I rarely encountered a patient in our unit with a diagnosis of a personality disorder who had not been profoundly damaged by life circumstances. These extreme behaviours did not arise from nowhere. The usual trajectory was from a broken home, an absent or abusive father, a neglectful mother and a total absence of any form of support or nurturing, to a profound lack of self-esteem and a grim descent into drug abuse, gangsterism and criminality. These patients, and that is how they were described while in the unit, provoked an anger and a moral indignation that too often deflected attention away from the tragedy of these abject histories.

My father’s death demolished me. It was perhaps because I had never properly grieved my mother’s leaving that I approached mourning him with fierce intention. Grieving, I learned, was a process of story construction. I needed to construct a story so I could reconstruct my world. There were decisions to make about what to put in and what to leave out.

The idea of roots setting a person free is counterintuitive, but deracination from the past, from land, from family, from mothers, makes for an unstable present. We must have, or we will always search for, a place to bury our bones.

There is no simple answer,” he said. “Your mother grew up in a family that lost everything, and the trauma is in her blood. I think that’s what made her leave.

This is mother recognition from the other side. Not only have all beings been our mothers but we are also mothers to all beings: the womb of compassion is there within us waiting to be rediscovered. When we realize how readily we have misconstrued ourselves, when we stop clinging to our falsely conceived constructs of how limited, isolated, and alone we are, when we touch the ground of being, we come home.