How To Cut The Emotional Umbilical Cord With Your Mother

3. Express the Anger that You Have Towards Your Mother

This is just a special case, really, of point number 2 of standing up to her and being assertive. I highly recommend that if you have anger towards your parents that you have not been expressing, it’s likely to come up in the way that they’re currently behaving.

You don’t really need to dredge up stuff that happened in the past because if your parents – and your mother in particular – are still behaving in a way that you’re emotionally enmeshed with, more than likely she’s going to be doing things that are going to be making you angry, and I’ve got a hunch that up until now you probably haven’t been saying that to her in a clear and concise and direct way.

Remember again the assertiveness formula:

“When you do X, I feel angry.”

It’s very, very simple. You don’t need to justify how you feel; you don’t need to label her behavior in any way; you don’t need to criticize her; you don’t need to call her a controlling bitch or any of those kind of things. All you have to do is say, “When you do X, I feel angry.”