This is going to be a long read. 17 ish minutes to be exact. And we’re in a society of 5 second TikTok’s, IG reels, commercials, and everything else geared to grab our society created short spanned attention. If I’m lucky, I might still capture the attention of more Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials than Gen Z, but I do still hope to access the curiosity and imagination from the Gen Z ers.
This post will give you a peak into the world of a 40-year-old woman with a Mother Wound. Many don’t know about the Mother Wound. Those who have, are on an enlightened self-journey to heal their wound, others are still in denial about the concept, and the rest are looking for answers. This post provides some answers to at least start uniting the generations when it comes to childhood trauma. All I ask is that you have an open mind and do your own research from the doors with which my personal experience has opened.
You’re gonna go on a ride here. A ride through my psyche and how it processes my mother wound through dreams. Memories of first-time toxic relationships and escaping from a zombie world. If I remember a dream, which most times I do, I’ll start dissecting the hell out of it. Of course, that doesn’t make it 100% accurate and true, what some call “Bible”. But it has allowed me to sort out and manage my childhood trauma. It also makes for a hell of a story. Welcome to the depths of my pained creativity.
The Mother wound
It would take me years of self-discovery, self-awareness, confusion, anger, fear, research, medication, and therapy to discover this term.
So what’s the Mother Wound? An article by Mari Grande, defines the Mother Wound as “an attachment trauma that creates a sense of confusion and devastation in the child’s psyche. It instills deeply rooted beliefs that make the child feel unloved, abandoned, unworthy of care, and even fearful of expressing themselves. Furthermore, the wound can be so strong that it unconsciously affects their adult relationships and mental health today”.
dreams
I’m very passionate about the Mother Wound because it has really affected my life. One of those ways is through very vivid dreams that I can’t seem to shake, even as I turned 40 this year.
Please Listen to Me
I’ve often found myself waking up with panic attacks, crying, breathless, and drooling.
Some dreams, I express my pain and frustrations verbally and physically towards Mami. Others, I am trying so hard to speak, to be heard, with barely a whisper to escape from my mouth. Throat sore and scratching from the straining.
Let Me Out
Then there are the more common dreams. The dreams of escaping some alternate world. Post apocalyptic, circus, scary house, fairy tale gone wrong, amusement park, you name it.
My First Relationship was with a Girl (Backstory)
Yup, we’re jumping right into it.
To this day, I still hate her. I’ve refused to talk to her for years now. And I’m pretty sure this says more about me than it says about her for so many reasons.
The relationship was secret. It went on for several years and it was very toxic. I spent a lot of time at her house. It was my getaway. My safe place away from the frustrations of my home and specifically Mami. Towards the end of the relationship, I couldn’t get far enough away from her. She wouldn’t leave me alone.
This relationship is very shameful part of my life. To me the relationship represented one of my biggest fears, not being desirable or worthy of the attention and love from men. The relationship was also a connection I was seeking from an older female. The emotional connection I didn’t have with my Mami. This is what I’ve told myself.
HERE WE GO AGAIN, another dream
Starts Out as One Thing … Ends as Another
Like many dreams, this dream started out as one thing and ended as another. Either way, it was indicative of my past trauma. Resurfacing previous relationships influenced by my mother wound and taking me to yet another world for me to figure out how to escape.
Why do I keep dreaming about her?
The dream started in her bathroom. I stood there watching her, packing and OCD organizing for a never return.
She was going on a trip, and I was just following her around. As she cleaned her room perfectly. Hanging up all clothes just right. Lining up perfume bottles mixed with collected trinkets. Perfectly lining up the labels, facing them forward like you see in restocking videos on TikTok. For the millennials and older, like the character Martin in the movie Sleeping with the Enemy. Canned goods aligned to perfection in the cupboards. Towels, set to the precise length of each other towel in the bathroom.
I was leaving with her. I don’t remember where we were going. No feelings of why the hell am I here again, like I normally have. This time, empty, floating along with whatever was going to happen next.
Well that took a left turn
We left in two separate vehicles. I was following her, me in a car, her in a forest green semi-truck. When she suddenly took a hard left on a curved street that hugged a mountain on the right side. Shocked from what I just witnessed, the first thing that came to my mind was, she did that on purpose. She fucking did, that, on purpose. And, I’m free.
I kept going without reducing my speed. Quickly assessing the situation, I realized that nobody knew we were together. I could go anywhere I wanted and act like I never saw that happen. So, that’s what I did.
I went about my life from there until months later when it caught back up to me.
Let’s just make matters worse
She had planned a cruise months before her disappearance. The bells and whistles added. Luxury suite and premium packages covering the entire trip. I had my mind set on posing as her and enjoying the trip. I could care less.
Geeze, dream me is ruthless.
