How To Get A Toxic Mother Out Of Your Nervous System

When we are children our survival depends on having support from our biological caregivers, principally our mother. If she rejects us, we die. Since our very life depends on her support, this gives us a tremendous desire for approval from our mother that goes deep into our nervous system.

If our mother was emotionally mature, mentally developed and physically competent at facing the challenges of her own life, her relationship with our father and of raising us, her reciprocal feelings of love towards us motivates her to meet our basic needs. Our nervous system calms down over time as we learn to regulate our emotions via the empathic bond that we share with our mothers, and to a lesser extent with our fathers, siblings and other significant older people in our infant lives.

Over time as we begin to individuate from our mothers, particularly during adolescence, our need for love, support and approval from her diminishes as we learn how to form healthy relationships with other people and to meet our own survival needs. Once our survival is no longer dependent on our mother and we are free to pursue our own goals, even ones that she may not approve of. This is part of the process of growing from a dependent boy into a [intlink id=”33″ type=”page”]confident, independent man[/intlink].

If, on the other hand, our mother was emotionally immature, narcissistic, mentally ill, personality disordered or was just plain incompetent at meeting the basic challenges of her own life and relationships, we end up dependent on someone who wasn’t able to meet our needs effectively. This leaves our nervous system permanently wired for support and approval from toxic people, unless we do something to break the pattern.

If the mother whose approval we were wired to seek had behaviors that didn’t work very well in the first place, we can end up as adults with behaviors that don’t work very well in the real world. Families created by toxic parents often shield themselves from the real-world impact of their behavior by forcing us to comply with whatever they want; but this strategy breaks down for us when we venture out from the family and start living our own independent lives.

The impact of a Toxic Mother can overwhelm our nervous system.

Whatever we experienced as a child will seem normal to us, even if it felt unpleasant. In the process of seeking our mother’s approval we internalize her dysfunctional coping strategies. It can come as a shock when we take behaviors that we learned through our interactions with a dysfunctional, narcissistic or incompetent mother out into the real world as an adult, and find that our interactions with the world and with other people don’t work very well for us.

This can be a recipe for generalized anxiety and depression in our adult lives.

Emotionally mature women seek relationships with men who have their shit together. They’re not looking for a child walking around in a man’s body who they have to parent all the time. Only very damaged women are drawn to such man-children. When our mother was unable to handle the basic aspects of her relationships without inflicting damage on the people around her, we end up suffering collateral damage. We need to get this damage out of our nervous system in order to have healthy relationships with other people, especially women.

The core skills we need to develop in order to get a toxic mother out of our nervous system are:

• Emotional awareness – Learn to identify and express how we feel emotionally in the present moment, especially emotions our mother was uncomfortable dealing with.
• Trauma awareness – Identify when our emotional reactions to present-day circumstances are out of proportion to what’s actually going on because a trauma from the past is being triggered, and how to heal it.
• Affirming Inner Dialogue – Silence our inner critic and learn to only say loving, affirming statements to ourselves, especially if we didn’t hear such statements growing up.
• Social skills – Develop healthy interpersonal skills to replace the dysfunctional skills we learned by interacting with our toxic mother, so we can relax and enjoy social interactions.
• Strong Boundaries – Develop clear boundaries of responsibility between ourselves and other people, especially our mother and other women who we percieve as powerful.
• Assertiveness – Stand up for ourselves when other people, especially our mothers and people who behave like her, treat us in ways that we don’t like.
• Conflict Resolution – Face and resolve conflict with other people so the stress of unresolved conflict doesn’t accumulate in our nervous system.
• Practise Forgiveness – Forgive ourselves, our mother and other people who act in ways that hurt us so that we can free ourselves from pain and resentment.
• Self-Determination – Having let go of pleasing our toxic mother as the primary purpose of our lives, we need to learn how to set and work towards goals that are personally meaningful to us.

Self-awareness is a key part of getting a toxic mother out of our nervous system. Our role in life isn’t to please our mother: it’s to set and pursue goals that are meaningful to us. In a healthy, loving, reciprocal adult-adult relationship this will often include meeting some of our mother’s needs in ways that are mutually beneficial. Be conscious of when you are doing this out of obligation rather than out of love though, and know where to draw the line when what she wants is unreasonable or you just plain don’t want to do it.

Learn to do what is important to you even if you know your mother would disapprove. If feelings of guilt, shame and fear arise, identify whether they are because you’re violating your own values or are emotional residues from your mother. Seek help from a therapist or from other men to process emotional trauma from the past so that you can get your mother out of your nervous system and live your life in the present moment on your own terms without her or anyone else’s approval.