over the years i've had so many men say some version of i'm just not good at relationships i just can't seem to make them work or i'm in a marriage i'm in a relationship we've been together for a long time but the same shit seems to be happening over and over again the same conflict i can't seem to get my needs met it's hard for me to feel happy in the dynamic and the truth is that not bad at relationships the truth is that you've been wired in a way to deploy dysfunctional behaviors and expectations and this is what's called the mother wound the truth is that at the very core of your intimate relationships the very foundation of it was the first relationship you ever had with a woman which is the relationship to your mom so today i'm gonna be breaking down what the mother wound is how it forms the different types i'm gonna give you specific actions that you can take to end this battle because you're not dysfunctional you're not bad relationships you're not terrible at these things you have just been wired and conditioned to deploy certain behaviors and have certain beliefs and expectations about women and your relationship to them so before we dive in don't forget to hit the subscribe button the like button and the bell notification so you can get notified when i drop more videos i almost hate to ask but the truth is in the age of ai slop and garbage i hope that you are somebody that would rather watch content intentionally content that you want versus more mindless garbage so let's dive into it um a lot of guys will say you know i don't think my relationship with my mom is that bad but here's the truth and here's the thing that i want you to know you didn't really learn the foundation of how you're going to do relationships or what you're going to expect from women from your first girlfriend or even from the you know women that you hang out with at work you learn them from your mother and the research is pretty clear on this the neuroscience is very clear on it the first three years of your life will have created the neurological and nervous system imprint on how you are going to show up in relationships what you learn to expect from them and this can be a hard thing for a lot of guys to come in contact with you know they hear that and they think well then what the hell am i supposed to do about it like if if my blueprint and foundation for how i relate to women was formed before i had language and before i have any memory of it what am i supposed to do with that well the truth is that these are just behavioral patterns that you can shift that you can change and what we can see is the way that your mom interacted with you held you took care of you prioritized your needs tended to you when you're upset that is going to deeply imprint itself onto you and affect you because the truth is that there's a kind of invisible umbilical cord that exists between you and your mother for the first three years of your life and what neuroscience has shown is that this is one of the most formative if not the single most formative times uh neurologically in your brain where your brain is wiring a tremendous amount specifically around relationships am i safe in relationship do my needs matter can i trust relationship is the world safe and okay and a lot of that is happening specifically with your mother and your primary caretaker so her imprint on you is massive if she's chronically anxious for the first couple years of your life that will have affected you if she was kind of avoidant and disconnected and not really present to your needs and what you wanted that will have affected you if she's somebody who was volatile and come all over the place and you didn't you know as a baby as an infant you didn't know if you're gonna get happy mom or yelling mom or you know leaving you alone by yourself mom that will have affected you and so the truth that i want you to understand is that you're not just dating that woman you're not just married to that woman you're dating your nervous system you're in relationship to how your nervous system responds to a woman and a lot of that is a very deep neurological and unconscious level another way of saying this and for some of you this might be a massive one and for others it's gonna be a little bit uh it's gonna be a little bit more like nuanced um your type is your trauma um so how you choose women yes is consciously every man has a framework of what they want from a woman uh you know you have some likes desires you want something that's kind and you want something that's nurturing you want something that's going to go on adventures with you and funny or whatever it is whatever your type is um but your type is also based off of your pain based off of your unmet needs and you might not have you know you might not be somebody that's like yeah i definitely have trauma because of my mom growing up you might hear that and think i'm always pretty great like you know my mom was was pretty solid and you know there wasn't anything major but the truth is that your type is your wound so if the word trauma doesn't relate to you that's totally fine but your type is your wound and so your wound your pain your insecurities your fears those things choose your partner too and they start to form and inform the type of women that you decide and what i have seen is that men that have a lot of repressed or hidden trauma men that have undealt with wounds specifically with women and more specifically with their mother those patterns are at the forefront of choosing the women that you are with and they are at the forefront of your behaviors and it's why it is so damn confusing all right guys really quick aside first off thank you so much for tuning in to the show and to the channel if you are wanting to go deeper if you're a man that's working on himself in some way shape or form you want to be