Physically abusive mothers

Mothering Ourselves: Adult Survivors of Abusive Mothers

“If I could go back in time, I would want to tell myself…You are beautiful. You are perfect. You are loved”– Katrina Mayer

In 2019, nearly 62% of victims of child maltreatment were perpetrated by their mother, making mothers the most common perpetrators of child abuse (US Department of Health & Human Services, 2019). It is important to note that these are only the cases that are reported to child protective services and many cases go unreported.

Sometimes emotional abuse by mothers is not recognized as such because these parenting methods are less overt and seem more “acceptable.” When compared to physical or sexual abuse, emotional abuse may not be considered as harmful. However, research now shows that children that suffer emotional maltreatment suffer effects equal to or greater than children who are physically or sexually abused. These behaviors may also be overlooked because a mother is single and does not have support or the has been abused herself and may not recognize her actions as abusive. Unfortunately, just as with other forms of abuse, emotional abuse can leave life-long scars on all members of the family (Spinazzola, et al., 2015).

Here are some behaviors or actions of an abusive mother that may not be easily recognized (Mayo Clinic, 2018):

Overly critical
Blaming the child for the mother’s stress
Expressing that the child is not able to do anything good enough
Making it the child’s job to keep her happy
Responding in an inconsistent and erratic manner
Limiting interactions with others
Demanding an inappropriate level of performance in school, at home, etc.

Mother’s Day can be a day of struggle for many people who have a history of being abused by their mothers. This day can bring up many painful memories and feelings of conflict about having or not having a relationship with your mother at this time in your life.

If this struggle resonates with you due to your relationship with your mother, please know that you are not alone. As a child, you did not have a choice. Abused children are usually quite loyal to even the most abusive of mothers, which is logical because a child counts on their mother for survival. As adults, although you may have the choice to have a relationship with your mother or not, either way can cause a significant amount of pain. Sometimes the psychological consequences of reconnecting with your mother can be so great that it outweighs attempting to repair the relationship. This can be a difficult boundary to set, as many other family members/friends may not support you in this decision.

If you have experienced maternal abuse, it may be helpful to intentionally set what Mother’s Day will look like for you. Here are some ideas and feel free to add as many as you think will work for you:

Set boundaries and be okay with your decision
Put space between yourself and your mother/family
Make plans with a close friend
Give yourself permission to grieve

Ask for support from friends, family you are close to, or professionals
Engage in an activity that brings you joy
Plan for self-care (walk in nature, work-out, meditate, get a massage)
Give your inner child the grace, love and compassion that you have always deserved

Resilient Retreat is here to support you. We have many programs and support groups focused on self-care such as trauma-informed yoga, meditation, therapeutic art/movement/writing, empowerment, boundary setting, etc. We also have a Kind Line available Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm. Please feel free to call for one on one support! You can also see our current programs on our website at www.resilientretreat.org/calendar

References:

Mayo Clinic (2018). Child Abuse. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/child-abuse/symptoms-causes/syc-20370864
Spinazzola, J., Hodgdon, H., Liang, L., Ford, J. D., Layne, C. M., Pynoos, R., Briggs, E. C., Stolbach, B., & Kisiel, C. (2015). Unseen wounds. American Psychological Association, 47, 68. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2015/07-08/ce-corner
US Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Bureau (2019). Child Maltreatment 2019 (30). Children’s Bureau. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/cm2019. pdf

Why Are Mothers Abusive To Daughters?

Many adult women experience ambivalent and strained relationships with their aging mothers, a kind of low-level or chronic, painful entanglement. This strain between mothers and daughters is pervasive, complicated, and still rather taboo. Women may lightly joke with one another about their mothers but endure seriously painful dynamics that never seem to get fully resolved, only endured. This mother-daughter strain can be particularly acute around Mother’s Day when the culture plays out the toxic, dehumanizing myth that all mothers are loving all the time and all daughters should be grateful no matter the shadow dynamics in the relationship. So, why are mothers abusive to daughters? Meet your mom’s inner child.

The third person in your relationship with your mother is her inner child.

Depending on how much trauma your own mother endured as a child and how much healing or inner work she has done in her life, your mother’s unhealed inner child has always played a role in your dynamic with her. We typically see our mothers as adults because that’s what she is, however, it can be useful to understand that your mother’s inner child plays a key role in how she behaves towards you.

