How Maternal Archetypes Can Help You Grieve

The Mother Shadow can be an unconsciousness consisting of what you don’t want to see or engage with.

Source: Photo by Johny Goerend on Unsplash

The relationship to the Mother archetype influences our ability to engage and disengage. It prompts the need for others to see your pain as a means to validate it, and it forms lasting impressions that can help you or hurt you.

The Mother Archetype

While in everyday cycles, as well as cycles of bereavement, the wish for the archetypal, “Good Mother” may be present. If you have internalized a consuming Mother, you might hear her voice echo in the conscious and unconscious aspects of your psyche, saying, “Get over your grief, so I can have you back. Your grief creates distance between us, and I don’t want you to leave me. Your grief is less important than our relationship.” This response shatters the hope for the “Good Mother” to be present when facing the tenacity of these feelings.

In contrast, a nourishing Mother encourages you to engage in the work of the psyche, to go into the depths of your grief process without needing to adapt your healing for her comfort. She wants you to be the strongest version of yourself. She is not intimidated by who you are. She represents the archetypal Good Mother.

The Mother Shadow

The hungry and devouring Mother is an all-consuming figure. The Mother Shadow is illuminated in both the feminine aspect of the self and the masculine aspect of the self. Experiences of insatiable thirst or hunger carry components of fear, loneliness, and dependency. How do the forces of this Shadow rule and create boundaries that seem to address safety, yet merely conspire to control and keep you down? The need to control everything is part of the Mother Shadow, and can affect how you handle the dance of grief and how you disengage from its grip.

On and around Mother's Day, white flowers, traditionally white carnations represent a Mother figure that has been lost.

Source: Kinglear55 | Flickr

How the Mother and Mother Shadow Work Together

The Mother Shadow can be an unconsciousness consisting of what you don’t want to see or engage with, while the Good or Nourishing Mother helps to conjure self-evident traits that might seem cliche and ineffective. You can choose between these very different Mother archetypes to create conscious messages that work for you.

Sometimes it helps to understand the relationship between Mother and Mother Shadow by writing down the answers to, or reflecting on, the following questions:

• Do you see her in your mind? If not your biological mother, is there a Mother figurehead that you relate to?
• Do you experience the Mother as forgiving, remote, loving, or protective? Do you experience her connected to some specific emotion?
• Do you hear her messages as consuming and shrewd, or nourishing and kind? So often, a consuming message plays: An internal repetition that cannot be shaken.
• Identify your responses to your loss and trauma. Are they the same as your mother’s response to you, or are they different? How are they different? Do you seek out the “Mother” in others? Are these mothers male or female? Are they caretakers? Are they harsh?

Reform the Relationship

It would seem the consuming Mother would be worth disregarding, as that internalized archetype is not on your side. Certain people may have taken on that role for you, even though they aren’t your actual mother. It’s common to form relationships with people who are symbolic representations of the mother, father, or parental influencer. Who are those people in your life? Do you seek them out in the midst of your mourning? Do you seek them out day-to-day? Take a moment to think about these questions and answer them. If you write them in your journal, you can revisit your answers to see if they change as part of the process of healing long term and every day.

Understanding the potency of this archetype is essential to unraveling the response to everyday grief up to major loss and trauma.