more self-led you want to trust yourself more you want to have a deeper level of self-worth or maybe looking to improve your relationship then i encourage you to check out the man talks alliance you can go to man talks.com forward slash alliance we have over a thousand men in this incredible community from around the world men who are just like you working to better themselves to be a better husband a better father a better leader in your own life so check it out man talks.com forward slash alliance so i'm going to break down a couple different archetypes that will help you to understand the different types of mother wounds that are driving your life in your relationship so the first one is the guy who is obsessed with emotionally unavailable women you find yourself in these dynamics with women that are kind of aloof and shut down they pull away the closer you get the harder they become to sort of engage with and there's almost something intoxicating and addictive about trying to you know win with these women and what you learned growing up what this equates to is that you learned that love equals distance love equals distance so if you're a man that is just constantly pursuing these women or you're in a relationship and you've been in a relationship with a woman who just constantly feels emotionally unavailable she's not really open it's hard to get her to open up she pulls away frequently she uses space as a kind of protective strategy anytime conflict happens you learned early on that love equals distance and it's very likely that your mother was more distanced maybe she had a lot of the children to tend to maybe she had postpartum depression and she was shut down maybe she just didn't know how to care for your needs very early on in life and so what you learned in those formative years in those first three years is love equals distance and so that becomes a normal state in your nervous system and that you become attracted to the next one is the guy who shuts down when things get intimate when things get close when things get emotional so maybe you are the guy that's you know you're married you're dating a woman or you date a lot of women and as soon as they start to get emotional they start to bring up how they feel maybe they communicate their love for you maybe they start to communicate how happy they are in their relationship or they start to communicate disappointment something's wrong something's missing they're wanting more of something then you start to shut down and pull away what you will have learned early on the mother wound for you is that emotion equals danger emotions are dangerous and you're very likely the type of guy that also withholds your emotion you're not overly expressive you're not really communicative with her about what you're feeling emotionally because you learned early on in life emotions are dangerous so you very likely had a mother who was very volatile emotionally or she is what i call the smother mother her emotions controlled dominated took up a ton of space and you constantly felt like you were having to kind of you know push her away in some way maybe she was chronically um you know trying to to be overprotective of you and not that you really take risks because she was so afraid and so worried and so you will have learned that emotions equal danger and that's the mother wound the next one is the nice guy the nice guy who bends over backwards the nice guy who's constantly trying to people please and you are likely the guy that is very much trying to get everything right and never feeling like it's going well like nothing you ever do is good enough and what your system learned what your neurology and your nervous system learned was love equals performance i have to perform for love and that is the wound so these are the three primary wounds that i see happen over and over again love equals distance love equal emotions equal danger and love equals performance the last one is that love equals chaos love equals chaos so you might bounce and oscillate between all three of these you might find yourself being repulsed or afraid of a woman's emotions you might find yourself performing to try and get love and affection and you might find yourself constantly going after women that pull away a little bit and create distance or you're creating distance and or that you know you're needing to to really work for that love so you love mom you text mom and you know you do all the things and you can find yourself oscillating so you learn that love equals chaos and if that's the case then you had a mother that early on in life was wildly inconsistent wildly inconsistent she'd be loving and nurturing she'd be hostile she'd be disconnected and you just your system can never land your nervous system your neurology can never land in a safe place of here's what i expect because again when you're an infant when you're a baby your whole mind and body are wiring for relationship through the relationship with your mother and what they're trying to get is consistency they're trying to get predictability of here's what i can expect and the first three of these emotions equal danger love equals distance love equals performance those were the predictable environments that you were in and so your behaviors how you relate to women your choices your actions what you come to expect we're all predicated on that type of behavior going up now the last one is uh one more is that the guy who sabotages the good thing um i definitely was this guy this was my mother wound um you get yourself into a relationship you get yourself into a dynamic it's good but you find yourself just messing up constantly uh you pick fights you argue you pull away um you know you you do you make certain choices that you know are going to sabotage relationship whether it's you know texting some toxic ex or whatever