Manipulative mothers and the effects of toxic love on their children
“A mother has two duties: to worry and to avoid it”.
Being, not being a mother, is a path as exciting as full of pitfalls, overflowing with bridges and abysses, tears and repairs. It is a bond that starts from afar, when the child is not yet in the womb but lives in the heart, when she is not yet in the flesh but is a ghost child; bond that then continues for the rest of life, even when the child is an adult by birth. The emotional relationship between mother and son (or daughter) should walk the balance between presence and the right distance, between care, nurturing and autonomy.
The alternation of love and the right distance, however, is almost never easy to implement. It is a chimerical dance between the needs of the mother and those of the son, between the mother's projections and her fears. Between the submerged and the unsolved that move the strings of many behaviors or needs of the heart and a child who tries to come out with difficulty from the egg-family.
The ability to be good mothers, or good mothers, depends on a variegated kaleidoscope of factors: on the mother's personality structure, on the child's character, on the parental bond - therefore on the "health" of the couple - and on the family dynamics that they came to be created. The mother walks in the balance like a tightrope between her being her mother, her being her woman and life partner. The balances are complex and sometimes one area looms over the other with the risk of engulfing it.
When the child is small, the mother is usually particularly attentive. Her psycho-physical growth, her well-being and her future depend on her care and attention. The child grows up, and the mother-child relationship gets underway. The balances change, or should change, the balance needle moves towards the pole of autonomy: physical and psychic. The mother, although she is always present, takes or should take a step back.
She teaches him to tie his own shoes, to eat alone, to take the bus to school without getting lost, to cross the street without being run over. The first conquests appear and consequently the first anxieties. Some mothers find it difficult to detach themselves from their child because they think that he, or she, cannot move freely in the world without her indispensable presence, and because she, the mother, no longer has a reason to exist without the maternal role and identity of she.
They consider it small, to be looked after, fragile for a world so full of pitfalls and threats. A child who is raised on bread and anxieties will in turn become an anxious and insecure adult, fragile and scared of the new, with low self-esteem. He won't be able to manage on his own, with a good chance he will seek out dominant partners to guide him in the hope of receiving parental care and psychological support in return.
When a mother's love suffocates
Sometimes a mother's love becomes a noose, a handcuff, an encumbrance. She becomes morbidly asphyxiating. It takes away the air, the living spaces, it clips the wings to the growth and adult dimension of the child's existence. Some mothers, due to their personality structure, because they in turn were raised by cumbersome and omnipresent mothers whose footsteps they reproduce again, because they are unhappily married, and for many other reasons they become asphyxiated mothers. Hyper vigilant, controlling, exuberant, super present, substitutes for the needs of the children.
In practice, they make a very dangerous shift from their lives and their most secret needs to that of their children. They try to have control over everything thinking they know what is the best choice for their child, an attitude that becomes more acute when the child grows up and starts making his own decisions independently. Which high school to attend, which boyfriend or girlfriend to love, how to dress, make up, or not to shave.
The child who becomes an adult leaves a void that cannot be filled, thus, when the mother has made only the mother, she cannot stand detachment, she cannot transform the bond into an adult and resolved bond, veering dangerously and in spite of herself towards a dimension of selfishness, narcissism and manipulation, of extreme seduction.
Moms who love too much
Badness or previous traumas? The script that repeats itself
Except in cases of previous psychopathologies, a mother does not become engulfing or aggressive out of pure pleasure or out of innate malice, but because of the childhood they have lived, which she has not elaborated and which she tends to re-propose in a dangerously unchanged way. These are mothers who in turn have suffered mothers or bulky, icy, rigid parents. Women who have themselves been humiliated, as well as controlled and manipulated.
These mothers were trapped in their childhood bloody wound which they attempted, amateurishly and inadequately, to heal by establishing a compensatory bond with their children. One of the most powerful mechanisms of the psyche is the compulsion to repeat, a sort of trap that leads to repeating ancient relational scripts, even the most dysfunctional.
History repeats itself, but this time the roles are reversed: the victim becomes the perpetrator, and the unloved daughter becomes an unbearable mother. In other cases, the behavior of manipulative mothers is due to character and personological traits that are difficult to change: women with a strong and dominant character who always need to keep everything under control, to control, to command.
Another case of unhappiness for children is their permanence in dysfunctional families. Unhappily married women shift their denied needs onto their children, sublimate and compensate. They promote him as a substitute partner, they make him a boyfriend, a lover, a husband who frantically tries to satisfy their need for care.
In the shadow of the mother no child grows.
The recurrent use of lies and denials
Between guilt and the need to fix, a child doesn't understand why he's sick, because he struggles to feel independent. Because he feels wrong, out of the box, inadequate. He feels the links of the maternal grip on his skin, but he doesn't see them, he doesn't know how to loosen it, how to get rid of it. He is afraid of hurting and disappointing her, of causing her further pain by her independent or rebellious behavior. To love in freedom, to dress as he wants and to choose the job he likes. In short, to become himself.
The cumbersome shadow of an intrusive or too present mother can have serious implications in the achievement of independence and happiness. A child raised under the hegemony of a manipulative mother had to get by as well as she could. You have learned the recurrent use of lies or half-truths in an attempt to carve out a corner of the sky.
Lying is for him a way out of the maternal grip, a real survival mechanism. At first he implements it so as not to disappoint his mother, to avoid the sense of guilt following her non-approval, in some way to try to survive; over time, he learns to use this "resource", he makes it his own, so he will automate its saving use even in adulthood, to avoid assuming responsibility for his actions as an independent person. The lie defends him from reality testing, protects him, will cloak himself to hide his emotions and fears, with the sole purpose of not disappointing his mother, in a vain attempt to live or rather to survive in any context.
Unresolved and intrusive mothers treat their children as if they were personal property. A precious asset to take care of and worry about, always and forever. This toxic bond has a whole range of implications for the child's emotional, psychic and sexual development. In the love and sexual sphere, a child who becomes an adult will live in bonds of love in a limping way: on the one hand he wants to love and be loved, on the other he fears unconsciously betraying his mother and finding an engulfing woman like her.
He thus develops a clear difficulty in establishing intimacy and a genuine emotional connection with an adult partner. He will look for unequal ties without real planning to defend his fears, and his immobilism of the heart. On the sexual level, he may experience an erectile deficit due to an excess of anxiety - from performance and from relationships -, premature ejaculation, due to the ambivalent relationship with the female figure, or delayed ejaculation due to hyper emotional control.
Even the choice of the ideal woman will be a path fraught with difficulties.
For the invasive mother no woman can be good for the heir. Too high, too low. Demanding, uncompromising. Accommodating, resigned. foreign.
Functions and dysfunctions of a family.
How a mother manipulates: from sweet to hostile words to symptoms
Taking care of a child doesn't (not always) mean worrying about them. Keeping fear to yourself for a symbolic and tiring stage in her life is equivalent to giving him the opportunity to take flight. Ensuring that the child who has now become an adult, at least in terms of age, can access his adult dimension of existence: the psychic one and autonomy.
An invasive mother does not give up and manipulates her as she can. She seduces with grace and an excess of fuss and kindness, she wounds with sharp and judgmental words. And when she's not getting what she wants, she manipulates with the symptoms, developing an anxiety neurosis, and blaming her illness on her wayward and ungrateful son.
A good mother, or rather a good mother, should take a step, sometimes even more than one, backwards to make her child fall and get up again; her that she makes mistakes and fixes, that she chooses wrong loves to then understand what she no longer wants from her life; that she finds her psychic center of gravity, without crutches or vicarious maternal substitutes.
