Woundmates And Shadowmates - What You Need To Know

A woundmate connection is another term for a trauma-bond connection.

A woundmate connection is a connection where we bond through our wounds, pain and trauma. 

The connection, while potentially powerful and passionate, comes with large degrees of combustion and reactivity. While a heartmate connection often sees a partner bringing us the necessary medicine our soul needs, a woundmate connection usually amplifies and destabilizes our wounds and undigested hurts to an even greater degree.

"Much like a twin flames connection you hear talked about a lot in spiritual communities, a woundmate connection usually sees two similar puzzle pieces fighting to fit into the same piece of the puzzle."

This is why these connections can contain so much combustion and friction, both people are fighting for territory to be heard. “You just don’t understand me!” “No you just don’t understand me!”

They’re both searching and seeking medicine for their evolution and healing, but this partnership only greater exposes their most unchartered areas of vulnerability.

A heartmate connection gives us the courage to face our darkness, while calling us forward into our light.

Whereas a woundmate connection usually requires around-the-clock processing. It’s this endless pursuit of two people triggering what is most tender inside of one another.

Naturally, the energy of the two energies combining in the woundmate connection continue to activate the hurts of the other, rather than naturally bringing one another the medicine they need to integrate and evolve.

This is simply a sign that there are parts of our hurts still unchartered, parts of who we are that we’re still looking to be saved from.

This connection feeds off our wounds, sucking our life force and contracting us into low states of self-worth, sinking us deeper into patterns of self-sacrifice for the allusion of a great love.

The connection holds a mirror to our empty spaces and drives us into the delusion this connection can fill the empty places inside of us with this epic, soul-quenching love.

The connection plays off of a mutual smallness and contraction. We remain dependent to one another. If one of us rises, it compromises the security of the wounded union.

The connection survives off of low self-worth, self-sabotage and self-abandonment. It drives us deep into the dark of our pain until we’re ready to embrace the process of showing up in our areas of hurt.

The lessons keep pounding on our door until we’re ready to listen.

These connections reveal our hurts until we’re ready to step into the grief, step into the fires of our own personal transformation. 

It feeds off of our unexplored parts. It attempts to bring the unconscious fracturing into the great wide-open of conscious awareness. But only if we’re willing to listen. Sometimes we’re not yet ready, we have not endured enough suffering, stress, drama and dysfunction, before we’re ready to unpeel the driving forces below.

The connection can serve as this rest stop before we’re ready to step into the destination of our pain. We can feel the enslaught coming, the pressure is mounting, the grief is rising, and we would rather stay asleep to our dysfunction, than come awake to our pain.

"Staying locked in a woundmate connection is like sitting idle in the wings of our great transformation."

It’s like we’re sitting in the waiting room of Relational Recovery Rehab.

That’s because once we break free from the wounded union, we’ll be forced to go back to the origins of our hurts, and face the roots of our rupturing and meet the forces that are driving our dysfunction head on.

Whatever we’re doing is not working, lingering in the woundmate connection can allow us to stay in denial, it keeps the cover over our eyes to truths we know on a deep level, a little longer before we have to face the music of what we know awaits us once we unlock from the grips of these trauma-infused connections.

This is why woundmate connections are really just shadowmates handed to us by the Universe to invite us into our ultimate transformation and integration.

If we’re ready, if we’re willing to grow, they call us forward into a greater level of love consciousness. We’re being gifted this dysfunction as an invitation to our love evolution. It does this by bringing these shadowy parts of ourselves into the wide open, there for our picking or for our avoidance.

We can either sink deep into our work, uncover a greater level of who we are and claim more of what we’re running from, or we can stay driven by the unconscious.

Woundmates are called into our life to excavate our shadow materials and bring our darkness into the light and give it a comforting voice.

If we don’t answer this call, we stay unconscious, continuing to live and love through our darkness.

If we don’t answer the call, we stew and simmer in the dysfunction, continuing the downward spiral, destabilizing our soul and further fracturing our self-worth.

A shadowmate – when we fall in love with the wounds of another, hoping to absolve and heal them of hurts before we’ve yet to absolve and heal ourselves of our hurts, so the sacred contract serves to hold a mirror to what we haven’t yet had the courage to claim and explore inside of ourselves.

The woundmate connection is a call forward into our own innate darkness.

It’s a call forward into what we’re looking for a romantic partner to heal for us.

It’s the courageous battle call - what we haven’t had the courage to be with, what we haven’t had the strength to face, is activated for us to see, for us to finally be aware of.

Love is a great marathon of the heart. We can’t truly know the taste of salvation and victory, without some battle scars along the way.

It’s a call forward into the unconscious wounding that is driving our perpetual self-abandonment.

Serving as soul excavation, each woundmate we encounter brings us a little deeper in unearthing our pain, in encountering our grief waiting in the wings. Each connection, a little bit closer to bringing us to the root of our grief, to the golden arches of the love we never learned how to give ourselves.

This is the purpose of these shadowmate connections, to expose the fire and the fury, to bring all what burns inside of us to the surface for review.

"Like a relational version of Mercury Retrograde, sometimes we must retreat backwards before we can move forwards."

Two step forwards into light, one step backwards into the darkness so we can claim more of the shadow. 

While heartmates exist in a balanced synchronicity between light and dark, an ever evolving humanness. A sacred tightrope of a balanced reality.

The woundmate takes us deep below into our shadowy Satan bowels for us to take stake of what drives the hurt.

Truth is some connections just, naturally, are better healers for our hurts. Some connections come with complimentary wounding to ours, while others aggravate and amplify our tender parts.

The amplification we experience in the throes of woundmate relating is us recognizing something familiar from our past, which is why these connections can feel powerful and passionate, yet true healing can feel nearly impossible.

This is why so often conscious woundmates are perpetually processing in their relationship. This constant processing gives the allusion of healthy relating as it gives this aura of self-righteous indignation because we are working at our relationship ALL THE TIME, but if you’re needing to process ALL THE TIME it’s probably because you’re triggered all the time, which means this connection aggravates your hurts, more than it helps heal your hurts.

This is what shadow relating does – it only survives as long as we stay wounded. 

Wounded dependency.

Wounded birds trapped in the nest, feeding off one another’s broken wings.

But once we evolve and expand into more true integration, we’re less exposed to the wounded dynamics –this ankle biting, soul sucking way of relating is exposed for the venomous and destructive creature it is.

When we become self-reliant to breathe life into ourselves, we no longer fall prey to those who suck our life force away.

When we rise, the wounded feeders fall away into the gutters of our great transformation.

But until we’re ready to stake claim of these shadowy parts, these connections continue to trap and imprison our great evolution.

The shadow way of relating serves to expose the unconscious blocks we haven’t yet made conscious. This is the purposeful activation these connections bring.

We listen and call ourselves forward, or ignore the call and stay stuck.

The dynamic between these two particular energies serves as a melting pot of dysfunction to reveal our past. We are called home in these connections, back to the origins of what we hoped to fix from our past with romantic love.

But all of this relational suffering comes because of our resistance to look at our own internal suffering.

Suffering is a choice we make by actively choosing to avoid our pain.

It’s a breakthrough via a breakdown.

But most people never breakthrough because they aren’t willing to move through a temporary breakdown.

Suffering is the reluctance to experience pain.

When we face our pain, we free ourselves.

But the fear of facing discomfort, recycles the suffering in a repetitive loop.

Woundmates and shadowmates continue to come into our life until we’re ready to learn, willing to finally listen and apply our lessons.

Detachment from them can feel like the end of the world because it’s bringing us back to our earliest pains and hurts.

The karmic lessons exist because a woundmate connection contains the same fires that burned us the first time.

The suffering takes place because we’re stepping into the fire, as an unconscious child, hoping to be healed by what has historically hurt us the most.

Trying to rewrite our childhood history in romantic relationships that activate more of our pain.

This why a 6-month relationship can reveal a lifetime’s worth of grief.

These relationships are karmic fuckers that bring our pain out of our blind spots and right into coming traffic, swerving right for our fucking hearts.

Fast-burning meteorites from the atmospheres of our past, plunging us right into the earths of our traumas.

The only way we end the shadowy cycle of relating is by stepping into our own discomfort and embracing our own grief.

If we don’t embrace the discomfort, claim and integrate, we stay stuck in our own repression and avoidance, being driven by the fires we seek to avoid.

When I look back on my story now, I am grateful for the woundmates that first broke me, before breaking me free.

If it wasn’t for their activation I would have never stepped into deeper knowings of who I am.

If it wasn’t for their devilish mirrors they held for me, I would have lingered in my smallness, I would have never had the courage to finally meet my pain.

These connections cast me out to sea, and by casting me out to sea, I found the sacred shores of my divine harbours.

They gave me the courage to walk home in the dark, using my own heart to light the way.

I am grateful for the drama and dysfunction because without it, I would not have learned to call myself forward to find my own calm centre.

They brought me deeper into my darkness, and only by being brought deeper into my own darkness, could I ever truly see my light.

By stretching me into my self-abandonment, they helped me finally figure out how to finally choose myself.

By trying to save them, they helped me realize what I really cried for all along was the yearning to save myself.

By sucking the life out of me, they called me forward to finally start living.

They called me forward in greater ways than I could have ever imagined.

They helped me see more clearly, they helped me claim more of what I needed, and helped me own more of my authentic voice.

They peeled back my false identities and uncovered greater, deeper truths that I would have never learned without our collision.

"I am grateful for the impact, for it was the BIG BANG my soul needed to finally activate into the stratosphere of unrealized potential."

I would have never learned how to give myself my own medicine unless they exposed the poison, seeping and slurping at the seams of my soul.

Thank you for revealing my shadow and helping me learn to embrace it and be with it.

If it weren’t for the temporary brokenness you brought me, I would have never learned how to find wholeness.

Most importantly, thank you for calling me forward to what I’d been running from. If not for this great hurt, I would not have gone home to my great big wide soul, my sacred soulvolution.

The golden arches of fractured pieces, the yellow brick road home to my childhood hurts.

I’d been running, shifting, repressing, avoiding, bypassing, and you called me out. You called me the fuck out. You showed me what I didn’t want to see. You gave life to my pain, and by giving life to my pain, you brought me to life also.

At first I was angry, with wells of tears, fires of rage, but then I was grateful.

You were a necessary stop along my way. You were not brought here to love me forever, but just love me long enough for me to learn a crucial lesson on my way to wholeness.

Construction through destruction.

Message begrudgingly received.

The lesson of how to love me deeper, harder, more heart and soul wide open.

Call forward the dark and break us apart, so we can finally be shaken awake.

Our dramatic, dysfunctional, destructive love showed me what I needed to see. You gave my soul eyes. You gave my heart wings. You gave me courage I didn’t even know I had. You gave my little boy a voice.

So thank you for activating me. Thank you for shaking the tree, so I could finally bare my fruits and my great gifts.

"Woundmates, shadowmates, often breathe life to our great hurts so we can finally learn how to stop holding our breath."

When we avoid our pain, it restricts and contracts our heart. Our growth remains frozen, while our soul grumbles.

This type of connection serves as the activation that something needs to die inside of us. Some distant hope that we can heal our hearts, without having to face our forgotten hurts.

This connection serves as the death of that realization so a greater soul revelation can finally be realized.

One where we finally become the champions of our great love story.

The wound needs to be ripped wide open, gushing at the seams, before we finally learn how to bandage the bleeding.

Woundmates are the blood-filled battle grounds that prepare us for the ease of heartmate kingdoms.

The rough waters that bring us to calm seas.

The storm clouds we must part to reach sunny horizons.

The treacherous mountains that bring us to the flowery meadows.

The chaos that teaches us peace. 

The pain that gives us life.

The hurts that bring us to our healing.

The darkness that brings us to our light.

The brokenness that helps us find our humanness.

And the heartbreak that finally brings us home to our great big hearts.

Want some support excavating and integrating your shadow materials that your woundmate connection is bringing up to the surface?

Free Starter Guide for Shadow Work HERE