The problem was her name was on the ticket. Somehow, the friend I brought, and I got past the ticket process to walking the hallways looking for the suite. Thats where I ran into trouble. From reading the room numbers on the wall right next to the door, to trying to take a picture of it to read it from the picture. I was still unable to read the numbers and words correctly. Even with my friend trying too.
This is where I usually start lucid dreaming. It’s hard to read numbers and words in dreams. It’s also hard to text and take pictures and see them immediately after. Everything is blurry, you can’t recall what you saw, messages don’t get sent, and for me, calls don’t go through. Try it.
We tried to figure out how we could get into the suite incident free. We walked around the ship, exhausting our options. And we got caught. Turns out, it was a setup. Homegirl survived the crash. In fact, the whole thing assembled to set me up. To get me for murder since I didn’t report the accident. For fraud since I was on this cruise trying to use her name. Yet I never saw her again.
From the real world: wait just a minute …
That whole sequence of events had a few irrational loopholes. But it was a dream world, wasn’t it.
Welcome to Yet Another Zombie Apocalypse Story … with a New Twist
I was taken off the ship and brought into this apocalyptic world. Right in the middle of an epidemic of people, mutating from humans to zombies.
Now in this new world, I slowly experienced awareness of the epidemic to figuring how to defeat the zombies and everything in between.
PHASE 1: WTF is going on?!
I began going about my everyday life until I noticed something wasn’t quite right. People I frequently interacted with were slowly acting unusual.
First was my friend from the ship. Along with those who lived in the same home as us. I knew each person’s role in the house. Father, Mother, Daughter, and me thrown in the mix.
One day the change slowly started happening as each member of the house would come home. First my friend, the daughter. Followed by the father. Then the mother. They’d come home, I’d greet them in the living room and they immediately took on a zombie persona, coming at me for the kill.
My adrenaline rushed survival skills kicked in right away, running, crawling around furniture, to a room with a window and door. Crawling out of the window to the side of the house, struggling to get my 40-year-old, non-athletic body with zero upper body strength over the wooden fence. My friend was at my feet as I was halfway over.
Finally, I made it over the fence, thankful for not feeling an inkling of pain. Thank you, adrenaline rush. Dusting my hands on my pants, I look up to see the father coming home from his long day of work. Eyeglasses, 3-piece suit, and suitcase in hand, he made it out of his car, onto the sidewalk path, sniffed the air, and slowly turned his gaze towards me. Shit.
His zombie metamorphosis began, as he crouched to all fours and began racing towards me. What the actual hell?!
I stumbled towards the back of the house as quick as I could, to get to the entrance of the garage from the back door to hide amidst all of the tools, storage boxes, gardening equipment, you know, garage things. He didn’t come after me though. I was safe again. Dang, twice in a row. Not sure how I managed that. Oh yeah, dream.
From my hiding spot in the garage, I could hear that everything was back to normal in the house as they went about their end of the day routines. Uuuuummm what is going on? So yeah, I obviously wasn’t going back into the house. I slowly ventured out to the front of the house again and immediately towards the street. Every time I looked up at people driving and walking around, traveling to their destinations, the zombie transformations happened right in front of my eyes. Alright, I guess I’m avoiding people altogether.
I got further away from the suburbs and closer to the warehouses of the city’s industrial area. The warehouses thankfully were abandoned. I had found a safe escape spot to figure out what the heck I was going to do next.
PHASE 2: Not alone
I began my ascend upstairs. The goal, to get as high up as I could to see out as far as possible. On my way up, I ran into a group of 4, with gear and weapons. We all paused on alert, waiting for each other to turn. None of us did.
Without hesitation, they took me in as the 5th to their group. We discussed our experiences outside, trying figure out what was causing people to turn into zombies.
We pillaged the warehouse for things we could use as weapons and for survival. The right sized pieces of wood and metal, sharp, maneuverable, and enough weight to be able to swing and knock someone … something out.
Along the trek, we kept coming across different tools and weapons. Heavy duty staple guns that shot across the room instead of having to press it against the intended .. … .. victim. Guns of all types. I kept eagerly trying each one. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t enjoying it.
I found a curved, short but sharp knife to carry on me. It slid perfectly between the gap of my ankle and boots I found.
We walked on without running into any zombies for quite a while in what looked like an industrial ghost town. A couple of gun and ammunition stores were actually open, still selling their merch for cash. Damn them, they had the market right now, didn’t they? Hell yeah they’re gonna bank on the demand at the moment. But what if the world no longer had use for cash and change as currency?
PHASE 3: Ready, Set, Fight
Our little group eventually got to parts of the town where we couldn’t avoid people any longer. A new home build site with partially developed homes. Construction equipment everywhere. Jackpot. And just like what I had gone through with my friend and her family, like what our group had discussed about their own experiences, one by one, humans started turning to zombies as soon as eye contact was made.
