How to Work with the Mother Archetype

Robert Maldonado  02:58

That’s a good way to put it. More familiar concept of the mother comes from Freud’s work, where people think analysis is talking about your mother and learning how to hate your mother. That’s the running joke.

Debra Maldonado  03:13

“I went to therapy and learned how to hate my mother.” When I used to do hypnotherapy, one of my clients said “My mother calls you ‘that woman’” because there she was, doing all this growth work and self-examination. The mother ended up coming to work with me too because she saw her daughter’s transformation. We’ll talk about the personal, but it’s so much more than that. But we have to deal with personal before we can deal with these wonderful universal ideas of the earth in general. A lot of people have missions with climate change, or getting back to the earth, they want to do earthly work and get back in their bodies. All that work, you need to work with your own mother first, before you can do that greater universal energy work with the mother.

Robert Maldonado  03:58

One of the clues is that the term itself, “mother”, is related to matter. The way we think about matter, like the Earth, the material world, not in the consuming sense of the word, but the physicality of the world.

Debra Maldonado  04:18

It’s interesting that “material” and “maternal” are very close as well, that phrase is in that as well. I was studying Jung for the first time, the world is our mother. If we think about it, we have our physical mother that gives us life, but Earth gives us life, it’s our mother. They call it Mother Earth or Mother Nature that sustains us. If we didn’t have air, we didn’t have food, it all comes from the earth, our life force, so it’s a very powerful concept.

Robert Maldonado  04:53

Let’s go to the personal first. At the personal level, it’s a powerful experience because our relationship with our mother is the primary relationship, it’s the first one, it’s the most intense one, where we’re totally dependent on another human being for our survival, our existence.

Debra Maldonado  05:15

And comfort too. Are they going to come to me when I cry? Are they going to nurture me when I have a bad day? Are they going to keep me warm? Are they going to be around me? Are they going to give me attention? All those things that we intuitively seek as a baby to feel secure in the world, because we’re thrust into this strange place, we don’t know what to make of it, and our mother is that anchor for us.

Robert Maldonado  05:41

A lot of the current science and neuroscience understanding the bond between the mother and the child shows that although the child leaves the mother’s body, they’re still connected. Intuitively is one of those difficult terms. Literally, the child is still within the psychological emotional bubble of the mother.

Debra Maldonado  06:15

It’s the outer womb, basically.

Robert Maldonado  06:17

The first few years, we do not leave the comfort zone of the connection with the mother.

Debra Maldonado  06:24

Now what if someone had a mother that died? Or a mother that abandoned them? What would happen? There’s always a mother figure. The grandmother would take that role. Or adoption, the adopted mother would take over that.

Robert Maldonado  06:38

If somebody had to take care of them, which means somebody had to keep you alive, they played the role of the mother.

Debra Maldonado  06:45

But let me ask you this question. Does the child still have some kind of connection to the biological mother? We have the genetics and stuff but is there a psychic connection, some kind of unconscious connection to the birth mother? I guess that’s not a question we know, or is it up for debate?

Robert Maldonado  07:07

It’s one of those questions that would be more in philosophy or in metaphysics, because we can never answer it in an absolute way. It is also subjective, some people do have that connection, others might not, or never experienced it. It’s more of a subjective understanding of what my connection with my personal mother is. But certainly there is always, especially early on, you’re within the psychological emotional womb of the mother for at least the first six, seven years.

Debra Maldonado  07:46

It has a huge impact on how you see the world. The world will be your mother. You’re reflecting your relationship with your mother onto the world. If your mother was there and encouraging, you’ll expect the world to be that way. If your mother was critical, or even cautious, like the helicopter mother that is always worried you’re going to trip over something and puts the helmet on even if you’re walking around, you’re gonna instinctively pick up that the world is scary. Always warning you where they feel worried, even when the child watches how the mother reacts to the world, they learn how to react to the world. It might not even be direct, but maybe unconscious, how they pick it up.

Robert Maldonado  08:33

Let’s see that connection. With a parent, especially with a mother, you get a double whammy, because you not only inherit half of her genes, which means that physiologically you’re going to be closely related to her, flesh of her flesh, but you’re also observing, picking up, learning directly from observing the mother, that intuitive understanding the messages I’m receiving from her psyche, from her body, imprinting those on your psyche or absorbing them.

