Aug 12, 2026 · 35 min · 9 segments
Every person carries a longing for real connection, yet the moment true intimacy arrives, an old instinct can trigger the urge to retreat. In this episode, Lorin unpacks Carl Jung's concept of the…
Lorin KrennHost
Carl Jung considered the mother complex one of the most common and challenging complexes to work with because it runs so deep and it formed so early.
The positive mother complex is when a mother's love was possessive, controlling, overwhelming, overbearing.
And then he talks about the negative mother complex, where a mother was emotionally absent.
You feel overshadowed, and you feel guilty when you try to break free from that and you sense something is wrong.
Now, the negative mother complex is when you've never received true love in a consistent way.
It shows up in our life as well, but it shows up in no place more clearly than in our relationships.
So I'm gonna go into these five steps, and keep listening all the way to the end, because even if the first few might not resonate, eventually we'll get to the one that you can pinpoint in your relationship life.
Most mothers are giving their best, but everyone loves at their own level of consciousness and their own level of maturity, which allows them to express love perhaps in a very limited way.
Instead, it's about understanding what pain might have been caused for you growing up and how this now shows up in your relationship life, and how you can shift it.
The idea is never to just put blame, but to look at the pattern and shift it inside you.
This is when you felt responsible as a child for your mother's emotional challenges and emotional moods.
Perhaps this is something she unconsciously projected onto you, or it simply was too much for her.
Carl Jung considered the mother complex one of the most common and challenging complexes to work with because it runs so deep and it formed so early.
The positive mother complex is when a mother's love was possessive, controlling, overwhelming, overbearing.
And then he talks about the negative mother complex, where a mother was emotionally absent.
You feel overshadowed, and you feel guilty when you try to break free from that and you sense something is wrong.
Now, the negative mother complex is when you've never received true love in a consistent way.
It shows up in our life as well, but it shows up in no place more clearly than in our relationships.
So I'm gonna go into these five steps, and keep listening all the way to the end, because even if the first few might not resonate, eventually we'll get to the one that you can pinpoint in your relationship life.
Most mothers are giving their best, but everyone loves at their own level of consciousness and their own level of maturity, which allows them to express love perhaps in a very limited way.
Instead, it's about understanding what pain might have been caused for you growing up and how this now shows up in your relationship life, and how you can shift it.
The idea is never to just put blame, but to look at the pattern and shift it inside you.
This is when you felt responsible as a child for your mother's emotional challenges and emotional moods.
Perhaps this is something she unconsciously projected onto you, or it simply was too much for her.
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