Anti-hypnosis #1: What do mothers want?

 

This post is about one parent-client exchange, the therapist response to it, and the spirit or principle at their base.

My client has a toxic mother. Maternal toxicity often features: unconscious solipsism and deliberate entitled selfishness. There is usually projected poison – directed devastation of the child’s heart – which may look like psychopathy but could be “Medea”* Borderline. These problems manifest in a wholesale lack of care for her adult-child’s feelings and needs, despite what the daughter may believe and the mother will insist.

From the progress note:

We did a little micro-dissection of the subtle manipulation. Example: “Rona’s” mother, feeling insufficiently embedded in her daughter’s life, said “I don’t feel I’m in the loop.” I asked my client not to be “sublim­inally” persuaded that her mother should, in fact, be in “the loop.” She might reply, as a quick example: “You’re my parent. You are not in my friend group.”

Let’s torture this mini-Eureka moment a little more. My client, hearing her mother’s simple plaint that, deceptively, is undergirded by an ocean of historical voodoo and submission, felt one little whisker’s weight of annoyance at her mother’s peremptory push while fully swal­low­ing the assumption that the loop – natural enmeshment in her daughter’s life – was right. There might be three whiskers of feeling sadly touched: “Aww. My mom is the outcast child who fears she won’t be picked by either team.”

Step back forcefully and burn both assumption and maudlin pity with your hard eyes.

“You are not in the loop, Mom. My circle is for people who are sympathetic to me. My children are in my loop, and I hope to rejoin theirs if they accept that I now will listen to them, respect them and not demand or order them. Look closely and you will see what I am saying about our relationship. It is not what you think it is or want it to be. It is painful and formal, not sweet, not obligated, and not owned by you. I am a survivor.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, probably unto my deathbed: Parents are children. They have power simply because they kept you from growing when it was easy to hold you down. Don’t let that be possible now.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* From Christine Ann Lawson’s Understanding the Borderline Mother.