The Stepmother Wound

You all know the story…

A young maiden loses her father to the evil stepmother.

Perhaps you have one, or at least have heard of her.

He chooses the bewitching stepmother over his daughter.

The stepmother uses her charms and insecurities to get what she wants. She lures the man with inverted sexuality and plays a game of competition the little girl never entered. The man, so bewitched by the woman’s charms, is willing to lose everything he once worked hard for.

She is very similar to the witch archetype.She is the shadow feminine.

Over the last few months, I have been writing and sharing Instagram posts decoding fairy tales, not as innocent children’s stories, but as psychological maps! Beneath the princes, princesses, witches, and dragons are hidden messages encoded into folklore and myth long before we had formal language, psychology, or education systems.

At first glance, many people dismiss prince and princess fairy tales as patriarchal programming. But when we understand the psychology of these stories, we begin to see through the surface narrative and recognise them as codes for the evolution of humanity.

Long before we could read and write, we had stories.

Stories are our most primal and natural way of communicating truth. This instinctive craving for meaning and understanding became encoded into rites of passage..what were once known as the Grail rites, thresholds into new identity and growth. These initiations were necessary for all humans and were expressed and preserved through fairy tales.

Today, in a world without campfire stories and elders, we have Disney, a distorted and often confusing transmission of ancient wisdom. The symbols remain, but the initiatory depth has been flattened, sanitised, and stripped of its psychological power.

And.. nowhere is this distortion more misunderstood than in the figure of the stepmother.

Why the Mother Dies in Fairy Tales

One of the most consistent themes across fairy tales is this: the mother dies.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run With the Wolves, speaks about this as the necessary mother, daughter split, a psychological severing that must occur for a girl to individuate, to leave innocence, and to begin the journey toward her own authority.

But this split is not only personal. It also reflects a collective wound.

We live in a time where the feminine lineage has been deeply interrupted, where instinct, initiation, and embodied mothering have been eroded or replaced with performance and survival. Many daughters grow up both longing for guidance and resenting the very source they need.

The death of the mother in fairy tales symbolises this loss. And into that absence steps the stepmother.

I did a post on this a few months ago from the lens of collective programimg.

Check it out https://www.instagram.com/p/DMi5tEFzT3w/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Why the Stepmother Is Always “Evil”

There is real psychology beneath the recurring figure of the evil stepmother. When viewed through family systems and depth psychology, she stops being a caricature and becomes a pattern.

Fairy tales do not invent villains. They exaggerate relational dynamics that are difficult, taboo, or unsafe to speak about directly.

The stepmother appears again and again because she occupies an inherently unstable relational position, one that sits between lineage and legitimacy, authority and belonging.

In family systems psychology, stepfamilies are among the most complex relational structures. The stepmother often holds responsibility without biological bond, authority without history, proximity without secure attachment, and visibility without true legitimacy. Meanwhile, the daughter represents the previous bond, the proof of the father’s earlier intimacy, the living reminder of another woman, another life. This alone can activate unconscious threat.

Jealousy does play a role, but not in the shallow way it is often assumed. The jealousy is rarely about the child as a child. It is about youth, fertility, attention, place in the hierarchy, and symbolic replacement.

The daughter unconsciously mirrors what the stepmother once was, what she fears losing, or what she never fully became. In cultures where women are valued primarily through beauty, fertility, or male approval, rivalrous feminine dynamics are easily activated.

Fairy tales do not create this rivalry, they expose it!

The Missing Father and the Birth of Shadow

The father’s role in fairy tales is so interesting. He is often absent, passive, emotionally unavailable or dead. It’s fascinating that so many women I work with carry the same experience of an absent father.

These fathers are often still little boys in adult bodies.. uninitiated, conflict avoidant, people-pleasing, and trying to be the “nice guy.” Without initiation, they struggle to hold boundaries, protect the daughter, or mediate feminine power within the family system.From a systems perspective, this is crucial.

When the father does not hold clear boundaries, does not mediate power, or does not emotionally protect the child, the stepmother/daughter relationship becomes triangulated. The stepmother is left managing insecurity, authority, and resentment without structural support. Shadow emerges not because she is inherently cruel, but because vulnerability cannot be safely expressed.

Psychologically, cruelty appears when fear cannot be named and power becomes the only available language. Unprocessed grief, grief over lost youth, lost safety, lost identity — combines with fear of displacement. Resentment toward the husband is often displaced onto the daughter, who becomes the symbolic threat rather than the true relational rupture.

Why Fairy Tales Make Her a Villain

Why Fairy Tales Make Her a Villain

The psyche, especially a child’s psyche, cannot yet hold ambivalence. Children can’t easily discern what is safe and what is harmful when someone is both loving and cruel.. So fairy tales externalise shadow. They give it a face. They make it unmistakable.

This allows the developing psyche to recognise danger, name injustice, and trust its own perception. The stepmother is portrayed as “evil” so the princess can develop discernment. It’s a psychological necessity.

Interestingly, many of my friends and clients who have stepmothers are incredibly intuitive and discerning. Almost as if they have a sixth sense.

On an archetypal level, the stepmother represents feminine power cut off from instinct: authority without nourishment, sexuality without initiation, motherhood without devotion. She is not the feminine at its worst and she is the feminine wounded by lineage rupture, patriarchy, and unintegrated power.

We see her again as the witch: Ursula stealing Ariel’s voice, Baba Yaga testing the girl who dares approach her, the crone who both threatens and initiates. These figures are not meant to be destroyed. They are threshold guardians.

The Princess’s True Initiation

The princess’s journey is not about being rescued.

It is about facing the shadow feminine.

In Cinderella, both parents die. She descends into invisibility and servitude a symbolic underworld where she must find inner authority before external recognition.

In The Little Mermaid, the voice is not taken by a man but by the witch, a warning about trading truth for belonging.

In Baba Yaga tales, the girl survives not by innocence, but by intelligence, humility, and discernment.

The confrontation with the stepmother is the initiation.

Through these tales, the daughter outgrows idealised motherhood, reclaims her voice, and develops sovereignty. Without this initiation, she remains dependent, appeasing, or unconscious, always waiting to be chosen, saved, or validated.

Why This Matters Now

The stepmother is a warning about uninitiated power, displaced resentment, and feminine authority without emotional grounding. Fairy tales do not teach us to fear her, they teach us to integrate what she represents, so she does not live inside us.

If all our little boys and girls were taught to read fairy tales as psychological maps rather than fantasies, we might raise adults who don’t wait to be saved, but understand growth, love, and responsibility as rites of passage.

And the princess does not survive by remaining sweet. She survives by becoming sovereign.

Thank you for reading.

Amanda Dyer

Light of Alchemy and Teacher at the Celtic Rose Academy