Written by Nicoleen Agnello, Holistic Healing Coach
Nicoleen, The Flamekeeper is a leader in holistic healing. 10 years bed bound with chronic illness, on life support repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse were released, revealing how energy poisons mind, body and spirit. She is the Creator of the Phoenix Program 1:1 transformational coaching to heal trauma and rekindle your self-confidence.
Mother's Day is a time when we honour mothers. The shops and social media are brimming with gifts and sentimental expressions of the role of mothers. But what happens if the relationship you had with your mother doesn’t fit neatly into the hallmark gift card hearts and flowers range?
Are you carrying guilt and shame from the mothers wound?
Your mother is supposed to be the one person who is always there for you, who loves and supports you unconditionally. As a daughter who didn’t experience the close, loving mother relationship that society portrays as the norm, I’ve carried a lot of guilt, shame, and pain. All my life, I felt my mother's inability to love me was because I wasn’t good enough and I was undeserving of love.
Hurt people hurt people
As a child, I experienced severe trauma of sexual abuse at age 4. Sadly, this pattern of abuse was a familiar or familial cycle, one that my mother had experienced, too. You see we share so much more than genetics in our family bonds. Energy that isn’t worked through and released doesn’t dissipate, it becomes a pattern that we get stuck in and that continues to be recycled through generations.
My mother was severely traumatised but she never acknowledged the trauma, she never worked on it. For this reason she was completely unable to take on the role of being a mother. She was not able to nurture or support me. She was emotionally and often physically absent, spending long periods locked in her bedroom and I remember often being alone, dirty and hungry with knotted hair.
When she did come out of her room, I was on red alert, hyper-vigilant about the threat of danger. I grew up living with a snake in the house, never able to relax my guard and unsure of when she would strike.
Survival strategies cost you your life and freedom
I lost my childhood innocence and joy and took on the responsibilities of running the house. I assumed the role of caregiver in my family looking after my mothers fragile mental health and doing basic everyday tasks like scrounging for loose change in my father’s clothes and walking to the shop to buy bread for my brother and I.
If you’ve been through abuse of some kind, be it emotional, physical, or sexual, you learn survival skills that, at the time, were necessary to keep you safe. As an empath, you learn to attune yourself to the energy of the unpredictable adult, the threat in the room, because your very life depends on it.
The problem with this strategy long term is that you become so open to another’s energy that you disassociate from your own energy. I betrayed myself constantly, I had no self-esteem didn’t listen to my own needs and always chose to please others. As a result, I experienced consistent betrayal by others, and with no self-honouring boundaries, I ended up so drained and exhausted that I became bedbound for 10 years in excruciating pain and dysfunction.
The journey to heal from trauma and regain my self-confidence has been a lifelong one.
Healing ancestral trauma
I have been able to shift my perspective on the relationship I am able to have with my mother. I no longer yearn for the deep mother-daughter relationship that is the stuff of sitcoms. I no longer wish that she would see me for who I really am, and love me as I am, because I understand that she has not even accepted and loved herself.
You see, I know that another can only meet you to the level that they have met themselves. Each soul sees the world through the lens of their own trauma. You cannot give what you do not have. My mother had not done any work to release the trauma that was blocking her from accessing love, but that was not my fault and it is also not my responsibility. You cannot pour orange juice into a glass from a jug that contains apple juice. She simply did not have it to give.
I now love and accept her as she is, for the good things she does have the capacity to give, without trying to impose my will upon how our relationship should be. She is funny, she works hard to maintain her home, she appreciates my children, and she loves God and animals. I am able to see her for what she is, in all her positive attributes and her shortcomings, and meet her with unconditional love because I have met myself with love and compassion.
You are able to break the cycle
Any relationship you see externally is only a reflection of the relationship you have with yourself. It must come from within you first, and so if you desire a deeper connection to others, you must first do the work of connecting more deeply to who you truly are beneath the layers of pain and trauma that are obscuring your true brilliance.
I have reclaimed my self-worth and built a truly loving relationship with myself, one that is based on self-compassion and accepting of all my idiosyncrasies and nuances, and this has helped me to build a loving relationship with my daughter.
I remember my mother telling me her mother said to her ‘one day you will have a daughter, and I hope she treats you as horribly as you treat me’. As I recalled this I turned to my beautiful little girl and told her ‘one day you will have a daughter and she will love you just as much as I love you.’
We do not need to be prisoners to these old energy patterns. When you choose self-love you choose to do the work to heal, so you can be the cycle breaker in your ancestral line. You choose inner child healing because you deserve to be loved and supported, and to live a purposeful and fulfilling life.
This Mother Day, I will think about how far I have come to heal the mother's wound and how far my daughter will go and her daughter, and her daughter's daughter because I chose to heal and to break the cycle!
If you are ready to let go of past trauma and heal so that you can live a confident and fulfilling life I invite you to reach out to me for a free breakthrough call. I offer both 1:1 coaching and powerful group work and it would be my honour to help you heal.
Nicoleen Agnello, Holistic Healing Coach
Nicoleen Agnello is the Flamekeeper, a holistic healing coach transforming mind, body and spirit. 10 years bed-bound with chronic illness, on life support, repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse were released, revealing how energy poisons mind, body, and spirit. She is skilled at healing sexual abuse, domestic violence and narcissistic abuse, that results in low self-worth, alcoholism, addiction, depression, anxiety and chronic illness. She is the Creator of the Phoenix program: 1:1 transformational coaching. Her mission: help you heal from trauma and rekindle your self-confidence so that you can create the joyful life you deserve.
