Systemic teachings through a mythic lens
Every human being is born between two great rivers: the river of the mother, and the river of the father.
When these rivers run clear, we inherit the strength to flow forward into life. When they are obstructed by absence, trauma, violence, silence we inherit the weight of their stones.
The mother wound shows up as difficulty receiving, belonging, and trusting the flow of life. The father wound emerges as struggle with direction, authority, and stepping fully into the world.
Systemically, these are not “personal failings.” They are interruptions in the great order of love patterns carried across generations.
The Systemic Lens
In systemic therapy, we see that the child never stops reaching. She reaches for the mother, for the father, for love itself. Even if they are absent or unavailable, the child will continue to call to them. And this calling shapes us.
The mother wound can leave us with a hunger for nurture that no lover, no food, no practice can fully satisfy. We may struggle to rest, to trust, to feel safe in our own skin. It often shows itself in our capacity to receive to take in nourishment, support, tenderness without feeling guilty or unworthy.
The father wound often carries itself in how we step into the world. Authority feels unsafe, or we resist structure, or we collapse when faced with challenge. Sometimes we overcompensate trying to prove ourselves, to take up space aggressively because we never felt the quiet strength of father behind us.
In the field of systemic work, we learn that these wounds are rarely “ours alone.” They belong to the system. We see daughters carrying their mother’s loneliness, sons carrying their father’s unfulfilled dreams, generations repeating the same silence because no one before had permission to break it.
What We Witness in the Work
At Phoenix Healing, again and again we see how ceremonies open the door to these rivers. A participant may come seeking clarity for their future, and the medicine brings them to the grief of the mother they could not reach. Another may arrive searching for purpose, and the medicine lays bare the absence of the father who was too wounded to guide them.
The work teaches us this truth: the flow of life comes through the parents. Not around them, not in spite of them, but through them. No matter how absent, broken, or difficult they were, they remain the channel through which life itself reached us.
When we resist them, we resist life. When we bow to them, even in their imperfection, something in us softens. Something begins to move again.
This bow is not approval of their failings. It is recognition of the greater truth: without them, there would be no me.
The Descent
Myth tells us that the hero or heroine always descends before rising. To face the mother and father wound is to descend into the ancestral waters. To feel what was denied. To grieve the touch that never came, the words never spoken, the strength never offered.
It is not an intellectual act. It is a bodily one. Tears, tremors, silence, rage. The system speaks through the body, and healing requires us to let it move through us.
When we do, the rivers begin to flow again. Not perfectly, not without memory, but with enough strength that life can move through us.
A Living Truth
Healing the mother and father wounds is not about rewriting the past. It is about restoring our place in the great order of love. It is about standing at the river’s edge and saying: the flow ends here, and begins again with me.
From here, we can receive the world with open hands. From here, we can step into it with grounded feet. From here, we can give to our children or to the next generation what was withheld from us.
The wounds of the mother and father are not the end of the story. They are the beginning of our initiation.
Personal Reflection
When I look into my own rivers, I see where the waters slowed. I feel the places where I carried what was not mine to carry.
There is grief here, yes, but there is also love. Love for the mother who could only give what she had. Love for the father who was shaped by forces I will never fully understand.
And when I bow to them not as perfect parents, but as the ones through whom life came I feel something greater rise behind me. A current that does not end. A strength that was never lost.
It is from this place that I step forward. Not carrying their stones, but carrying the flow.
