Author of You Are Not Your Mother: Releasing Generational Trauma & Shame and Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters: A Guide for Separation, Liberation & Inspiration
when your mother is "mirror hungry"
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About One's Own Sense of Self ~ In this piece, Captain Tom Bunn, who is both an airline pilot and a licensed clinical social worker who works with anxious flyers, describes what happens when... "...instead of mirroring her child, a mother uses the child to mirror her. Dr. Beatrice Beebe has studied children who failed to thrive. She found that their mothers were so mirror-hungry that they, instead of mirroring the child, pushed their child to mirror them." ~~~ Have you read The Calamity Club? This part jumped out at me mostly because I could say this about my mother, but also because I've worked with enough women who have sisters like this. "...my little sis always wanted me to take what she thought a me and turn it into what I thought of myself. Ain’t that a gas? And you bet your last dollar, I use to think that too. Those were some real dark times, they were. I could hear her voice like she was sitting in my ear. Until one day I realized that my sister only wanted me to hate myself on account a she hated her own self even more.” ~~~ My colleague Simona Hadjigeorgalis is offering this free workshop in September for mothers of teens: 3 Keys to Set Loving Boundaries With Your Older Teen (in a fast-changing world) Without Guilt or Power Struggles ~~~ Much, much love, Karen My own work in the Shame School Community led me to write this poem. |
Karen C.L. Anderson
Author of You Are Not Your Mother: Releasing Generational Trauma & Shame and Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters: A Guide for Separation, Liberation & Inspiration
Here's the tweak: change the reason you are setting boundaries with your mother from: "Because she's doing something bad and wrong and I need to protect myself." to "Because I respect myself and know who I am and what I want." (Are there times when protection is appropriate? Yes. And as you evolve your boundaries practice, you will find that protection is needed less and less.) Setting boundaries because you think your mother shouldn’t be doing whatever it is she's doing, or because you don’t...
The meme said: "Be kind and full of love...but have boundaries like a motherf-er." Here’s what it gets wrong: there's no "but." Healthy boundaries ARE – in and of themselves – kind and full of love. They make room for anger. After more than a decade of helping women take care of themselves in the relationship they have with their mothers (including myself), here's what I know for sure: It's messy. There's no perfect answer. There's no precise way to do it. All you can do is be human (a human...
You know what has been super helpful to me in the past nine months since my mother ended her three-year silence to tell me she wants to move closer to me? Instead of trying to plan for every possible outcome and rehearsing all the possible conversations in my head (talk about exhausting and confusing), I ask myself: "Who do I want to be when I engage with her?" If you've been following along, my mother reached out to me in January to tell that she wants to move closer to me (she currently...