Women's Identity. Crisis And Competition With The Mother

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

It is a well-known fact that the psychological age of a person has little to do with his passport data. We cannot inside be older than our past years, but younger - it happens often, depending on how the process of our growing up proceeded. Developmental traumas, like any trauma, are events that have not been experienced by our psyche, which means they have not been assimilated and have not turned into experience. When there is no experience of successfully passing the planned age or other crisis, a certain part of the psyche is fixed at this stage and continues to function at this level. And it is not very important how many years a person has lived.

There are people who are babies. Adults may be successful at something, but in any intimate relationship, their patterns of behavior are the claims of the infant to the mother. Inadequate exactingness to the other, egocentrism, inability to empathize and notice the needs of a partner, objectivity, outbursts of uncontrollable rage in any situations where he was not pleased. These are ways of contacting the world of a person of a very early age. Here we are not talking about situational manifestations in communication, but about permanent character traits, stable patterns. These are people whose psyche is partially fixed in the infant phase of development. They are prone to addictions of any kind, as they constantly feel the deficiency of the symbiotic connection. This is a vivid example, and each of us probably knows a couple of such babies.

But the article is about something else. In it, I want to consider two phases of development in which a girl is forced to face such a phenomenon as competition with her own mother. Why are they needed, how they proceed, and what happens in the life of an adult woman when development is fixed at these phases

The first important stage in the formation of female identity is the oedipal … Approximately 3-5 years old is the phase of the formation of guilt, finding its own size, rejecting the illusion of infantile omnipotence. The child begins to understand that not everything in this world is subject to his whims. Mom stops running at any time on demand. There are some obligations and restrictions that he must follow in order to be accepted. The girl is faced with the fact that dad does not belong to her, that he is mom's partner. She is jealous of her father for her mother, envy of her as his partner appears. This phase is needed, among other things, for the little girl to develop a sense of belonging to her gender. The price of the issue is the loss of the mother's competition. That is, only having resigned herself to the fact that mother is a big and full-fledged woman, and she is small - and not yet full-fledged, and therefore - dad will not be with her, but will be with her mother, the girl gets the opportunity to go through the oedipal crisis, which means further growing up … A chance someday from a caterpillar to turn into a butterfly.

For a child, these are unpleasant experiences, but tolerable if the parents are involved in living through his crisis. In return for the early lost illusions, the girl gets a feeling of connection with her mother, as with her own kind. She has an incentive to enter into an alliance with her mother, to grow, following her example.

If, for some reason, there is a fixation at this phase, the crisis stops living. An adult woman can often get screwed up without feeling her real size in relation to other women. She is often forced to compete inappropriately, through competition, as it were, confirming the very fact of her existence. Her identity is confused and she is poorly guided about what she may or may not claim. Who she is and with whom she is similar, and with whom she is too different. Due to blurred boundaries, it is difficult for her to understand where hers is and where someone else's. In adulthood, this leads to a wide variety of consequences and difficulties. One of the most striking examples: an almost comical lady of Balzac's age, who wears clothes not according to her figure and not according to her status, defiantly dyes, giggles and pretends for no reason, flirting with all her colleagues at work. When she was younger, infantilism was often forgiven by those around her. But the older a person is, the more discrepancies there are.

Any crisis not fully lived makes it difficult for the next one to live. Since in human development there is a certain sequence of stages of growing up, each with its own age crisis and tasks. If the task has not been completed, it remains as an outstanding debt at the institute. At the next session - during the next crisis, his new tasks will pull the tail of unresolved ones

Sometimes a woman with oedipal problems is lucky, and she finds herself a rival with whom she loses the competition to smithereens. The collapse of illusions about oneself in adulthood is more painful than in childhood, but it still allows you to determine your boundaries, discover your size, your weaknesses, and then strengths. And to re-form the image of yourself, your female identity, based on a greater connection with reality. The current crisis in this case is multiple, since it pulls up unresolved tails. While it lasts, the woman will curse fate from the pain that has fallen on her, but towards the end she will surely discover that she is still lucky. Fresh sprouts of a new, more mature identity will appear, which means internal supports to grab onto.

The second crisis that directly affects women's identity and its development is puberty. Here the girl again encounters competitive feelings for her mother, but against the background of a different task.

If everything went well in the oedipal phase, the girl yielded to her father to her mother and resigned herself to her role, she grows, develops, goes through a couple more age crises at school and begins to enter the pubertal zone. Towards the end, a period of psychological separation begins. Here it is important for the girl to discover her differences from her mother, features and individual traits. At this age, relationships with peers become more important. The girl wants to win their attention, seeks to insist on her right to be separate from her mother and different in everything that is important to her. Encountering the mother's natural resistance to the fact that the growing child is moving away, a teenage girl seeks to receive from her a recognition of the right to her otherness. To be different from the mother, as it was in the Oedipal age, but in some ways to be completely different and perhaps even superior to the mother, for example, in physical beauty, youth and prospects. And no matter how difficult it is for some mothers to come to terms with this, the daughter at this moment needs recognition of her flourishing femininity.

If all this is received and everything important is won back with the mother. If she accepts that her daughter loves not good music, but electro house, not normal clothes, but strange hats and platforms, not a human appearance, but lilac hair and black lipstick. If the mother further allows her daughter to enter not where she dreamed of, but where it would be better if her eyes did not look, etc. If the mother recognizes her daughter in these differences, the girl gains self-confidence and the ability to trust herself, her desires, aspirations and hopes. In her main war at this age - for the recognition of her peers, the mother acts as her ally, not her enemy. If the mother, out of anxiety, or poorly realized envy, suppresses her child, one of the most important separation crises may be: a) never passed, with the ensuing consequences - not confidence, not independence, avoidance of competition; and b) passed at the cost of breaking the internal connection with the mother and then looking for another adult figure to gain recognition.(Provided the child is fixed at earlier stages of development, the separation crisis may not be overcome due to the complex "tail" of tasks that the child cannot cope with.)

Only if the girl has all these relationships with her mother, the positive contribution of the father can play an important role in shaping her female identity. When the father knows how to normally and humanly confirm the attractiveness and growing up of a girl, this adds to her confidence in communicating with the opposite sex and teaches her to keep good boundaries. If the girl did not have a fulfilling and nourishing relationship with her mother, or a substitute adult figure, the love of her father will not help to form a normal identity, but rather turn into a kind of psychological incest. Because a man cannot teach a woman to be a woman. Like a mother alone, she cannot help her son to form a masculine identity.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, no one can reward us with identity. No one can convince a woman that she is a woman if inside she feels like a confused girl or a protesting teenager. It is a personal choice and responsibility of everyone - whether to go in search of their own, or remain immature, since they have not managed to grow up during their childhood. Many people live their whole lives with the identity of a non-adult person, they adapt somehow. Difficult, but they live. And someone chooses to grow themselves in order to live somehow differently. Well, psychotherapy helps seekers to direct efforts in the right direction.