The Mother Wound, the False Self and Depression: What's the Connection?

How the gaps our mother left cause a lifetime of outward performance that disguises the inward death of self.

Photo by Kinga Howard on Unsplash

Bless The Daughters: An Examination into the Mother Wound, Inherited Pain and the Legacies that Shape our Lives

Chapter Seven ~ Depression: Anger Turned Inward

‘I KNEW IT WAS GETTING BAD AGAIN / when the wildflowers meant nothing / & their absence meant even less / when I looked at my trauma & could only see far enough to call it a full life / when I stopped singing in the kitchen / & every day stretched audaciously into its own season / & I didn’t have it in me to love / anything the way I used to / when I looked at my heart & saw a hotel with no vacancies / even though every room was empty / I tell you / every room was empty.’

~ Emily Adams-Aucoin

A week or so later I wake to stillness. Heavy fog lies upon the landscape; a millpond of colourless horizon that wraps around me as I step outside. I used to think fog was just fog until I discovered there are nine different types of fog which seemed a somewhat overkill amount of fog but nature has always liked to be superfluous in her extravagance.

The fog this morning is radiation fog. Most common in winter, it happens when there are clear skies and no wind at night and the heat absorbed by the earth’s surface during the day releases thermal radiation back into the atmosphere, cooling the earth and creating a layer of moist air just above the ground. Water droplets form in this moist air and if the conditions are humid enough, they condense to a fog that disappears once the sun rises and warms the earth once more.

Carl Sandburg writes of fog in this way:

‘The fog comes / on little cat feet / It sits looking / over harbour and city / on silent haunches / and then moves on.’

This poem always feels like an allegory of my life with Complex-PTSD — how the dark days arrive without announcement, tiptoeing into my mind and ladening my thoughts with a cold, silent, bleak heaviness I cannot see beyond until, unannounced, the fog shifts once more. Today, the fog settles upon me. My thoughts carry no shape or movement but hold stagnant — my mind mirroring the millpond of colourless horizon displayed outside.

My limbs feel heavy; a feeling of moving underwater and not being able to surface. I am sinking, drowning in the fog. Seeing it happen before my eyes yet not caring enough to try and save myself. Defeat washes over me, followed by apathy. I let them carry me to where they want to go. We spiral, spiral, spiral.

I have not got the energy to fight this morning.

I think it was Freud who said depression is anger turned inward. While perhaps a simplistic reasoning for a much more complex condition, I feel myself able to relate. Someone asked this week how my book was coming along. I said the thing I am finding hardest is writing this around life. How I can be in my office deconstructing a lifetime of trauma and then my family will return from work and school and I am forced to take a deep breath, push down all that I feel in that moment, and emerge from behind my computer: bright and cheerful and ready to hear about how their days have been. And it isn’t that they wouldn’t understand or be able to hold space for my pain. It just feels easier — or perhaps is just my default — to compartmentalise these different facets of my life.

I like to imagine that at the end of my writing day I put all those emotions aside but I’m aware of the reality that I am pushing them down. Suppressing. Repressing. Oppressing. Turning my anger inward. Pretending I am not a vessel of wayward anger; white-hot lava seeping from my pores and dripping down the surface of my skin, the heat of it burning until I want to scream fire in the hope someone will hear me but I am too exhausted to open my mouth; too exhausted to save myself.

Too exhausted with pretending I am fine. So goddamn fine.

I am not fine.

I make coffee, open my journal to a blank page. Words land; apprehensive at first but soon gather momentum, saying things like: inadequate, imposter, survival, empty, grief. The more I write these words the more they expand inside me and I feel the pressure build as I allow the feelings to come to the surface and I cannot do this I cannot do this I cannot do this I cannot write this book I do not have what it takes to write this book I am just so tired so fucking tired and this trauma just takes and takes and takes and leaves me without I have nothing I am nothing I am nothing more than survival and I hate this I hate that it’s so hard that everything is so fucking hard and none of this is fair I didn’t ask for this I didn’t deserve this and I’m so tired of having to fight just to make it through each day and who could I have been without this trauma how much more could I have achieved what would it be like to wake each day not exhausted before the day has even begun what would it be like to wake each day and not have to fight just to survive and what would it be to wake each day and actually care if I even survived it or not.

