Pathology Of Maternal Love. Part 2

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

In the previous article, the mother's behavior was described, which leaves her daughter almost no space next to her, merging is the state in which the mother would like to always be with her daughter.

But there is another extreme, another implicit (although sometimes there is also a direct) message from the mother to the daughter: “I am your mother. And you are just my daughter. I have other things (relationships, etc.) that are more important than you. And if a mother with a message to her daughter “You are me” reduces the distance with her daughter to a minimum, no matter how old her daughter is, then a mother with the message “You are just a daughter” increases this distance to the maximum. Mom always has things to do, relationships or people more important than her daughter. This may be the mother's own persona - for example, the mother is in full swing in search of self-realization, or the work of her whole life, and the daughter is left to grandmothers, nannies, in extreme cases - to her father; either it can be a man around whom the mother arranges her whole life, or something else. The main thing is that in these relations and in the space next to the mother's daughter there is no place at all. At the same time, outwardly, the mother can talk about her insane love for her daughter, how she needs her and so on, but these will be just words. A vivid example of such an attitude towards their daughters can be found among the stars of show business - when a mother travels on tour, or changes the child's seventh nanny so that the daughter has all the best, although in the early years the presence of a permanent mother figure nearby is vital …

In this type of relationship, the mother in the life of her daughter, as it were, is, but in fact she is not. Excessive distance, as well as the lack of distance in the mother-daughter relationship, is also not useful for the development of harmonious relationships between the daughter and herself and with other people.

At the same time, at some point, such a mother may suddenly suddenly decide that this distance needs to be reduced - unfortunately, most often this happens "at the wrong time", for example, in adolescence, when a teenage daughter begins to look for herself, her place in the world, and when the search for distance from parents, including from the mother, becomes a natural process.

A vivid example of this type of relationship between mother and daughter is shown in the film "Autumn Sonata" directed by Ingmar Bergman - according to the plot of the film, the mother comes to her daughter not because she wants to see her, but because an adult daughter calls her mother to her, using what is the most important in this world for a mother is her professional self-realization (mother is a recognized pianist who plays better than her daughter, and her daughter can never reach such a level of professional skill, and even more so the daughter could never compete with the mother's vocation).

If a tragedy occurs and the mother for some reason disappears from her daughter's life (for example, dies from a serious illness), then in the girl's inner worldview, the mother also turns out to be unattainable - for obvious reasons. But the mother does not have to physically disappear for this sense of an irresistible distance to arise.

Example from practice 1. Mom is a successful model, she is constantly on the move, she is almost never at home. Most of the daughter lives with her grandmother. Also, my mother really does not like it when she is treated like a mother, and asks her daughter to call her by name. The girl calls her mother either "mother" or "Lena". At the same time, the daughter adores her mother and dreams of becoming, like her, a model, and maybe even a supermodel, to which her mother mockingly replies that she really cares about a supermodel. When the girl grows up, her mother ends her modeling career, and now she wants to always and everywhere be close to her daughter, to be aware of all her affairs, while waiting for constant admiration from her daughter, and constantly reminds her of what she was able to achieve. The girl, on the one hand, is very aggressive towards her mother, on the other hand, she is constantly not confident in herself and does not believe that she is capable of anything.

Case example 2. Mom is constantly trying to arrange her personal life after a failed first marriage. The daughter often remains either with her grandmother or with her friends, and is often perceived as a "burden", because if there were no child, it might be easier for mom to find a partner. When the daughter grows up, the mother does not even try to hide from her daughter, which she perceives as a hindrance. As an adult, this girl almost constantly feels “superfluous” almost everywhere.

Daughters who grow up in such a relationship with their mother may subsequently seek out intimacy and recognition throughout their lives that they never knew in their very first and most important relationship.