Debra Maldonado  09:14

Because she’s an authority figure? She’s the one who’s there for you, helping you survive, so you put the mother up on a pedestal. You’re subservient to them in a way because you’re dependent on them?

Robert Maldonado  09:29

It depends on the message. Everyone’s different, but no one has a perfect mother. We do have that idealized mother archetype. It comes from the archetype, that’s where we’re going, essentially. But we think about our personal mother, she’s not going to be an exact idealized image of the mother we have in our psyche, we’re already born with. She’s going to be a human being who has flaws and has her own personality, and is expressing her own parenting imprint from her mother. We received a mixed message. If we try to drop the idea of good and bad, right or wrong, we imprint who our mother is, what is the message of her behavior towards us, her way of relating to us. That’s what we internalize.

Debra Maldonado  10:38

Wouldn’t you say that all those imprints are designed for our survival? We only imprint what we feel is going to help us. We’re getting the information like “I need to learn this, I need to protect myself from this”, almost like “this is how it’s done”. The intention is not just throwing a bunch of things randomly, bunch of ideas, but no emotional reactions. Everything’s designed by our ego to keep us surviving. We take these things and learn coping mechanisms and ideas of how to be in the world. but underneath the intention of how to survive. How do I keep surviving and fitting in, staying above floats in the world?

Robert Maldonado  11:26

One thing to keep in mind is that the internalizing element of the psyche, we internalize our relationship with our mother, it’s our own interpretation. A lot of people read it as “What I have recorded in my mind is a true, objective recording of the experience I had with my mother and who she was.” That’s a false understanding, it’s an error in understanding what’s happening. Our personal mind, our personal brain and nervous system internalize an interpretation of what our relationship with our mother is, not an objective reality.

Debra Maldonado  12:20

An interpretation of who she is, not who she actually is. This is very easy to put to the test. Ask your siblings what they think of your mother; everyone will have a different opinion. We all have a memory of a childhood event, and we all remember it differently. Sometimes we’re like “Wasn’t our mother mean that time?” “No, you were the bad one in that situation.” That whole interpretation, you can see it clearly. I had a client once, she went through her mother’s funeral. There were four siblings, the other siblings were giving this beautiful eulogy of what a wonderful person she was, and the other two were like “I do not think she’s talking about our mother.” We make those decisions inside us. It’s not impressed from the external. It’s so hard to accept because even if all your siblings agree, it’s still your own personal interpretation. You don’t know what your mother’s going through, you don’t know what your mother went through when she was young, what challenges she had, how she presented herself. You make an assumption it’s about you. I get a lot of people tell me “My mother was always working, I had to take care of the younger siblings.” I hear that story a lot. They’re like “My mother didn’t care about us as much.” She cared because she was working, it probably tore her apart that she couldn’t be with you. But you don’t know that because she doesn’t share it with you. Then you make up a whole story about this absent mother. We make it about us, we start creating our life from the assumption we’re making.

Robert Maldonado  14:50

This is also another key, most of that impression is unconscious. It’s hitting your psyche unconsciously, you’re not aware of it. You think you know your history because you remember certain events, you have photos of your past experiences, there’s a mythology in the family of what happened when you were little. They’re passed on, these stories about your grandparents and your parents growing up, working, having the kids. All that is their stories, their myths, their interpretations. It doesn’t take away that they’re meaningful and important. But they are interpretations again. Most of the messages you receive, just like we know most of communication is nonverbal, most of that communication was internalized unconsciously, emotionally.

Debra Maldonado  15:57

You can’t just think what you believe about your mother, “I’m gonna write down and journal this”, you have to go a deeper layer.

Robert Maldonado  16:06

That’s where the Jungian model comes in. He says you’re not going to be able just to look at your history and be done with it.

Debra Maldonado  16:18

Look at the stories, your assumptions, your beliefs. This is all great, they form on the surface but they’re still not the cause. They’re actually the effect. When a lot of people think thoughts create your life, it’s actually the assumption underneath the thought that creates your life. The assumption underneath your life that creates the thought, and that creates your results. We need to go one step deeper. It’s a part of our mind that our ego hides from us. It’s not easily accessible.

