How The Mother Wound Creates Toxic Guilt in Adult Daughters
Why women feel selfish for setting boundaries, saying no, or wanting more—and how to reclaim our sovereignty
Bless The Daughters: An Examination into the Mother Wound, Inherited Pain and the Legacies that Shape our Lives
Chapter Eighteen: Guilt, Guilt, Guilt ~ The Perpetual Emotion
'The most powerful ties are the ones to the people who gave us birth… it hardly seems to matter how many years have passed, how many betrayals there may have been, how much misery in the family: We remain connected, even against our wills.' ~ Anthony Brandt, Bloodlines
November arrives. After an endless winter there finally feels a shift in the season. Though the temperature remains low, there is a warmth to the sun that draws me to the beach for the first swim of the season. Diving beneath the crisp blue feels like a baptism, like a rebirth; when I walk back upon the sand I somehow feel I have been made new—light, clean, alive.
Later that morning, I sit and my desk and journal. As the pen scrawls across the page, I think about my earlier swim and the joy it brought, but how that sense of joy is attached to guilt. Guilt for taking time for myself. For wanting something that's just mine. For daring to put my needs first. I consider how I have carried these feelings of guilt my entire life and whether this, too, could be an unrecognised thread of the Mother Wound woven through my life.
I begin to research and find an article by Bethany Webster titled Guilt, Gratitude and Emerging from the Mother Wound, where she makes an important distinction between healthy and toxic guilt:
'The healthy function of guilt is to help us recognize when we have done something wrong; it indicates a functioning conscience. It allows us to identify when a transgression has occurred so that we can feel remorse and take any necessary action to rectify it. However, toxic guilt is unhealthy and greatly limits our ability to realize ourselves as empowered, adult women in control of our lives. Because women are conditioned to view themselves as “less-than” and powerful women are seen as threatening in this culture, toxic guilt is a very common trap and keeps us disempowered.'1
Until now, I hadn’t considered the feelings of guilt I’ve carried as toxic guilt—but there is something in this that feels immediately resonant. I make a cup of tea and keep reading.
‘The abused child has no choice but to depend on his or her caregivers. So in order to ensure that they will continue to be present and available, he or she takes their guilt upon himself or herself—much as Christ archetypally took upon himself the sins of the world and died in its stead. Abused children willingly take on the role of scapegoat and sacrifice themselves and their developmental potential in the interests of survival.’ ~ Ursula Wirtz, Trauma and Beyond: The Mystery of Transformation
As I continue to research this topic, the clearer it becomes: guilt shows up in numerous, insidious ways when we carry a Mother Wound. Though not necessarily exclusive, these are the patterns I have seen most often discussed in relation to guilt and the Mother Wound:
Guilt for Wanting More
An article published at Simply Psychology states that one of the ways a mother can affect her daughter in the long-term is through making her daughter feel guilty for 'abandoning' her, or wanting to pursue her own independence.2 This happens because these daughters are often conditioned to suppress their own desires in order to meet the needs of their mother—resulting in adults who equate ambition, pleasure or success with selfishness. This type of guilt is rooted in the belief that we do not deserve more than our mothers had, or were willing to give.
Guilt for Feeling Negative Emotions Toward our Mothers
One of the things I have come to understand with greater depth since researching the Mother Wound is John Bowlby's attachment theory. This theory suggests that children will often preserve the idealised image of a parent, even in the face of emotional harm, because to acknowledge the full extent of the parent's failure threatens their sense of safety.3 This early attachment loyalty can then result in guilt when confronting complex feelings like anger, grief or betrayal toward our mothers, bringing with it a sense of disloyalty or disrespect. This guilt is further reinforced by societal narratives that suggest challenging our mothers on any level is unacceptable, and we should instead honour her and be thankful that she did the best she could.
Guilt for Setting Boundaries
For those raised in enmeshed, dysfunctional or emotionally immature families, boundaries were often unheard of. So, when an adult daughter attempts to implement boundaries, this may be interpreted as rejection or abandonment by a mother who relied on the child for emotional support. In turn, this makes it incredibly challenging to set boundaries as they are often not respected, and the daughter is conditioned to prioritise the feelings, needs and wants of others over herself. Asserting herself can often feel selfish and leave her afraid of rejection and abandonment, as well as feeling guilty should she attempt to assert her needs above those of others.
Guilt for Going No-Contact
As I consider thoughts around going no-contact, I realise it is a challenging subject for me to write. Though I consider myself estranged from my mother, it was she who executed this—she who chose to remove me from her life rather than take ownership of her actions or offer validation in the face of my childhood pain. And while I have had to work through the pain and grief of estrangement regardless of how it was effected, I do not feel guilt over something I did not choose. What I do understand, however, is going no-contact with a parent is often a last resort—a necessary boundary that is placed to provide psychological safety when all other options have been exhausted. Yet even in the necessity of such things, there is guilt. Guilt for abandoning our mothers, especially if they are ageing or unwell. Guilt for not maintaining the illusion of family unity. Guilt for rebelling against societal narratives around familial loyalty. Guilt for feeling as though we have overreacted or acted too harshly or not been forgiving or gracious enough. And guilt for prioritising our own needs, as explained in the next point.
Guilt for Prioritising Our Own Needs
Women, in particular, have been taught that our worth is found in how selfless we can be. As Glennon Doyle observes in Untamed,
'We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist.'4
When that belief is rooted in childhood—when love depended on pleasing our mothers—then guilt arises if we choose ourselves. With this comes the struggle to differentiate between selfishness and self-care; to make the conscious choice to honour our own needs when we still believe love must be earned through self-abandonment, as reinforced by our early experiences of conditional love.
As I contemplate the types of guilt listed here, I think again of Bethany Webster's comparison of guilt, and realise these are all forms of toxic guilt—things we have not done wrong and are not responsible for. Continuing to carry this guilt affects our entire lives, rarely staying confined to just the mother-daughter relationship but bleeding into all areas of our adulthood. In the reading I have done for this chapter, I have uncovered some of the ways that guilt dictates how we show up in the world, in our relationships, and in our sense of self:
Guilt and Hyper-Attunement in Relationships: When we are raised to believe that love must be earned through pleasing, fixing or caretaking our mothers, we often grow into adults who prioritise the emotions of others before our own—anticipating needs, avoiding conflict, and feeling guilty when we assert ourselves—leading to relationships where we over-give and lose our sense of self in the process.
Guilt and People-Pleasing as a Survival Strategy: The internalised guilt from feeling as though we are not enough creates adult daughters who people-please and feel anxious around disappointing others, as well as carrying guilt around declining requests, setting boundaries, or expressing disagreement—which often shows up in our relationships as a form of self-abandonment.
Guilt and the Fear of Success: Success feels dangerous to those of us carrying a Mother Wound because growing up—if our mothers felt threatened by our independence, achievements, beauty, or power—we often experienced rejection and abandonment in light of this. This leads to sabotaging our own growth and success to preserve the illusion of connection or to avoid feeling disloyal to our mother, thus creating an incongruity where success feels like betrayal and shrinking feels like safety.
It would be easy to dismiss guilt as a minor symptom of the Mother Wound, but what I've come to realise through this chapter is how significant a player it has been in all areas of my life. It is something that has kept me small. It has kept me afraid of asserting my needs, of reaching for success, of setting boundaries, of claiming joy. It has kept me afraid to live a full, authentic, and unapologetic life. It has shaped how I love and how I hold back.
It has made me afraid of outgrowing my mother.
Of being everything that she never was.
Bethany Webster writes that toxic guilt blocks us from the healing we need. She says,
'If we cut off our healing process too early with guilt and are too afraid to temporarily feel anger towards our mother (which, for some women, is essential in the process of healing) then we are still being complicit with the patriarchal mandate that to honour mother we must diminish ourselves.'5
Naming the guilt we feel is the first step to loosening its hold. We need to be able to recognise this toxic guilt as unnecessary, unhelpful, and disempowering—to understand these feelings have never been about a moral compass, but a learned response to a system that demands our diminishment.
From here, we can begin to release it: to learn that honouring our needs is not selfishness but sovereignty; that boundaries are not betrayals but protection; that choosing distance can be an act of love for ourselves when others failed at loving us as we needed.
As I move into the final stages of this book the most profound understanding I have come to grasp is this: healing the Mother Wound is not about blaming our mothers—it is about reclaiming ourselves. And when we learn to let go of the guilt that was never ours to carry, we give ourselves permission to live in the fullness of the life that was always ours to claim, written into the birthright of our existence.
Next week: Chapter Nineteen ~ Inability to Make a Decision: The Fear of Being Wrong
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https://www.bethanywebster.com/blog/guilt-gratitude-and-the-emerging-from-the-mother-wound/
https://www.simplypsychology.org/daughters-of-narcissistic-mothers.html
Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.
Doyle, G. (2020). Untamed. The Dial Press.
https://www.bethanywebster.com/blog/guilt-gratitude-and-the-emerging-from-the-mother-wound/
My therapist once told me this — guilt is a manageable emotion.
It’s been my mantra ever since whenever I need it. It means that I can bear this awful sensation if it means I get to live a fuller life with autonomy.
The alternative is to be consumed by it rather than simply carrying it. And that would be terrible waste of a life. I realize she chose this option. Or perhaps she didn’t have the options I did.
I wish I could change things so she could love her life too. But I’ve finally learned only we can do this for ourselves.
Thank you so much for sharing!
This was far too relatable and so beautifully written. I read each word, nodding along. I too have a no-contact relationship with my mother that is more her choice than mine, which makes it easier and harder at the same time.
"Healing the Mother Wound is not about blaming our mothers—it is about reclaiming ourselves." I needed these words today more than I knew. Thank you! I look forward to reading more.