The Mother Void; How it physically feels.

As discussed in Can'tExplains post named " a mother shaped hole" we were discussing what that void physically feels like to each person and got some great descriptions, so i thought i'd start a new post that people could add to because up until recently i never realised other people had felt this thing i've had since i was really little. I think it's a failure to attach securely to your mother as a child that causes it and is hugely damaging.

The descriptions so far have been great.

"For me it usually hits me kind of in my solar plexus and radiates up into my heart, it feels like a dull all encompassing aching pain that literally takes my breath away for a few seconds." By me

"I also feel it in my chest area. Sometimes it feeling crushing and not really a void like thing at all. I do feel suffocated at times when it happens. Mostly though what I feel is like I am falling into the void, just dropping without any safety net. It is vertiginous." By Archipelago

"This "feeling" overcomes me most when there is something or someone that I feel fills in the void (I guess). When whoever that is or whatever that is, is out of reach (almost always)....well, it's a devastating hit for me. I have to agree with everyone. For me it's like every frightening feeling hits all at once. I feel every scary sensation at the same time, starting right in the center of my chest and radiating out to my heart. It's like an explosion at the same time you feel crushed and smothered. It's like feeling your heart skip a beat and then race. I'm numb and oversensitive. I feel like I'll never be happy again but I can remember what it tastes like and every thought or memory is an "arrow to the heart" kind of sensation and everything starts over, AGAIN." By Shrinkpatient

"Physically it is like a churning pit in my stomach. Not pain necessarily but more of that dullness that you describe. It radiates from my stomach into my chest. I was so used to it at one point that I thought that was the only way there was to feel." By Amee200

Anyone want to add how it feels to them?

I feel this whenever I want my T to be something she's not. It starts with a faint sense of disappointment, then my stomach feels funny, not exactly hurting, but aching. Then it goes to my heart, and I feel like there are 1000 arrows piercing it. If I'm alone, I start to cry, but if I'm in my session, I sit there and tell her I'm feeling that "quicksand" feeling. I feel like I'm sinking and part of me just wants to die. It's a horrible feeling. Sometimes my face gets flushed and I feel like I'm burning up because the shame of wanting my T to be "that person" for me. I feel a sense of wanting something so badly that I can't live without it.

Strangely, i get it when i'm around a lot of people. It's like the loneliest feeling in the world, like i can't cope being around people, like i have no reserves. I feel homesick even when i'm amongst friends and family. Totally weird.

It's a always hungry gaping hole in the middle of my heart, the blood pooling there creating this drowning and suffocating feeling all at once, the dull pain sending throbs throughout my body. It will never end.

I think it can end eventually, with a lot of hard work.

I feel it right in the center of my being, as though it's entering my body through my belly button and burrowing down into the deepest parts of my body and then radiating outwards. It's the sharpest, most intense pain you can feel, and it stops me dead in my tracks.

I feel it most when I'm reminded of what I don't have, have never had, and never will have. I feel it when I see a mother with her daughter at the mall, when I see a mother hug her daughter on TV, when I hear a friend of mine talk about her mother, or when I hear my T talk about her daughters. It makes me stop really hearing what is being said and sends me into my head. It's as though I'm frozen, but I can feel the world moving on around me. It makes me feel so profoundly alone-- especially when I'm with other people. It makes me feel so unloved and devalued.

The rest of the time, the void feels like a dull ache; a pain just below the surface that never goes away. When I'm with other people and we're laughing and having fun, that pain is still there, even though it's mild, just to make sure I never forget what they have and I don't.

It hurts especially bad when people discuss the minor shortcomings of their moms or how they have a mix of good memories and bad memories, or when people discuss the death of mothers they loved. That pain feels the most intense because it reminds me that I will never have one good memory, one good moment, or one brief instance of feeling what maternal love might feel like. That's just something I'll never know, and each time I re-remember that I can't help but feel that deep ache in the deepest part of my body, and shed tears for the one thing I want most in the world but know I'll never have.

I feel it in my sternum. Sometimes it feels a bit like fear. Sometimes it feels more like sadness, and when it's sadness I feel a bit nauseous on top of the fear/panic feeling.

I have this. Let me try to describe....it's always in my chest where I feel it most. It's crushing and is kinda that feeling you get when you can't cry but really need to....or when you can't breathe. If it gets really bad, it feels like I'm bursting into I don't know what....like glass shards are piercing my heart.

