The Mother Wound: Being the Sacrificial Lamb
Do you find that you sacrifice yourself in many situations in life? This could be from generational trauma passed down from your mother.
Making Yourself the Ugly Duckling
The need to make others happier, more beautiful, smarter, more athletic, or wiser than you. Have you ever done any of these things for someone so that they shined bright and you stayed small and insignificant? For many of us, the mother wound is very impactful. The father wound is a doozy as well, no doubt, but sometimes the mother wound is very strong within us. This is likely because the mother is the first influence and often the strongest one when we are young.
Quite often in our world we have mothers who are not healed of their childhood trauma and they pass down their personal narratives about themselves to us. When a mother was abandoned, abused, or neglected or felt that she had to compete with her own mother or vie for her mother’s attention, this created a large hole inside of her. She was shamed and made small. She was rejected in certain ways too. When children are not given the love and attention they need, they feel abandoned and rejected. They take on their own shame as well as their critical parent’s or parents’ shame. She needed her mother’s love and attention and her mother, by virtue of the fact that generational trauma is passed down the ancestral lines, needed her own attention so she neglected her daughter. This daughter (your mother) may grow up to be competitive in work, with other women, and with her own children.
As the child of this mother, you may have felt that you had to play small, never outshine her, dumb yourself down, or add layers of weight to your body in order not to suffer your mother’s wrath. Even if your father gave you attention, your mother might have felt jealous about not getting enough attention from him. She might have felt threatened by you for getting “more” love and attention from your father than she was getting. She could not take that, so she made sure to stand in the way of the relationship between you and your father. Now, as a result, you have abandonment wounds from your father simply because Father now does not want to rock the boat with Mother, so he decides that ignoring you, abusing you, or neglecting and rejecting you is better for everyone—-especially for him. He certainly does not need or want his “crazy” wife to be angry with him. Better to ignore the kid (you) than deal with her narcissistic rage. When she felt threatened by you, Mother would strike out at you or play passive aggressive competition games as though you were trying to “steal her man” and make you feel hated, misunderstood, and bad.
Similar to how Father coped, in this kind of situation, the best adaptive coping mechanism for you in order to stay safe was to become the ugliest ducking possible—fading into the wallpaper, being as quiet as the quietest mouse, never trying to show off, have passions, talents, or skills of any kind—disappear in order to belong, to be safe, and to not be killed by your mother. This is how a child controls their abusive world in order to survive and to keep the peace at home.
Becoming the Sacrificial Lamb
As you grow up, you might then find out that you have girls, boys, men, women, friends, bosses, co-workers, partners, and spouses who all need this same kind of deferential treatment. Think about it. If any of what I described above was your childhood experience, can you name at least one friend, boss, co-worker, or partner who you have sacrificed your own happiness and well-deserved attention for in order to keep the peace and not create the inevitable drama that would ensue if you took the spotlight or your attention away from them?
Have you encountered someone in your life who plays the victim, the martyr (narcissistic), cries huge crocodile tears, is very melodramatic, or threatens to hurt you or themselves if you don’t do whatever they need you to do for them? It is scary and guilt- or shame-inducing. It is control and manipulation, too. In other words, this is emotional abuse and it very often can turn into verbal or physical abuse as well. The more the person needs for you to do their bidding and the more you decide to choose your own happiness, beliefs, or opinions over theirs, the worse off you will be. There seems to be no limit to how this type of abuser can twist the truth, turn the knife in your back, pull your strings, and force you to make them feel good no matter the personal cost to your happiness or health—mental, physical, and emotional.
Once they have hooked you in by playing on your guilt and shame or your desire to be happy on your own terms and they have made you feel sorry for them, their hardships in life, their past “abusive” partners and told you that you are the only one who really “gets” them, loves them, you are their savior and their “life” or some other nonsense, you are theirs. Your empathy has been used against you and I am sorry for this. Until I healed this within myself, I had been there MANY times myself, so I am not judging you. However, once they have you feeling sorry for them, they can then begin taking over your life, cloning you as their “Mini Me,” and dominating your every waking moment. You become isolated from friends and family and you very often will lose important people from your life simply because your abuser needs you to focus solely (and soul-ly) on them. They are energy vampires and succubi (female) or incubi (male) who seduce you and suck your life force from you because they believe that they have no self-love and no higher source or soul energy from which to draw on for their own worthiness and self-esteem and need to take from your supply of goodness in order to feel alive and okay. Their abandonment wound is so large that they have nothing to lose, so they will create a sacrificial lamb in you. At some point, you may decide it’s best not to make waves or there will be detrimental consequences for you, so you simply go along to get along.