it is and what you learned early on in life is that love is instability now here instability is different than chaos okay chaos is real disorganized attachment chaos is like you know everything is changing all the time you can never really get a grasp on what's going on and that chaos is sometimes often connected with some type of trauma some type of trauma happened in the household you know whether it was extreme yelling physical violence etc but the instability is just there's inconsistency and you're not really too sure what's happening not really too sure what to expect so all of this isn't random right all of these wounds are created through conditioning and this is why attachment theory has been so prominent and so helpful because what we're really talking about is secure attachment is where we want to go but these mother wounds are different forms of insecure relating different forms of insecure attachment and this is why you continue to feel bad in relationships to feel like you're not good at relationships you keep losing good women or you keep pushing them away or you keep messing up the relationships that you have this happens because of one simple thing that is at the heart and soul of the mother wound regardless of which one you identify with and that is that your system has been calibrated for chaos inconsistency distance but it has been calibrated to look for the wrong thing okay your system your nervous system and your neurology have been calibrated to look for a relationship that's insecure and it's not because you're broken it's because peace and ease and security feels unfamiliar that's the really big part that i want you to hold on to okay you're not broken you're not bad relationships your nervous system and neurology were literally calibrated they were programmed right out the gates to seek insecurity versus security so every time you overreact every time you shut down every time you get anxious and you text bomb every time that you feel text bomb i think it's a text bomb text bomb i mean i guess maybe you could text bomb uh every time you feel like you're too much or you're not enough uh you're not responding to her in the right way what's happening is that you're responding to a memory you're responding to an imprint in your neurology and in your nervous system of a younger version who said this is what love feels like to me this is what love feels like to me and so your nervous system and your brain have been conditioned to get aroused to come online to think that love is that insecure state so another way of saying this is that the mother wound produces a faulty relational picking system all right so like your ability to identify a woman that you can have a stable peaceful intimate deep connected relationship with has been skewed and what you will be drawn to the fire the flame the light that the month inside of you is drawn to is a woman that's going to reproduce that insecure state all right so you're not bad at relationships your picker the the nervous system and the brain inside of you has said ah that's what feels familiar and here's the real thing you have two options you can repeat the pattern over and over and over again which is likely what you've done or you can begin to break it and i'm going to teach you how to do that specifically but what i want you to remember is that there's no shame in this we're not trying to blame mom we're not putting the fault on her the truth is that most of your moms your mom probably did a great job your mom probably did the best that she could you're probably sitting here listening to this and you're like i don't want to blame my mom and that's totally okay you don't have to blame her the truth is just that there was a pattern of behavior that created insecure attachment and your mom may have been great when you were seven and ten and fifteen but the first couple years of life for whatever reason something got missed and it created an insecure attachment style that caused your system to move towards women or engage with women in this way that is more insecure okay so what do we do number one get very honest about your pattern get honest about your pattern stop saying stuff like i attract crazy women or i can just never make it work with women or uh you know i'm not able to communicate what i want and need stop running the same script get very clear on your pattern what is the pattern and so go back into this video and identify if you haven't already done so already which pattern you really deploy is love equal performance are emotions dangerous which one did you identify with and then what behaviors coincide with that what do you do what do you say what do you expect because the truth is you need to be able to identify the type of women and the situations that your system is drawn to that's creating the dysfunction that's creating the unwanted behaviors and outcomes okay so get very clear on that pattern the second thing is and this is a little bit more challenging but it's absolutely possible you can do it quickly you have to learn to tolerate healthy love you have to learn to tolerate healthy love again the core mother wound is that it produces a nervous system and brain that wants women that create arousal based off of insecurity based off of there's something missing i have to perform there's dangerous emotions etc but the truth is that health healthy love is consistent it's stable it's calm it's available and it reinforces that your needs are important and for a lot of men this is going to feel uncomfortable this might feel very very uncomfortable for you to the point where you start to ask for your needs to be met and your partner starts to meet them, you're like, hey, I want you to give me more physical affection. I want you to touch me more, hug me more, kiss me more. I really want that. And she starts to do that.