The Role of Trauma In Toxic Mother-Daughter Relationships

Understanding how your mother’s inner child plays a role in your dynamic is a useful lens because:

It allows us to see our mothers as human beings who have faced incredible challenges, including possible trauma or abuse.
It helps us as adult daughters to not take their behavior so personally and not carry it as something we need to resolve or fix on her behalf, which is impossible.
It helps to be more discerning in choosing how to interact with her from an empowered, adult place and to stay in our sovereignty as individuals.

Trauma Is Passed Down

It’s no secret that many of us adult women have seen our aging mothers endure some measure of hardship and difficulty in their lives. Our mothers could only be present, protective, loving, and reliable to the degree that they felt loved, safe, and valued by their own family of origin. Many of our mothers have experienced deep hardship, traumatic experiences, depression, etc. which are things that society has hidden, shamed, or kept in shadow—making it shameful for mothers to need help, ask for support, or reach out. Often it was the children who saw the truth and bore the brunt of family secrets, abuses, and neglect which the mothers were forbidden to feel, face or confront, due to multi-layered obstacles both within and outside the home.

Trauma Is Silenced

In older generations, traumatic experiences were not openly talked about or worked through. They were often swept under the rug under a mandate of silence and shame. One simply pretended these awful things did not happen and the feelings about them did not exist. Thus, many of our mothers have endured severe trauma that went unacknowledged and underground into their unconscious. She may have had to push away these memories or painful feelings to survive and stay stable as a mother herself. A woman who went through childhood trauma with little to no support gets developmentally stunted and can’t develop her full potential. This has implications for her emotional development, and self-esteem, and this limits what she can offer her own daughter.

Trauma Is Unresolved

Your mother’s unresolved traumas have an impact on how she relates to you. These are the events and dynamics that shaped our mother’s personality and disposition towards herself, life, and those around her. It shaped the lens through which she sees you as her daughter. Depending on how much self-awareness and processing she has done about her own history, your mother may have brought her own psychological baggage to bear heavily on her relationship with you, in ways that she may not even be aware of, or wants to be aware of. This is not to judge or blame our mothers or make them wrong in some way. Rather, this is about making these painful things conscious so that they can be healed and can’t continue to cause harm. It’s about freeing ourselves and coming generations from childhood pain getting unwittingly passed on.

As adult women, bravely exploring this is a form of deep love and empathy for the little girls we were, and as “inner mothers” we transform that painful “prison” we grew up in into a safe inner “playground” where our inner child can finally be free, protected and loved unconditionally, within us as adult empowered women.

Why Are Mothers Abusive To Daughters? Inner Child Explained

A mother who has endured trauma with no support or healing work done may unconsciously BLEND with her own inner child in moments, projecting the rage, punishment, and aggression about how SHE was deprived or betrayed by her own mother, onto her daughter. Through the distorted lens of her own wounded inner child, the mother may see her own daughter as her own rejecting, betraying, or abandoning mother in moments, all the while feeling entitled to compliance and deference from her daughter. The daughter then feels confused, unseen, silenced, and longing for approval. A huge gulf develops between them.

Toxic Mother-Daughter Relationship Signs

Signs that your mother’s inner child is “at the wheel” may include (these things can be overt or very subtle):

Mother gets reactive, snappy, cutting, or curt in her comments in an underhanded, undermining way. There’s a “flip” or “turn” when her behavior changes.
Mother displays signs of jealousy, envy, or competition towards the daughter.
Mother acts like a bully with no sense of accountability or responsibility. Can be aggressive and domineering.
Mother has moments of sadism; she likes to hurt your feelings and seems to take some pleasure or satisfaction in making you feel bad or in “one-upping” you.
Mother has tantrums, creating drama, tension, and upheaval around her.
When things are going well for you she seems to be going through a hard time.
Mother has moments of immaturity, being petty, and childish (sulks, tantrums, demands attention, etc. ).
Mother has a narrative of victimhood and entitlement, what you owe her, what the world owes her, how she’s been done wrong, etc. Nothing sustainably shifts her mood.
The mother always has to be the center of attention and catered to. Your feelings and needs as her daughter are secondary.
No curiosity about you; she appears to assume that she already knows what you think or feel or do, without ever asking or listening. You feel more like an image in her mind, or an extension of her own body, or a cardboard cutout of a person.

