How To Cut The Emotional Umbilical Cord With Your Mother

6. Start Making Your Own Choices in Life

This is particularly important if you’ve been very emotionally enmeshed with your mother. There’s a very high likelihood that a lot of the choices you’ve made in your life up until now have been based on what would keep her happy rather than on what would make you happy.

Remember, a lot of what we’re talking about here operates on an unconscious level. So we can be unconsciously making choices that try to keep our mother happy if we’re still emotionally enmeshed with her, rather than doing the things that are most important to us, the things that would create a happy life for us or the things that we would just find most rewarding.

So starting to make your own choices is very important. I recently made a choice to move to a beachside suburb where I now live like 10 minutes’ walk from the beach. I’ve never lived by the beach before but I absolutely love it. I had a hunch that I’d enjoy living by the beach; I mean, it’s a pretty good lifestyle.

You can go down to the beach any time, go body boarding, hang out with people, meet girls on the beach; it’s great. And yet up until now, I’d never given myself permission to live by the beach. I’d never even thought that I really wanted to.

So once you cut your emotional enmeshment with your mother and start making your own choices, you get to explore things that you might not have tried before, have experiences that you might not have tried before; a whole world of possibilities opens up that you previously weren’t even aware of.

The key to this is stepping outside your comfort zone and making your own decisions, rather than always thinking, “What would my mother think of that?” Or if you have sisters, what would your sisters think of that. I have two sisters, and I have to say that some of what I experience in my relationships with them is simply a reflection of programming from our mother that they haven’t dealt with yet.

So therefore I also have to think, okay, keeping them happy is nice but it’s not my most important goal in life. So if I’m to do what I really want to do in life, it might upset the people who are around me, but dealing with the primal fear around that is your way out of that situation.