How To Deal With A Mom Who Hates You

If you feel that you are not getting the right amount of attention or love from your mother, it can feel like a terrible situation that can leave lasting mental scars that are not healthy for anyone having to deal with it. The reasons for receiving hatred or the perception from a parent are wide and varied, especially if it comes from a mother, which can be especially distressing. In this article, we’ll go over some steps you can take to minimize the problem and prioritize your mental health, your most important priority.

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1. Define hate

First off – we need to define hate. Hate is an extremely powerful emotion that stems from a number of strong feelings like jealousy and resentment. While these feelings can be extremely strong in the moment and during a fight about something specific, they typically dissipate quite quickly. This is a bit of a distortion, as the emotion is playing into the feelings and what they think of the other individual.

On the other hand, if the feelings stay over a period of weeks, months, or years, then there might be a deeper issue at play. This type of issue might not be able to be resolved in a quick conversation but may need additional help and resources.

2. Take stock of the current relationship by looking at the past

What you might define as hate could actually be a stern form of love from your mother’s point of view That’s where the term “tough love” comes from. When parents have major ambitions for their child, it can breed into a form of caretaking that has much stricter rules and a harsher parenting style than the average methodologies. While this has the potential to create greatness in the individual, oftentimes the long-term effects of such a parenting style can result in resentment in the individual for the parent instilling trauma into the individual’s childhood.

This is a major issue in the concept of “tiger parenting”, where parental behavior is often abusive towards the child in order to get a certain, specific achievement out of them. If you did feel this was an issue in the past that informs your feelings of resentment in the future, then recognizing it can be the first step towards repairing a relationship that might be much different now that you are an adult. On the other hand, your current success may be a source of jealousy for your mother. If this is the case, then identifying the cause of this jealousy will be extremely important as you move forward.

A cause for tiger parenting could be that your mother had major ambitions for herself. Whether it is in education or the arts, she may have had her own dreams that went unfulfilled when she had to take on the duties and responsibilities of being a mother. As a result, she may have projected her own feelings of inadequacy onto you and pushed you even harder than a parent not projecting their own ambitions onto their child. “Living through your children” is an often-heard conception of this and can result in toxic relationships that are difficult to repair years down the line when the damage has already been done.

3. Understand the root cause of these feelings

As we just noted, a few different causes of your mother’s hatred towards you, if it can be defined that way, could stem from their own jealousy and resentment towards you. This could be from harboring negative feelings about their own mental state of mind as well as feelings of inadequacy in themselves. In both situations, neither issue is your fault but of their own misgivings and past trauma that has affected them to this day. Remember, your mother is a human being as well and may have her own unresolved past issues that she needs to work on herself.

Sometimes, parenting patterns can be passed on from generation to generation. In this case, if you underwent some kind of toxic or abusive, whether psychological or physical, parenting, there is a strong possibility that your parent did as well and has attempted to offload some of that trauma onto your own upbringing.

4. Try to start up a dialogue

When trying to mend and fix relationships, it takes two to tango. That being said, starting up a dialogue or even attempting to start up a dialogue is the critical foundation for moving into a new era in the relationship. Communication is often challenging and a lack of it can be downright frustrating. Telling your mother in black and white how you feel about the situation, while painful, could be the tipping point that sparks a better and stronger relationship between the two of you. Speaking up for yourself and the truth about your feelings for her, regardless of the result, is likely to have some kind of effect on her.

5. Do activities together

Perhaps starting up a dialogue worked and now you’d like to make the relationship even deeper. Doing physical activities like taking walks or hiking together can completely change how dialogue flows because the surrounding environment is not inside of a room or on the phone where miscommunication can easily happen. Alternatively, some relationships are not founded on spoken words but instead, are deepened through physical activities. If this is the case with your mother, then doing an activity can go very far in repairing the relationship.

Although it seems like balancing work and life might make it seem impossible to do such activities, planning something out well in advance is worth the possibility of deepening the relationship. Even the act of working together to plan an activity can stem better feelings between the two of you.

6. Learn as much as you can

Read, read, read. There is a wealth of information out there that can point you in the right direction about the origins of those feelings that your mother may have against you. While it is easy to put the blame on yourself for all of these issues, you need to understand that it is not your fault and that your mother is likely going through her own mental health issues. Luckily, we live in a time where mental issues are not as stigmatized and several studies have been published that attempt to find answers to these kinds of important questions. By learning more about these issues, you can maintain and manage peace within yourself, even if you do live with your mother and have to deal with these feelings on an everyday basis.

7. Practice self-growth

At the end of the day, the feeling that your mother hates you would make anyone feel down and depressed. This can cause you to project these feelings onto others. Instead, focus on activities that help you learn, grow, and improve as a person in order to take your mind off of the current negative feelings that you have towards your mother. Personal growth makes you more empathetic to others, which will be extremely important as you navigate dealing with your mother’s own feelings towards you.

8. Speak to a therapist

Whether or not everything else fails, make sure to get guidance from a professional therapist. These individuals have dedicated their lives to figuring out solutions to difficult and sensitive issues, parental resentment and strong emotional feelings being one of them. Therapists can guide you through some steps that you can take in order to get past tough emotional barriers. It’s also great to have someone you can speak to and who will listen to you, so don’t hesitate to reach out to a professional as soon as possible.

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Suzy Prichard

Hi, my name is Suzy Prichard and I have been a high school councilor for over 12 years now. I am also a parent to three marvelous children - who have all been through their rocky teenage years and come out of the other side.

Over the years, I have seen my fair share of teenage issues. I have also seen plenty of worried parents at a loss of what to do with their children.

My aim with Talking Teenage is to put a stop to this and help you to communicate with your teenagers better. This will leave you with a better relationship and help you to keep such a close bond.

Please take the time to read my website and learn anything you can - we were all teenagers once!