Separate From Mother

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

“I always need you - it's clear

I always need you

Hourly …

I'm deadly accustomed to you

Deadly."

T. Berchnard

Separation from parents, in particular from mother, is a long and sometimes painful process. It begins from childhood, when a child begins to crawl, walk, learn about the world around him, and later - get acquainted, make friends, fall in love and build his family. Unfortunately, sometimes things don't go as smoothly as we would like: on the way to growing up, autonomy and independence there are people who hinder this process of separation. These people are mothers. Various reasons “help” them not to let their child go into adulthood: fears, complexes, anxiety, narcissistic manifestations. Because of these interfering circumstances, the separation process can last for years, decades, sometimes it does not end when the mother has long been dead. A lot of people wait until a choice is made for them, ask for advice, do not take responsibility for themselves, live not their own lives, but the lives of their parents, their attitudes, judgments, conducting internal dialogues with them. This affects both men and women equally. In this article, I would like to look at ways in which a mother can increase her daughter's dependence on her, and I also highlight the process of separating a son from a mother.

First, I would like to consider the relationship between mother and daughter. How does growing up, the separation of a daughter from a mother take place? There are two opposite factors that slow down the separation:

• Lack of intimacy. If there was no closeness with the mother, the desire to merge with the mother, to feel her unconditional love may remain the most important, the main thing.
• Too close relationship. In such a relationship with her mother, the girl stops growing up, because she does not feel like a separate person, she is “merged” with her. Keeping her daughter close to her, the mother prevents her from finding answers to the following questions: "How am I different from her?", "What am I?", "Who am I as a woman?" This can also include the mother-friend relationship, which has become the ideal of many women. Often, such relationships hide the lack of distance, independence, which is exactly the same “uncut umbilical cord”.

A woman's natural desire to become independent can be hindered by the mother's desire to keep her close to her, often unconscious. She does this in several ways.

Guilt. Some mothers use guilt to exercise control over their daughter. From such mothers you can often hear: "Your independence upsets me", "You will ruin me", "You leave me, I will not survive this." Usually, such statements by the mother are related to her own experience of sudden separation. The daughter, in turn, cannot cope with the feelings of guilt that she has inflicted on the mother.

An overbearing mother can use guilt feelings to reflect her daughter's claim to ownership of her own life. Feelings of guilt will remain in adulthood when the daughter grows up and leaves the parental home, and which will arise again and again when she takes life into her own hands. Some children lose their mother's love the moment they try to separate from her. Here is the story of one girl: “My mother always asked me to love, support, share the details of her life. I got used to the fact that I could not help but patronize her, could not refuse her support, which I myself needed … At the age of 17 I fell in love and received a lot of rejection from my mother. She closed in on herself, began to drink, said that I did not love her, that I had betrayed her. She constantly violated, and still does, my boundaries and climbs into my personal relationships. I don’t want her to take care of me, but I don’t want to be a mother for her either. I don't need anything from her, I just want her to be happy and build her life."

Anger and aggression. The daughter cannot bear the mother's anger - she either breaks out of this relationship, or becomes intimidated. Neither alternative leads to freedom and personality building. Independence should be encouraged by the mother, not violated. The mother can convey to the child one of two messages: either "I love your unique individuality" or "I hate your individuality and will try to destroy it." The child cannot resist such an onslaught and develops in the direction that suits the mother.

Lack of love and structure. Children raised by often absent or inattentive parents do not receive the love and attention they need to develop their own independence. Love provides "a haven from which to sail," and structure provides "something to fight against." Only love and structure together provide the building of independence.

You can also single out another way to slow down and postpone separation - this is to inspire the child with thoughts about his dependence, weakness, worthlessness. Here is another story of a 27-year-old girl: “My mother behaved unfairly towards me since childhood. I often heard words of condemnation and criticism where I needed support and understanding. “You won't cope with it”, “Yes, you couldn't do anything a few years ago, where it’s coming from now”, “You don’t know how to choose men”, “I was ashamed of you then” … it seemed that all this is my life … It was very difficult for me to love and accept myself, to overcome my fears and complexes, because in my mother's eyes I was a useless child. We did not have a trusting, sincere and close relationship with her. After years of struggling with her, I realized that I did not love her. I feel powerless without her. All my life I fled from her, but at the same time I could not live without her …”.

If you look at the relationship between the mother and the child from the inside, then all of these above signs lead to ambivalent (opposite) feelings, both in childhood and in older life. Continuing to fight with the mother, the adult himself slows down the process of separation from her. The more there are feelings of guilt, resentment, anger for the mother, or for both parents, the deeper the attachment to them.

Exercise 1. Ask yourself questions: “What am I hiding from myself, explaining all the problems of life by pressure, influence and the need to take care of my mother?”, “Maybe it’s me who fill the emotional emptiness with the struggle for independence?” frightens so much that it is easier for me to remain in a strange mixture of struggle and love for my mother than to enter this world? " mother?"

Exercise 2. Answer yourself to the question: "Why do you still need to be a child?" and finish the sentence: "I still need my mother, because …".

Consider how an unfinished relationship with a mother affects specifically men. Q: “I am 33 years old, and I still live with my mother, without any completely satisfying relationship. Of course, I meet, sometimes I live with girls for several years, but all relationships end the same way. They just start to piss me off! I can't help myself. Everything starts well, there are feelings, but time passes and sympathy, passion and tenderness replaces a person with real hatred, I begin to humiliate, insult, expel them from home. I think that when I start noticing my mother's features in girls, they become less attractive to me, to put it mildly. This is the first variant of an unseparated relationship with the mother that can be called role swapping. Without overcoming relations with his mother, a man sees every woman as her “substitute”, and he himself turns into a boy or, at best, into a teenager, and puts his beloved woman in the place of his mother, uses her to solve old problems. Of course, a man does not realize that he is building his relationship according to the same scenario and sincerely “believes” that the relationship with his mother can be overcome through his relationship with women. There are several more signs by which you can determine the dependence of a man on his mother:

1. Aggression. Moving away from intimacy, a man starts a conflict whenever the relationship is "too" to improve;
2. "Merging" with another woman. Merging in a relationship with his beloved woman, a man begins to dream of another, not so close;
3. The division of a man into a "love object" and a "sexual object" - which in his understanding refers to different people;
4. Control in relationships. A man can either control a woman by invading her personal space, traumatize her, or he himself lends itself to control and too close, suffocating intimacy. If at one time he managed to establish normal boundaries with his mother, the man would now not be afraid that his wife or girlfriend would prevail in his relationship. If a wife or girlfriend is identified with a domineering mother, with the only woman who turned out to be too tough for this man, he leaves love;
5. Drug addiction can also be an attempt to combat the need for intimacy. The need for close relationships is replaced by anything - work, sex, drugs, alcohol, hobbies, food, etc. Anything, just not to depend on another person!

Exercise 3. Check to see if you are using an adult relationship to overcome childhood problems and meet children's needs. In principle, this is possible within a relationship, but it is within a relationship. Make sure you are able to admit your needs, not just "give them free rein."

Some men who have not overcome their relationship with their mother also have a problem with their father. A man must identify with his father to determine his gender role and separation from his mother. If the father is in one sense or another unavailable, the child merges with the mother, or enters into an insoluble conflict with her, or plays the role of a kind of ersatz spouse.

How do we know if we have really become independent and self-reliant? By what signs can one determine whether there has been a separation from the parents, in particular from the mother? Separated person:

• does not "lead" on provocations, does not nurture his resentment and does not try to justify himself;
• understands that parents are not obliged to fulfill all desires, and he is not obliged to meet all their expectations;
• does not expect a parent to show concern and love if he is incapable of them. He stopped nurturing a painful relationship with his hopes;
• refused to act out the role of the ideal child and mother;
• realized that his parents are ordinary people and that they gave him as much love as they could;
• he also realized that he may not be loved and that they may act out their own traumas on him, realize their needs at the expense of him;
• critically evaluates the attitudes inherited from the mother, ways of behavior, life scenarios;
• he regulates the degree of trust and distance in relations with his parents himself, without feeling guilty;
• can objectively assess in what ways he is similar to his parents, and in what ways he differs from them, but does not compare himself with them;
• does not suffer from internal conflicts and is not torn apart by conflicting feelings in relation to the mother / parents;
• feels that he is connected to his mother, but not tightly attached to her.

By accepting parents as they are, we get the opportunity to live in peace with ourselves. I wish you the best of luck with that!