Robert Maldonado  16:51

Accessing the unconscious mind, how do we do it? We begin with those narratives, those stories about what your childhood was about, what happened, the events. But then you want to go deeper. What’s underneath? What are those assumptions that are unconscious regarding those stories. That’s the good stuff. Of course, his dream work is very useful in accessing those repressed or forgotten memories, active imagination.

Debra Maldonado  17:21

Working with the symbolic mother images. They also comes in, it’s not just your physical mother, but the church is the mother, a snake or dragon could be the mother. It’s understanding how the unconscious works. Unconscious speaks to us in some symbolic ways, synchronicities to things in our life. Also looking at what triggers us in the world or what triggers us with our mother is often what is pointing to that unconscious.

Robert Maldonado  17:54

Because ultimately, that internalized interpretation of our relationship with our mother, we project it onto the world. Think of the implications of that. It means that if you grew up in a secure relationship with your mother, I know nobody’s perfect but let’s say it’s pretty close to how good human nature can be, you feel you’re taken care of by this incredible being called your mother, you’re going to experience the world pretty much in that sense, you’re going to expect the world to be there for you, to take care of you, to give you opportunities.

Debra Maldonado  18:38

I always expected the best of people. There’s people that are very cynical, I’m surprised when people let me down, I just assume they’re going to be good. That’s because my mother was so loving. I think a lot of people have the opposite, where they assume the person is going to cheat them or they’re more skeptical. I don’t think one is better than the other because thinking everyone’s gonna be nice didn’t help me either. There’s no positive or negative, there’s no perfect way your mother could be to make you the perfect human being. Everything that shaped you is always an opportunity. You’re not stuck with it forever. It formed you, it got you where you are. The next step, what Jung calls individuation, is the way where we break free and now choose who we want to be.

Robert Maldonado  19:34

It’s a spectrum. If we think of the best possible scenario where you’re in a loving, comfortable, caring, nurturing mother situation, you’re going to internalize that and expect that from the world. On the opposite extreme, where there is a doubt as to whether your mom is going to take care of you, be there for you, let you down, or accept you, often there’s an interpretation people make because the mother had to leave the child with grandparents and go to work or to school. The child might interpret that experience as abandonment.

Debra Maldonado  20:19

Another one is that a lot of mothers are critical, the child receives it as “I’m not good enough, my mother doesn’t love me”, when the mother’s critical because her mother was critical. The mother’s intention really is to make that daughter or son’s life better, that’s their intention, but it comes across as criticism versus “I care”. When your mother’s in your stuff, you feel like she’s interfering a lot and maybe critical, it’s better than someone who’s just like “I don’t care. Do what you want, I don’t care if you succeed or fail.” It’s going beyond what the mother’s behavior is, the behaviorism and the speech of your mother, to what her intent is. Many times, if you don’t ask her, you don’t have that conversation, you’re not going to know. Your mother might not even know but a lot of times we go through life, assuming things about our parents. We ask them, they’re like “I want you to be the best, but we comes across wrong.” There’s a lot of assumptions and reactions versus having intimate conversations with the people around us. That can make a difference as well.

Robert Maldonado  21:29

Of course, it’s complicated by development of the child. The child wants to break away from the mother. It’s a natural process of individuation early on, the child wants to explore the world, but at the same time have that safety of the mother. It’s a push and pull that’s happening naturally. Often that process depends on how the parent sees it. The parent may see it as the child wants to break away.

Debra Maldonado  22:04

The mother wants to grasp higher or punish the child for moving away. You see this right around puberty too or maybe even pre-puberty, when they’re like “Mom, leave me alone, I’m in my room.” “Do you want to go somewhere with me?” “Nope.” There’s a place where the child starts to break away and the mother’s heart aches because now they’re aligning with their peers versus everything about her. If the mother has unresolved stuff about her mother abandoning her, she’s going to have all their stuff toward that child. It’s going to distort the relationship because her stuff hasn’t been resolved with her mother. It’s a tangled web with a mothe, very powerful, especially the mother and the daughter because they’re both female. The daughter has to identify with a mother because they’re feminine. It’s a feminine image. That’s even more difficult and more entangled than the son. I think the mother almost lets the son go away more but clings to the daughter a little more. What do you think? You’ve seen it both ways.