In moments, you feel like she looks at you more like a threat, a perpetrator, or a competitor, rather than as her daughter. Sometimes a strange absence of “mother”.
She may sometimes act as though she’s been physically attacked or disturbed when you do express a differing value, opinion, or expect to be heard.
You know you can’t be your authentic self around her. You feel like you have to “armor up”, mentally prepare for seeing her, or put on a mask of what she wants you to be.
Your body gives you strong signals, such as an ominous, sinking feeling, an urge to flee, a feeling of being frozen or stuck, a feeling like all your energy has left your body, start to feel “small” like shrinking in her presence, adrenaline surges of wanting to argue or defend yourself but you deflate and feel small.
You feel like you always have to be the “bigger person” and take the “high road.”
She’s oblivious to all that you’re feeling and shows no interest in your inner life. If you do share, she quickly changes the subject or brushes off what you’ve said.
She’s very role-based, meaning that her role as your mother removes her of all responsibility and accountability towards you. She is entitled as a mother and any degree of discontent is interpreted as disrespect towards her. Your separate reality is an affront to her.

How Adult Daughters Are Conditioned To Respond

Most adult daughters of these aging, wounded mothers have compassion for their mothers and truly long for a healthy, loving, close relationship with their mothers. These women often blame themselves and try everything under the sun to try to make their mothers happy, avoid her bad moods and tantrums, cheer her up, get her to look on the bright side, and excuse or downplay toxic behavior with things like:

“She doesn’t mean it. She’s been through so much.”
“I should have compassion for her. I need to have more patience.“
“My anger means I must be a bad, ungrateful daughter.”
“She’s the only mother I have. I am obligated to put up with this.”
“She gave birth to me. I owe her my life.”

The problem is that nothing ever gets talked about or improved. Resentment builds and it becomes about “enduring” the relationship. You may go into a slump for days or weeks after seeing her. Your own mental and physical health may suffer.

Common Themes for Adult Daughters of Toxic Mothers

The mother expects her daughter to pretend like it never happened. She forgets conflict when it’s over and nothing ever gets resolved.
You try everything; explaining your motives and feelings, empathizing with her feelings, trying to cheer her up, focusing on the positive, giving her books to read, podcasts to listen to, only to be repeatedly shot down, ignored, or dismissed.
A constant refrain of self-blame and shame: “There must be something wrong with me that she is this way. I just have to change myself to create the relationship with her that I want. Someday I’ll get it right. I just have to keep trying.”
You feel increasingly off-balance and may start to question your perception of reality.

Why Are Mothers Abusive to Daughters? Deprivation Consciousness Explained

What is happening here is that the deprivation that the mother experienced as a child gets unconsciously projected onto her daughter. In the absence of any substantive insight or tools derived from inner work around her own childhood trauma, the mother may easily project and mistake her own daughter as the source of her pain and frustration, rather than it coming from her own disowned pain within her; from her own inner child.

A daughter is a potent target for a mother’s unprocessed traumas and the resultant rage, anger, and deprivation she experienced in her life.
The mother may have experienced the same with her own mother. Tension and deprivation may have built up for decades from the pain of enduring that.
A daughter is always “positioned below” the mother, always in a position of deference, similar to a woman being the inferior sex in a patriarchal culture.
Arguably, it’s a path of least resistance for a dysfunctional mother to “punch down” onto a daughter. Not necessarily as easy to do that with a son, husband, or sister as a dumping ground or punching bag.
Female aggression is not culturally approved of, so this aggression can be very subtle, intermittent, or cloaked in seemingly benign or on the surface, motherly behaviors.

Many adult daughters feel deep compassion for their mothers; a lack of compassion is typically not the issue. What many adult daughters find difficult is to have compassion WITH boundaries, as toxic mothers often find a daughter’s expression of independence as intolerable. The growth edge for the daughter is to hold her own ground, stay anchored in her own reality no matter how the mother is behaving, and respectfully set boundaries accordingly.

How Did This Play Out When The Daughter Was a Child

For a wounded mother, a female baby or young daughter’s expressions of joy, spontaneity, or independence can trigger painful feelings of loss, grief, or anger about her own history. The mother’s inner child may feel like, “How dare you be a happy, carefree child when I had to sublimate that in myself to survive? How dare you enjoy and express what I’ve had to kill or mute in myself? I didn’t get to be happy and carefree, why should you?!”

A triangulation is happening here. If the mother is not self-reflective or self-aware, the daughter is set up in competition with her mother’s inner child, creating a constant tension and battle that a daughter can never win.

