Understanding the Male Desire for the Maternal

Christina's Wisdom

In the article “Mother-Hungry Men versus The Night-Born Path”, we talked about the longing for the primordial mother that quite some men unconsciously feel. How many men, me included in the past, search unconsciously in women, the mother figure they never had. This is both an unconscious compensation for unmet childhood needs, and the connected trauma, to things like emotional neglect. However to expect someone else to fulfil this role is not realistic. Not that someone can’t be emotionally present when one cries, or feels bad. It is more that they are not there to fix it, or to act like a mother that goes, it will be all okay my little baby.

The Projection of Needs onto Women

It is the outward projecting onto women that keeps one from confronting the real pain and the tied unmet needs and their connected trauma from childhood. Trying to fulfil them through external validation, which can’t sustain it long term. As only by feeling through the repressed pain, can one process it and truly start to heal. This is a process that one has to do internally. Which requires a slow weaning off, from the projection and idealisation onto women. It means for a man to not emotionally lean onto women, as an emotional dispenser of care, and to face existence. To learn to care for oneself, to be compassionate to oneself and love oneself. To thus be the parent one never had, for ones inner child.

The Journey to Self-Sufficiency and Healing

Now one might be, that is so sad. Why would you have to do this alone. Well. One can always talk to friends, cry, and spend time with people that care about you. But it is in the end about realising that they are not there to be your mom. They are humans, and have their own struggles to carry too. Not that they can’t be there for one, or that one can’t lean on someone at times. It is to understand that we can only nurture our inner wounds by being there for ourselves and our inner child. We are both the wounded child and the redeemer of our own hurt. No one can save you from your emotions, they can only hold space with you. Yet you are the one who has to feel them, and learn to hold space for it. To hold yourself through the pain of it all.

This itself is indeed not fair. Every child deserved to have been loved. To be truly seen for who they are. Yet we sadly live in a world of masks, repression posing as empathy and goodness, next to worth being tied to external markers. Trying to fill a hole, that can never be filled, only felt through, till your tears fill it with grief and love. Only then can one reconnect back to the mother within, with the unconscious, and the authentic self, that one was cut of from due to trauma. That is all one really unconsciously longs for, which is to reunite consciousness, with the unconscious. Which is coded in our civilizational language as masculine and feminine. To heal our wounded inner child, the merger of both into one. Which would heal the civilizational and familial trauma.

Yet we seek it outside of ourselves in others. As if this could unite our inner divide, between our consciousness and the deeper parts we had to bury to stay alive. Yet the bridge to this is not thinking, or analysis. It is love, rage, grief, tender care to oneself and others you care about. It is to love yourself into wholeness again. Not by moving away from our emotions, but to honour them. To honour the feminine, unconscious, and the hurt child within. To grief with the Anima, the inner feminine embodiment of the unconscious. To hold each other in the mind, and let the tears of grief fall, and become grief-soaked love for the child that never could be.

Christina’s Wisdom: The True Nature of Love and Care

Last year, Christina, told me something. Wisdom that I will carry with me. That what women seek is not a boy in a man’s body. That the ick they feel from men is not about being too soft, or not bad boy enough, or aggressive dominating enough. It is when they turn a woman into a ghost mommy for their own wounded inner child. Whilst they pose like they are strong, and above women. Making women into endless givers of love and emotional care, without ever seeing them for their true human selves. That women too long for that same love and care. To be held in their grief, seen in their rage, witnessed in both their strength and vulnerability. In their humanness. For their soul to be seen, cherished and loved as something sacred.

For Christina
Christina, too, knew the cost of giving,
The silence, the solitude,
Not unloved, but unseen.
A quiet light, flickering in the dark,
A warmth given not because it was easy,
But because she understood,
What it was to go without.

And when I met her,
Her soul alight in the flicker of flame,
We saw each other, truly saw.
In a way that few had.
She reached out,
And in her touch, I found the softness
I had longed for,
A moment where I didn’t have to be strong,
Where we could both just be.

But now she rests,
Her warmth now a whisper in the wind,
A light that lingers,
Guiding me in the places,
Where her presence once was.

This is for Christina.
For the love she gave,
The love she was,
And for the light she still is,
Even as she fades beyond the veil.
Let this, above all, endure:
I carry the love she awakened in me,
And it lives on,
Even when she no longer can.