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Dear ,
In August I had the wonderful chance to spend a week with our daughter, and I realized how lucky I am that I am allowed to be her mother and how lucky we both are to have such a great relationship.
As we all know, the mother-daughter connection is one of the most defining relationships in our life and many of us struggle with it even at a mature age, spending hours of therapy trying to heal that wound. Please don’t get me wrong, this is no criticism of therapy - I am just opening up the perspective.
In my last workshop we had a beautiful constellation about the mother-daughter relationships over generations, and we were allowed to witness that love is always there – it just has been blocked through events that happened in the past. When we can witness this in a constellation, we find the key to opening our hearts and love can flow again.
The ones who have bought my book already know the story of me and my mother, but I guess it is something you can read again and again to be reminded how easy it can be to make peace with the past and heal a relationship, even if the person is no longer alive.
“When I think about my parents, if I went to therapy today, most probably I would leave with the information that I come from a dysfunctional family with a narcissistic, emotionally abusive, and manipulative mother and an emotionally absent father and that all this contributed to the issues I had encountered in my life. Would this really help me? Would this heal my wound? Definitely not. But let me share with you my healing experience with my mother. An experience that allowed me to make once and for all peace with her and our common past.
It was the last time I saw my mother alive. I held her in my arms; she was nearly ninety; skinny, with wrinkles all over her face. She did not even recognize me because she had dementia.
First, I recalled MY past with her: The tears, the pain, the constant desperate, unfulfilled longing to be seen, her crossing boundaries, and sometimes merciless reactions.
Then I recalled HER past: The war times she went through, her experience of losing two brothers in WW2 as a teenager, losing her mother shortly after from cancer, letting go of her career dreams to stay close to her father who was alone, losing three children - one of them the so much-desired boy, in the 8th month of pregnancy …
Suddenly I could see HER pain, HER loneliness, HER trauma. All I felt was love, compassion, and gratitude for that woman who, despite of going through all this, eventually passed on life to me, her daughter. I am here because she is exactly who she is and was.
Then, like a miracle, she opened her eyes, looked at me and said my name: “Ursula”. I asked her, “Do you know me now?” and she answered, “No, I don’t know you, but I know your eyes.”
That day changed my life, most of all because I no longer felt the need to be stronger or better than my mother and no longer the need to be seen by her. She DID see me. It is through the eyes that souls connect. And this was like an unspoken blessing to be myself and follow my own path."
(In the Spirit of Love and Reconciliation - More than Constellations, 2024)
I don’t know how your relationship with your mother is (no matter if you are a woman or a man), but if you struggle, if you still want her to be different (and it could be the same with your father), maybe this is a new perspective that supports you in your healing journey.
I wish you a wonderful month of September and maybe I will meet you in one of the online evening seminars I am offering, or at the constellation workshops in Cluj-Napoca or Malta. Check them out below.
In the spirit of love and reconciliation
Ursula |
