Is she comfortable enough verbalizing that she can put skills into words, or does she teach only by example?

and without having internalized the warm, comforting presence of the Good Mother, there isn’t a reservoir of feelings of safety or security.

You can feel Mother as an inner layer of support, of love that is always with you, or you can feel as if there is something dead or toxic in you. This toxic substance is what you absorbed from your interactions with her and perhaps from what was toxic inside her.

Devotional practices to any of the Divine Mother figures help open the heart to the Good Mother archetype and can eventually help replace the image of a withholding mother with something more generous and warm. We need models for developing the Good Mother within, and those coming from spiritual traditions are potent for many.

Although I have described this process in the context of a close therapeutic relationship, a similar process could happen with any potential attachment figure who stays consistently present and supports this evolution.

Author Judith Viorst in Necessary Losses calls the loss of the mother-child connection Original Loss. It is our first loss and tilts us in such a way that future losses will involve more risk.

bewilderment

Perhaps the positive side of this is that unlike those who are identified with Mother and fail to individuate from her, thus shadowing her their entire lives, those without this connection—if they do the psychological work necessary—are freer to fashion a self that is more of their own making.

Sometimes the answer is to be mothered, and sometimes it is to become the mother. This is true on the human level, but it can also happen on the spiritual level. Ariel, who was very undermothered, turned to the goddess tradition to provide a positive model of the mother and the deep feminine, finding it healing and transformative.