Mother’s Influence

From the moment of your conception until about 18 months of age, you were like a sponge, absorbing all of your mother’s emotions, thoughts, and feelings—believing they were your own. This means that from the instant your life force entered this world, you have carried within you a belief about yourself, one that aligns with your mother’s emotional state at the time of your conception. Whether she was feeling joy, fear, or pain, her emotional state became part of your emotional makeup and belief system.

As your mother carried you through pregnancy, you felt her emotions and stored them in your body, creating an emotional framework. When you reached 18 months and began to experience your own emotions as an individual, you continued to store those emotions in the same framework. Over time, your emotions became tangled with your mother’s, and even today, the two remain inseparable.

If you’ve done inner child work or emotional clearing but find that certain emotions keep resurfacing, it’s possible you need to address emotions that aren’t truly yours—emotions “borrowed” from your mother. You can’t release emotions unless you fully own them. As we age, many of us find ourselves looking, acting, or even repeating the neuroses of our mothers despite our best efforts to take a different path. This often happens because we haven’t fully cleared those early, inherited emotions.

Beyond our mother’s influence, we were also affected by the environment around us—the womb experience, the birth process, and the people in our early lives. These pre-verbal experiences are key to the formation of who we are today. Until recently, it was believed that we didn’t think or feel until we could speak. Even today, many psychological therapies overlook this crucial period of our emotional development.