Unpredictably, the mother can get triggered, blend with her inner child and see her daughter through that lens of a competitor, abandoning mother, perpetrator, or threat. Without warning, the mother may shame, betray, humiliate, and withdraw from the daughter based on the rollercoaster of her own triggers, which are like “burps” from her own painful past. These triggers create the optical illusion that the daughter is somehow a present threat, causing the mother to withdraw or lash out. With little self-awareness, the mother may be completely unconscious of this and even disassociate, not even remembering it hours or days later. The mother’s behavior may flip from adult behaviors to child-like behaviors unpredictably. So if the daughter attempts to talk about it, the mother may not be lying when she denies it or says she can’t recall it.

Daughters Must Obey In Exchange For Love and Safety

This creates an impossible situation for the daughter because the mother, as the adult, always has the power and controls the narrative of what happens. The daughter is a child and thus has a biological imperative to seek her mother’s approval and see herself as a source of conflict as a way to preserve the connection with her mother. The mother may be totally unconscious of why she feels so triggered by her daughter, unaware that she is replaying these dynamics that may have originated with her own mother. For the daughter, the aggression, entitlement, and immaturity of a little girl are playing out under the guise and power of the role of the mother. In effect, the mother’s inner child always wins because she has adult status and the daughter always loses. In response, the child may experience extremely painful emotions that are not safe to process or express, such as terror and despair, as they would only make her more of a target and so they have to be suppressed.

The daughter is a victim of her own mother’s unhealed, unprocessed traumas.

The daughter is basically bullied and manipulated by another child who lives within her mother. She is set up to be in competition with a ravenous, deprived little girl or rageful inner teen of the mother.

In this way, the daughter becomes a kind of prisoner of her mother’s pain with no choice but to absorb and internalize these projections as seemingly due to her own innate, shameful deficiency or “badness. ” As a child, she’s not capable of realizing that it is actually her mother’s inner child enacting and playing out her own sense of “badness” onto her, which is an introject of her mother’s internalized badness. This is how the cycle of Mother Wound pain gets passed down and internalized in each generation until someone breaks the cycle. A daughter is set up to carry the burden of whatever traumas her own mother is unwilling or incapable of facing. This shame-based fictional narrative helps the daughter survive the abusive dynamic but has to be healed later on when she is an adult.

How Do We Break the Cycle?

You may see your mother’s despairing inner child and feel deep compassion for her. You may understand why she does what she does even though she may not. If you find yourself trying to mother your mother’s inner child in the hopes it will get better, do everything you can to STOP. It only reinforces the projection and never actually solves anything. It creates more pain and false hope for you and drains your energy. You can have compassion for your mother’s pain without carrying her pain. By ceasing to mother your mother’s inner child, it gives her the chance to come to terms with her situation and possibly take adult action on her own behalf to heal, which is her only chance.

How to Break The Cycle As an Adult Daughter

As adult daughters, we have no power to heal our mothers or resolve the original traumas that continue to dominate and shape their views, beliefs, and behavior. Only our mothers themselves can do anything about that. A mother has to have the psychological capacity, courage, willingness, and motivation to heal her inner child. We best serve both ourselves and our mothers when we refuse to present versions of ourselves that distract our mothers from their pain; playing small only prolongs their suffering and postpones their healing.

All we can do as daughters is to expand our awareness of the dynamics with her and understand where they come from—to take responsibility for mothering our own inner child, and get support, tools, and inspiration for the journey. This includes grieving what we’ve been through, showing up for the child within ourselves in the ways we needed our mothers to—and seeing that there’s nothing more we can do for our mothers. Pressuring them to change or heal doesn’t work.

It’s a form of respect to allow our mothers to have their struggles, lessons, and wounds without attempting to solve or fix them. We have to learn to be assertive and firm when that’s called for and to not get hooked by our mothers’ attempts to shame us back into submission and deference. With time and allowing ourselves to grieve, we can eventually accept whatever level of connection with our mothers is possible. It’s often much more shallow and superficial than we long for and this too must be accepted. For some women, they may need to go no contact if the cost of connection with the mother, even little contact, is too toxic and disruptive to bear on her mental and physical health. An adult daughter cannot be expected to sacrifice herself on the altar of her mother’s illusions and unprocessed traumas.

