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Addiction and the Mother Wound: What’s the Connection?
Are we all just trying to mother ourselves?
There is a calmness to the morning as I tie my laces and venture onto the well-worn rubble track. Autumn fog lies still upon the flats, unflustered by the pace of which I undertake the day — hurried, as always, in an attempt to keep my self-imposed, work-from-home schedule intact. Headphones in, I listen to an episode of the podcast, We Can Do Hard Things, with Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle, and Abby Wambach.
Chani Nicholas, a Canadian astrologer and activist, is the guest on this episode, What Your Sign Says About How You Love. While not a topic I would ordinarily lean toward, I am immediately drawn into Chani’s words as she begins to discuss her childhood:
“I grew up around a tremendous amount of addiction, and the impacts of addiction on a child is that no one reflects you back to yourself and that your needs are always second, if not two-hundred-millionth on the list of things when the first thing on the list is to get high or to get out of one’s feelings or out of the difficult thing by using a substance or whatever behaviour is happening.”
Addiction is one of the themes that has emerged in the past twelve months as I have researched and written about the Mother Wound and its effect on adult…
