Reconnecting to the Feminine Principle

When your Own mothering was insufficient.

Workshop: March 8th, 2026 - 12:00pm PST - 2:00pm PST

What is impacted when early mothering is insufficient is not only the capacity for healthy attachment, but the very possibility for the individual to inhabit their emotions without experiencing them as threatening or alien.

Online Workshop

In clinical work with women, one difficulty has appeared repeatedly: the feeling of having to support oneself at all times, as though no internal instance were truly able to take over, contain, accompany, or carry one’s emotional experience.

This is not necessarily the result of overt trauma or a childhood marked by dramatic deprivation. More often, these women describe a mother who was outwardly present, yet psychically, emotionally unavailable, or unable to attune with sufficient regularity to the child’s internal states and its emotional world.

What was lacking was not love, but a quality of presence that allows certain fundamental psychic functions to take root.

Among these functions, what may be described as the Feminine principle occupies a central place. In this workshop, In this work, the feminine principle will be understood as a living psychological function, and not as an identity or an ideal.

From a psychological lens, the feminine principle refers to:

• the psyche’s capacity for inner holding and containment.

• a receptive mode of attention that allows experience to be received rather than controlled.

• the establishment of rhythm, continuity, and psychic time.

• the ability to tolerate not-knowing so meaning can emerge gradually.

The Feminine Principle: A Psychological and Emotional Function First and foremost.

From a psychoanalytic and analytical perspective, the Feminine principle does not refer to a gender identity, nor to a culturally defined way of being “feminine.” It describes a function of psychic life that is deeply connected to the capacity to receive experience, to contain it, and to transform it without needing to master or force it.

This function makes it possible to remain in contact with one’s affects without becoming overwhelmed, to tolerate uncertainty without rigidity, and to maintain an inner continuity even when the environment is demanding or unstable. When sufficiently supported, it provides a quiet internal ground of support, through which effort is no longer the sole mode of psychic existence.

The Personal Mother and the Inscription of This Function.

The Feminine principle does not develop in an abstract or intellectual way. It takes shape very early within relational experience, through repeated interactions with the personal mother or maternal figure, and through the manner in which she receives the child’s emotional states, tolerates dependency, and supports both withdrawal and initiative.

When this presence is sufficiently reliable, even if imperfect, the child repeatedly experiences being received in what she feels. Gradually, this experience becomes an internal capacity: the ability to remain in relation to oneself without urgency or collapse.

When, on the other hand, the mother is emotionally unavailable, overwhelmed, too fragile, or constrained by her own history, this function struggles to consolidate. The child then learns to support herself in other ways, often by mobilizing capacities for control, anticipation, or early understanding—capacities that become valuable resources, but also, over time, costly ones.

The mother is usually the first bridge between a child’s inner emotional life and the world around them. When she cannot play this role, it is not a failure of love or intention, but a gap in how emotional experience is passed on and made understandable.
What is missing, in these situations, is not love, but the ability to help the child’s feelings become something that can be shared, held, and understood.

Effects in Adult Life.

In adult women, this early organization may manifest as difficulty resting psychically, persistent emotional vigilance, or a diffuse sense of always having to “hold” something together, even in the absence of real danger. The Feminine principle is not absent, but remains fragile, sometimes inaccessible, and often subordinated to more voluntary or defensive modes of functioning.

What is at stake here is not a lack of maturity, but an internal organization that developed without sufficient support for this specific function.

The feminine principle is what allows for the connection between the body, emotions, and language.

When this connection has not been established early enough:

• emotions are experienced as overwhelming or dangerous

• the body becomes either controlled or alien to oneself

• thought takes over in a defensive manner

The Orientation of This Workshop.

This workshop offers a process of understanding and reorganization of this function, without regressive return to childhood and without placing the mother under accusation. Rather, it seeks to allow a precise recognition of what could not take root, and to open a space in which the Feminine principle can be restored as an autonomous psychological and emotional function.

Drawing on psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, contributions from the neurobiology of emotional regulation, and a respectful approach to the different parts of the personality, this work aims to support the emergence of a more continuous, more internally supported relationship to oneself—one that is less dependent on effort alone.

This workshop will invite a return to the inner Feminine as a source of meaning, continuity, and inner support.

When early maternal containment was inconsistent or insufficient, the psyche often lacks reliable symbolic rhythms.
The feminine principle is not only an image or an idea — it is a felt continuity over time.

The workshop will also explore the use of simple, clinically grounded rituals to support reconnection with the feminine principle.
These are not spiritual nor performative practices, but gentle symbolic gestures designed to restore rhythm, continuity, and a sense of inner holding for you where these were once lacking.
Rooted in the body and in time, they will offer a way to experience the feminine as something lived with and supportive — a place to come back to rather than an ideal to strive for.