Robert Maldonado  23:14

The point is it’s highly individualized. That is what a relationship is, what happens in a relationship between two people. No one can really describe it or experience it except the people that are in that relationship. In doing your work with your relationship with your personal mother, that’s what you’re looking at. But again, it’s not about right or wrong or fixing anything, it’s about bringing it to light. What was ultimately that impression, that story, that narrative that unconsciously became the story of who you are. What is your relationship with the world because that’s what you’re going to carry forward into your life. If you’d never examined it, like Socrates says “The unexamined life is not worth living because you’re simply going to replay that pattern over and over.”

Debra Maldonado  24:17

If you are a mother, you have kids, teenagers starting to break away, or the empty nesters, you have to examine your relationship with your mother because a lot of what you’re seeing with that child is something unconscious from that relationship. I want to talk about the light and dark aspects of the mother. Archetypically we have extremes, they’re not always negative or positive. Remember that little fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel, where there was the evil witch, she took the children and wanted to boil and eat them? It was a weird thing we learned as kids, this cannibalism. That’s under the archetype of the devouring mother, the mother who wants to devour their children. Of course, your mother doesn’t want to eat you. But it’s more like that mother wants to keep the kid in their control, so they become almost claustrophobic to the children, or the child feels claustrophobic around the mother, whether she’s checking in on them all the time, texting them all the time. Maybe the child is intertwined in that dynamic and loves it, or they hate it. But if you think about devouring, it’s a negative witchy metaphor, an archetypal, but it’s not negative. Sometimes it comes with an intention, like I said, the critical mother that’s in your business all the time, wanting to help you and prevent you from making the same mistakes, not trusting you to make your own. You grow up learning “I can’t make my own decisions, I can’t trust my decisions because my mother always criticized everything I did. I have to second guess myself.” Then it plays out that you make decisions, they don’t work out or you read them as not working out. The light side of the mother would be— or do you want to talk more about the dark side?

Robert Maldonado  26:09

Just the nature of the unconscious, because here we’re getting into the archetypal mother. We have to understand how the unconscious in us works. First of all, in Jung’s work it wasn’t the same as Freud’s work where the unconscious was just this repository of forgotten and repressed emotions. There is some of that, but Jung goes further and says there’s the collective unconscious, a very active process going on within us. It’s a separate intelligence than our conscious mind, that’s participating in our life through dreams, through projection, autonomous, through synchronicity. It’s very actively helping us. But most people don’t tune into it. We’re so focused externally on external objects in the world that we forget to tune in and participate in our own internal development.

Debra Maldonado  27:21

I have a great metaphor for that that our students loved. If you think of the ocean of consciousness, there is a surface of the waves, that’s what we’re aware of right on the surface. Your individual ego is riding in a boat, the things that are coming at you in life, you’re trying to adjust the sails, you’re on the surface struggling with all these obstacles in the world, you’re trying to adjust the sails. That’s what we do. But if we can tap into the depth of us and not only see the current underneath that could support us in the direction where you go, but actually change the current, not just navigate the current but actually become the current that drives our life. That’s the deeper work. You can think positive, change your sails, set your goals, point the sails in the right direction on the top of the ocean, but you’re still a slave to the condition of the ocean. Anyone who’s ever been sailing or seen those survival shows where they are out in the ocean forever, there’s this great reverence we have for the ocean. But we have that within us, the ocean of consciousness is within us. Imagine being able to access that, not just being on the surface, with the wind and the rain and the storms of life, maybe the sunshine every once in a while. We want to get to the depth of who we are and that power that’s beyond the personal, it’s a universal part of ourselves.

Robert Maldonado  28:48

The unconscious mind speaks a mythological language. That’s why fairy tales, movies, novels are all using metaphors of characters that are hitting a deeper aspect of the mother archetype. The witch is, like you say, the dark aspect of the mother, the devouring aspect of the mother. Psychologically and emotionally, it’s the mother that suffocates the life, not physically, but emotionally and psychologically, from the child where they’re not able to grow and express themselves in a complete way. It’s a symbolic way that the unconscious speaks to us through myths, through dreams.

Debra Maldonado  29:40

There’s always a witch in every fairy tale that you remember from childhood, even the Disney movies. There’s always a wicked witch, The Wizard of Oz, so there’s always that element of dark mother, or the witchy mother.

