boundaries

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 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 And When To Go No-Contact With A Narcissistic Parent

One of the best things I’ve ever done for my own self-confidence and for my relationship with my parents was to go “no-contact” with my narcissistic mother for over a year. Narcissistic parents create a family dynamic which is all about putting their own needs ahead of everyone else. This becomes a real problem when we become adults because we can end up trapped by the unconscious belief that our parent’s needs and desires must always come before our own.

Because the emotional dynamics of the parent/child relationship are so strong, this will keep us perpetually stuck as an emotional child emotionally even though we are physically adults. Since our unconscious mind projects our experience of our parents onto everyone else and onto the world at large, the limiting impact of being trapped in the role of a child who must always please their parents restricts our whole lives.

Going “No Contact” With A Narcissistic Parent Can Give You Space To Heal.

Going “no-contact” with a narcissistic parent is one way to grow up emotionally by breaking this unhealthy parental relationship dynamic.

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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

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.

(more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago
What you get in the Deep Inner Game package

Deep Inner Game

What you get in the Deep Inner Game packageI’ve been watching David DeAngelo’s Deep Inner Game program with Dr Paul, and it’s really brilliant. The program is about developing the mindset that men need to be successful, particularly focused on women, dating and relationships. This mindset is often referred to as our “inner game”, and it really extends to the bigger picture of being confident and successful in life generally.

Here are some of the key things that I’ve learned:

Boundaries

Many of our problems in relating to other people are caused by having a weak psychological and emotional personal boundary, often viewed as having holes in our boundary.

Saying “No” is how we patch holes in our boundary.

Expressing preferences also helps build our boundary, and demonstrates it to other people. Women find this very attractive, even if their preferences differ from ours. If you’re very bad at expressing preferences, you may feel like you don’t have any; in which case you may need to start with arbitrary preferences. e.g. I love dogs, I hate cats.

Immature boundaries either have holes, or are thick and impermeable. Mature boundaries have doors that allow us to control what gets in and what does not.

Perfectionism is caused by a hole in our boundary, projecting our own faults and internal ideals out onto other people.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago