How To Get A Controlling Mother Out Of Your Head

One of the challenges in growing up with a controlling mother is that they tend to implant their own insecurities into our heads. Controlling mothers are fundamentally driven by fear and the way that they assuage their own anxieties about their growing children is often by passing their insecurities onto us. If we’re too insecure to take any risks in life or to violate our parent’s absurd “rules”, then they don’t have to worry about us hurting ourselves, scaring them or ultimately leaving them.

The obvious problem with this is that all children inevitably grow up, leave their parents and form intimate relationships with other people. This can cause a lot of jealousy to an insecure and emotionally immature parent. Controlling mothers often try to manipulate their children into staying as long as possible in order to forestall the inevitable pain of separation. It’s ultimately a futile strategy since children growing up and leaving home is the natural order of things. Trying to stop us living our own lives just makes us want to get away even faster and really it’s just a consequence of the parent’s wounded inner child and unwillingness to grow up.

All this craziness can really mess with our heads and leave us feeling insecure as an adult. We can’t do much about our controlling mother’s behavior since trying to control her in return would just be using the same losing strategy that she’s been using on us all our lives. Manipulating other people doesn’t lead to true freedom or a deep sense of inner security.

A Controlling Mother Can Really Mess With Our Head and Undermine Our Self-Confidence

Instead, we need to learn to get our controlling mother out of our head. Here’s how to do it:

Replace Our Mother’s Voice With A Supportive One

I literally used to hear my critical mother’s voice in my head whenever I went to do something I thought she would disapprove of. It continued to frighten me well into adulthood. Over time I learned to replace her negative, critical voice with a more positive supportive one. Offering positive words of encouragement in us when facing a challenging world is one of the roles of a good father. However, controlling mothers tend to end up in relationships with passive fathers who aren’t great at telling us “You can do it!” because they lack confidence in themselves.

So we need to learn to do this for ourselves. This is particularly true when faced with life’s challenges. Rather than telling ourselves “This is really hard”, re-frame the challenge by saying “This is challenging, but I can do it”. Rather than saying “I’m too scared”, say “I’m anxious but I can do it.” Stop saying things that make you feel weak. Look at all life’s challenges as opportunities to grow rather than showstopper problems that we won’t be able to get past.

Avoid making mountains out of molehills, also known as catastrophizing. Break problems down into manageable steps that we can take and remind ourselves that we can do it. Gradually as we overcome obstacles between ourselves and what we want in life, we can change the negative self-talk we learned from our controlling mother into positive self-talk that empowers us rather than drains our energy.

Set Clear Boundaries

Controlling mothers tend to have very poor boundaries. Whether consciously or unconsciously, they deliberately overwhelm our nervous systems in order to get us to submit to their authority. As a child this is reasonable to some degree in situations where we might hurt ourselves like stopping us running across a busy road say; but controlling parents take it way too far and refuse to stop the manipulation even once we are an adolescent or adult. They may even mess with our head further by telling us that they’re doing it “for your own good”.

Narcissistic mothers are particularly bad at respecting personal boundaries. Our parents are our primary role models for how to relate to other people, but in this case we need to learn good boundary setting from someone else. This means standing up for ourselves and being honest with our parents and other people when they are behaving in ways that we don’t like. When we learn to stand up to our controlling mother and people like her in our external world the critical voice in our head will begin to quieten too.

Acknowledge Our Anger

A key part of learning to stand up for ourselves is acknowledging and utilizing our anger to motivate us. Having our boundaries violated would normally leave us feeling angry that our security needs aren’t being met and our individuality isn’t being respected. This can be challenging when we haven’t had good role models to teach us how to manage anger. Controlling mothers rarely acknowledge and express their own anger cleanly. Instead they often resort to bullying, manipulation and passive-aggressive behavior in order to coerce us into submission.

This can lead us to repress, suppress or internalize our anger and adopt poor strategies like passive-aggression, conflict avoidance or simply getting depressed ourselves.

It’s important that we don’t use these sort of losing strategies with a controlling mother because they don’t work well and will cause other people to lose respect for us. Instead we need to learn to be direct with our mother and say “I feel angry when you …” or “I don’t like it when you …”. Practice this on other people in lower stakes relationships like friends who we trust to support us even when we have some kind of conflict with them.

Learn To Resolve Conflict

Controlling mothers tend to deal with conflict by dominating the people around them and forcing them into submission. When we were children we were dependent on them for our survival so we had no option but to submit. As we grew up we may have learned that there was another option: to rebel. But that doesn’t lead to great long term results either since it’s still a reaction to our mother rather than a free choice on our part. By habitually rebelling we can end up mistrusting all authority figures; even those who are there to help us. A better strategy is to learn to handle conflict assertively and work towards win-win situations with other people even if they aren’t keen to play the game fairly.

This can be challenging when applied to controlling mothers who have a deep fear of abandonment. Ultimately, we all end up leaving our parents one way or another as we grow from a dependent child into a mature, independent adult. This means every parent has to deal with their own abandonment pain eventually. If we want to get our controlling mother out of our head, we need to be willing to let her experience the pain of us leaving and renegotiating our relationship with them from parent/child to adult/adult. This is a form of loss which we both may need to grieve. If we attempt to avoid this conflict by giving in to our parents all the time then we stay a perpetual child in our relationship with them and this will affect the way we see ourselves as adults.

Working towards win-win outcomes in conflict isn’t necessarily pain-free but involves facing rather than avoiding emotional pain along the way.

Set Our Own Goals

Controlling parents tend to want us to grow up to be like them. They’re fundamentally insecure and having us follow in their footsteps is a form of external validation for them. This is one reason why they are afraid of us being self-determined: we might choose not to be like them. This can affect everything in our adult lives including our choice of interests, career, religion, friends and intimate partner(s).

Having been on the receiving end of controlling behavior from our mother, we generally think that the last thing we want is to be like them. But as I said above, simple rebellion isn’t really freedom either. There are two equally bad extremes here: to submit and be like them, or to rebel and be the opposite. Neither of these are likely to leave us freely self-expressed.

The third alternative is to set our own goals independent of our parent’s influence and work towards becoming the person who achieves those goals. This can be challenging because the influence of a controlling mother can go deep into our unconscious, but we have to start somewhere. We can find hobbies and activities that we enjoy and start working towards mastering them. Be willing to experiment to find out what we actually like rather than what would simply please our parents. By setting ourselves some goals and learning to discipline ourselves by working towards achieving them every day, we end up getting what we want out of life.

Heal Our Wounded Inner Child

One of the most damaging long-term effects of a controlling mother is the lack of truly empathic connection that we need as a child in order to feel safe and to grow into an emotionally mature adult. This is a form of emotional abandonment, and can leave deep emotional scars on our inner child. Once we’ve formed a sense of safety and sanity around our relationship with our mother, we need to learn to express the pain we carry about all the ways that she wasn’t really there to love and support us. This can be a confusing process when we’ve been taught that all her strategies of control and manipulation were love and support; when in fact they were primarily ways to assuage her own anxiety.

Healing our wounded inner child requires a safe place to learn to express our emotions to other people who will offer us the love and support we didn’t get from our controlling mother. This means creating relationships with other people where we feel safe to be emotionally honest and vulnerable. Artistic forms of self-expression like music, art and dance can also be tremendously healing when done in a safe environment. Professional help from psychologists, therapists and counselors has also been vital in my own experience of healing my wounded inner child. This can be a life-long journey but the important part is to simply start wherever you are at in order to recover your true sense of self and get your controlling mother out of your head.