While the third person in your relationship with your mother is HER inner child, the fourth person in that relationship is YOUR inner child. Your bond with her is where the cycle of pain is broken.

How to Break the Cycle as a Mother

For mothers, the vision forward is to minimize the burden of your projections on our own children. Use the triggers that arise with them for our own insight and growth, to become more conscious of what needs healing in yourself, and to fill our own “mother gap” from within. The more your inner child feels loved, safe, and seen by you (your adult self/ inner mother self), the more emotionally available you’ll be for your own children. The tension between your inner child and them is gradually released. In other words, with an inner mothering practice, the less your own inner child will see your actual child as a competitor for scarce emotional resources. The child in you will finally get the happy ending of a loving mother, not with your actual mother, but with YOU, your adult self. This is how the cycle is broken.

It’s not about being a perfect mother or getting to some final destination of “healed.” For the majority of us, it will take a lifetime and that’s OK. This is the most courageous, difficult, and necessary inner work, to create more peaceful, nonviolent, healthy families and communities in the world. The most important thing is the commitment, to keep healing, layer by layer, with each turn around the spiral. Over time, it becomes less about being done healing and more about enjoying life as an adventure with more gratitude, awe, wonder, and joy emerging along the way.

Parenting experts today encourage parents to see that THEY are the adults and thus, they are the ones that determine the quality of their relationship with their child; good outcomes for their children hinge on the quality of the relationship that parents have with themselves.

This contrasts sharply with what parenting assumptions were in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. The tone seemed to be that children are the problem and the goal is to get them to behave, listen, be polite, be respectful, etc. Looking back, it’s rather shocking to see that this style of parenting, centered on compliance and behavior modification, boils down to expecting children to act like little adults and if they don’t comply, punish them to some degree. It’s a tragedy how many children were set up for failure, punishment, and shame by well-meaning but ignorant parents, coaches, and teachers, as the fact is that children simply lack the capacity for emotional regulation, self-awareness, complex reasoning, and the cognitive faculties that adults possess.

“Respecting children means understanding their stage of development, not reacting to their age-appropriate behavior as if they are our peers.” ~Janet Lansbury

Practice Inner Mothering To Heal the Mother Wound

So, why are mothers abusive to daughters? Your mom’s inner child—carrying unresolved and silenced trauma—leads to deprivation consciousness and a toxic relationship with herself and her daughter. While you can’t heal your mom’s trauma, you can heal your own and break the intergenerational cycles of trauma that keep women stuck.

The more of us that learn the practice of inner mothering, the less burden we place on all children in our lives to somehow mirror something back to us that they simply cannot and should not be expected to.

Kids need to be allowed to be kids and as adults, it’s our responsibility to understand and respect their developmental limitations. Many of us did not get to be kids, we may have been robbed of childhood in some ways, but that’s not a burden that should be placed on the next generation. Through the practice of Inner Mothering, we take responsibility for our pain and heal the Mother Wound. We increasingly free ourselves and the children of the future, by embracing the child within us that needs our love, support, and protection. It begins with each of us doing our part to heal whatever pain was passed down to us so that we can lighten the load of future generations.

At the source of his feelings | PSYCHOLOGIES

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Parents

As soon as we talk about the relationship between mothers and sons, a whole set of clichés pops up. About the Oedipus complex, about the fact that the mother is the first woman in a man’s life, that every time he will look for her traits in a woman, that he will never get rid of the feeling of guilt in front of her ... Whether this is true or not, but the idea that the mother’s relationship and son are special, lives firmly in our minds.

“This is an almost physically tangible love, the edge, the limit of love, behind which only something real is hidden…” – this is how film director Alexander Sokurov describes these feelings in the annotation for his film “Mother and Son”. Why do they have such power?

If a woman tried to imagine that she was born from her father's belly, that she fed milk from his breast for several months, that he caressed her and she bathed in the smells of his body, she could get an idea of what is happening in the mind of a boy. Perhaps the "feature" of the relationship between the boy and the mother is due precisely to this initial merging with the mother's body. The temptation to keep the symbolic umbilical cord is great for both mother and son.

Human relationships are riddled with rivalry. And the connection between the son and the mother is free from him - and this is unique

“From birth and up to about three years, the attitude towards the mother of a boy and a girl is similar: she is the closest person, the one who cares and protects,” says psychoanalyst Tatyana Alavidze. “But then comes the Oedipal complex. The girl turns her feelings to her father: "I want him to belong only to me." The boy is different: he continues to love his mother and competes with his father for her love.

