“An immature parent with unresolved issues and repressed shame can also transfer his or her shame to us.”
John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You
Your relationship with your mother sets the default style for your relationships with women. If that statement is enough to make you want to run screaming from the building, don't worry: there is hope. You can choose to relate to women very differently if you deal with the emotional impact on you of your relationship with your mother. And you do that by letting go of your emo- tional attachment to the relationship you had with her as a boy. No matter how good or bad your mother was, there will have been ways in which the relationship you had with her as a boy was less than perfect. Invariably we all get hurt by the people who love us one way or another. Even if you had a great relation- ship with your mother while growing up, you need a different kind of relationship now as a man to what you had as a boy. The process of releasing your emotional attachment to past hurts is called forgiveness. This is a widely misunderstood process. It means letting go of any emotional attachment that you have to the actions of another person. It is not about “letting them get away with it”, or “letting them off the hook”. It's about letting
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Other people do not suffer greatly when we maintain resent- ment, anger and bitterness towards them. We may think we are punishing them by depriving them of our love, or self-right- eously holding them accountable for their actions. But in fact, when we refuse to forgive someone else we are merely punishing
ourselves by allowing ourselves to suffer needlessly and endlessly
for whatever it is that they have done. We remain a victim to our circumstances; and victimized men are very unattractive to wo- men.
Your mother had her own reasons for acting the way that she did when you were a kid. I don't believe in the romanticized notion of purely selfless parenthood that many long-suffering parents like to project. Yes, being a parent means many sleepless nights, hard work, and years of constant demands from needy children. But the brutal truth is that the reason your parents had you in the first place was because they wanted to meet their own biological needs. Even if you were an accident, your creation was the result of them attempting to meet their own needs and fulfill their own desires. Once you came on the scene, they couldn't help but love you; it's a biological imperative that parents love their children, whether they could communicate it to you or not. The way they raised you, and the relationships that they established with you, then reflected a combination of their love for you, and their own self-interest.
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You need to come to terms with the fact that at least part of the way your mother treated you and chose to relate to you was based not on your best interests, but on hers. Everyone has rela- tional styles with which they are comfortable, and styles with which they are uncomfortable. Unless she was particularly in- sightful, your mother would have chosen a relational style to use with you which was comfortable for her. Not necessarily one which was good for you. In my case for instance, my mother's default relational style is cold, dis- tant, and critical. As a sensitive per- son, this didn't go down so well for me. What I wanted was warmth, ac- ceptance, emotional support and love that I could feel. What I got instead was stoic practical support and “ad- vice” which to me just felt like a stream of invalidating criticism.
Feeling loved and nurtured during childhood is an important part of any person's development into a secure adult. We expect much of this love and nurture to come from our mothers. When this doesn't hap- pen because she is unable, unwilling, or unavailable, we can end up feeling insecure as adults and resentful towards our mother for withholding the love, approval and acceptance that we craved.
Gary Chapman's book The Five Love Languages describes five dif- ferent styles through which we give and receive love to and from each other. If your mother's style matches your style, there is a good chance that you would have felt loved and nurtured by her
What To Do
•Let go of any
resentment towards your Mother
•Release the ties of emotional control •Love Your Mother •Read The Five Love
Languages by
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fairly naturally. But if your styles differed, you may have grown up feeling unloved. In my case, my mother's style is by doing things for other people, what Chapman calls Acts of service, whereas mine is by affirming, encouraging and hugging, what he calls Words of affirmation and Physical touch. I grew up feeling that there was something wrong with me, because I didn't see my parents using the style that felt natural for me between each other or with me. I thought my parents didn't love each other, and that my mother didn't appear to love me very much either. When I learned about the different styles of giving and receiving love, I realized that this was the result of a disconnect in commu- nication rather than an intrinsic lack of love.
Forgiving my mother did not come easily for me. It started when I decided I needed to tell my parents the impact of their abusive relationship on me. Even though I went about this as gently as I could, everyone else in the family resisted me bringing this skel- eton out of the family closet. My mother screamed and wailed like a stuck pig as I faced my fear of her head-on. It wasn't pretty, but it was necessary if I was to take myself seriously as a man. I did a tremendous amount of work on the emotional baggage (Step 12) I was still carrying around this, especially regarding fear and anxiety towards my mother. I even managed to drag her along to one of my therapy sessions, where she proceeded to get into an argument with my therapist.
At the height of their argument as she streamed critical vindict- ives towards my psychologist, she said: “I don't know what it is Graham's so afraid of!”
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My fear of conflict and sensitivity towards my mother's criticism led me to avoid ever doing anything to upset her. This stopped me being free to do what I wanted because I was always con- strained by what I feared she wanted. Yet I was often wrong about what I thought she wanted. The whole family system worked hard to avoid upsetting her. Eventually I decided that there was a higher goal in life than avoiding upset to my mother, and I was going to pursue that instead even if it meant her disap- proval and some degree of alienation from my family.
Whatever went on between you and your mother, you need to understand that she was doing the best she could with the re- sources she had available. There will inevitably have been times when your mother attempted to control you to protect you from danger, partly out of her sense of love for you, and partly out of her anxiety over how she would feel should anything bad hap- pen to you. While there are times when parents need to protect their children from harm, many parents don't let go of the strings of emotional control when their children have grown up into adults. It's up to you to break the apron strings.
Forgiving your mother is about releasing yourself from the con- trolling ties of the emotional bond that you had when you were a child. Continuing to seek your sense of validation and approval from your mother now that you are an adult will stop you from being free to be yourself. There are times when you will want to do things that your mother will disapprove of, and you need to be free to act anyway in these instances. It is impossible to fully develop your own sense of who you are as a man and what you have to offer women and the world, when you are still con- strained by the emotional heartstrings of maternal control.
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Your mother may have taught you that parts of you such as your drive to have what you want, your natural aggression when threatened or your sexuality were bad. Most of us don't like to imagine our mothers having sex with our fathers, even though it obviously happened. Chances are that your mother was as un- comfortable with your developing sexuality as you are with hers. She may have tried to educate you in how to be a gentleman in the way you relate to women, but it's unlikely that she was com- fortable with the idea of you being sexual with women. Whatever sexual morals you choose to adopt, you need to do so without being influenced by any latent sense of shame that you may be carrying based on your relationship with your mother. Connecting with your father or with other men more closely can help here (Step 7).
It took me a long time and several attempts for me to truly feel like I have forgiven my mother. It's not necessarily a one-off event; it's an ongoing process. Truly forgiving someone means accepting someone just the way they are without trying to change them or manipulate them into being different. You don't forgive for their sake; you forgive for yours. My mother still is stoic, emotionally detached and occasionally critical. She still says and does things that I don't like, so I need to keep forgiving her on an ongoing basis. I'm human too and resentment over past events I haven't fully let go of keep surfacing in me from time to time too.
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Women will judge you by the quality of the relationship you have with your mother. Dating guides aimed at women quite rightly suggest that they examine a man's relationship with his mother, for all the reasons I've suggested here. You owe it to yourself to resolve any unresolved issues that you have with your mother because they will show through in the way you re- late to women. She's waiting for you to cut the apron strings and learn to forgive her so you release yourself from her control and become free to be the confident man
you were meant to be.
What To Avoid
•Seeking Your Mother's Approval •Killing the bitch
when she pisses you off
•Becoming a Mommy's Boy
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