It might be confronting for you and uncomfortable for you to receive. That is the work. The other thing about this that's really important in terms of tolerating healthy love is I want you to start to look in the different places. I want you to start to look in different places.
For most men that have insecure attachment, again, because your nervous system and your mind gets sort of, I'm using the term aroused, I mean activated. I don't actually mean sexually aroused. Because your mind and your nervous system have been conditioned to pursue relational dynamics and situations that are more insecure, that repeat that pattern of that mother wound, safe, secure, easy love feels foreign. It might even feel boring to you.
It might even feel like, how could that possibly be it? That seems like it's too easy. And I hear this from a lot of men of like, you know, it just felt too easy. You know, it was like, it felt safe.
Yes. So in order to choose a woman, you know, if you are single or in order to start to really build and foster a dynamic with the woman that you are already dating or married to, what you want to start to move towards is producing safety. Producing safety and having your needs met and creating connection. And that should really be the North Star.
How do you want to feel prioritized by the other person? How do you want to feel protected by the other person? How do you want to feel admired by the other person? But all of that should be in the context of safety.
Now, for a lot of you, you're going to think to yourself, well, safety doesn't really sound sexy. And that might be true. But for every single one of you, safety is going to be the battleground. It's going to be the place that feels really uncomfortable.
Can you feel safe and ask for your needs? Can you end the performance and feel safe? Can you be with her emotions and feel safe? Can you express your emotions and feel safe?
So safety becomes the foundation, which creates stability instead of that instability that you are constantly putting yourself in, that your brain and your nervous system has said, oh, this feels familiar. Again, your brain and your body are going to move you towards familiarity over the unfamiliar. So you have to start to do the work to move towards the unfamiliar, safe territory. Step number three, stop earning love.
You do not have to prove your worth. You do not have to perform to get love, to get your worth, to acknowledge, to get your needs met. And you don't have to become some guy that she will choose. You really have to focus in on becoming the man that you want to be for you.
Finding your own connection to this is who I want to be. These are the things that I like. These are the things I want to pursue. These are the things I want to do.
And as you develop a deeper quality of agency, that agency will create stability and draw in the woman that you are with. When you are trying to earn love or you don't trust love, what you are really communicating is, I need to control her or myself in order to get the outcome that I want. And when we are trying to earn love, we are performing and we never actually allow love to land. We never actually believe it.
We never actually trust it. So what we really need to do, the action that you need to take within this category is to start to really ask for the things that you need, want, and desire, start to embody those things and start to prioritize those things. And as you do that, the woman that you are with or that you are dating or you are attracting can actually land into it. And you'll be able to see that she can meet your needs versus let me try and earn this because you'll never trust anything that you can earn.
So in closing, what I really want you to take from this is at the core, the epicenter. And I will do a bigger video on the mother wound. I can do a deeper dive. But what I really want you to take from this is your nervous system and your brain have been conditioned to seek that insecure style and you do not have to continue to choose that.
Get aware of the pattern, start to prioritize safety and start to express your needs, wants, and desires in a very clear way. And as you do those three things, what will happen is that the relationship will move more and more towards a secure style of connection and you will feel no longer like I can't do relationships, I attract the wrong women. You will really start to understand, oh, it was just the blueprint that I was given. I don't have to operate like that anymore.
So don't forget to man it forward, share your comments below. What are you taking from this and what are you implementing today? Until next time, Conor Reed signing off.