In Beyoncé’s album Lemonade, she alludes to her mother being cheated on by her father as a “curse” that was passed down to her relationship with Jay Z.

The “curse” that she is referring could also be called the mother wound. The mother wound is the reason daughters repeat the relationship patterns of their mother.

Some people think the mother wound has to do with something our mother did to us, and that can be a part of it, but the deeper part is how we energetically merge with our mother.

We spend nine months in our mother’s womb, and then as energetically open children, we are immersed within the energetic field of our mother.

We are so deeply connected to her as children, that we don’t know where she ends and we begin.

Unless we had uber-conscious and aware mothers, her energetic field was most likely heavy with wounding, which means we merged with our mother’s wounding.

As we grew older, most of us were never given knowledge or tools to separate our energetic body from hers, so we continued to stay merged with her into adulthood. Because of that unconscious merge, we’ve created issues and situations in our lives that resemble our mother’s issues and life situations. One example of that is—like with Beyoncé—we often attract men that resemble our father.

In my private practice as a women’s sexuality coach, one of the first things I do with clients is take an inventory to see how many of their sex and relationship issues resemble their mothers. Inevitably, the similarities are many.

This is good news!

What this means is that many of your sex and relationships issues are not essentially yours. This is why people can be in therapy for years, and never resolve certain issues, because the issues are not essentially theirs—they are a merge with mother.

So, the work becomes about separating from the mother wound, instead of resolving issues.

One of the quickest ways to begin separating from mother, is to simply recognize the merge. The merge happened unconsciously, so bringing awareness and consciousness to the merge can begin the process of separation.

Even declaring to yourself once a day: “I am not my mother,” can start to create a powerful separation from the merge.

I’ve found the personal work I’ve done with separating from my own mother merge, and doing mother merge work with my clients, to be profound.

Together we can heal this aspect of our lives, or in Beyoncé’s words, end the curse.

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Author: Sarah Kennedy

Image: Jon Phillips/Flickr 

Editors: Caitlin Oriel; Yoli Ramazzina