Robert Maldonado  29:56

It’s an oversimplification to say she’s evil. It’s not so much that she’s evil but that the archetypes have this dualistic power to give love and to withhold it. Anything that has a power can be both nurturing and empowering, or it can be the opposite, disempowering.

Debra Maldonado  30:25

If you think about it, your mother could be the most beautiful loving person, then if she dies, she left you, it’s painful. Loving someone is not just all flowers and rainbows, it’s pain when you watch your loved one get sick, or die, or leave you, or move away, it’s the dark side of that love. Love isn’t one half, it has two sides. It’s not evil or bad, it’s just the ebb and flow, the two energies that are there. What would the archetype be, besides the witch? The light side would be Mother Mary, or the Savior, Mother Earth. In The Wizard of Oz, there was Glenda the Good Witch, this nurturing, loving, giving you all the tools you need. But Glenda didn’t give her the key to get home until the end of the movie. “You had it all along.” Is she good or bad? She let her go through that trial and didn’t give her the answer till the end. Is she witchy? What was she doing? Everything, even the greatest intention for our mother can also be perceived by the ego. The ego splits things into good and bad, right and wrong. But on an archetypal level, deep in the pure sense, it’s just one, it’s both basically, and neither separate.

Robert Maldonado  31:51

It’s a deep concept. What it’s talking about is that the unconscious is giving us a corrective mechanism. Jung says, if you pay attention to dreams, what the dreams are doing is balancing out our lopsided conscious attitude. If we’re too rational and too logical, if we pay attention to dreams or tap into that unconscious mind, it’ll give us instructions on how to balance that rationality out with creativity, with intuition, etc, so that we’re not over dependent on our logic and reason.

Debra Maldonado  32:34

Getting into more creativity, openness, and possibility for this archetypal pattern. But also, it’s a burden to put on your mother to be like Mother Teresa for you, or mother Mary. It’s projection that we’re doing to a mother. As a mother, how much of that burden is “I gotta be there for my kids.” I hear this all the time with parents that I work with, that are business owners, they feel guilty, taking time away from their kids, or there’s a conflict within them because they should be investing in their children’s activities versus hiring a coach for themselves or bettering their own life or following the wrong career. A lot of people see their mother give up career for being a mother, so they have this conflict within them. It’s very powerful to examine these things because unconsciously you’re going to be making decisions. Your ego says this is the right thing to do.You’re still gonna hate it. You’re like “Why do I know this is the right thing to do, but I still feel bad about it?” You’re not really clear, you have a conflict within yourself.

Robert Maldonado  33:47

What I’ve seen is that once people understand that this is the way the psyche works, it’s not about good or bad, right or wrong, it’s nature expressing itself through our human psyche, becoming aware, becoming conscious of what is unconscious, as Jung says, liberates us from these patterns. When we are unconscious, we’re compelled to act based on these internalized interpretations. Mythological symbols are types of elements that come up from the unconscious, they’re literally compelling us to act in these patterns. Whereas when we become conscious of them, we’re participating with them, where we have some say in how they’re going to play out in our life.

Debra Maldonado  34:43

In our line of work, we train coaches, but we also work with coaches, thought leaders, consultants that have teams and clients. Your clients and your team are going to project the mother archetype on you. Their own personal conflicts and complexes with their mother are going to be projected onto you. Also your concept of mother, because as an authority figure, you’re going to either over give because maybe your mother didn’t give, or you’re going to over give because that’s what your mother would do. The mother carries out into business, into your team, into your clients. If you understand that projection, when I realized that my clients are projecting their mother onto me, they weren’t even seeing me, they were seeing a filter, their own vision. I knew that intuitively, early on when I was first starting to be a practitioner, working with one-on-one clients. They were like “I’m not projecting my mother onto you.” I was like “I’m sensing a little bit of that dynamic with your mother and the way you are with me”, calling them out on it so they could see the pattern. It’s important for everyone who’s working with people in a service-based industry, or working as a leader and having a team of people to do your mother archetype work. It’s probably the most important work you can do. Otherwise, things will happen, you’ll think “Why aren’t people listening to me? Why do I not have authority? Why are people expecting too much of me? Why would I feel overwhelmed?” It carries on to every part of your life.

