YOU CANNOT MAKE YOUR MOTHER HAPPY, IT'S NOT YOUR OBLIGATION

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

Are we happy with our relationship with mom? Are you satisfied with your self-esteem, which was formed in childhood? Didn't my mother say: don't paint your lips like that, doesn't suit you? Or: are you too shy, boys don't pay attention to such things? Or: don't you have enough plastic for dancing? One more question: is mom happy with me, an adult woman, today? And why do I still care?

Lyudmila Petranovskaya: “Mom is a very important character in the life of any person. For a small child, mother is his universe, his deity. Like the Greeks, the gods moved the clouds, sent floods or, conversely, a rainbow, approximately to the same extent the mother dominates the child. While he is small, for him this power is absolute, he cannot criticize it or distance himself from it. And in these relations a lot is laid: how he sees and will see himself, the world, relations between people. If mom gave us a lot of love, acceptance, respect, then we got a lot of resources to understand our view of the world and ourselves.

AND IF NOT?

Even at thirty, we cannot always resist mom's assessments. These children still live inside us: three, five, ten, to whom mother's criticism has eaten into the liver itself, into the gut - even at a time when they could not oppose anything to it. If your mother said: "Forever everything is not with you, thank God!" - so it was so. Today we understand with our heads that, perhaps, my mother bends about the fact that everything is always wrong with me. We even remind ourselves of our position, education, number of children as arguments. But inside us, at the level of feelings, there is still the same little child for whom mom is always right: our dishes are not so washed, the bed is not so made, the haircut has failed again. And we experience an internal conflict between the realization that mom is wrong and the unconscious child's acceptance of mom's words as the ultimate truth.

FORGIVING OR NOT FORGIVING

In fact, when there is an internal conflict, it means that you can work with it, try to do something. More dangerous when he is not. After all, you can stay forever in a five-year-old state, believing that mom is always right, and make excuses, take offense, ask for forgiveness or hope to somehow try and show yourself well that mom will suddenly actually see how beautiful I am.

Today the idea of "forgive and let go" is popular. Forgive your parents for being somehow wrong with you as a child, and you will feel better right away … This idea does not give you any liberation. What can and should be done is to feel sad about that child (you in childhood), to feel sorry for him and sympathize with his mother, because everyone deserves sympathy. And empathy is a much healthier start than arrogant forgiveness.

Try not to forgive, but understand: Mom was in a situation about which we do not know anything, and, probably, she did only what she could. And we could draw erroneous conclusions: "Thank God everything is always with me", "There is nothing to love me for" or "You can love me only when I am useful to other people." Such decisions, which are made in childhood, can then imperceptibly influence a person's entire life, and the point is to understand: it was not true.

THEIR CHILDHOOD

Now is the time for a warmer relationship between parents and children. And our mothers in their childhood, almost all were sent to a nursery, and many for five days. It was a common practice, so how could they learn warmth and close contact?

Fifty years ago, they were sent to a nursery at two months, because maternity leave was coming to an end, and if a woman did not work, it was considered parasitism. Yes, someone was lucky, there was a grandmother nearby, but mostly they were city dwellers in the first generation, their parents stayed far away in the villages. And there was no money for nannies, and there was no culture of hired workers … There was no way out - and in two or three months the child went to the nursery: twenty-five beds in a row, between them one nanny who gave a bottle every four hours. And everything, and all the child's contact with the world.

In the best case, if the mother did not work in shifts at the factory and could take him home every evening, the child received his mother at least in the evening, but extremely exhausted by the work. And she still had to cope with the Soviet life - to cook food, get food in lines, wash clothes in a basin.

This is maternal deprivation (deprivation), when the child did not have access to the mother at all, or had when she thought not about smiling and tickling him in the belly, but about how tired she was. Children with such experience do not have the ability to enjoy their child, communicate with him, and be in contact. All these models are taken from their childhood. When in childhood they kiss you, hold you in their arms, talk, they rejoice at you, they do something stupid, play with you, you absorb it and then unconsciously reproduce it with your children. And if there is nothing to reproduce?

Many thirty-year-olds now have memories of their childhood as that their mother always complains about how hard it is for her: a burden, responsibility, you do not belong to yourself … Their mothers took this out of their childhood - there is no joy in motherhood, you must raise a worthy citizen who the school, the Komsomol organization would be happy.

Today's mothers have to restore the lost programs of normal parenting behavior, when you get joy from children, and for you parenting, at all its costs, is compensated by tremendous pleasure from the child.

RETURN YOUR ROLE

There is one more aspect. Our mothers, who did not receive enough protection and care from their mothers in their childhood, could not fully satisfy their own children's needs. And in a sense, they could not grow up. They received a profession, worked, could occupy leadership positions, created families … But the child inside them, he turned out to be hungry - for love, for attention. Therefore, when they had children of their own and grew up a little, became more reasonable, then such a phenomenon as an inverted guarantee often arose. This is when parents and children essentially switch roles. When your child is six years old and he wants to take care of you, he loves you, it is very easy to get hooked on it - as the source of the very love that you were deprived of.

Our mothers grew up with the feeling that they were not loved enough (if they were loved, they would not be sent to a nursery, they would not have yelled). And then at their disposal is a man who is ready to love them with all his heart, without any conditions, absolutely completely belong to him.

This is such a "dream come true", such a temptation, which is difficult to resist. And many could not resist, and entered these upside-down relationships with their children, when, psychologically, the child seemed to "adopt" the parents. At the social level, they continued to be in charge, they could prohibit, punish, they supported the child. And at the psychological level, children began to be responsible for the psychological well-being of their parents - "Don't upset mommy!" Children were told about their troubles at work, about the lack of money, children could complain about a goat husband or a hysterical wife. The involvement of children as home therapists and "vests" in the emotional life of parents began.

And it is very difficult to refuse this: the parents, as they were disliked children, remained so, because the child, even though he hurt himself like a cake, cannot give it to them.

And when a son or daughter grows up and begins to separate, start their own family, their own life, parents experience the feeling that an abandoned child experiences, whose mom and dad went on a long business trip. And naturally, this is an insult, a claim, a desire to be in this life, to interfere in it, to be present in it. The behavior of a young child that requires attention requires to be loved. And adult children, who have lived most of their childhood in parenting, feel guilty and responsible and often feel like bastards who do not love their “child” parent enough to abandon him. At the same time, another part of them, adults, tells them: you have your own family, your own plans. It turns out a complex conglomerate of guilt and irritation towards these parents … And the parents have a strong resentment.

WHEN MOM IS OFFENED

First of all, remind yourself that these are not grudges against you, but against their own parents, and there is nothing you can do about it. Very often these grievances are also unfounded, unfair: it is not that they did not love, but that they were in a very difficult situation. And it seems to me that here it is important not to continue interacting with this childish part of your parents, but nevertheless to communicate with an adult.

Every parent, even the most offended, still has something that they can give you, and something that they can help you with. It is much better than serving your mother's grudge, for example, asking her to pamper you, prepare food that you have loved since childhood, and spend time with you.

This is an appeal to her correct part of the personality, to the parent. And it is pleasant for any parent that you can, for example, feed your child as tasty as they will not be fed in any restaurant, you can cook for him what he loved as a child. And the person already feels not a little offended child, but an adult who can give something.

You can ask your mother about her childhood - because access to the emotional state that has shaped her current one always helps. If she recalls the difficult moments of childhood - we can sympathize, pity her (that child), then she herself will be able to pity him.

Or perhaps she will remember that not everything in her childhood was so bad, and although there were difficult circumstances, there were also good times, good, joyful memories. Talking to parents about their childhood is helpful - you get to know and understand them better, this is what they need.

TRANSFER YOURSELF

Yes, there are difficult cases when a mother only wants to control, but not interact in any way. This means that you will have to increase the distance, to understand that, no matter how sad, but you will not have a good, close relationship.

You cannot make your mother happy, it is not your responsibility. It is important to realize that children cannot “adopt” parents, no matter how hard they try.

This is how it works: parents give to children, but it doesn't work back. You and I can give parents specific assistance in situations where they objectively fail. But we cannot help them grow up and overcome their psychological trauma. There is no point in even trying: you can tell them that there is such a thing as psychotherapy, but then they are on their own.

As a matter of fact, we only have two ways to grow (and usually people combine them). The first is to get everything we need from our parents. And the second - to be sad about the fact that we did not receive it, to cry, to feel sorry for ourselves, to sympathize with ourselves. And live on. Because we have a large margin of safety in this regard.

And there is also a bad way - it’s all my life to rush with a bill "I was not given" and at any opportunity to poke it to my mother - real or virtual, in my head. And hope that someday she will finally understand, realize and pay off this bill with interest.

But the truth is, she can't do it. Even if she now suddenly magically changes and becomes the most mature, wise and loving mother in the world. There, in the past, where you were a child, only you have access, and only we ourselves can "carry over" our inner child."