assertiveness

How To Deal With Domineering Women

One of the challenges of growing up with a domineering mother who routinely disrespected our boundaries as an infant or adolescent, is that we can become hypersensitive to boundary violations with women as an adult. This can make domineering women particularly difficult to deal with when we encounter them in our daily lives. However, being assertive with such women can help us heal our wounded inner child when we stand up to them powerfully in a way that wasn’t safe for us as a child to stand up to our mother.

This leaves us feeling more confident and powerful in our interactions with other people generally; especially those who remind us unconsciously of our domineering mother. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How (Not) To Manage Anger: Lessons From My Parents

When we are young, we learn to manage our emotions through the interactions with our immediate caregivers, principally our mother and father. The way our parents manage their emotions leaves a dramatic imprint on our developing nervous system that can last long into adulthood. This is particularly true of strong emotions like anger.

Two common adult reactions to poor emotional management by our parents are to submit or to rebel. We either live the rest of our lives managing our emotions they way they taught us out of fear and submission, or doing the opposite out of anger and rebellion. Neither of these two reactions represent true freedom. A better approach is to make our own choice in each situation but this takes insight and practice, especially if we choose to do things differently from the default programming we got from our parents. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Deal With Generalized Anxiety

Anxiety sucks, especially when we don’t know what’s causing it and what to do about it. When we feel anxious all the time for no obvious reason, it’s called generalized anxiety. However there are often things we can do to reduce, eliminate or manage generalized anxiety so that it doesn’t ruin our life.

There are many reasons why we may feel anxious. Solving this problem can sometimes involve trying a number of different approaches until we find one or more that work for us. Based on my experience of what works for me and my clients when feeling anxious, here are some strategies to try: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

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: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Deal With Other People’s Jealousy

An interesting thing happens when we get out act together, drop our victim stories, start taking responsibility for our lives and getting what we want in life: Other people’s response to us change significantly. The majority of people treat powerful, self-confident men with respect; but there will always be people who respond with hostility because they are jealous of our success.

Don’t Get Trapped By Other People’s Jealousy

The only real downside to letting go of our insecurities and learning to live life on our own terms is that other people’s insecurities can start getting triggered by us.

This happened to me today at music college when another male student walked up to a lighthearted group conversation I was having and suddenly said “Graham, you need to stop being such a cunt.”

That didn’t feel good to me: I immediately felt deflated. When I thought about it later, I felt angry; but when I interpreted what he said in the context of possible jealousy towards me, I could see that his comment was really about him rather than me.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Be Assertive With Strangers

I was on my way to music class this morning and the peak hour train was a little more crowded than usual. As I headed downstairs to find a seat, I came across a couple of men occupying two opposite-facing three-person bench seats. I wasn’t keen on standing for a half hour while two guys occupied six seats, so I politely said “Excuse me” to the guy on the aisle end of backward-facing seat, and he kindly moved over to the window to accommodate me.

As I sat in the newly vacant aisle seat, I felt constrained by the man sitting in the middle of the bench seat opposite me. He was sitting forward with his legs spread wide in the classic genital display pose that male primates evolved to demonstrate dominance to other lesser primates. So wide in fact that his left leg and knee were taking up at least a third of the legroom in my own individual seat.

His behavior may have been unintentional and unconscious; but it didn’t feel good to have my newly acquired space dominated by another man’s knee.

Assertiveness Makes a Man Feel Strong

I’m working on getting over my fear of conflict with strangers, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to be assertive with one who was overstepping my boundaries; albeit boundaries that I had just stepped into by requesting the seat.

I made eye contact with the spread-eagled man and politely asked: “Would you mind moving your leg over a little please?”

He kept his leg in place and said something that I didn’t hear due to my noise-cancelling headphones. I removed them so I could hear his objection and replied: “I’m sorry?”

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Ten Signs That You Had A Narcissistic Mother

I had a narcissistic mother and it was a complete disaster for my boyhood sense of self-confidence and the way I saw myself as I grew into a man. A narcissistic mother can leave deep emotional and psychological wounds that get triggered in our daily adult lives, undermining our self-confidence and making life extremely stressful. The impact is most pronounced in our relationships with women, leaving us feeling disempowered and emasculated around women until we get our narcissistic mother wound healed.