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I have never had a formal diagnosis of depression; it has never been a constant in my life but that’s not to say I haven’t known of its insidious grip at times it has laced its fingers through mine and seduced me into its delicious darkness, such as how Stephanie Perkins describes it in Lola and the Boy Next Door:

‘Because that’s the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time.’

If you research the Mother Wound you will find depression listed as one of its symptoms, though little more seems to be written about how or why the Mother Wound leads to depression. Yet each of the women I interviewed said, similar to me, they had experienced periods of depression in their lives for days or weeks at a time, but struggled to pinpoint the exact reason for this.

In her book, Discovering The Inner Mother, Bethany Webster writes of the mother gap, in which she briefly mentions depression. She writes,

'The mother gap is the gap between what you needed from your mother and what you received from her. This gap can cause pain and diminish your ability to love yourself (causing low self-esteem), to trust that you are safe and life is good (causing anxiety), and to be truly fulfilled (causing depression).'

And then goes on to say,

'In response to the mother gap, the mask of a “false self”, a term coined by psychotherapist D. W. Winnicot, is formed. The false sense is originally developed in childhood as a way to compensate for some level of rejection you may have experienced for being your real self. It’s an unconscious attempt to change oneself to be acceptable to the external world. The problem is that as adults, when we confuse our false self for our real self, we end up receiving approval for others for our false self, while deep inside, we want to be loved for who we really are, for our authentic self. Wearing a mask to cover up our vulnerability and shame leads to feelings of being a fraud, emptiness and depression.'¹

I think about depression in light of what Bethany says; that depression is rooted in the mother gap — in not receiving what we needed from our mothers and in an attempt to acquire this we create a false self, believing our true and authentic selves to be unworthy of being seen and loved. Yet living out of this false self “leads to feelings of being a fraud, emptiness and depression.”

In her book, My Body Keeps Your Secrets, Lucia Osborne-Crowley says this of the false self:

‘It strikes me that the false self is also the key to understanding why I… struggle to know what is real and what is not; which parts of the world we perceive are to be trusted and which are to be doubted. Because we have always believed ourselves to be rotten and worthy of contempt, our own perceptions of the world are not to be trusted. All our lives we have been taught to lie in order to stay alive, and eventually we do not trust ourselves when we tell the truth. My whole life has been either a paradox or a performance.’

My whole life has been either a paradox or a performance.

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‘What is my identity, even? What the fuck is that? How would I know? I’ve pretended to be other people my whole life, my whole childhood and adolescence and young adulthood. The years that you’re supposed to spend finding yourself, I was spending pretending to be other people. The years that you’re supposed to spend building character, I was spending building characters.’

~ Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

When I began to write, just over ten years ago now, I started a blog called, This Girl Unravelled. This blog was a raw and unedited version of my journey at that time — how my life had unravelled in the face of repressed trauma resurfacing and how, as JK Rowling once said, rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. I no longer have that blog and much of it has been lost but I recall an entry that spoke about how much of my life I had lived as a chameleon: tell me what you want me to be, and I’ll be it — and how much of myself I had lost within that.

From a young age I adopted survival skills of people-pleasing, perfectionism, proving and performing, all of which were a means of minimising the shame I carried. I was terrified of anyone learning the truth of my life. I soon came to learn the best way to stay under the radar was to rise above it — to perform, to excel, to achieve to a higher standard than everyone else.

Existing in this space not only satisfied the desperate need for acceptance and approval I harboured, but also alleviated the chance of anyone suspecting my life wasn’t as perfect as I painted it to be. Nobody ever questions the home life of a student with high grades and high standards and high morals.

Even after I had left home at fifteen — even then, as I moved from living on the couch at a friend’s place to living with a family who took me in as a good deed (this did not work out as I was not into Jesus as much as they would have liked me to be), to living in a hostel with a guy who had a penchant for drugs and death metal to living with an older lady who fed me porridge with lumps of butter stirred through in an attempt to fatten me up — even then, when I worked three part-time jobs to support myself so I could finish school — even then, the performance never wavered.

And even years later, when the memories resurfaced and I could not contain the trauma that lived inside of me any longer and I took a glorious fall from my sanctimonious heights of self-righteousness into self-destruction and eventually landed at rock bottom — even then, you’d have still found me at church in my Sunday best. Whatever it took to maintain the facade, even as I died a slow and silent death on the inside.

