The Challenge Of Growing Up With A Stoic Mother

I recently had a conversation with my mother that illustrated for me the challenge of growing up with a stoic, critical, emotionally unavailable mother.

My parents are now in their late 80’s and we were headed out to Sunday lunch at their favourite club. On the way my mother starts telling me about an experience that morning in their local church service at the church where I grew up.

“Remember that crazy lady you used to live with?”, my mother says.

“You mean Megan?”, I guess.

“Yes, your friend Megan”.

A minute ago she was a crazy lady, now she’s my friend. Although we haven’t been in touch much since being flatmates years ago, I understand from what my parents tell me that Megan is still part of the ministry team at the church.

Growing up with a stoic mother can lead to anxiety, depression and low self-esteem

“Our Minister is leaving and during the farewell speech Megan was giving, she burst into tears. She always cries when she talks at church. I just think it’s so selfish”, my mother protests, “Why can’t she just be happy for the person who is leaving that they’re going on to better things? Don’t you agree?”

For me, this illustrates the mindset behind my mother’s stoicism and the challenge it presented for our relationship. While it’s all very well to want to be positive and look at the bright side of things, the reality is that human beings have emotions and the way we deal with our emotions impacts on other people. Sadness is a normal human emotion and the natural response to any perceived or impending loss, such as someone we value leaving.

But to my mother, expressing sadness at someone leaving is “selfish”.

Although I haven’t spoken to Megan in a long time, my guess is that she cried because she valued the relationship with the minister who was leaving and is going to miss them. My mother’s criticism of Megan’s free expression of sadness as “selfish” is probably because seeing her cry made my stoic mother feel uncomfortable.

Stoic people avoid emotional stimulation to help keep their feelings contained and in check. Seeing someone freely express sadness comes as a challenge because it risks eliciting the same emotion in them; a situation my mother would find uncomfortable. In her mind, it’s better to criticise the person who is being emotionally expressive that to face the embarrassment of showing an emotion yourself.

The reality is that all human behaviour is an attempt to meet our own needs. We are all inherently self-focused. It’s just how we’re wired. It’s not a bad thing because we are also empathically connected to each other and our needs are interdependent so in meeting many of our own needs we naturally meet other people’s needs as well.

When someone like my mother criticises someone else for being “selfish”, what they are really saying is:

“I don’t like that you’re choosing to meet your own emotional needs instead of mine.”

… which is, ironically, rather self-centred of the person making the criticism.

This attitude is a complete mind-fuck to grow up with. We learn to regulate our emotions as infants primarily through the empathic bond that we share with our mother. By withholding their own expression of emotions, stoic mothers present an emotionally unavailable brick wall that gives their children nothing to connect to. The inevitable conclusion that we come to is that there is something wrong with us, and the resulting inability to regulate our emotions can lead to anxiety, depression and challenges forming intimate relationships later in life. It certainly did with me. Psychologists call this attachment trauma, leading to an adult attachment disorder.

I figured there wasn’t much point trying to argue with my 87 year old mother about her life-long habitual pattern of withholding emotions. But since she’d asked what I thought, I figured it was an opportunity to challenge her thinking a bit.

“How do you think it impacted the person who was leaving?”, I asked.

“Oh… well… I don’t know”, my mother replied, as if she hadn’t even considered this.

My guess is that seeing someone cry over the fact that they were leaving probably made the outgoing minister feel valued and loved… something I generally didn’t feel myself growing up around my stoic mother. Perhaps it even connected the minister to their own feelings of sadness so that they could release them and help with their own feelings of loss during the transition.

“Do you think Megan’s expression of emotion was inauthentic?”, I probed.

“No… I just don’t think she doesn’t need to cry all the time. She said it didn’t happen when she was practising.”

I really felt for Megan, being criticised just for being human. It reminded me how painful it was growing up in a family where emotions weren’t shared freely in a healthy manner, but attracted criticism and derision instead.

Later in the afternoon after we went back to my parent’s house, my mother tells me about another lady at the church who presented the children’s story in the service.

“She’s wonderful with the children; really gets them involved in the story. She’s quite old now but she used to be a school headmaster. We’re really going to miss her when she leaves.”, my mother says.

“Are you going to do a Megan?”, I reply teasingly.

Having a stoic mother is no joke though. Stoic mothers often leave a painful emotional legacy in their adult children which can show up as anxiety, depression, difficulty forming emotionally intimate relationships, and a denial of their own true feelings. This can lead to perpetuating a family pattern of emotional abandonment in future generations until someone breaks the cycle by learning how to express, rather than withhold, their emotions.