When the relationship with your mother is unhealthy
There's a lot of rhetoric around the kind of relationship one "should" have with their mother and there's a negative stigma attached to those who decide not to.
Motherhood is mostly viewed through a prism of idealism. Mothers are intrinsically good. They’re always giving up something. From literally space in their bodies during pregnancy, to their time after birth, to always putting their kids first. In recent years, millennial moms have been decrying the long suffering aspect to motherhood. Now it’s okay to complain about being tired, show off postpartum bodies and talk about mental health issues.
And all of that is good, even lifesaving. But there is another conversation to be had. One that creates cognitive dissonance between the concept of mothers being innately good and that same mother sometimes being the source of all that challenges your ability to maintain good mental health.
The unspoken belief is that mothers aren’t to be criticized. Unless they physically neglected you, or caused you to be harmed physically, you’re supposed to love your mother. She can’t be that bad - after all, she didn’t have to have you. You owe her an eternal debt for giving you life. Conversely, you’re allowed to hate your father - no questions asked. But God forbid you don’t speak to your mom.
Dr. Racine Henry, licensed family and marriage therapist in New York State, tells Hale & Hearty that “I think within the Black community, we are taught that our mothers sacrifice everything for us and we can often feel indebted to them. As children, we are always trying to pay our mothers back for this sacrifice and any negativity we experience is disregarded under the guise of "she did the best she could".”
Henry went on to share that while that may be true, that does not always mean your mother's "best" wasn't painful, traumatic, and unhealthy. A lot of what we have had to experience were from our mothers who raised us while experiencing their own abusive relationships or racism or poverty, and this is unique to being Black.
Cultural factors can definitely play a part in unhealthy mother/child relationships. Regine Galanti PhD, licensed clinical psychologist, shares with Hale & Hearty that “White American families often focus on the nuclear family unit - so parents and children are the way that families are conceptualized. If you're part of a community where multigenerational families are the norm, or that families are interconnected, and mothers are expected to help their kids out with childcare and housework, it's going to be that much harder to put your individual needs before the group.”
Galanti went on to say that in these types of families, the calculus of whether to break off a relationship with your mother might involve those communal factors - will cutting off this relationship hurt my communal relationships? Can I handle that, and is it worth it?
The differences between unhealthy mother/daughter and mother/son relationships depend on a lot of factors such as ethnicity, culture, birth order, socioeconomic status, religion, and mother's age at the time of birth. Dr. Henry believes that the two can be very different in cisgender situations “where the daughter may eventually become a mother and made to experience unhealthy situations as a result of teaching the daughter what it's like to be a mother. For example, daughters can be forced into abusive and unhealthy domestic roles to prepare them for motherhood. A son in the same family will never have this kind of grooming. The navigation of these two unhealthy relationships can be compounded by gender norms and the differences in expectations for a son versus a daughter.”
Acknowledging that the relationship with your mother is unhealthy
As with any other toxic relationship, you can tell that your relationship with your mother is unhealthy by how you physically, mentally, and emotionally respond to any form of contact. Dr. Henry advises that “if you notice your speech pattern changes and/or your body stiffens, there are indications that you don't feel safe or comfortable with your mother. Some characteristics of an unhealthy maternal relationship are withholding information, needing to present in a certain way, crying or feeling stressed after contact, physical, verbal, emotional abuse, a lack of support, and finding excuses to not be in contact.”
Dr. Galanti adds that “the best way to figure out if you're in an unhealthy relationship is to look at the other person's behaviors. Do they constantly put their needs before your own, or is there a balance between your needs and their own? Does your mother respect your boundaries? Does she recognize your strengths, or is she constantly blaming you and overly critical?”
Another way to help identify an unhealthy relationship with your mother is to think about the way you feel when you're with and around her. Do you dread getting together? Do you avoid picking up the phone to call? Send the call straight to voicemail when she calls? That avoidance could be a sign that you're not in a healthy relationship. You can't expect to feel positive all the time, but if talking to or spending time with your mother makes you feel anxious or sad, think about what that feeling is trying to tell you. It might be time to set some boundaries around the relationship. Feelings give us information, so the answer is not necessarily to figure out a way to make yourself less anxious or less sad. First decide on your priorities around the relationship.
Whose feelings do I prioritize, me or my mother’s?
