Cradle for an adult: how to make up for the lack of motherly love

Love is a huge force. And motherly love is also necessary. If it was not enough in childhood, we grow up with an unsatisfied need for maternal care and tenderness and continue to look for it in others: a partner, friends and acquaintances. We risk being on the lookout forever, because no one can love as strongly and unconditionally as a mother. How to fill this deficit?

Home

The psychotherapeutic group practice “Snubbing”, developed by clinical psychologist Victoria Averkieva, helps to experience an experience that is as close as possible to the “mother-child” relationship. Each participant receives one of two roles by lot.

“I trust the information field of the group: whoever pulled out which role will be in it on the first day, and the next on the other,” says the master of lulling, body-oriented psychologist and systemic family therapist Tatyana Timchenko.

“Men also come into practice, but only in the role of a child, because the maternal role requires female energy, which cannot be replaced. And the next day, when the “boy’s mom” becomes a “baby”, she is lulled by a space doula, or, as she is also called, a mother’s nanny.

Before the practice, the “moms” go to another room, and the host tells them how to intuitively choose “their baby”, and the “children” in the hall sit in hammocks and put on blindfolds that will be removed only at the end of the practice.

“The training lasts two days for six hours, so that we have enough time to slowly get involved in the process, to live it and get out of it in an environmentally friendly way,” continues Tatyana Timchenko. Each participant lives through three periods of a child’s development:

1) внутриутробный;

2) birth;

3) age up to one year.

Return to the womb

The recording is turned on, reproducing the sounds that the baby hears while in the mother’s stomach: the sound of blood, the beating of the heart and the sound of breathing. At this moment, clients in the role of children live the perinatal (prenatal) period. “In my practice there was a 62-year-old woman for whom I was in the role of a “mother,” recalls Tatyana Timchenko. “She didn’t want to be born, she felt good in her tummy, and she was sure that after the birth, her mother would not love her.”

The feelings and experiences that we received in childhood live with us all our lives, they are sewn into us. But we come into practice as adults and can rewrite new experiences. “Mom” is like a key that opens the children’s space, its contents appear, rise.

“These are unshed tears and unspoken words. “Mom” accompanies the “child” in his process, containing children’s feelings, withstanding his tension, the psychologist emphasizes. “I make sure that the woman in the role of “mother” does not begin to consider herself the cause of what happens to the “child” in the hammock. They have a common field, there will definitely be some intersections, but each has its own processes.”

New birth

An hour after the start of “Snubbing” the background sounds change, and, as in real childbirth, the “baby” decides when to be born. If he already feels an impulse and desire, then he begins to “be born” – to leave the hammock. Thus he decides to live at the level of the body: it is filled with vital energy.

If a baby is born by caesarean section or is pulled out with forceps, he does not go through the important stage of “collecting the body.” And in “Snubbing” he can say to himself: “I am born of my own free will”, thus gaining the experience that he lacked. “This is the moment when we take the control panel into our own hands,” the psychologist notes.

45-year-old Nadezhda came to “Snubbing” with the goal of being born naturally: “My mother had a caesarean section. I was interested in psychology and realized that it affected my life: as if I didn’t quite deserve to be born. But this time I went my way into the world anew and received from “mother” not only care and warmth, but also permission to be myself, listen to myself, have my own opinion and defend it.

Nadezhda still works at the same place, lives in the same house. But her sense of self has changed: she feels the support within herself.

Thanks

In the third part of the practice, lullabies are heard. Mothers carry out their “newborns”, feed them. For children, this has a symbolic meaning: “I accept the gifts of this world.”

Then the “mother” swaddles the child, saying blessings, the “child” feels his body and its boundaries more densely, and the inner tension with which he lives finds a way out. Processes that need to be completed are being completed, and space is being made for the new in life. After swaddling, the “baby” removes the blindfold, meets with the “mother”, they hug, discuss their impressions, thank each other. The “child” gives the “mother” a small gift – recognition of her work.

A child in the pre-verbal period does not have a verbal memory, so the possibilities of talking therapy in healing childhood traumas are limited, says Tatiana Timchenko: “If a client notices that his head is empty, it means that there is no access through words to the depth where his vulnerable part is located. But there is through the body, which remembers everything. The practice heals wordless traumas and provides a new positive experience that imprints the memory of the body.

Love

“My parents died early, I didn’t go to school yet and felt hurt, as if my mother had abandoned me,” recalls 37-year-old Valery. – And even when I realized that this was a childish perception, I could not get rid of bitterness. And he could not give full love to his son. And in practice, I felt with my whole body that my mother loves me even now, when she is gone.

As children, our parents were gods to us and provided for our needs. If the mother in the perception of the child is caring and supportive, then the child receives the message: “God is on my side. The world cares. The world is for me.” The task that lies at the heart of “Snubbing” is to find a loving “mother” inside of me, to get a great Power that is definitely on my side.

And if we have children, pass on to them our new experience of love. “I have three daughters, it’s hard to let them go, so I criticize them, teach them,” said 42-year-old Elena. In “Snubbing” she lived her pain and realized that you can both love and allow yourself to let the child go into adulthood.