Pathology Of Maternal Love. Part 1

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Mother's love is sacred. Only a mother can love with devotion and selflessness … How often you can hear, read about it from a variety of people. There are many myths and stereotypes hovering around maternal love. Recently, these stereotypes and myths (at last!) Are beginning to undergo deconstruction and revision. Because motherly love can be stifling and crippling, and maybe not love at all …

In this series of articles, I propose an analysis of several types of the so-called "pathologies of maternal love" and those destructive messages that mothers, explicitly or implicitly, broadcast to their children, primarily to their daughters.

“I am your mother. You are me. Be me, be like me. Don't live your life, live my life."

This is one of the most damaging messages a daughter can receive from a mother. At the same time, the daughter is not perceived by the mother as a separate entity from her, the daughter is a completely and completely continuation of the mother. While the girl is small, she can be the meaning of life and the light in the mother's window. Mom is constantly worried and afraid for her, and her daughter often starts to get sick. Because mom literally does not give her daughter space for herself, loves her with that very suffocating mother's love. And, probably, it is no coincidence that a little girl begins to get sick most often with those diseases that are associated with breathing problems. For example, bronchial asthma. This is the girl's mute call to her mother: "Let me go, give me more space." But my mother's love and anxiety do not allow to hear this call.

More serious problems in the relationship between the mother sending such a message and the daughter begin when the daughter begins to grow up and her whole being demands separation from her mother. Adolescence for the daughters of such mothers can be a real nightmare, because the mother will not understand how her own leg or hand (that is, a daughter, since she is by default an appendage of the mother, and not a separate, holistic, independent being) dared declare their desires or their individuality. Mom will do everything to make her daughter "rationalize" and return - more precisely, so that this natural distance, which is simply necessary in the relationship between mother and daughter, is again reduced to a minimum, otherwise the mother simply will not survive. Such mothers often begin to follow their daughters, rummage through their private correspondence, look for personal diaries, and, of course, read them from cover to cover, fear the daughter's early sexual life, and even take them to the gynecologist for a checkup in order to finally humiliate them. All this is seasoned with the sauce of mother's "love" and incredible anxiety. Very often the daughters of such mothers think about suicide, and about suicide not demonstrative, but one that can be brought to its tragic end. And if the daughter nevertheless realizes her intention, then those around him are only perplexed - such a wonderful loving mother, a wonderful family, how is it that this teenage girl was missing. And this girl literally did not have enough life and air to breathe … More often than not, something else happens - an attempt at a failed rebellion of her daughter, and the daughter returns back to her mother, bending to the ground with an incredible sense of guilt for the fact that she dared to undertake at least some an attempt to separate.

An extreme case of such a stifling maternal love, with a similar message to her daughter, is shown in the film Black Swan, starring Natalie Portman. The film shows how the daughter is trying to realize her mother's ambitions, and how the mother does not allow her daughter to grow up - the room of an adult girl is still all pink and littered with toys, as if she were still a little girl. By the way, the message “do not grow up, always be a child” is also a very frequent message from such mothers, because mom wants to stay in this blissful state of merging and symbiosis with her baby all the time. The natural development of the child assumes that this state of fusion will last for a very short time, but the mother does not understand this and wants to remain in this state always and will be any - really any, and often very destructive actions against her daughter - to return this state. And so the final of the film is more natural - a mental disorder and suicide of a girl who is no longer anything but the daughter of her mother.

If we turn for examples not to cinematography, but to cases from our own practice, then there are also quite a few of them. An adult daughter who lives with her old mother, who has excellent health and energy, while her daughter is near and lives with her mother. With any attempt by such a thirty or even forty-year-old daughter to separate from her mother, her mother immediately begins to hurt and suffer, for example, from heart attacks. And so the daughter remains an appendage of her mother until the end of her life. And such mothers often, moreover, also worry about their daughters, and it seems to such daughters that if they leave their mothers, finally live their lives, and the mother will die. And on the altar of mother's life is laid her own unlived daughter's life.

If a daughter, at the cost of incredible, as a rule, efforts, manages to arrange her personal life, get married, give birth to a child, then the mother will be a constant background in her daughter's life, a constant reminder - to whom she should be grateful for this wonderful life. Such mothers often enter the space of a young family at any time, when it is convenient for mother (already mother-in-law and grandmother). She often has her own key to the apartment, such a mother loves to clean and tidy the closets, in the apartment - that is, again reduces the space between herself and her daughter to a minimum. After all, the daughter's family for her is not a separate young family, but a continuation of her own space, because she was created by her daughter - her continuation, her part. I met with cases when a young family, moving from one city to another, suffered from the fact that they had to carry their mother with them - because my mother asked: how is it possible with a living mother - and you will live separately? Often, such a mother begins to implicitly, and sometimes directly, to her daughter who has married and gave birth to her own child, that her husband has done his function - helped with the conception and birth of a child, so you already need to think about divorce. Because the husband is the third extra for the mother, in this holy space, where only she and her daughter can be. There is also such a twist, which occurs quite often, and strikes a young family: it is proposed to "give" the mother a grandson or granddaughter, and the young family "to enjoy life." Mom knows exactly how to live in fusion with a child, a child is an extension of her daughter, and now you can continue to live in this suffocating symbiosis with a daughter’s continuation. Also, such mothers, as a rule, are asexual, and do not accept any expressions of flourishing femininity in their daughters - after all, this is very dangerous, because threatens to destroy the merger with the daughter.

Another example from practice - a mother does not buy clothes for her growing daughter, because they now have the same size, and they can wear the same things together, a kind of wardrobe for two. And, perhaps, one of the most shocking examples that I have met more than once (!) In my practice is the incredible aggression of the mother towards the adult daughter, with a humiliating and derogatory text that clearly shows how the mother does not perceive her daughter as separate from her being in no aspect: "You are my shit, and you dare to object to me!"

The daughters of such mothers, as a rule, are oppressed by an incredible sense of guilt before their mother - after all, their mother loved them so much and took care of them, especially in their childhood, and now, in adulthood, they have to "repay a debt" for this, while compensation of the debt is required neither more nor less - the daughter's own filled life. You can cope with these messages, as well as find the necessary distance in your relationship with your mother. Often this distance must be very large. As a rule, this requires a lot of effort and courage from an adult daughter, long-term therapy, but it is worth it, because the price of the issue is her own life instead of its surrogate.