Wound Show Up?

Left unexamined, these early experiences don’t stay in childhood. They drive how you show up in adult relationships, whether or not you connect the dots.

People-Pleasing and Walking on Eggshells

When you grow up managing everyone else’s moods to keep the peace, you become the fixer, the one who abandons her own comfort so the room stays calm. It carries straight into friendships and romantic relationships as chronic people-pleasing.

A Constant Need for Validation

When you didn’t feel like “enough” early on, you can spend adulthood chasing proof that you are. The danger is outsourcing your worth: if praise builds you up, criticism can just as quickly tear you down, because you never anchored it in yourself.

Difficulty Receiving Love

If the only love you knew came wrapped in toughness or aggression, love can start to feel foreign or unsafe. Learning to actually receive it becomes its own skill. And as you’ll hear B. Simone explain, growing up around aggression can also lead you to feeling the need to people-please.

Fear of Rejection and Distrust of Women

An abandonment or rejection wound can leave you braced for the next exit. For some women, it hardens into distrust of other women entirely, which, as B. Simone points out, is a hard thing to carry when you’re a woman yourself. The invitation is to look inward and find your tribe rather than putting every woman in the box your past built.

If you want to go deeper on how these patterns play out between generations, this look at the mother and daughter relationship is a natural next read.

Why It’s Crucial to Heal the Mother Wound

Doing this work isn’t about tidying up your feelings. It changes what you pass forward. Here’s why healing the mother wound is so important:

You Stop Handing Down Intergenerational Trauma

Unhealed hurt people pass their hurt on; it’s how these patterns survive. B. Simone frames it as looking at the family tree and deciding what stops with you. Naming the cycle is the first step to breaking the intergenerational trauma instead of forwarding it to your kids, your marriage, or your friendships.

You Free Yourself to Move Forward

B. Simone is blunt about the payoff, and it’s a spiritual one for her: some things won’t unlock in your life until you forgive and release what you’ve been holding. Staying stuck in a 12-year-old’s mindset keeps you from the relationships, the peace, and the next season waiting for you.

You Build Healthier Adult Relationships

When you stop running childhood patterns on autopilot, your mother daughter relationships and every other bond get room to change. That’s the whole point of trauma recovery: not erasing the past, but no longer being run by it.

How to Heal the Mother Wound

None of this is quick, and B. Simone says so plainly: it’s a process. But she offers real, grounded starting points from her own healing process.

Kill the Idea of Who You Wanted Her to Be

The line that cracked things open for B. Simone came in a therapy session: you have to kill the idea of the mother you wanted, because you break your own heart every time you expect her to be someone she’s not. Loving the mother you actually have, instead of the fantasy, is where the pressure finally releases.

Set Healthy Boundaries Without Guilt

Healing doesn’t mean unlimited access. You can honor a parent and still set boundaries; the two coexist. You’re an adult now, which means no more walking on eggshells and no more shrinking to keep the peace. If you need a framework, this guide on how to set boundaries with toxic family members pairs well with this episode. Setting boundaries is protection, not punishment.

Forgive Without Waiting for an Apology

This is the hard one. B. Simone pulled her stepmom aside herself rather than waiting to be approached, and it became one of the most healing experiences of her life. But she’s clear that your forgiveness can’t be contingent on their apology. Sometimes you have to be the bigger person because you’re the one doing the healing, and the release is for you.

Lean on Community and Emotional Support

B. Simone found women who filled the gap, “mamas” who poured into her along the way, and she built the LTTA sisterhood so other women wouldn’t have to do this alone. Community is real emotional support, especially when you’re doing the internal work. Practicing self compassion is part of it too, and so is professional help; therapy was a turning point in her own wound healing.

Ask Yourself the Right Questions

She closes with a journaling prompt worth sitting with: What did little-you need that she never received? What are you still waiting on your mother to give you? And what cycle ends with you? Those questions are where the real work starts.

What Healing the Mother Wound Really Sets Free

The throughline of the whole conversation is hope. This isn’t a takedown of your own mother, and it isn’t about staying angry. It’s about getting to the other side, from victim to victor, and being able to say there’s love, honor, and respect there now, boundaries and all. Our parents were people before they were parents, kids with their own experiences and their own unhealed places. Grace gets a lot easier once you understand that.

Watch the full conversation on Let’s Try This Again, and drop your own relationship-with-mom breakthrough in the comments; someone reading needs to hear it. And if you want more inspirational advice, head to Dear Media, home to 100 top-rated pop culture, entertainment, and lifestyle podcasts hosted by today’s most talked-about celebrities and creators.