You have to prioritize yourself, always. If you're in an unhealthy relationship, there's a good chance that your mother isn't thinking about or acting from a place that considers your feelings. According to a study published online in the journal, Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice, “mothers were less likely to endorse internal attributions for estrangement compared with external attributions or to validate their children’s complaints about abuse or neglect.” During the process of rehabilitation, it is important that you consistently check in with yourself to ensure that the process is truly healing for you and not causing more pain or trauma.
It may also depend on how unhealthy the relationship is and what you're getting out of it. If your relationship with your mother is very unhealthy, for example, you've been putting up with decades of emotional or physical abuse, the healthiest thing to do might be to set strong boundaries for yourself and move away from that relationship.
It is okay to prioritize yourself, even over the person who gave birth to you. If your relationship has unhealthy elements but also some positive elements, there may be benefits in evaluating the value it brings to your life. Ask yourself, what's working for me here and what isn't? What do I need to do to minimize the negative parts while enhancing the positive? Do I need to spend less time with my mother? Should I make certain topics off limits? Can I use my siblings as buffers?
Strategies for coping with the unhealthy relationship
“The feelings around the unhealthy relationship can be stress, fear, anger, sadness, isolation, and anxiety,’ says Dr. Henry, “to cope with these feelings, you will need to establish boundaries within the relationship.” Henry suggests that for in-person visits and phone calls, create limitations and subsequent actions you can enact if these limits are reached. Limit phone calls to 5 minutes and at that 5 minute mark, you end the call. Or, if you are in person and you begin to feel unsafe or anxious, you decide to leave the physical space. You can't control anyone but yourself, so rather than looking for your mother to behave differently, take control by removing yourself as much as possible.
It's okay to mourn not having the relationship with your mother that you want. Sometimes a relationship ending is the worst possible outcome. There's a lot of rhetoric around the kind of relationship one "should" have with their mother and there's a negative stigma attached to those who decide not to. The reality of it is that people hurt people, even those that they birth. It can be extremely painful to reconcile the idea that the one person who is supposed to love, protect, and care for you doesn't, but that does not mean that others won't. You can find genuine people who are and have the will to mother you and provide a positive relationship.
You will be okay
So you’ve evaluated the relationship, what now? Dr. Henry advises that “in evaluating risk versus reward, consider the worst that can happen. Let's say you try to repair the relationship and it goes really badly. How would you recover? What do you stand to lose? What is the cost of repairing? If you have resources in place and a way to heal from the worst possible outcome, then you are probably in a stable enough place to take the risk of rehabilitation. Remember that you can change your mind whenever you want to. You don't owe anybody access to you; especially not someone who is harming you.”
“One important thing that I talk to many of my patients about is that the only person who you can change in a relationship is yourself,” says Dr. Galanti. “People often stay in unhealthy relationships of all kinds because they expect the other person to change. Try and shift your thinking: don't expect your mother to change. If things stay exactly the same, would you be okay with that? Is there anything that you can do without compromising your values that will enhance your relationship for you? If those answers are no, then it might be time to explore putting more distance in between you and your relationship.”
Dr. Galanti reiterates that “whether or not to repair a relationship is an intensely personal decision. Try this visualization: What would happen if your mother was completely absent from your life? What would be different and how would you feel? What would you miss out on? What would be easier?”
You can decide to whom or how much you disclose about your decision. The act of not communicating with or participating in a relationship with your mother is a clear communication. You don't have to explain your decision if you don't want to. You don't necessarily need to break off a relationship by communicating that message directly. For some people, that might be necessary. In those cases, don't hedge. Be clear and write down what you want to say so that you don't get off track. Don't leave room for negotiation if that's not what you want.
For others, it might be easier to have the relationship fade - answer the phone less,
visit less, etc. Think about what would be easiest for you and stick to your plan and values. This is your relationship with your mother, and you're allowed to put your needs first. It doesn't matter who else knows or who wants to know - people don't have a right to what exactly happened and why just because they want that information.
The final takeaway……
Hale & Hearty loves Dr. Henry’s advice. She says “I do hope we can have this conversation more often and get rid of the stigma that you're "supposed" to love your mother and always maintain a relationship with her, no matter what. We need to normalize seeking and participating in ONLY healthy relationships, of all kinds. If we do, I think more people can heal out loud and then become healthy parents, partners, etc.”