As they take over your life more and more, you will find that you have no room to think your own thoughts, have your own space, have friends, or do your own hobbies or interests because this person needs to be the main focus in the relationship. You are simply a satellite orbiting around them as the central sun. In fact, it might even become a headache to hang out with friends because your abuser gets so upset every time you spend any time away from them. So, you just give up having friends all together in order to avoid a fight. You are losing yourself completely. You need friends and other people in order to know who you are and to have other outlets for fun and sharing as well as for developing interests and passions away from your partner. Having friends and other interests can add to the relationship, not take away from it. In a healthy relationship, the more you you are, the more it adds to the relationship and helps it flourish. In an unhealthy relationship with an abuser, however, this threatens the abuser and leads to thoughts that you might abandon them for your friends or hobbies or find another partner and leave them. So, they create obstacles and inner conflict within you and in the relationship in order to keep you trapped in their lair and under their thumb.
Later in this article, I will help you recognize that this does not have to be your life sentence. Sometimes we just get taken in by very unhealthy, toxic, abusive people who need help. When people are severely abandoned, neglected, or abused as children, it very often changes their brains for good. It can cause brain damage. There can be many emotional, psychological, biological, and relational aftereffects that result and create permanent issues or illnesses in a person who was severely traumatized as a child. While you might love and feel sad and sorry for your abusive partner, the truth is that they might need more help than your empathy and compassion. If they do not get the help they truly need because they think you and others are the problem and they can’t see how they behave in inappropriate ways, they can end up abusing you, projecting their issues onto you, and blaming you for what they are thinking about themselves or doing outright to you. Remember that they have a lot of shame as a result of how they were traumatized as children. Like many other things in life, shame does not just go away because you are an adult. It takes deep self-awareness and work to heal it. You being in this kind of relationship is definitely not your fault, nor is their behavior toward you your fault, but sometimes we think that it is our fault and that we have to do better in order to make them happy and find peace. You “doing better” by them will never fill in that huge hole they feel within. Only they can get that kind of professional help and do their inner work to heal it. The fact is that you are a good person, which is why you felt sorry for them to begin with. This is a good thing. Boundaries and detachment from taking on others’ problems is part of the recovery process that helps you move past this kind of relationship for good.
The Consequences of Choosing Yourself Over Your Narcissistic Martyr
The narcissistic martyr is someone who uses manipulation, guilt, and shame to control you. He or she will cry the biggest crocodile tears about how if you leave them or don’t do x, y, or z they will self-harm or harm you. They may protest about how they have done “so much” for you and “This is the thanks I get?!?!” They will tell your family, friends, and business acquaintances how horrible, abusive, and bad you really are behind closed doors. In other words, they will lie to people about you and project their guilt and shame onto you. They will attract “flying monkeys” (people who will believe the abuser’s lies and stand behind them). People outside of the home do not actually know how the abuser acts behind closed doors. The abuser is usually very attractive, charming, and intelligent and can easily sway people to believe in their innocence and goodness. Narcissists are, by nature and definition, pathological liars who feel no fear or remorse about lying about anything and everything if it advances their position and helps them keep what they deem necessary in order to be in control. They often lie about the smallest things that they would not even have to lie about. This is because they are simply lying all the time about everything. They fully believe in their lies too. This is how they control you. It’s confusing to your normal, healthy, loving mind because you would never even think to lie about most things and especially not things that no one would even care about. The confusion is where you get trapped. Once they have gaslighted and confused your brain, it can be very hard to know which end is up and “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” in each conversation. This creates a lot of stress and drama in your life. You want peace. You want happiness. So, in order to avoid drama going forward, you just walk on eggshells and do your level best not to incite your abuser into getting upset about anything at all. This becomes second nature to you or maybe it already was if you had a mother who taught you how to defer to and subjugate yourself to others in this way.
If you have been groomed from a young age to feel sorry for this kind of abuser, the ability to play on your guilt strings is very easy for them to do. You are walking around with an energetic sign that indicates that you are used to being sacrificed in this way. This is not to victim shame you. This is how grooming and generational trauma is carried down the line. Consciously, no, you know that you deserve to be treated well, but subconsciously and on an emotional (energetic) level, your energy is saying something else. Everyone feels energy whether you realize it or not. So, the narcissistic martyr can target a person who sends out this signal that they will do the abuser’s bidding at the expense of their own happiness. The obvious consequence of all of this is that you lose your entire self, your self-esteem, your confidence, and your health on many levels. The confusion alone is crazy-making and makes you doubt yourself and your ability to discern who to trust or how to trust yourself. These are very real and very significant consequences.
The Upside of Having These Kinds Of Relationships
Can there really be an upside to having this kind of relationship? Yes! This is because once or twice that you have one, you learn a huge and valuable lesson about the price you pay for losing yourself, your self-esteem, and your self-love. You eventually feel compelled to change your life so that you never fall prey to this kind of predator again. This is where someone like me comes in. I can coach you and help the parts of you that feel compelled to be with and stay stuck in abusive patterning like this. Once we get to the root cause and get you unglued from what keeps you feeling loyal to abusive people, you can be set free and moving along a better path in your life. Life is too short to be controlled by those who are in deep pain. I do have a lot of compassion for them, of course, but it is on all of us individually to get the help we need in order to be happy and not take out our past pain on innocent victims. Eventually, with healing and help, you might just realize that you were never that ugly duckling to begin with. You were really a beautiful swan all along.
