Looking for the Patterns …. Healing Our Relationships with our Mothers

Looking for the Patterns …. Healing Our Relationships with our Mothers

My childhood was very dysfunctional; it was filled with "shoulds," family rules, family secrets, abuse, being good and saying and doing the right things necessary for my survival. It was not a stable environment; in fact, it was a traumatic situation whereby I was concerned with my physical safety and that of my siblings and my mother. I felt that I had a lot of responsibility as a child to try to find solutions that would protect everyone and keep the negative experiences from escalating out of control, while protecting myself and the others. If I was successful I felt loved. If I was not successful I felt devastated, fearful and unloved by the others. I wanted to know why they didn’t love me.

Because my childhood was difficult, I always felt that my mother rejected me; however, other times I also felt that I rejected my mother. I understand now that perhaps she might have been held captive by her own patterns of conditioning and created experiences of her own that oddly turned out to be very similar to patterns of my experiences. Many times I would say to myself, "I will not be like my mother." Then, suddenly, words would come out of my mouth that was her words exactly.

I felt abandoned by my mom; I felt she had no time for me and that she did not love me. Whatever the cause, I reacted to the rejection by withdrawing behind a protective barrier so that I would not be hurt. I had a tendency to try to win her love and acceptance by taking on duties and family responsibilities and building a life of wealth and success; as if to say “Look Mom….see me now.” I now have the knowledge and wisdom to see that my emotional responsibilities might have been founded on guilt, and I can see where I carried this pattern with me in other relationships.

The situation is perhaps more complex then I could have imagined in those years. I had a strong emotional hunger and need for security as a result of my childhood experiences. My mother, because of her own circumstances, could not fulfill my needs and demands as a child. I interpreted her actions as rejection and, in turn, rejected her when she wanted to be warm and loving. We often can be very difficult to approach when we feel hurt, and some of us have the emotional resilience and determination to withdraw emotionally for quite long periods of time.

Furthermore, these extraordinary circumstances regarding my relationship with my mother and my general upbringing evoked a very detached emotional attitude in me. My relationship with my mother was characterized by a sense of equality or of a friendship, rather than the traditional patterns of dependence. I often switched roles, whereby I felt like I was parenting her in ways that I thought were protecting her. I was never allowed to feel a natural dependence, and I tried to protect myself by developing detachment; from another point of view, I rejected mother when she did try to assume the traditional maternal role. This may have been because there was an element of unpredictability about my mother's behavior, a situation where I never knew what she was going to do next. I also know that, looking from the perspective of a child, I might not have been able to feel her love for me.

As I looked back even farther and even deeper into this issue, I could see that the patterns in my mother and me were the same as her mother and herself. I was very loving, protective and compassionate with my mother as she went through her own negative experiences, which she a shared with me ─ as if they were hard to miss. I liked being the strong one for the family. I felt needed, loved, validated and important; but I also felt power over her and I was often angry at some of her decisions in life. As I grew older, I saw her as a loving, compassionate person, but weak and always dependent on others for everything. She was not able to decide anything for herself because she had very little self-worth.

Little did I understand that what I was seeing was also within me. I did not see myself beneath my "winning formula." I saw that I was bright, well-educated, successful, wealthy, and all the things my mother was not able to accomplish. I set out to become much more than my mother, much better than my mother; but did I really?

To really understand this pattern, I had to see something I was not willing to look at: the hurtful patterns that I experienced as a child and that I was now passing on to my own child. This meant healing for me on two levels ─ one with my mother and one with my daughter. There were times when I was definitely the parent and my daughter the child; and other times where I might have given my daughter too much information on the negative experiences I was having in my life, whereby the roles seemed to reverse. I became the child, just like my mother did with me.

I looked for comfort from my daughter, which she would give me as she slipped into a parental, nurturing role. This was comforting to me at the time but, later, I was feeling ashamed for laying my burdens on her shoulders. I felt that I was failing as a mom and I experienced feelings of guilt, loss of self-worth, and loss of respect. I perceived all that were in her eyes, but they were actually within me.

I saw that I had been affected by my daughter to some degree concerning my self-worth as a parent and person. I also saw how this issue affected her well-being and feelings of self-worth. I saw myself, my mother and my daughter with more clarity and the details of my patterns with each of them so much more than I could have ever imagined. I understood that my codependency was not really about my mother or my daughter; it was about me needing to heal a dysfunctional relationship with myself.

When we reject others especially those who have close energetic connections to us, it is important to understand that we are also rejecting some aspect of our self……love and light Christina