Breaking up with your mother
“When she said, ‘I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have you. I wish your father would listen to me like you do,’ Tom had had enough. He hung up without a word and threw the phone to the floor in a rage. Teary-eyed, he screamed to his wife, ‘I don’t want to know about her personal problems! I hate it, but I don’t know what to do.’ As had happened so many times before, Tom’s evening with his wife was ruined.”
How does the above excerpt hit you? If you are like Tom and have had an unhealthy emotional bond with your mother, you might be feeling the same rage, frustration, and grief. Had I read this a few years ago, I would’ve flung the book across the room and shouted, “FUCK!” I am very familiar with Tom’s pain.Mothers are deeply connected to a boy’s development; there is no getting around it. It is in her womb that we grow. It is her umbilical cord that connects us. And it is her breast that feeds us and is the first source of softness and comfort we blindly grasp for. She has a special place in our psyche and we cannot help but be dependent on her and enamored by her. Eventually, we realize we are fundamentally different from mom. If things are ideal, we learn to psychologically separate from our mothers, enter the world of men, embrace our masculine qualities, and form healthy relationships with men and women. However, this is not the case for the modern man. The modern man is like Tom, hopelessly bound to being his mother’s confidant and emotional caretaker, all while resenting his mother and himself. Or the modern man is a chauvinist who has projected onto women his internalized rage towards his mother. And perhaps the most insidious of all, because it appears almost virtuous, is the Nice Guy who strives to please women and show them, “I’m not like those other guys,” then wallows in self-pity and resentment when she goes for “those assholes.” (I’m raising my own hand here – recovering nice guy).How did this come to be? It’s hard to say for certain. One thing that is clear is that this enmeshed relationship between mothers and sons is very common in the West. Robert Bly, in his book “Iron John,” points out that the industrial revolution was detrimental to the father-son relationship. With fathers gone from the home, boys spent most of their time with their mothers. And while in school back then, the majority of teachers were women.“For most boys, the first several years in school become basic training in how to please women… If a little boy was already disconnected from his father and trained to please a woman, the typical school system magnified conditioning.”
The departure of fathers from the home also contributed to tension between mothers and fathers. Mothering is a monumental task that requires energy, patience, and focus. In order for the mother to be at her best, she needs emotional support from those around her. In the traditional nuclear family, this was the father. With fathers gone and emotionally unavailable to their wives and children, mothers had to fulfill the task of being both the nurturer and disciplinarian in the house. Done long term, patience wears thin and resentment settles in. This resentment towards the husband, the main male figure of the household, becomes unconsciously projected onto the only other male in the house: her own son. Sons now bear the weight of their mothers’ frustration and unmet needs that were never their responsibility to bear. But as highly empathetic children, no boy wants to see his mother suffer. They will often step up to be what their father could not. They become, in effect, surrogate husbands. If he succeeds, his reward is being pedestalized as “mommy’s good little boy” and personal confidant to all her joys, woes, and secrets. This may seem innocuous from the outside, but this is a very slippery slope.Some aspects of this slippery slope are:Boys/men become emotionally enmeshed and monogamous to their mothers.Boys become frozen in boyhood and fail to cross the developmental stage of becoming a man.Boys become triangulated in the family. The closer mother and son become, the further mother and father become. The son drives a wedge between the parents.Men resort to addictions in an attempt to cope with pain, confusion, and free themselves from their mothers.
As depicted in the excerpt above, Tom was emotionally enmeshed with his mother. He was her confidant and made to be her emotional caretaker. This resulted in Tom being emotionally unavailable to his own wife because his mother owned so much emotional real estate in his mind. Men who are enmeshed and monogamous to their mothers have great difficulty forming healthy relationships with other women. They carry into those relationships their deepest fantasies and deepest fears, terrified of intimacy and being vulnerable. As hard as it is to admit, our mothers are our first lovers. No other woman can give us that same attention (positive or negative) as she did. The quotes below capture the dynamics in this mother-son bond.“He becomes a victim of repetition, looking to women reminiscent of his mother for the things he never got from her, as if he would make up for some terrible emotional wound. If he needs tenderness he will not look for a sweet, gentle woman, but rather for one who is cold and reserved; then he can win her over and finally bring out the gentleness in her.
Paul’s adult behavior was a repressed form of protest against his mother; it expressed his anger at having been neglected. He was looking constantly for someone who would love him unconditionally. He refused to admit that his childhood was over, that no one now owed him that kind of love. At the same time he felt guilty about imposing himself on others through extreme behaviors. He therefore tried to gain forgiveness by showing his extreme willingness to help others.
The deep reason for Julian’s involvement with feminism lies in his fear of being abandoned and in his intense desire to be rewarded with maternal affection for even his smallest acts on behalf of women. His feminism does not come from a conscious decision; it is only another attempt to please women and to stay in their good graces. As long as a man is not liberated from his mother he cannot love another woman; his libido, his vital force, remains imprisoned in his mother complex.”
Boys become frozen in boyhood when raised by their mothers. Contrary to what people may believe, women do not raise boys into men. Men raise boys into men. However, with fathers gone or emotionally unavailable, boys are stuck in boyhood. Historically, the world of men was shrouded in darkness and secrecy. Rites of passage involved practices that physically or psychologically terrorized and wounded boys. The idea is that the masculine edge grows through challenge and friction. The feminine is soft and nurturing, but the masculine is hard and confronting. Boys raised by women are stuck in the merry-go-round where they face the ambivalence of wanting to get off the ride and go their own way, but also afraid to leave the comfort of their mothers. Again, Corneau has powerful observations to speak to this dynamic.“She is both permissive and sadistic with her son, overprotective, and intolerant of his attempts to be independent. She thinks she is protecting him from the outside world, when in fact she is breaking down his initiative and his confidence in himself.
Intimacy wounds him because it is beyond his control; he is torn between wanting to run away and letting himself wallow in affection. He is frightened of turning into a child again, a child at the mercy of the hungry dragon.”
This aspect of boys feeling lost and reliant on mothers to help them grow into men visited me vividly in a dream I had four years ago. In this dream, I am seeing a line of boys who are having sex with girls. After they had sex, they had become men. I am sad because I realize I do not have a girl to have sex with. I turn my back to the line of boys and look to my mom and say, “Mom, I need to have sex with a girl to become a man. I don’t have a girl. Can you substitute for me?” She offers her body to me, almost as if to say it was her duty to initiate me into becoming a man. I then proceed to have sex with my mom in the dream and all I feel is deep shame, embarrassment, and disgust towards myself. I do not make eye contact with my mom during this “initiation” and feel nauseated by the sweat and oil pouring from our bodies. Immediately after having sex with her, I rush to the shower to clean myself off. When I woke, I couldn't believe how symbolic this dream was. In spite of how disgusted I felt, I knew that it was showing me a deep truth within my psyche that I had to confront, no matter how gross it felt. The pain and depression I had experienced in my life was a result of not shining light on the dark and disgusting sewers of my unconscious. It was time to get dirty. I dove into the darkness and learned to live there. It was time to confront the reality of how dependent I had become on my mother (regardless of her feeding into it), the feelings of rage and impotence I felt, and the reality that I was afraid of men. Thus began the journey of severing the psychological umbilical cord to my mother and entering the unknown territory of men. I was determined to reclaim my masculine power.This understanding shed light on my habitual patterns and addiction to porn/masturbation, video gaming, and overeating. These addictions helped me cope with the pain, confusion, and powerlessness I felt in my relationship with my mom. Through pornography and masturbation, I played out narratives where I was finally good enough for women. It was also a place where my rage towards my mother became eroticized: I could say whatever the fuck I wanted and dirty talk to the images and videos of women I immersed myself in. Unfortunately, these fantasies and addictions never addressed the root of my pain. Like many men, the very addictions that created the illusion of power and control soon became my undoing. The addictions began to control me. This is where the power of psychodrama comes in – a therapeutic process in which the pain or conflict of an event/relationship can be acted out in reality instead of in fantasy. For me, this looked like working with therapists who provided a container for me to shout, scream, cry, and fall apart as I expressed verbally and physically all the things I was terrified of saying out loud. I then began to do this on my own and create art or do self-guided visualizations to work out my pain.Below are art pieces I created in my own process. (Fair warning, they are dark, macabre art and may evoke strong visceral responses).
Corneau shares how he worked with a client of his to do the very same thing.“With a mixture of laughter and tears he allowed himself to break the taboo and give in to his rage. The following image then emerged: in the basement of the family home he hacks his mother to death with an axe and then stomps on her bloody remains in a sort of dance of jubilation. For Alex this imagining was a radical experience. He finally went to the end of his negative feelings and reached the sadistic murderer within him. The experience calmed him. The negative feelings that had governed him before gradually found expression in more realistic forms. His hatred of his mother transformed into an appreciation of all she had done for him. And little by little he rediscovered his enjoyment of life.”
“So what do I do!?” you might be asking. First, I want to normalize your experience of confusion, rage, and shame. This is often the reaction when a man realizes what he thought was a “normal” relationship with his mother is not so innocent as it seems.My recommendation is that you: Consider working with a therapist to help you process your emotions around thisAccept that your mother was only doing the best that she knew how toRelease any responsibility you feel to rescue your motherSet firm boundaries with your mother and within yourselfRead and study to better understand yourselfRepeat affirmations such as, “This is my body. This is my mind. They belong to me. I release myself from being emotionally and mentally bonded to my mother. She must do her own healing and I must do my own healing.”
Forgiveness and acceptance will come in time, but not by you shoehorning yourself into it. You must move through the stages of rage, anger, and grief before you reach acceptance and forgiveness. It can be difficult to hold the reality of loving your mother and also hating her. Accepting both is part of being a whole person. Once you can accept and metabolize the hate, you will begin to see it transform into gratitude.It is a scary and monumental task to grow up and become a man. But it is also this very man who you have been waiting for. The savior, the hero, is you.Resources for study and exploration:"No More Mr. Nice Guy” by Robert Glover“Silently Seduced” by Kenneth Adams“Absent Fathers, Lost Sons” by Guy Corneau“Iron John” by Robert BlyYoutube video on Nice Guys