“Human relationships are riddled with rivalry. And the connection of the son with the mother is free from him - and therefore unique. This explains its impact on the entire future love life of the future man, ”says psychoanalyst Alain Braconnier. He proposes to consider five psychological types, some features of which are present in every mother, but may manifest themselves to varying degrees depending on the characteristics of her personality and life experience, as well as on the role that her husband or life partner plays in the family.

Mother in love

Her behavior: look, gestures, words - everything expresses loving admiration for her son, to whom she completely transfers the idea of the male ideal. She is always ready to praise his beauty, intelligence and other virtues, she is proud and happy when he succeeds. She is confident in his brilliant future, whether she talks about it or not.

She wants only the best for her son and is ready to sacrifice herself for him: he is the meaning of life for her. She not only supports her son in every possible way, but also demands a lot from him. She does not want to put up with manifestations of mediocrity either in himself or in his environment. This mother places all her hopes on her son. Even if she is reserved and withdrawn by nature, she encourages him, not sparing praise, affection and care. This is a typical mother of a "great man."

Her influence: such a mother radiates great power. From her, the son receives a strong self-confidence, thanks to which he will face any life problems without fear. He is confident and ambitious. This "chosen one", inspired and inspired by unconditional maternal love, will go in search of the one who will take over from his mother and will not take his admiring glance off him all his life.

But it happens that his hopes are not justified - and then the novels follow one after another. The search for the only one turns into a search for adventure, and the handsome prince, having learned the bitterness of disappointment, turns into a don Juan. If this captious conqueror still finds the chosen one, he will demand from her self-denial and devotion for life. Strong, independent women, like the windy conquerors of men's hearts, are usually of little interest to him.

Overprotective mother

Her behaviour: is a typical Woody Allen Jewish mother, an anxious possessive woman who dreams of becoming one with her son and constantly interfering in his affairs. Her goal is to remain the one and only woman in her son's life as long as possible. To do this, she shamelessly plays on contrasts, acting either by intimidation or by caress. She often exaggerates the dangers, both emotional and material, but at the same time pampers her son, creating the most comfortable environment for him.

Because of her deep anxiety, she passes on to her son a pessimistic view of human relationships, which causes him to become emotionally dependent and, in turn, anxious.

Her influence: sons, crushed by this cruel love, grow up in an atmosphere of anxiety, emotional immaturity and guilt. It is difficult for them to establish close relationships, it is difficult to express feelings and talk about them ... For men who are literally attached to their mother, if they manage to cut the umbilical cord, it is only as a result of a quarrel, and once and for all.

Otherwise, they remain loyal to their mother and prefer to keep their distance from other women they meet along the way and who, of course, rarely manage to win the favor of a potential mother-in-law. Therefore, such men prefer a few infantile women whom the "mommy" can symbolically adopt.

The mother is distant

Her behaviour: she deeply doubts that she can be a good mother. Therefore, she is always afraid to do something wrong, to hurt the child. Everything that comes from herself seems to her potentially dangerous - her emotions, her suggestions, her touches.

As a result, she keeps away from her son, both physically and emotionally. This does not mean that she does not love him - on the contrary. But until he realizes that suffering is hidden under the coldness of his mother, he will feel not loved enough.

In relations with women they reproduce maternal remoteness and suffer from this themselves

Her influence: among the sons of distant mothers one can often meet misogynists and even misanthropes. Lacking the warmth and security of a mother's love, they have difficulty trusting women and are often cynical about love and sexuality.

In close relationships, they are afraid to show feelings and, trying to defend themselves, show a frightening coldness. It turns out that in relations with women they reproduce maternal remoteness and suffer from it themselves. But if they dare to let down their guard and meet a confident, warm, warm-hearted woman, they will put their whole soul into a relationship with her.

A benevolent mother

Her behaviour: First of all, this mother is a happy woman, content with her life partner. She does not project onto her son either excessive expectations or unattainable ideals. She is attentive to the needs of the child, but not anxious and does not seek to raise self-esteem at the expense of her son's success. She takes care of the whole family and gives the child's father his proper place.

She has many sources of joy - her child is more than just a light in the window. Although she is attentive to her son and able to establish trusting relationships, she never seeks to interfere in his life and does not act possessive, especially when he reaches adolescence. In a word, she loves him without stopping him from wanting and loving other women.

