Finding the Inner Mother: How to Work Through Maternal Trauma and Find Personal Power

A groundbreaking exploration of the personal, cultural, and global consequences of intergenerational trauma passed down from mother to daughter, and methods for overcoming the destructive cycle.

Why do women try to live quietly and unnoticed? Why do they hold back in their professional and personal lives? What fuels the insecurity they often experience? In this book, leading feminist thinker Bettany Webster gets to the root of women’s psychological trauma. She calls it maternal trauma, and shows how destructive beliefs and behaviors are passed on from traumatized mothers to their daughters.

Through her workshops, courses, and lectures, Webster has helped countless women reframe their lives and relationships with their mothers by giving them space to express their pain and encouraging them to share their experiences. In this manifesto and self-help guide, she offers practical tools for identifying the mother wound in our daily lives and strategies we can use to heal ourselves and prevent our daughters from experiencing the same pain. She also offers step-by-step guidance on how to reconnect with your inner child, stop trying to please people, and transform heartache and anger into healing and self-love.

Ultimately, it is about creating a more just society for all of us.

Many people don't realize that the root problem in finding the power of femininity is the maternal trauma. Very often, mother-daughter relationships are complicated, but they are not spoken about openly. Because of the taboo on openly talking about the pain associated with the mother, the maternal trauma remains in the shadows, out of sight, and only gets worse.

What is the mother wound? The mother wound is the pain of being a woman that is passed down from generation to generation of women in a patriarchal culture. And it includes dysfunctional coping mechanisms that are used to cope with that pain.

Maternal trauma includes pain from:

-comparisons;
-feelings that you are not good enough;
-shame;
- a constant background feeling that something is wrong with you;
- suppression;
-feelings that you need to remain small in order to be loved;
- a persistent feeling of guilt for wanting more than you already have.

Maternal trauma can manifest itself in the following ways:

-you don’t show your full self because you don’t want to scare others;
-you are very tolerant of mistreatment from others;
-emotional care;
-perception of other women as rivals;
-self-sabotage;
-excessive rigidity and dominance;
-eating disorders, depression or addictions.

Author: Bethany Webster
Translation: Julia Zmeeva
Editor: Tamara Evgenievna Shaposhnikova
Year of issue: 2022
Publisher: Mann, Ivanov and Ferber
Pages: 384
Cover type: softcover
Dimensions: 190x130x32 mm
ISBN: 978-5-00195-616-7