The Five Wounds is a typology developed by Canadian author Lise Bourbeau identifying five core emotional wounds — rejection, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal, and injustice — and the protective masks people adopt in response.
The framework originated with American psychiatrist John Pierrakos, co-founder of Core Energetics, and was systematized by Bourbeau in her 2001 book Heal Your Wounds and Find Your True Self, which has sold over three million copies across more than twenty translations. Bourbeau proposes that each wound forms at a specific developmental stage in relation to a parent and produces a characteristic mask the ego wears to avoid re-experiencing the pain. Rejection produces the withdrawer (felt as a wound to the right to exist, related to the same-sex parent); abandonment produces the dependent (the opposite-sex parent, fear of being left); humiliation produces the masochist (shame around bodily and emotional needs); betrayal produces the controller (broken trust, hypervigilance); and injustice produces the rigid (cold or perfectionistic caregiving, conditional love based on performance). Bourbeau argues the masks maintain the wounds rather than heal them, and that integration comes through self-acceptance rather than further protection.
The framework sits in the personal-development and somatic-therapy tradition alongside 📝Internal Family Systems (IFS) and the Enneagram — coherent, practitioner-popular typologies with substantial reach but without empirical validation in clinical psychology literature. It is not present in the DSM or in evidence-based trauma protocols (EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Polyvagal-informed work). Some of Bourbeau's specific claims — particularly the mapping of each wound to body shape and to a same-sex versus opposite-sex parent — do not survive scrutiny and should be treated as interpretive scaffolding rather than diagnostic fact. The infographic circulating in wellness communities (BetterMe and similar) is a derivative that typically drops humiliation and pairs each wound with affirmations and meditation prescriptions not present in the source material.
Useful as a reflective lens, not a clinical map. Lives in the same epistemic neighborhood as Human Design — coherent enough to surface real patterns, loose enough that the wrong reader will mistake the metaphor for the territory.