They prefer to build relationships with women based on goodwill rather than love

Her influence: Such a mother raises self-confident men who are satisfied with themselves and easily start relationships with women. If the man's mother was happy, and he, in turn, will want to make his life partner happy. Sons of benevolent mothers are able to accept and express emotions. They attract women without resorting to bluff or show of superiority.

Such men play the roles of friend and lover with equal ease, they feel safe with a woman and feel confident in any alignment of forces. But they also have an Achilles heel: they prefer to build relationships with women based on goodwill, and not on love. As Aristotle, who probably referred to this type of man, said, “friendship is the best fate of conjugal love” ...

Suppressive mother

Her behaviour: whether she knows it or not, she lives at war with men and seeks to subdue them. In terms of psychoanalysis, this woman wants the "phallus" (the symbol of power) to be hers alone. Possessing an imperious character, she does not tolerate objections and loves to command. Directly or more subtly, with an iron hand in a velvet glove, she reminds her son at every opportunity who is the boss in the house.

Her influence: after the experience of living with such a mother, how not to be afraid of meeting a woman alone? The sons of such superpowerful mothers behave paradoxically. At first glance, they avoid them, but in fact they are looking for a copy of them everywhere in order to start playing mistress and slave with their life partner again. After a while, they try to throw off the yoke with the help of treason . .. but in vain.

However, their submission is not unlimited: when such men feel that a woman threatens their masculinity, they may be violent, verbally or physically. So they avenge the humiliations experienced under the authority of their mother.

Text: Galina Severskaya Photo Source: DJAMEL DINE ZITOUT FOR PSYCHOLOGIES FRANCE, Getty Images next two years. What if he then goes to another?

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Anna Skavitina, psychologist, analyst, member of the IAAP (International Association of Analytical Psychology), supervisor of the ROAP and the Jung Institute (Zurich), expert of the journal "Psychologies"

What are you doing?

In a supermarket trading floor, a five-year-old boy runs up with a cart and drives right into me. I do not have time to dodge and shout: “Hey! Stop!” It hurts me, but he does not look at me, he is focused on the process, his eyes are burning with excitement: he has found himself an interesting business in the store. He rapidly accelerates to hit me again. I manage to dodge and shout, looking for his mother with my eyes. Mom wanders along the supermarket shelves with a smartphone. He looks up at me: "Don't yell at my child!" She immediately reacts to the situation. The guy looks back at his mother and, feeling support, accelerates again, threatening to smash the rack with cans. The buyers standing nearby resolutely grabbed the cart, he growled in displeasure, but was forced to stop. Rubbing the future couple of bruises, I really wanted to say that this terrible cruel child will become a criminal / scoundrel / rapist in the future. But I didn't say. Because it's not true, I can't predict from this one incident whether a child will grow up to be a cruel person. But I can hardly imagine that one of the adult buyers would do this. I have heard the expression many times that if children were as physically strong as adults, they would easily destroy our world. This child obviously had nothing to do, and enough energy had accumulated, and he came up with a game for himself. I don't know what role I played in it. Maybe I was a space pirate or a terrible monster, and he was the protector of the entire planet, but I definitely didn’t want to play in this format.

Any child, in order to live in society, must gradually learn socially acceptable ways of behaving and expressing their aggression, as well as causal relationships: “What will happen if I ...” This is the main task of socializing a child at an early age.

We don't beat him!

Parents encounter the first manifestations of cruelty in a child around one and a half years . And that's okay! Just if the child does not show any aggression at all, then there are questions about his development. The aggression of the baby baffles many parents: “We didn’t teach him this! We don't beat him! He didn't see anything like that!"
The child has impulses of aggression, but there are no ways to cope with it yet. For him, there is still no difference between living and not living: what to break off a doll’s hand, what to drag a kitten by the tail. The child is not cruel, just as long as he does not know how to do it and how not to. He is interested in exploring and studying everything, he is curious. He knows what pain is, but he does not understand that he himself can cause pain. There is a goal - I see no obstacles!

And, of course, a very important role at this age is played by parents, who not only stop violent actions, but also show how it should be: “We stroke the cat like this, we don’t drag it by the tail, it hurts. If you need to move a cat, you can call it “kit-kit”, and it will come by itself.” If, in response to the aggressive actions of the child, the parents respond aggressively - they hit back, bite, scratch - "Let him understand what it hurts", then the child either begins to be afraid to show himself completely, becoming frightened and anxious, or decides to go for broke and fight with the whole world to the blood. Which method the child chooses depends on many factors, in particular, on the strength of the mental system.

