The Other Influence

Years ago, I began my blog writing about the link between the emotionally unavailable men we choose and our own emotionally unavailable fathers.

And while so many of you found your answers in exactly that connection, there was another group of women finding their way here as well.

For them, this wasn't at all about their fathers. It was about their .... mothers.

The first one I chalked up to an anomaly. A few more and I still thought it was rare. But the more women I worked with, the more I realized there was something here I had to explore further. Book after book and article after article, combined with in-person interviews confirmed for me what my real-life experience had suggested.

It wasn’t just our emotionally unavailable dads who had created this pattern of attraction as normal in our lives; for many of us, it was our mothers.

Growing up enmeshed in their world, we never learned how to be our own person. Their existence, their very survival, depended on this unhealthy relationship with us where we grew up taking care of their emotional needs, never developing the healthy separation of discovering our own boundaries and our own needs.

The feelings we received in return - being loved, being validated, being adored for meeting those needs of our mothers – and the opposite negative feelings that would result if we didn’t – set us up for a future of taking care of everyone else’s emotional needs, to the detriment of our own.

When this becomes our norm, when we learn the positive reinforcement of basking in the love and approval of a mother whose needs we’ve learned how to predict and navigate to keep on her good side, we don’t realize how unhealthy this connection is for us.

Indeed, on the surface, it seems like the culturally ascribed perfect mother-daughter relationship.

It’s no surprise then, that when we dare to question it, or even take a closer look at what’s really going on here, we’re shamed and guilted by a public opinion that protects the mother regardless of how much hurt and pain she may be inflicting on her daughter.

And yet, spinning her ever familiar brand of guilt and shame on her children as a way to control their behavior and maintain the always necessary status quo, there’s no room for a child to develop her own healthy sense of self apart from her mother.

It would be too much for the mother, even though there's never a conversation around how it’s ALWAYS too much for her daughter!

To be clear, it doesn't start with her. It's when her own needs were never met as a child, that she projects those needs onto her own children when she grows up and becomes a mother herself, expecting them to do what she learned to do, putting her own mother's needs before her own.

The stories I hear from you who’ve grown up with mothers like this are heartbreaking. You led me on a search to see this connection in my own relationship with my mother that I’ve had to work hard on forming boundaries around.

If you’ve been wondering why you have such a hard time around setting boundaries, if you’ve often wondered why your emotionally unavailable father only seemed to tell part of the story, I hope this helps you to understand yourself better.

When all you’ve had modeled for you is how to get your needs met through guilt and shame and no direct conversations about what you actually might need, this becomes your pattern. You’re not your own person, you belong to someone else.

So where do you go from here if this is resonating with you?

You become aware, you acknowledge, you accept. And most importantly, you learn to set your own boundaries. You draw a line around yourself and you don’t allow anyone to cross that line who isn’t emotionally safe enough to respect that you have a right to those boundaries in the first place.

You recognize the pattern that so readily plays itself out here, where you keep repeating the pattern of caretaking for everyone else, doing their work for them, seeking that same kind of enmeshment with someone who - this time - you might actually be able to win over,  finding precisely the men who from their own wounded backgrounds, choose you for exactly this trait.

You'll never be enough for these types of men in exactly the same way you could never be enough for a mother like this.

As her needs grew, so did her requirements of you to remain on her good side. These needs change all the time, so you learned to read her mind, to read her moods, to sense what she needed from you, just like you now read him so well.

You stop blaming yourself, you stop victimizing yourself, and you start recognizing your right to your own individual personhood instead.

A narcissistic mother can’t allow you to be separate from her. You’re an extension of her, you’re a reflection of her and if you refuse to be, she will try to guilt and shame you just like she’s done before. And the more you distance yourself from her, the more you try to be your own person, instead of recognizing the strength and courage within you and celebrating that with you, she’ll only want you back the way you were before.

And this is why, when you wonder why you can’t find it within yourself to break free of yet another guy who isn’t there, who doesn’t show up, who isn’t capable of allowing you to have your own needs let alone meet those needs, this theme lives on in your life.

Once again, it’s never about you and your needs, it’s about him and his needs.

Oh girl, you’re so good at meeting everyone else’s needs, but what about your own? You learned this. And you can unlearn it. No, it’s not selfish.

It’s exactly how we begin to change this pattern of being there for everyone else, of deserting ourselves, and feeling the guilt and shame of looking out for ourselves instead of following our programming and the positive rush we get of knowing we’re yet again living up to our programming of putting everyone else's needs before our own.

It sounds just like we've been brought up to be, but no one can live up to that facade. No, we do this begrudgingly, resentfully. Because we've never known anything else.

This has been a topic on my mind for a while and if this resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. You're the forgotten ones who are often overlooked in so many conversations. I hope you feel seen here. I'd love to hear from you in the comments below.