Anger of a grown child who has been a surrogate partner in his childhood

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Anger of a grown child who has been a surrogate partner in his childhood

So, is there a lot of anger with these men who are enmeshed with their mothers? The short answer is – yes. Usually these men, because their mothers have demanded, either explicitly or implicitly that “you be there for me”, and “you tune in to me”, they become very nice guys. They become wonderful caretakers. They’re very nice, sweet in their exterior role. But they lack a hard edge to them. They have hard times making decisions. They might have difficulty with sexual performance. This is all related to this experience of feeling dis-empowered by relationship to their mother.

When we get these men in treatment; they have a tremendous amount of rage that needs to come up and talked about in therapeutic setting, not directly expressed at their mother. We don’t advise that at all. But in a contained way and in a therapeutic setting so they can recapture a part of themselves they have been sitting on for years. And when we see that happen, they become a little or even a little to a lot more embodied in their own masculine self.

One of the most consistent issues we see with these men who are been enmeshed or over involved with their mothers is that, if they are heterosexual and involved with women, that they’ve never been able to reject and betray the loyalty with their mother. But they are angry with that, and they need to be able to separate.

So what happens is that when they make attachments with a woman, a primary attachment with, say, a wife, a marriage, she becomes the person that they betray and reject, because they couldn’t do it with their mother. She becomes the object of his anger and his need to finally distance and separate himself. The trouble is, he’s doing it with the wrong woman. And he stays loyal to his mother and contributes to injuring or destroying the woman he fell in love with.

For more information on parenting visit KidsInTheHouse.com