A vapid film, glazed over their eyes, sweat dripping out of each pore on their sick stricken paling face, and mouths salivating, drooling as their teeth sharpened, lifting from their reddening gums. The turning process ended as quickly as it began.
With barely a blink of an eye, the zombies launched at us. We were ready. Weapons in hand we began violently attacking zombies one by one with our guns and makeshift weapons.
We battled it out with beautifully executed blows. The squish of metal and wood penetrating their moist flesh, splashing chunks and fluids everywhere. Once we hit them hard enough to kill the zombie out of them, they’d be down for a while, shaking off their zombie and eventually getting back up as human. Until they made eye contact with us once again.
They kept coming. We were all shouting over the hellish sounds about what to do to stop the cycle of human to zombie to human and back to zombie again.
Someone came up with the idea of pilling all of the killed zombies in-between the house structure using the drywall to enclose the wall, so they wouldn’t turn back and continue the never-ending cycle. That’s when we noticed, that’s what stopped the cycle. They remained dead, defeated, and contained.
It was a brilliant idea. Why was I fixating on the after smell? Random.
PHASE 4: It’s all in the eyes
It was confirmed. The eye contact was causing them to turn. And we had the antibodies.
We learned we could walk amongst the zombies so long as we didn’t make eye contact with them. If we did, it would start a massacre. One by one looking up from their phones or kidnapping the attention from the socially phobic to make automatic eye contact. Setting off a chain reaction.
That was easily done in today’s society, since we were already used to people that didn’t know how to communicate with each other any longer.
We had to train ourselves to not look at people as we were traveling to each destination. I still struggled with the concept of how to trust something that has the potential to be instinctively driven to kill you as you confidently walk through crowds of them? Keeping your head and eyes down, trusting they will not turn and hurt you unless you look at them.
And that was it. The dream stopped there.
Dream Interpretation: Crazy or Creative?
Don’t make eye contact with the black people so they don’t talk “hood” to you. Don’t make eye contact with the Latinos or your wallet will go missing. Don’t engage with the white people or they’ll strip you of your culture.
One by one they’ll tear you apart and eat your soul.
Whoever “they” is depends on who “you” are, right? Why? WHY?!
Am I guilty of making racist remarks, yeah, I am. We all are. It’s the inability to understand and accept differences in life. And the thinking that one is superior over the other. It’s ignorance combined with hurt.
Was our society better off without us, the immune chosen ones?
Were we slowly killing off humans who turn? They can’t be our evolved form. Or are they? We didn’t wait long enough to find out. Resisting change in our ignorance.
Do we see society like it’s full of ravenous zombies?
They become zombies without human engagement. They become zombies with negative human engagement. We don’t even allow ourselves the opportunity to look at humans before we make the assumption of how our interaction will go. We just assume now that no matter what, we will be greeted with blood thirsty, predatory hostility. So, we go in expecting zombies out of humans and that’s what we get. Reinforcing the very thought that turns humans into zombies in the first place.
Dreams About Escaping and its Link to emotionally Immature Parents
In my adult years, a very special book came into my life. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents … How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting or Self-Involved Parents by Lindasy C. Gibson, PsyD. This book has painfully guided me to understanding.
In an excerpt from Gibson’s book, a patient study named “Natalie” flipped the switch from a rapid downward spiral of my life to healing.
“Natalie, fifty, an award-winning business consultant, was an emotionally neglected child who nevertheless created a rewarding adult life for herself both personally and professionally. Unfortunately, the emotional neglect she experienced as a child still haunts her in the form of dreams, which she described like this: ‘I have recurring nightmares with the same theme. I’m in a desperate situation that I can’t get out of. I’m trying frantically to find a solution, a way out. Different roads, different keys, different doors–none of them are a solution. I’m all alone, and there’s only me trying to solve the problem; there’s no one else. Lots of times I’m responsible for other people who are watching and waiting for me to fix everything, but here they give me no help. There is no comfort to be found. I have no protection and I’m not safe. Then I wake up and my heart is racing’.
Natalie’s dream captures what it feels like to be emotionally alone. She has to deal with everything by herself and doesn’t consider asking anyone for help. This is how children of emotionally immature parents feel. Their parents may technically be present, but they offer little help, protection, or comfort.”
Natalie’s story, for the most part, is me. Ironically, her story about dreams was the key to my childhood trauma, Mother Wound, and Dreams.
Now, my dreams are no longer just about me finding a solution, alone. I still have these dreams, but I often have help now. Even my dreams are healing. And my creativity, well, that’s creating the next chapter in my life.
Each generation can really learn a lot from each other, instead of chastising what the other does. We just have to be willing to slow down and listen with an open mind.
The Mother Wound … Childhood Trauma … Generational Differences … Dreams … have they affected you in your life? One of these topics, all 4 combined? No insight is too big or too small. Let us know in the comments below.