mothers

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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By Graham Stoney, ago

Forget About What Your Family Thinks Of You

For many men I know who lack confidence, the seeds of low self-esteem were planted early on during childhood in our family of origin. In an ideal world, our parents create an environment in which we can flourish as a young boy, thrive as an adolescent, and fulfill our potential as a man: confident and self-assured. We feel loved unconditionally, get on brilliantly with our siblings, and learn to deal constructively with conflict that inevitably occurs within any family.

In the real world though, things work a little differently. Unless parents make a conscious effort to deal with their personal issues through some other form of personal growth or therapy, they tend to unconsciously pass on their own insecurities to their children. They can’t help it; as children we are particularly sensitive to what goes on in our environment, and our parents are our natural role models whose behavior we tend to copy. Our parents have a god-like status to us as a young boy, and we can’t help but naively assume that the way they operate in the world is a good way for us to be too. As children we lack the real world experience and insight to notice that the way our parents operate doesn’t necessarily work real well for them either, and we don’t know any better.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

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…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Overcoming Limiting Beliefs

I was watching David DeAngelo’s Advanced Dating Skills program the other day, and the topic of limiting beliefs was huge. A limiting belief is any belief that inhibits us from having what we want.

The reason that we don’t have the success we would like all comes down to the way we behave, and this behavior is ultimately driven by our conscious and unconscious beliefs. Emotions play a big role too, and these are linked to our unconscious beliefs.

Limiting beliefs get learned through our experiences of life, and become built deep into our subconscious. They shape our default response to the world. Once any belief is acquired, our subconscious makes an automatic connection between what we observe in the world and the beliefs that we have, which makes these beliefs self-reinforcing. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago