Managing Your Difficult Mother
Managing Your Difficult Mother
Has your mom hurt you?
Listen now: Managing Your Difficult Mother – Series 7, Episode 4
This is the 4th episode in our series Managing Your Dysfunctional Family where Lynn and Austin talk about how to manage your relationship with your mother. Our relationship with our mothers can be difficult and challenging – and that’s with a caring mom! When mothers are unable or unwilling to care for their children, a lot of damage can be done.
We’re going to approach this in a similar way to the Managing Your Difficult Father episode by talking about:
The Good – How does a mother impact and influence their child’s development?
The Bad – How do even the best-intentioned mothers let us down?
The Ugly – What happens when mothers neglect, harm, or abuse their children?
The Good
Going back to creation, we can see that God had a plan for both men and women to be involved in a child’s life – from procreation to protection, care, and nurturing. It’s also God’s plan that only women can bear children, which points to the unique role and advantage that a woman possesses. Not only does she “house, nurture and deliver” this new life, she has the inborn capacity to help her children feel seen, soothed, safe, and secure - which are the 4 S’s of attachment.
Good moms aren’t perfect! Good moms get angry, lose their temper, feel overwhelmed and exhausted, and are unable to meet all their child’s needs. Yet at the same time, a good mother respects her child as a valuable human being that is worthy of dignity and care. A good mother strives to meet her child’s needs and creates a safe place for the child to develop and grow without fear. She shows affection and compassion for her child while at the same time providing discipline and guidance.
The Bad
Bad mothers are ones who might have good intent, but they’re unable or unwilling to understand the harmful and negative impact they have on their children. To get a little more specific, we’ll name a few different kinds of mothers as listed in Susan Forward’s book, Mothers Who Can’t Love. If you recognize some of these traits from your own experience, it may feel distressing. Yet recognizing harmful behavior is an important step to being able to manage your relationship with your difficult mother.
THE NARCISSISTIC MOTHER: Narcissistic mothers “act” like they love their children, but it’s an illusion. The love only comes when the child is compliant and conforms to the mother’s wishes. A narcissist filters all incoming information through two primary questions: How does this make me look and how does this make me feel? if the child does anything that makes the mother LOOK bad or FEEL bad then the mother can’t tolerate that.
For further exploration of narcissism, you can listen to these previous episodes with Pastor Erwin Lutzer: The Roots of Narcissism and Managing the Weeds of Narcissism.
THE OVERLY ENMESHED MOTHER: This is a mother who lives vicariously through her children; she doesn’t know where she ends, and her kids begin. For these mothers, separating is not an option. She is locked in the role of providing care for them and wants her children to stay dependent on her. Her kids are her source of happiness and she can’t handle it if their ideas and opinions differ from hers: hearing the word “no” means that she is unloved.
THE CONTROL FREAK MOTHER: This mother needs to be in control of every aspect of her world and manages everything to maintain control. She lays down the rules and expects them to be followed or there will be dire consequences. These mothers tend to be perfectionists and hold others - especially their kids - to impossible standards.
MOTHERS WHO NEED MOTHERING: This is the mother who depends on you to take care of everything. Instead of being your caretaker, this mother expects and ultimately demands that you step into the mother role that she is abandoning. When children are parentified in this way, they feel overly responsible for other people’s needs in adulthood.
The Ugly
MOTHERS WHO NEGLECT, BETRAY, and BATTER: There is no good intent with ugly mothers. They deliberately harm their children - physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. This mother is unavailable, distant, and cold. Their self-centeredness swells to a level where they intentionally neglect their children’s basic needs. In the most tragic cases, they fail to protect them from predators and abusers, or even become the abuser themselves.
Four Steps to Healing from Mother-wounds
1. Call a spade a spade: Name behaviors for what they are: harmful, hurtful, not okay. If you minimize, excuse, or rationalize your mother’s bad behaviors then the burden of responsibility and ownership will remain with you. You’ll always feel that your mother’s lack of love is your fault which keeps you in feelings of shame, and continually striving to change her. But you can’t fix, change or control your mom, nor are you responsible for her feelings or her happiness!
2. Take ownership for your own healing: You’re not responsible for your difficult mother or how she treats you. In fact, it may be helpful for you to make a list of all the things that you are NOT responsible for and grieve the loss of all the things that you needed from your mother and didn’t get. This hurt goes very deep. This is where, as with healing father-wounds, we recommend that you find a qualified therapist to help you process, grieve, and heal.
3. Set healthy boundaries: If you’ve been entrenched in a pattern where you “have” to take care of your mom, boundaries are going to be super uncomfortable at first. Ask yourself some questions: How much time are you spending with your mom? Do you feel obligated to see her or talk to her more frequently than is comfortable for you? Are you still taking on responsibilities that should be hers? And last, are you allowing your mom to have access to your thoughts and feelings that she uses against you? If so, you can change this dynamic by setting boundaries around the level of sharing and involvement you allow your mother to have.
4. Grieve and forgive: As you grieve, be aware of the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation. We like to think of forgiveness as releasing a person from the debt they have incurred with you. You’re not seeking to punish or harboring bitterness against them. And yet, this doesn’t restore the relationship. You may not trust your mother because she hasn’t yet taken the steps to demonstrate a believable repentance. Your ability to trust is based on IMPACT. You can’t trust someone who isn’t aware of the impact that their actions have on you.
From Hurt to Healing
A lot more could be said on this topic, but we hope this is a good starting place for thinking about your relationship with your mom and how to heal if your mother is unable or unwilling to meet your needs. When we find that our relationship with our mother is beyond repair, God is both father and mother to us; as God says in Isaiah 66:13, “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you”.
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