I sometimes feel like I'm emotionally beyond repair and visualize my internal world as bleeding to the point where it's life-threatening...maybe I'm long gone beyond that now, idk. It just feels like if someone could see me in the emotional sense, they would rush me to the hospital. But they can't.

It makes me feel empty.

When it's really intense, it feels as though my world is crumbing down around me an there's nothing I can do to stop it.

Like someone has reached inside my chest, pulled out my heart, and stomped all over it.

Empty.

I've never really stopped to think about where in my body I feel it. I think it has always felt like it sits in the centre of me. It's such a part of my identity and it feels like that's all that I am, right at my very core. I read your question earlier this evening and since then I've noticed that it often hits me in sudden unexpected waves, even when I'm otherwise okay. I feel it in my chest, sometimes just on the left side, and also in my head. It felts like a relentless pressure. It's like one great big bundle of loneliness and so much sadness.

There was something on TV earlier this evening which showed a child who is very good at something my therapist is good at, and it hit me then. It doesn't really have words that go with it at the time, it's just a feeling. If I had to put it into words, it's the if I was good enough maybe she would love me feeling. It also hits me when I think about Christmas and the way that I can't reach out to this one important person at a time when people tend to be surrounded by those they love. It’s so impossibly hard to know that I just don’t get that person, there isn’t anyone for me.

It's funny, I don't think I feel it I'm my body necessarily (but I have a tough time connecting to my body much of the time). It feels like I'm a tiny speck in the middle of space and falking back to the ground hard, all while contained in my body. My head feels a million miles away from my body and I'm totally some in a vacuum. It's a longing to have support from someone when I feel very small. It's an emptiness. And its terribly "alone". It's wanting a hug or someone to hold my hand, but being terrified of it at the same time...

This thread is so sad

I don't have a full-on mother void. I had two mothers, and fortunately for me one was fantastic. She's now dead and my heart is shredded.

The other is the one who gives me my own experience of that mother void. I love her so I feel incredibly guilty even typing these words. But there the void is, and there's no getting away from it. I get it worst after a disconnected conversation with her (usually on the phone, as we live in different countries now). I'll start to not feel quite real. The edges between me as an individual and the world blur and I feel like an abstracted piece of matter floating around in the world, who by an unfortunate stroke of luck, has become conscious. I disconnect a bit from my own physical self. I absolutely cannot identify with other people in that zone - people who exist as defined selves, with real relationships with others, valid human beings. I 'see' my mother and her husband and my brother is their family unit, and wish I just never existed. I never lived with them, so I was always separate, and these years flash through my head like a taunt. As if I was so stupid to not feel that pain then. I suppose maybe I did, but dissociated from it as a kid.

It is effing horrendous when it happens. It trips my switch for thinking about suicide (I have made a promise to myself I will never do it, but I wish I could stop focusing on it as the best option, in those moments) because there is no solid course of action to take that will guarantee a relief from it.

It amazing how similar and different each of us are. Things recur like it being in the chest, suffocating, and also falling. We should write an article together about this experiential way of locating this emotional experience in our bodies. It reminds me of reading about near death experiences and how similar yet different they are; it gave proof that something does indeed happen that is a human reaction despite the differences. But to have a similar thing happen with a "mother void" is really remarkable. I wish that therapists could know how this thread has turned up evidence for how it feels to have such a thing and how it affects us.

Saw this on Post Secret this morning ...

While it is true that at times I have hated my mother, really what I feel more often is a blankness, just a void. It isn't even necessarily painful except that it is frozen. I tend to suspect that underneath, and this is true for anger as well, there is a lot of hurt and sadness that I can't let myself go enough to feel. The sadness would lead to a healthy mourning of my loss so at some point I should be prepared to let it happen. But since a lot of these feelings have not been all that insistent in recent years, perhaps there is a healing taking place that doesn't mean I have to directly confront it.

I love her very much, yet I feel anger hurt shame, I feel like im walking around with half a heart, the other half of the heart was torn away in my childhood, I feel like I am walking around with only one leg and one arm like Im missing lots of parts and body organs.

I was just thinking the same about how amazed i am at how similar our experiences are, like we feel it in the same parts of the body, isn't that strange? This thread is very sad but also very unifying and exciting for me because i know now i'm not alone in these feelings, that it is a "thing". I feel like i'm saying hello to some soul mates that i haven't seen for a long time or something.