The following three articles directed for undermothered women are reprinted from Open Exchange Magazine.
Articles specifically for undermothered men will be posted in the future.   However, the majority of what I have written below are quite applicable to men as well.  I believe we have an universal, emotional need to be mothered that we do not grow out of,  just because we have become adults.  This legitimate need to be mothered can mature as we grow emotionally, but the desire to be enfolded in the emotional/energetic embrace of a good mother is forever alive within us, whether one is conscious of it or not.  




Hope and Love for Undermothered Women

By Soonja Kim

(Soonja Kim, MSW, LCSW, offers re-mothering therapy for undermothered women. She describes in detail here how to heal shame and nurture emotional connections).

In the hearts of many undermothered women there is a deep longing to be seen and loved for who they are. They carry an innately healthy desire for close emotional connection and an unconditional sense of belonging that they needed from their mothers but could not get. Close emotional connection with the mother allows the child to feel safe, comforted, cherished, and fulfilled.

Without adequate mothering, the child does not have a secure emotional base from which to freely explore and make a mark in the world, that expresses their authentic self. Consequently, believing that they have to earn love, people who did not receive adequate nurturing from their mothers may develop a false-self to obtain the attention and care for which they hunger. They often suffer a deep sense of insecurity and shame that renders them vulnerable to life's many stresses and challenges.

It is not that many undermothered women are incompetent or unsuccessful in the world. On the contrary, many are quite independent and accomplished. Yet how they present themselves on the outside does not always match how they feel about themselves on the inside.

"Why am I so needy?" they ask." Why am I so insecure and anxious, so sensitive?" "Why am I so dependent on others to love me?" It is hard for them to ask these questions in a truly self-respecting , exploratory way. These questions may be loaded with a sense of painful shame about what they feel is lacking in themselves, as if the lack is their fault.

For such undermothered women, the very popularized antidote, "You must love yourself" can be dangerously interpreted and applied. Instead of accepting their need to be loved and reaching out safely to suitable others, they often galvanize themselves to become even more independent, self-sufficient, and outwardly successful. They do not realize that much of their shame and suffering from insecurity and anxiety originated in early wounding relationships with mothers and other caregivers. As such, a majority of their healing has to come from the relational, interpersonal arena of close emotional connection. In order to heal, they need the actual, newly imprinted positive experience of being loved and accepted by others. Being loved and accepted, not more false-self improvements, is the powerful medicine for healing the shame and anxiety that rule their lives.

Nevertheless, to seek emotional closeness with others can feel very threatening and painful for them. It entails re-examining and dissolving the fears and defenses they had to erect to survive the lack of loving connection as children. When these undermothered women reach out to others now, they once again have to become vulnerable to and dependent on the behavior of others. They do not want to revisit the feeling of powerlessness and helplessness they once felt in negotiating their care from their unavailable mothers.

So, how can these undermothered women proceed to obtain the needed emotional healing?

My first advice is to take your need for love seriously. Your need for the mothering kind of love and nurturing is innate, and you do not outgrow it when you become an adult. Your longing to be loved is the seed of a universal belonging and oneness, our inseparable connection to humanity, nature, and the cosmos.

Secondly, I encourage you to go seek help to safely dissolve defenses around loving and receiving love from others. If you are considering therapy, seek therapists who are emotionally, somatically, and relationally oriented. Find therapists who will not shame you for wanting to be loved and adored by an outside source, including the therapists themselves.

There are spiritual reresources that emphasize the Divine Mother and the feminine Shakti principle. As long as these resources do not encourage you to do a spiritual bypassing of your legitimate limbic brain, emotional/relational needs, they can be helpful in reminding you of, and connecting you to the Big, Ultimate Love.

Finally, reach out and seek people and organizations that value close emotional connection and will support you for wanting attention, care, reassurances, acknowledgements and loving kindness.

In conclusion, do not give up your longing to be loved and mothered, just because you are a grown woman. You do not have to just love yourself, or even to love yourself before you can be loved. You can learn to love yourself in relationships, not outside of them. Also, being mothered does not have to come only from your own mother. Mothering can come from both females and males. There are people out there who would want to come towards you in your vulnerability and emotional neediness.

They are drawn to do so, because they accept or want to learn to accept their own neediness, and experience the healing power of love and connection, right beside you, rather than independently, away from you. You do not have to be alone and isolated, feeling ashamed of the parts of you that have not been accepted by others. You can seek to be loved by others, and lean on one another to learn the challenging but beautiful process of how to give and receive love unconditionally.

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Sweet Re-Mothering for Undermothered Women

By Soonja Kim

We modern undermothered women have striven to be independent, strong, resilient, sophisticated, astute, and assertive. In the process, we have tended to devalue the quality of sweetness as something meek or docile, uninteresting and not sexy. We do not want to be like our mothers before the feminist movement: dependent, striving to be sweet and nice, trying hard to please others at their own expense. So, instead of accessing genuine sweetness within ourselves and with each other, we seek sweetness in foods, such as chocolate, ice cream, drinks, and pastries.

A similar devaluing process has happened with our longing for mothering. To admit we need mothering feels regressive and immature to us, as competent, adult women. We are supposed to be able to take care of ourselves and not feel needy and helpless. We often turn to food, money, or material things for the comforting, the soothing, and the love that we have wanted, but could not receive from our emotionally unavailable mothers.

However, many undermothered women are still hungering for genuine sweetness, and for the mothering kind of love, whether they know it or not. It is no accident that the first food we are supposed to be fed, as we transition out of the womb, is mother's breast milk, which is naturally sweet and has all the nourishment a baby needs. A mothering kind of love needs to feel sweet. Some undermothered women are in touch with this longing for sweet mothering, but some are defended against it. To allow ourselves to be vulnerable to be loved feels very scary. To let go of control feels like we will not be able to survive and manage. To emotionally need and not to receive is an all too familiar story for undermothered women. Instead of honoring our wanting, many of us have tried to change, deny, or transcend it, or distract ourselves from it.

In my Visionary Re-Mothering Amae Therapy, I encourage undermothered women to tap into their deepest inner feminine wisdom. Deep inside of them, they know that their true needs and desires are good, and they will be met. If they still want mothering, even as grown women, it is available to them.

So what is it like to be sweetly re-mothered? Here are two terms that are important to understand. The word "amae" is a word in Japanese which means sweet dependency. Dependency is seen as a safe, close, emotional connection that we legitimately need. In the United States, where we work so hard to establish our separateness and independence, our hearts and bodies are left with a deep yearning to merge with one another and nature. In feeling safe to depend and count on another, we can tap into our primal sense of oneness and belonging that dissolves the tension of divisiveness and differences.

Amae, sweet dependency, is closely tied-in with the second term to be emphasized in the re-mothering process. That term is "passive love." Passive love is the kind of love where care is offered, without your having to do much to elicit it. It requires more intuitiveness and empathy on the part of the giver, and more receptivity of the taker. Receiving passive love can be deeply healing for undermothered women, who had to be so active in trying to earn love. They have so much shame around their emotional neediness, that to be given, without having to disclose their needs directly, feels extremely comforting. Also, implicit in this concept of passive love is that undermothered women can trust in the good will of the other, and in the abundance of the universe. They can take a break from active doing and surrender into receptive beingness.

As you feel your dependency and attachment needs sweetly embraced by a mothering figure, and allow yourself to receive passive love, there proceeds a gradual relaxation in your body, heart, mind, and spirit. In that relaxation, you may first go through the grieving period of not having the care and the sweet love you needed growing up. However, as you allow the grieving to flow and to be released, you can move to a deeper level of relaxation, where you can access who you really are. While being held in the holding environment of sweet re-mothering, you will feel safer and safer to claim who you truly are. You also may experience the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings that releases you from the deep sense of aloneness you have felt. Furthermore, there is the gradual remembering of the joy and abundance that is your birthright. Your life will reflect more and more of what you truly want. You can be re-born into a life that feels sweeter, more joyful, and more effortless.

