When Home Hurts: Moshitadi Lehlomela on Healing Maternal Trauma

A baby’s initial understanding of safety is in their mother’s womb and her warm, loving hands. But when that sanctuary is abusive and chaotic, the effects can be dire for the child all the way into adulthood. As a toddler, bestselling author Moshitadi Lehlomela sucked her thumb thin and dry as a self-soothing mechanism in response to her mother’s hostile energy.

“Her body, my home, was in distress. My first taste of toxicity,” she writes in her latest book,Healing the Mother Wound. Growing up, Lehlomela didn’t understand why her mother’s behaviour was erratic and unkind.

“On some days she would rage at even the smallest mistakes and inconveniences, physically and verbally abusing us,” she writes. The mother wound, often called “mommy issues”, is a psychological trauma resulting from maternal neglect, abuse, abandonment or emotional unavailability. Drawing from her work as a mother wound recovery coach, Lehlomela offers a compassionate approach to the often-unspoken topic in many families.

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In her first book,Girl Who Survived Her Mother, Lehlomela writes from a survivor’s perspective. In the much-anticipated follow-up, she offers a transformative guide to healing one of the most complex forms of trauma — one caused by harmful mothering. The book is based on her online course, “The Self-Mothering Care Practice”, grounded in the idea of reparenting one’s unresolved mother wound. Divided into five parts and structured around bite-sized but profound chapters, the book explores definitions of the mother wound, reparenting the inner child, grieving and learning to thrive.

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