Have Lunch With Your Mother

Here is yet another confidence building tip for you: Today you’re going to learn about taking your mother out to lunch. Now, my relationship with my mother has been a source of some pain and anguish for me, and this is a way of getting past some of that stuff by actually trying to re-establish an adult-adult relationship with your mother, whereas when you were a kid you would’ve had a child-adult relationship with your mother and that may not have gone all that well for you if your mother was anything like mine.

So what you want to do now is start putting some of that childhood stuff behind you and begin to see your mother as just a regular adult person who you can have a normal adult relationship with.

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How to Recover From a Controlling Mother

Growing up with a controlling and/or domineering mother can suppress your masculinity and leave you stuck feeling and acting like a boy in a man’s body. My mother was the dominant figure in my family of origin and with a relatively passive father it was a disastrous recipe for my developing masculinity.

A controlling mother creates a relationship dynamic that will undermine your confidence in yourself as a man unless you take steps to counter its effects. So here are some steps to take to help you recover from growing up with a controlling, dominant mother:

Recognize that Your Mother is Controlling

Did you have a controlling Mother?

Did you have a controlling Mother?

The first step to dealing with a problem is to recognize that it exists. It took me a long time to even see that my mother was controlling. It wasn’t until I did The Landmark Forum in my mid-30s and they started talking about how controlling most of us are that I had this insight.

When I was a child, my mother used a physical leash to control me; partly for my own safety, and partly for her convenience. As I got older, verbal stoushes with my father made it very clear that the masculine point of view wasn’t welcome in our household.… Continue reading…