Hi, Reader.
This month I’m hosting a live workshop called Who I Become When I’m With You — a 2-hour exploration of what happens when we check out in the presence of the people we love, and what becomes possible when we stay.
What you’re about to read is part of why this work matters to me so deeply. It’s personal. It’s about what I’ve come to understand about loss, abandonment, and the moment a mother — any of us — leaves the room while still standing in it.
February 26th | 11 AM – 1 PM EST | Live over Zoom | $47 - $97
I have always been deeply attuned to the perceived loss I experienced as a child, growing up in a world that felt inherently unsafe.
It wasn’t communism or starvation that I noticed; it was the chaotic internal state of my mother that I saw reflected back to me through her eyes. It was that inner state of being that I sought to escape, numb, and eventually transform, my whole life.
I hadn’t fully realized just how everything was interconnected in my life, but I always knew that it was. Without delving into the details, what I’ve come to discover recently in my life is that the fear of loss has been driving the bus of my life for as long as I can remember.
Growing up, I was never really aware of the undercurrent of fear – I much preferred righteous rage, to be honest, because it made me more powerful, more in control. In that state, I felt like I was doing something (even if it was killing me while accomplishing nothing else in the process).
In that state of outraged distraction, I would intelligently ignore the deep undercurrents that ran the show of my life, out of my awareness.
I say intelligently because to face it then would cause me too much pain, and given that I didn’t know how to handle the pain, I would dissociate further and try to numb myself with more drugs, sex, and rock n’ roll.
Children (maidens) respond to their world as if everything is about them. They take things unfolding personally. Why? Because that’s how the brain works. I don’t know the details, I just know the facts. Ask any child whose parents divorced, and you’ll see that they consistently believe that they are to blame!
The bottom line is this: what we internalize at a young age becomes the platform we build our adulthood.
When we have been gaslighted as a child, we turn into four-year-olds in the presence of our mother.
When we have been abandoned as a child, we are terrified our husband might die on his way from work because he’s three minutes late from work.
When we have been dismissed as a child, we yearn to check out through drugs simply to numb our pain.
What all these scenarios have in common is the undercurrent of ‘loss’ from feeling abandoned (aka unwanted).
How many children grow up to feel unwanted by their mothers? And then spend the rest of their lives trying desperately to “be somebody” while perpetually battling a perpetual inner war of never enough.
How many mothers mean to abandon their children?
What is abandonment, anyway? Perhaps we’ll start here. Because abandonment is a nominalization. It isn’t about what the official definition is; it’s about how it feels inside our being.
I don’t believe that to feel abandoned by one’s mother the mother has to have a malicious intent to leave her kid behind. I believe that more often than not, mothers abandon their children out of necessity, or the comfort of habit.
Necessity could be something as intense as escaping communism and seeking a better life, to escaping violence in the home, to escaping her own life because it does not map to what she had hoped for. Necessity ranges and it manifests differently for different people.
Habit, on the other hand, is the learned behaviour that we repeat simply because it’s familiar. Habits feels safe because they are familiar — not because they are actually safe. Far and few are the people who have developed healthy habits in their life. The main problem with familiar habits that pull us up and out of our body is that they leave our children vulnerable, alone, and feeling like they don’t matter.
Ultimately, what remains the same is the process of abandonment, not out of maliciousness but out of a desire to escape the moment. That’s why most mothers check out.
But, the nanosecond the mother checks out of her moment, the child feels abandoned. Because, as Louise LeBrun likes to say: lights on, no one home. Children are particularly acute when it comes to the absence of the Presence of their mother because that is their safety net.
If you are not Present, then you are absent.
Our bodies may be present, but our attention is not. The version of ‘leaving’ looks different for each of us. Here are some examples — which do you identify with?
- blinded by rage and outrage
- dissociation through distancing
- detachment from the moment
- daydreaming
- depression
- yearning to die
- mindlessness
- addiction to fill-in-the-blank
It could be anything that removes our attention from the moment we are in and from the inner cues of our body.
Children are intimately fine-tuned to the inner state of their mothers. It is the state of our mothers growing up that shows us the appropriate responses to the world. So if the mother dissociates (the I AM that she is disappears), children sense that and respond accordingly by developing their adaptive strategies to cope with their environment.
When the environment does not support the full emotional maturation of the child, the child learns to cope in whatever way is available to them. Rage was easy for me because I associated it with power. Yet rage was only the mask I was wearing to protect myself from the deep pain of feeling that I had been abandoned, and then gaslighted about that.
This is why I feel so passionate about the process of ‘mothering’. I know, wholeheartedly, that mothers are the key to the evolution of our species. More than that, mothers are the key to the evolution of their own child.
But…
“You can’t give what you haven’t got!”
– Louise LeBrun
So perhaps it is time for you to awaken to your potential and become who you want your child to be. After all, modelling is our greatest teacher.
Mothering can be such a tough process because of the intergenerational gifts that keep on giving! Until someone steps up and declares: Enough!
So, how do we become awake and aware enough to know when we have drifted off to sleep?
How do we maintain our connection to our Truth/essence/Signal/Self/godForce when we are facing a relentless external push to give up and comply?
How do we remain Present in our moment when we are overwhelmed by our habits?
How do we reclaim our moment when we are distracted by the past or the future?
I don’t pretend to have your answers for you. I do, however, know what worked for me and thousands of other women seeking to reclaim their power: the process and context outlined in the WEL-Systems® body of knowledge.
This month's workshop: Who I become when I'm with you
I created this month’s workshop because of everything I just wrote. Because I know the personal, professional and inter-generational costs of checking, and I know what becomes possible when you stay Present in your body.
If you want to explore this inside yourself, with guidance and in real time — this is the space for that.
Who I Become When I’m With You
February 26th | 11 AM – 1 PM EST | Live over Zoom $47 community rate | $97 full rate