Robert Maldonado  36:28

Where do we begin to become conscious of the mother archetype? It has to begin with a personal experience with a mother. The shadow work takes us into examining, not judging, it’s not about judgment, it’s about examining, seeing through a non-judgmental mind what happened in my early experiences with my mother, what were the messages I received, how do I go deeper into the assumptions that created the narrative that I live into?

Debra Maldonado  37:09

Most people start with a narrative, they don’t go to the deeper assumption. That’s really where you want to go. That assumption is not conscious, you can’t get that through journaling, you have to go deeper into the unconscious.

Robert Maldonado  37:23

It’s a process of self-inquiry and discernment, where you start to look at what happened from the third eye perspective. You’re looking at your life, as if you were looking at a character in a novel instead of being caught up in it, trying to judge, playing off the emotions that come up. You’re observing and understanding it.

Debra Maldonado  37:50

The second part is we highly encourage people to do this work with a coach, doing that inner work is so important. If you’re a coach and you need a coach, that’s just something that can help you accelerate that process versus you can’t see what you can’t see in yourself. You need someone who can reflect back and take your hand and guide you through navigating the unconscious, because your ego will resist. It’ll get that quick insight and say “I had a breakthrough about my mother.” You’ll think you’re done, then the thing keeps happening, you’re like “I thought I worked on it.” That’s where we have to invite ourselves and challenge ourselves to go a little deeper to what the assumption is. What’s the philosophy, what’s the foundation of my understanding of myself in the world that is really going on here? It’s a deeper layer. The last one is working with archetypal mother.

Robert Maldonado  38:53

Once you metabolize your personal experiences with your mother, it changes the relationship with your physical mother.

Debra Maldonado  39:02

We see this time and time again. They come in criticizing their mother, then they’re like “I have a great connection with her now, I feel so much love for her.” It’s because the projection was taken away. You get to see her for who she is. The more you love her for who she is, good or bad, right or wrong, the more you care for yourself, she’s a reflection of you.

Robert Maldonado  39:25

Personal work is very important, then you can get to the deeper archetypal mother, the great mother, as sometimes she’s called. The great mother archetype is the way we’re going to experience the world. Think of the implications of this. It means we’re actively consciously transforming our relationship with the physical world. Our reality, how we experience work, the world, nature, other people, society, everything changes, because we’re now in touch with a true source of that archetypal pattern.

Debra Maldonado  40:08

Isn’t the mother archetype institutions too?

Robert Maldonado  40:13

The church, the university.

Debra Maldonado  40:16

Government is like a mother.

Robert Maldonado  40:19

All those are symbols of the mother archetype in the world.

Debra Maldonado  40:25

There’s so much of “I don’t trust the government”, which we can all agree. Sometimes we’re looking at it and you’re projecting a lot of your mother archetype in that situation as well. Many of our clients want to make a big change in the world. You can’t make a big change in the world unless you do this work because you’re creating it from ego and from false assumptions of what needs to change. When you clear out your own mind, purify your mind from your own personal experience and get to see the power and magnificence of these archetypal powers, then you know how to navigate the world, because then you’re not projecting your personal stuff on the world, your see solutions that may be impossible to see when you’re in ego. The way we solve problems is not the way it was created. The problems of the world are created by ego. But it’s not the way to solve them, we have to solve them with a new evolved mind. That’s how powerful this work can be. Having a better relationship with your mother is a great thing but imagine being a force of nature in the world to make big impacts, change societies, change culture, make everyone love each other a little more, save mother earth. There’s so many things you can do. We invite you to explore this work if you haven’t already. Take into account “Am I going deep enough?” If you forgive your mother, there’s nothing to forgive, she didn’t do anything to you. It’s more like you have to come to terms with your own projection. If you want to forgive, that’s fine, but you’re still laying judgment on her that she was wrong. You want to go into a deeper layer with yourself, a deeper understanding of your psychology so you can truly be free of that relationship with the past chains that lock you into your conditioning and the way you experience the world.

Robert Maldonado  42:21

That was the mother archetype. On the next podcast, we want to talk about the trickster archetype.

Debra Maldonado  42:26

That’s going to be great. Tune in next week to find out about the trickster archetype. In the meantime, if you don’t want to miss that episode, if you are listening to us on Spotify, iTunes or any podcast service, make sure you subscribe. We’d love for you to come every week. If you have questions, if this tickles your brain a little bit, don’t forget to leave comments. We hope to see you on the next show.