I think back to these earlier years of adulthood; how much they were defined by depression even when I wasn’t conscious or aware of the state of sadness I existed in. Even those closest to me never knew the ways or the extent of how much I struggled — how much I failed — so proficient I was at hiding my true self.

I wonder now if this kind of performing is birthed in the Mother Wound; in the adaptations we make to our true and authentic selves — such is our desire to be seen as acceptable, worthy, loveable. Our desire to receive positive attention. Our desire to remain safe.

I wonder whether these adaptations are survival skills that serve us in childhood but when carried into our adult lives, they cause disconnection and isolation from ourselves. How we spend our lives a slave to perfectionism; to compliance and subservience and acceptance. How we desire to be loved but feel our true selves not worthy to receive so we present to the world as our false self and in this, we lose our identity — our true self.

Because this is the thing about childhood trauma — it is the thief of identity. It takes from us the truest version of ourselves and creates a loss of self — a loss of who we were born to be — and replaces it with the version of ourselves that is safe, no matter how false. But as Brené Brown says,

‘If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment and inexplicable grief.’

I think about how I am feeling today — the heaviness, the sadness, the apathy — and wonder if it is because I have, of late, traded my true self for my false self in an attempt to minimise the discomfort of the emotions that have been surfacing. For myself, but also for those around me. Not allowing myself permission to feel my anger, to express my anger, to outwardly show my anger — all of this is a form of self-betrayal that causes me to hide who I am that I might be more palatable to those around me.

I fear the emotions I am experiencing; label them as negative and find myself afraid of allowing others to see my anger and rage and grief — afraid I will not be loved or loveable unless I portray a self that does not cause discomfort to others. It is this response to the mother gap that Bethany Webster speaks of — the way I attempt to make myself more acceptable to the external world to compensate for my fear of rejection and abandonment from those I love if they were to see the real me and the darkness that ferments beneath my skin. But within that, feelings of being a fraud, emptiness and depression.

I try to think of a time in my life that has not felt like a paradox or a performance.

Outside, the fog loiters, thick and soupy. I close my journal and crawl back into bed.

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The next morning I drag myself out for a walk despite what feels like sub-zero August temperatures. At the beginning of winter I made a promise that unless there was actual rain, I had no excuse not to walk — for the sake of my mental health as much as my physical health. Though I have not remained one hundred percent faithful to this promise, I have for the most part braved days outside that previously would have seen me unwilling to step away from the warmth of the wood fire and out into the ferociousness of south-east South Australian winter. As bitter northerlies slice through me I draw my coat in closer and curse under my breath. I am anything but a willing participant, but I’m here nonetheless.

As I walk, I listen to another episode of the We Can Do Hard Things podcast. In this particular episode, Glennon shares of the season of depression she has recently been in, and how it reminds her of crabs — that crabs have seasons of losing their shell and during these seasons they are particularly vulnerable and must hide in deep, dark places of the ocean to protect themselves from prey as they transform from their old shell to their new shell.

Amanda goes on to say that when a crayfish loses its shell, it will eat its old shell so that it has the strength to build its new shell around them to which Glennon replies,

‘Nothing is wasted… nothing is wasted… we are using every bit of every version of ourselves that we have ever been to create the next version of ourselves that we will be,’

and I am drawn to the beauty of this metaphor — to the idea that even as I come to understand how my false self has not served me, I am already starting to become a newer version of myself and that perhaps the process is just as important as the outcome.

It reminds me of these words from Alice Walker,

‘Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognise that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realise that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.’

Maybe depression is anger turned inwards, or rage turned inwards, or grief turned inwards. Maybe depression is found in that space between what we needed from our mothers and what we did not receive from them. Maybe depression is a corollary of living as our false selves for too long, as a direct result the Mother Wound. Maybe it is all of these things. But maybe also within that — within the deep, dark places we dwell — maybe there is a time of shedding of these old things; a transformation taking place we cannot see at the time.

Maybe it’s okay to not be fine today.

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Next week: Chapter Eight ~ Addiction: The Need to Escape

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1. Webster, B. (January 5, 2021). Discovering the Inner Mother. Published William Morrow. https://www.bethanywebster.com/book/