Does he hurt?

By the age of 3, , a child usually understands the difference between living and non-living and knows that others can be hurt. The child treats both the cat and the dog, and the people around him with understanding, but he can still be involuntarily sloppy when interacting and cause pain by accident. It can be quite aggressive with strangers, animals, insects, especially if mom or dad says something like: “These animals are contagious”, “I hate insects”, “These children are bad, let's go, let's not play with them”. The child conducts a “bad” connection - it must be removed away, driven away. He can step on a worm, throw a chick to the ground with all his might if he pecked at him. This does not mean that the child is cruel - he reacts to the emotions of his parents and does not fully know how to protect himself.

Specialists in pathopsychology believe that if a child is constantly aggressive at the age of 2.5-3 years, then this is an alarming bell, and it is better not to draw from the “it will pass by itself” principle and turn to specialists to discuss what is happening and think over a program of interaction with the child. Pathologists say that if families had the opportunity to diagnose behavioral and emotional disorders early, then we would have much less problems with juvenile delinquency and school shooters, because prevention is always better and cheaper than treatment later.

How useful is kindergarten?

By the age of 5-7 years , a child normally learns the basic social rules: fight, shove, bite, scratch, you can or cannot, how to get what you want without using force. He understands the structure of families "parents and children", he knows that babies need to be taken care of, because parents take care of him. He himself can give arguments that stop the aggression and cruelty of other children: “Don't break the tree, it hurts! Do not take ants, their children will be left alone at home without parents, who will feed and love them?

Children who go to kindergarten usually socialize better than those who stay at home or go to individual classes in development centers. Why? In the kindergarten, there is a constant team in which the child has to go through numerous interactions with children and other adults.

He spends the first months of the garden on adapting to the fact that now he will sometimes have to be apart from his mother, who, if anything, would instantly start a rescue operation. Then he begins to look for his place in the team, learns ways to protect himself from aggressive children, tries to be aggressive with others, usually gets an aggressive response, tries other ways. Yes, alas, being periodically aggressive in kindergarten is the norm. And the norm is sometimes to be bitten or scratched.

And it's not about "where the caregivers look if one child has bitten another" - it's instant! The educator's job is to stop and explain other ways of interaction, just like the job of the child's parents. Not the norm - if an aggressive child has only this way of interacting with the outside world.
And if a child goes to different master classes and individual classes, then he is constantly at the introductory stage, adapting to the room, children, teacher, and next time everything is new again.

How to teach him?

Some preschoolers do not have enough time or opportunities to learn the norms and rules of life in society, and they continue to do this in primary school and beyond. But if a child of 7-8 years old continues to be cruel towards other children, towards animals, it is imperative to show him to a specialist. You should not think that this is his "period of development" and wave your hand. Parents regularly turn to chats for support: “They want to kick my child out of school because he is aggressive, he broke the boy’s nose, and the girl’s arm. Do they have such a right? No, I don’t want to go to specialists, but why?” For what? Firstly, to understand whether everything is in order with the psyche of the child himself. He may need medical attention. Did he himself experience violence, persecution? Perhaps he needs psychological support. He definitely needs to be taught more adequate ways to cope with his aggressive impulses, if for some reason his parents failed to do this earlier. Perhaps he needs pedagogical support.

It is very important to understand and convey to children that social rules and restrictions have arisen in society not to infringe on the rights of the child and not let him express himself, but in order to protect him!

Imagine that you are teaching like this: “They hit you - immediately hit back!”. What's happening? You have a strong and courageous kid who decides to respond to aggression with even more aggression, to protect himself, making everyone afraid of himself. Seems great? But next time there will be an even stronger and more courageous baby, and maybe with dad or mom as support, who will answer your baby with his fists and very strongly. What will you do if your child is severely beaten? You will be beside yourself with rage and go to defend him, but they will answer you that "your first started." This is an example of the escalation of aggression, teaching cruelty and non-constructive ways to stand up for yourself. If today a child is dissatisfied with someone, tomorrow another person will experience hatred for him: it is very important to understand that you can be dissatisfied and even hate, and every person has the right to any emotions, but not to any actions. There is a vital need to resolve issues with the help of words, in a peaceful way, if we live in a society.

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