Motherhood as Evolution

and a Mother's Day gift from Stoicmom

Happy Mother’s Day! Yes, a few days early, because I’ve got a podcast scheduled to publish on Sunday: a conversation I’m excited to share with Vashti Summervill, parent coach and author of Letters from the Wilderness of Modern Parenting (a collaboration with artist, Wendy Blickenstaff), and I don’t want to inundate your inbox on your special day. But read on because this one contains a Mother’s Day gift that I’ve made for you! 

If you’ve been listening to Attachment Matters, you’re learning a bit about Dr. Gordon Neufeld’s ideas regarding what nature demands if we’re to fulfill our role as mother, and what goes into maturing into ourselves through the course of parenting—the sacrifices required. Rose brings up sacrifice in our first Q&A episode, and the conversation gets a little awkward. If I could go back and do it again, I’d linger longer on this idea of sacrifice and support Rose’s assertion that it is indeed this sacrifice that is the mechanism by which we finish growing ourselves up.

And, in honor of Mother’s Day I also want to talk a bit about the Mother archetype. Yes, this is Jung speak for the idea of mother, the expectation of mother, that we are each born with. 

Like with all archetypes, there is no single representative image. It is a frame on which we’ll hang our actual experiences and develop our mother complex (which is unavoidable and will inform our sense of how the world receives us.) This complex will be an autonomous part of our personality, made up of all the feelings and memories that we associate with our own mother (or one who played the role of primary nurturer in our earliest years, or even with the absence of a mother.) It doesn’t represent who our mother actually was throughout our childhood, but rather our subjective experience of ‘mother’.

All archetypes have both light and dark sides to them. From Kim Kranz’s “Wild Unknown Archetypes”

We begin our archetypal story with The Mother’s love. Through her sensual, fertile, and life-giving energy all creation takes form. Regardless of our birth story, each of our hearts beat for the first time in the warm womb of The Mother, where she offered resources from her body for the building of our own. Yet her tale is not so simple, as The Mother… contains both light and dark aspects of the feminine. With the best of intentions The Mother wraps her loving arms around her creations and begins to grip what she meant to set free. The mother both nurtures and prohibits growth. She gives, yet clings. She creates, yet restricts. Amid this complex energy, The Mother holds the key to the eternal challenge of love. 

Rose and I also attempt in the aforementioned Q&A episode to distinguish between healthy attachment and enmeshment. We consider the possibility that enmeshment arises when the provider and seeker attachment instincts are reversed from what nature intended (Mother as provider.) When we seek for our children to tend to our emotional needs, we distort the natural order of this relationship in which we are meant to be the alpha, taking the lead and accepting the sacrifice required as the provider of unconditional nurturance in the dynamic. 

When that nurturance is no longer unconditional and we provide care that feels emotionally transactional, I suspect this is when we’re creeping into enmeshment. (Resurrecting a quote I shared frequently back in 2022, from my favorite novel, Circe: “Perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.”) We’re rarely conscious of when we’re doing this, and I’d say it’s pretty universal these days with plenty of cultural influences that increase the likelihood that our parenting, which of course translates to our children as our love, contains some element of conditionality. Our world is saturated in conditionality and coercion so it’s no wonder we tend to parent this way. Most of us know nothing else.

To bring this back to Jung speak, we’re leaning into the dark side of the archetype here, sometimes referred to as the “devouring mother’, when Mom “grips, clings, restricts, prohibits growth”. And again, it takes consciousness to recognize when we’re showing up in this way. Remember that mother complex that we all have? It’s autonomous, and has the power to take possession of our will, driving our behavior and leaving us feeling like we have no control over our responses. Complexes will seize us and take the wheel–unless we make them conscious and change our relationship with them. Once we recognize the complex, we can see it as an invitation to undress the archetype and clothe it in something healthier, something conscious. 

A few words about this photo choice. I can’t remember the search terms I used to discover it. I know I was searching for an image to accompany Battling the Gods, but knew immediately that I wanted to save this image for an article about the Mother archetype. I see serenity on her face, and wisdom—the kind that only comes from experiencing the world in a way that breaks open our defenses and exposes the soft, vulnerable heart underneath. I love knowing that Neufeld agrees that it is when we can tolerate, even feel grateful for, the pain of an open heart that we know we have “grown up.” The way she’s ripping open her own ribcage, and that what erupts from the wound is more Life—is this the gift of motherhood if we surrender to the evolution it invites in us?

As moms, identifying with the mother archetype and all her “sensual, fertile, and life-giving energy” is important not only for our children, but for our own growth and maturation. Our love for our children and our desire to do right by them may be the only thing powerful enough to inspire this painful growth in ourselves. The crucible in which our most wise, authentic selves are formed. 

But how do we do this so that the archetype doesn’t consume us–which in turn causes us to consume our children? (Not in a literal sense of course, but in the sense of the “devouring mother”.) I’d say it takes consciousness, and the courage to take an honest look at ourselves. We can recognize motherhood as “the obstacle” providing “the way” for us to develop this consciousness. We can reorient to and befriend our emotions, learning from them rather than being overtaken by them. 

We can integrate parts of our selves that will balance out our experience of the world. It is possible to over-identify with the Mother archetype, or not know when to allow other parts of us to take a leading role. Along with the Mother archetype, there are other feminine archetypes that are contained within us including the Lover, the Mystic, and even the Warrior. Consciousness gives us more choice. More free will. 

One way to develop consciousness is to learn more about these feminine archetypes so you can recognize them in yourself. How much do you identify with the Mother archetype? And this is where that Mother’s Day gift comes in that I mentioned, but first a bit more context…

My readers tend to be more keenly aware than most of the fluidity of identity and the danger of over-identifying with aspects of our personality. Jung would say, because we are human, we are all all of it. To not recognize this is to limit ourselves, to guarantee that we’re projecting our shadow onto others, and to ultimately contribute to the chaos and division in the world. A famous quote of his is this, 

The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others. The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.

In other words, we make the biggest impact in the world by making the unconscious conscious. As we individuate from culture, we’re invited to discover what’s in our shadow and figure out how to integrate–in a healthy way–these parts of ourselves that we’ve cut off. By doing so, we become more whole while also becoming more compassionate, more able to recognize the humanity in others rather than focusing on their flaws. We also experience more agency in our lives, being able to tap into traits not previously recognized to be in our repertoire.

I’ve created a mini-course designed to help you tiptoe into some shadow work while also learning more about the shadow and its relationship to the ego and persona—key Jungian concepts to help us understand our psyche. Part of the individuation process as described by Jung is to turn inward and discover the parts of ourselves that have been split off and tucked safely away in the shadow. If we can take a more "observer" stance and examine our persona, we’ll discover both the aspects of this mask we show the world that serve us well and those that hang us up and make life more challenging for us. We now have conscious information about ourselves that we can use to make beneficial changes to how we're doing Life.

The course also contains a persona quiz designed to see how the four main feminine archetypes, (originally described by Jung’s female colleague, Toni Wolff) stack up in your persona profile. If we learn more about these main archetypal female ways of being in the world, we can recognize whether we over identify with a single archetype as well as where aspects of the different archetypes come easily for us, how they serve us and where they trip us up–taking the wheel at inopportune times. 

Can you see how, by creating this awareness, we increase our choices i.e. our free will? With this information in our consciousness, and with some practice, it can help us to stay firmly in the driver’s seat, choosing who is the best co-pilot for the task at hand while keeping our most wise, nuanced Self in command of the vehicle. 

As I mentioned in my last article, Purpose and Torture (and the purpose of torture), I am hellbent on inspiring moms to do their own individuation work, evolving themselves through the painful sacrifices demanded of motherhood. Because I agree with Jung’s imperative about what our most important work is and who better than mom to create ripples of consciousness?

This course can give you a relatively light yet still challenging experience of shadow work and hopefully even contribute in a small way to your self-awareness. And it doesn’t mention gender ideology even once. I invite you to enjoy this diversion, and maybe even treat yourself to a bit more consciousness this Mother’s day. Go here to sign up for the course, and be sure to use the coupon code MOTHERSDAY24 to get it for free: Persona/Shadow mini-course

Happy Mother’s Day!

Love,

Stoicmom

Oh, and p.s. The course is housed on a platform that is new for me: Paperbell. I’ve tested it and think I’ve caught all the snags, but if you encounter technical challenges as you move through the course, please let me know about them! The course is also, as I mentioned, brand new and I welcome your feedback for how to improve it. I have additional exercises planned that still need to be created and will be delivered as I get them into Paperbell. I hope you have as much fun completing the course as I did making it!