Narcissistic Mothers Are Emotionally Unavailable

Narcissists carry a lot of internalized shame and project their own unhealed emotional wounds onto everyone around them, especially their children. As a boy we were powerless to deal with our narcissistic mother and may still carry this sense of powerlessness along with her paranoid world view unconsciously into adulthood.

It’s easy to recognize a narcissistic mother because they typically: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Put Your Mother In Her Rightful Place

I was visiting my parent’s place on the weekend and seeing some relatives from interstate who I don’t often get the chance to hang out with. At one point we were all sitting in the lounge room listening to my father describe the apocalyptic nightmares he’s been having lately, while my controlling mother kept interrupting, talking over him, “correcting” him and just generally dominating the conversation.

Take Your Mother Off The Power Pedestal

I’ve always found my mother’s domineering behavior annoying, but I used to be far too scared of her to stand up to it. This time though I casually lent towards her, put my hand on her arm and said “Mum, could you be quiet please. I want to hear what my father is saying”.

She moved her arm to brush me off dismissively in a way I’ve always found infuriating. This time though rather than feeling powerless and simply capitulating, I [intlink id=”2809″ type=”post”]channeled my anger into assertiveness[/intlink]: “Don’t just brush me off!”, I said, “I want to hear what he’s saying.”

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Do You Feel Guilty About Being Angry With Your Parents?

I grew up in a family where emotions weren’t expressed cleanly; especially challenging emotions like anger. Everyone feels angry from time to time, but growing up I got the sense that there was something wrong with this basic human emotion because nobody talked about it. My parents never seemed to say directly that they felt angry; but it was obvious when they were and their anger came out in ways that I found very frightening and destructive.

It's OK To Be Angry With Your Parents

It’s OK To Be Angry With Your Parents

Everyone around me seemed ashamed of their anger. Over time, I learned to feel ashamed of my anger too. I denied, suppressed and internalized it as though I was doing something righteous and noble. But the repressed rage built up inside me until eventually as an adult I developed overwhelming anxiety, panic attacks, depression and even a physical illness.

This forced me to wise up and realize that there was nothing noble about denying my anger. But with poor role models for expressing anger constructively in my family of origin and in society at large, who was I to turn to for help?

My answer came in the form of enlightened therapists who understood that anger is a perfectly normal emotion whose purpose is to motivate us when our needs aren’t getting met. A powerful energy that needs to be channeled and expressed constructively; not internalized, denied, suppressed or misdirected.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Heal Your Mother Issues

Many men have mother issues that undermine our self-confidence by stopping us from really growing up and fulfilling our true potential. Unresolved mother issues cause us to remain emotionally and developmentally immature; a boy in a man’s body. If we had a critical or controlling mother we’re particularly prone to having mother issues. Add in a passive father and a lack of tribal structure with initiation rituals in modern society to force us from the cozy comfort of our mother’s breast, and it’s easy to slip from childhood into adulthood without ever actually growing up.

Unresolved mother issues can leave you stuck in a permanent state of adolescence.

Unresolved mother issues can leave you stuck in a permanent state of adolescence.

This leaves us forever unconsciously seeking comfort and reassurance from our mother, and our neediness ends up projected onto any woman we come across; which is a disaster for our relationships with women.

In normal human development, we individuate from our mothers during adolescence as we grow into being our own man with our own set of values different from hers. This is a time of rapid brain rewiring and emotional upheaval as we alternate between feeling emotionally connected with our mother, and separating from her to explore the world and our place in it.

If our mother wasn’t emotionally available to connect to, or tried to control our excursions into the world in order to prevent her feeling upset in case we got hurt, then everything can go horribly wrong. Nice Guy Syndrome and the associated approval seeking are classic symptoms of mother issues. Insecurity resulting from unresolved mother issues ends up being unconsciously projected onto everyone and everything around us, having a serious negative impact on our whole life.

Here’s how to heal your mother issues: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago