Excessive Motherly Love

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

Motherhood in our culture is colored with a halo of holiness, but in reality, the mother is the very first evil that a child recognizes after birth. Or rather, an unconscious emotionally immature mother is the greatest evil in a person's life. Whether we like it or not, the first pain the child receives is in the relationship with the mother. There are no ideal mothers. There is no mother who would not injure her child precisely because she is not a robot and not a god. She may get tired, may be anxious, distracted from the child when he really needs her, or she may love him very much, be afraid of losing. And with all this she hurts him.

Maternal anxiety, what mother is she not familiar with? Is that only the one who consciously wishes harm to her child and does not want to be a mother, is burdened by this role and realizes that she gave birth to a child simply because “it is necessary, like everyone else, because age, because my husband wanted, but I don’t want to be left without a husband, because parents ask, and sometimes press: well, when are the grandchildren already … And a woman, not being ready for motherhood, obeys the requirements of the environment and then, in fear of admitting that she did not want a child and does not want to raise him, blaming himself for dislike, trying to replace love with care and anxiety.

It is a long-known fact that a “desired child” may be far from desired in reality, that a declaration “I want a child” does not mean a willingness to be a parent.

But even the very thought that I do not love my child shocks a woman, because this is socially unacceptable. And she automatically tries to replace these thoughts with care, care, in which she could feel like a "normal" mother, and not some kind of moral invalid and monster.

Unfortunately, one of the reasons for maternal anxiety is that a woman, not wanting children consciously, without becoming ready for love and bestowal, gives birth to a child. Of course, such a mother cannot give her child anything good from the point of view of the psychological aspect, if she does not develop this ability to love and be aware.

Another cause of maternal anxiety is her own childhood trauma, her relationship with her mother is usually anxious, protective or cold and withdrawn or aggressive. Own unconscious fears are transformed and projected onto the child in the form of fear of losing him. And so such a mother jumps up in the middle of the night and runs to the baby's crib, checking his breathing on the mirror.

The task of each mother is to "mirror" the child: The child, through the eyes of the mother, through the touch of her hands, through her intonation, learns who he is. And if a mother lives in constant anxiety, then the child "mirrors" like anxiety in the eyes of the mother, and this is the first childhood trauma that none of us then associates with failures in life. A child who sees fear and anxiety in the eyes of his mother does not understand who he is for his mother and who he is in general in this world. Such a mother, like the first one, cannot provide a high-quality emotional connection with the child, because she is flooded with her anxiety and fears.

The mother's anxiety shows the child that the world is dangerous, that nothing good should be expected from it. Anxiety is the nucleus for depression and the formation of a depressive personality structure. The infant responds to the mother's anxiety with anxiety in response. Through glance, touch, facial expressions, intonation, he reads his mother's state. Because of anxiety, the baby becomes restless: he constantly screams, does not sleep, does not eat well, he has problems with digestion.

We are not talking about the first weeks after childbirth, when almost every mother is worried, but about the mother's long-term anxiety, which does not end for months, years. In these cases, this is already a signal that the mother needs psychological help.

So, over time, the child grows and the mother comes to her senses, but what happens next? The child is that space, that field on which the entire child-parental conflict of the mother herself unfolds. She may have forgotten how she was treated as a child, but she is forced to raise her child in the model in which she was raised, since she does not know anything else.

She unconsciously "plays out" on the child. The one whose will and psyche were broken in childhood cannot afford not to break the will of his child, the one who is weaker, the one who depends on her.

An adult, as if reveling in his power over the weaker, and this is what is called hazing in the army: I have suffered now, you suffer (but this is not realized in any way).

Mom wants to love, but she cannot and does not know how and calls the form of relationship that she saw in the parental family love.

Reproaches, blackmail, manipulation, control, power, condemnation, criticism, remarks, control, constant anxiety, custody - this is the description of love, which is implied when we tell the child that we love. And even worse, when the parent says: "You are everything to me, you are my life, the meaning of my life" and what does the child feel then?

The child feels anxiety and responsibility for the parent, the duty to take care of him, because the parent is a victim and all his life he heroically suffered for the sake of the child. The fate of such a child is very dramatic.

Such a sacrificial mother binds the child tightly to her with a psychological umbilical cord and holds her in a stranglehold for the rest of her life: the child slavishly fulfills her maternal heroism.

Anatoly Nekrasov's book "Mother's Love" describes a case: a woman left her mother in Kamchatka with her husband and children, but the mother began to get sick and she rushed back to her mother: as soon as the daughter took a ticket back home, the mother took an ambulance with an attack and so 10 years. Mother reproached: "What are your husband and children dearer to you than me?" When the mother finally died, the daughter came home but she did not have time. The day before her return, her husband died … This is how the mother unconsciously destroyed her daughter's life and made her her slave.

Children do not have a fate due to the fact that their energy is directed backward, and not forward in subsequent generations.

As Anatoly Nekrasov says in his book: "The heart of the mother is in the child, the heart of the child is in stones."

An anxious mother is fueled by her anxiety on the baby. What does a mother get from her child as a result of her anxiety? Power (it dominates, controls, becomes important and significant for the child, fills his entire being with herself). She was small and could not control anything and obey, now she plays out this shortcoming of her own on her child. And the child becomes helpless and learns that he will not survive without his mother. And now an over-aged child, attached to his mother at her first request, runs to her, abandoning his own children and family.

Whatever you do, the child will still love you. In fact, the greatest gift a parent can give to a child is to accept and love him even when he does unpleasant things, when he is angry, when he is uncomfortable for the parent. But in reality, the opposite is true - it is the children who make a similar gift to their parents: the gift is all-forgiving love. And the parent knows this, and in order not to lose this childish love, he binds the child with this importance, significance, umbilical cord dependence. How he does it? He decides everything for the child, controls him, criticizes him, depriving him of self-confidence, extorts love with manipulations, introduces the child into a constant feeling of guilt.

For example, an anxious mother compensates for the lack of love from her husband and brings down all her passion on the child, strangles with her love, invades the child's personal space, violating its boundaries, floods, absorbs, because it is scary to lose love. Such a mother sticks like a vampire into a child, there is a lot of her in the life of even an adult child. She is essentially marrying a child. Such a mother skillfully manipulates the child, accusing him of putting so much effort into him, and he …

Many single mothers and mothers who do not get along well with her husband, father of the child and then the child, regardless of gender, bears this burden of responsibility for mother's life, health and mood, fall into such a story. Mom made the meaning of the child's life, and the meaning of life is very difficult to lose, and such a mother, like a vampire, bites into her son or daughter, calls a hundred times a day (everyday conversations with mom are a signal that you are merging with mom and are not psychologically separated from her) or you don’t want to talk, but talk, because she’s a mother, how can you not talk to her. "Mom is sacred."

The children of such mothers always idealize the mother, since she herself put herself on a pedestal of sainthood: TO COLLECT - means I can do whatever I want with you, and you endure.

Such mothers require constant reporting, motivating this by the fact that they are worried about you and they do not sleep, because all sorts of pictures climb into their heads. And you are forced to calm her down because she is to "crush".

Children who follow such manipulations become emotional donors of mothers and grow old very quickly, stall in personal relationships and in business, because the mother sucks all her strength. Saying no to a parent to such a child seems like a disaster. Such parents take away the right to "no" from the child in advance.

This is, of course, the behavior of emotionally immature parents. In the book "Mother, Anxiety, Death" Reingolds writes that in these dreams and pictures about the death of a child, there is actually a death wish for the child: "Die and free me from this anxiety." This is the manifestation of all the hostility of the mother. It often happens like this: a child who is silent and is afraid to hurt his mother sees dreams, how the mother dies or how he himself kills the mother, and in these dreams lies the resolution of the conflict within the child's psyche: his anger at the mother seeks a way out and is realized in these dreams.

Maternal anxiety is dangerous in every way for a child. The same Reingolds in his book "Mother, Anxiety, Death" writes that with these visualizations of catastrophes and the death of her child, the mother forms a negative field around him and attracts these catastrophes. After all, no one will deny that what we are more afraid of losing, we will soon lose. I have often heard while working in pediatric oncology at the Cancer Institute that often a child's cancer was preceded by bad thoughts from the mother. The mothers of children with cancer were anxious and unconsciously hostile to the child, and they were all highly dependent on the child to merge with him.

Whatever the reasons for hyper-anxiety, the most important thing is for the mother to be aware that her behavior can seriously harm the child. In difficult cases, anxious moms need the help of psychologists.

If your anxiety goes off scale, don't be under the illusion that you can handle it alone. This is the case when it is best to seek help from a specialist … It is important not to run away from your fear, not to deny it, but to be able to live it in contact with another person.

(c) Yulia Latunenko