This type of therapy may seem radically different from more traditional therapies, where one is encouraged to grow out of dependency and attachment needs, rather than encouraged to relax into them. Similarly, this re-mothering work emphasizes more of what one wants and dreams of rather than what seems practically possible in the present reality of our five senses. This work is obviously not for everyone, especially not for those who truly need more limits, structure, separateness, empirical evidence, and boundaries. But for those who found it impossible to give up their inner feminine wisdom, and their wish to merge and be mothered, this work offers the possibility of their dreams coming true.


Heroine's Journey for Undermothered Women

By Soonja Kim LCSW

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.... We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?.... Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you."

                                                                            —Marianne Williamson


We are indeed great. We are infinite beings; each and every one of us. Yet for many undermothered women, they have forgotten their infinite Selves. They have forgotten who they really are. As incredulous as it may sound, one can forget who she really is if there is no one mirroring her true self. These undermothered women have been deprived of this mirroring of their essential Selves from their mothers, their first love and feminine counterpart. Without much true mirroring from their mothers, these women as children have become lost and disoriented.  Oftentimes, they conclude that they have to develop a false self to be loved and to belong.

"If I am so great, why didn't my mother love me? Why didn't she put me first? Why was she so mean to me?" Such painful questions as these plague undermothered women's hearts. They simply cannot understand this contradiction. In order to make sense of the discrepancy, they often treat themselves the way their mothers have treated them: putting their needs last, constantly criticizing themselves, hurrying themselves, pushing themselves to do more, undermining their dreams and aspirations, etc. They do not quite realize that these methods do not bring more clarity and loving connections they hunger for.  On the contrary, they are absolutely re-wounding. Yet these ways of treating themselves have become so familiar, and oftentimes the only remnants of their connection with their mothers, that they become afraid to let them go. They work very hard to earn love, as if love is conditional, and to remain safe in the known and the familiar.

However, despite the fear of rejection and the unknown, the inner suffering that undermothered women feel will one day compel them to want more. Their pain will push them to embark on their heroine's journey to reclaim their greatness and their true Selves. They do not have to wait until their suffering is concretized into outward symptoms of mental or physical illnesses, relationship difficulties, financial ruins, unemployment, etc. to begin their road back to their infinite Selves.

Yet a heroine's journey, especially for undermothered women, cannot be like the John Wayne type of journey, a single strong man standing alone, fighting alone. Their journey needs to be relational. They need emotional connection with others to fuel and sustain their journey, which can be fraught with inner and outer obstacles, Their journey has a chance to become nourishing and joyous, instead of harsh, scary, and lonely if they take the risk to uncover and own their emotional needs for love and connection. They need to learn to open their hearts to others, to learn to depend and to count on others. The journey has to be relationally and emotionally enriching to call forth their inner, feminine wisdom.

How does one begin such a heroine's journey? As a first step of this journey, you can simply begin to set your intention to claim your Self back. You must reawaken your wish to find Her, to connect with Her, to embody Her greatness. Without Her, your life, however successful it may seem on the outside, will eventually become meaningless.

As you truly commit to your journey of finding your Self, the universe will orchestrate to provide opportunities, people and resources for you. Synchronistic events will lead you to the next step and to the next. Go to a bookstore you are moved to go to, and let your intuition lead you to the right section, to the right book. Open the book and the right page with the right message of the moment will reveal itself to you. Trust your intuition also to find guides and mentors who will mirror who you really are. Your guide could be a friend, a therapist, a healer, an animal, ancestors, spirit guides and/or even a geographical area. Ask to run into your kindred spirits who would love you and accompany you on your journey. Before going to sleep, invite a dream to come to you, leading you to the next step. Surround yourself with everything that has an imprint of nature, reminding you of oneness and the wholeness of the universe. Meditate, visualize, say your affirmations, and anything else to remember who you really are. Keep releasing your fear of disappointments and rejections, so that you can truly own who you are and what you want in life.

It is important to stay loyal to this journey, despite many setbacks and a seeming lack of concrete progress. Your way towards your Self will become clearer and clearer to you. You will ultimately be able to claim your sense of greatness, without arrogance. You will know that you are not alone, that you truly do belong to the greater Humanity. You will be like the ugly duckling who discovers her true identity, finally able to fly with her tribe of swans.