Psychologists’ offices are full of adults who have not cured the deep wound that a mother who does not love unconditionally generates. Not to mention a mother who is mean to the child she gave birth to. And yet is kind to everyone else. ‘Why is my mom so mean to me but nice to everyone else,’ is the question for many children around the world.
This is unfortunate, considering the mother is the first person a child recognizes. It is she who protects and cares for the children. Yet, the fact that she was also the one who neglected the children was unbelievable. However, there is always a good reason behind this behavior. And here, we are going to talk more about them.
1. The Loving Bond
The loving bond between mother and child is natural and even sacred. And yet, it can be difficult for many to accept that there are mothers who do not love their children. However, this situation is real. These are women who may have reached maternity without desire due to family or social obligations.
Or perhaps, due to the demand of their partner, by accident, or for multiple other causes. These mothers have not found a way to integrate this new role into their lives. In the case of being new, or to bond with that new baby if they are already mothers of other children.
2. The Reasons
Many mothers of large families adore some children and show parental favoritism to them compared to their other children. Many others may have had a long succession of deliveries and exhaustion from maternity and nursing. Let alone raising their kids! Some even need to hand that baby over to their family members to take care of it, abandoning it.
Women who are forced to give up their career or personal desires because the couple wants to have children are prone to frustration. Few also face challenges in having babies because of family control issues for the marriage to “bear fruit.” And worse, they cannot handle the frustration of giving up on themselves, which requires the role of a mother in the early years.
That frustration and resentment are projected onto the baby, who will never be good enough. If he were, she would be able to love him, and she wouldn’t be so frustrated. There are other reasons below why mothers show hostility toward their children.
3. Coldness
There are mothers who have never or rarely expressed any sign of affection towards their children. Mothers who seem to directly or indirectly send an explicit message to their children of rejection and lack of acceptance.
They behave emotionally distant and cold, which makes it difficult to have a good relationship with them. Instead, a communication breakdown will develop as a result of the neglect.
However, those same mothers may be able to show a different side of themselves to others. Their coldness only exudes in the child and not to anyone else. This could be the same coldness they received from their mothers.
4. Incompatibility
It may be that your personality and your mother’s simply don’t fit at all, as well as her ideas and beliefs. Therefore, every time you try to talk to her, you end up getting angry, or you just don’t feel in tune with her. And thus, this causes frustration. At this point, you and your mother may need professional intervention to help maneuver through it.
Does therapy help solve family conflicts?
Family dynamics can affect how the role of a mother in the family. Sometimes, prolonged conflicts involving emotional abuse, criticism, gaslighting, and constant manipulation of their partner overwhelm them.
As a result, you become the target of her projection to vent her anger and frustration. And at this point, it’s natural for you to wonder why my mom is so mean to me.
A mother forced to give up her career may also develop jealousy and insecurity when she sees successful colleagues. And again, she will shift the blame on you and not others. You may also experience sibling rivalry, where your mother shows more love to your brother or sister.
Suppose you have tried various ways to improve your relationship with your mother, but nothing has worked. In that case, counseling may be the best alternative. You can first discuss the root of the problem with a professional before booking a session with your mom.
From this session, a therapist will dig deeper into why your mother is so mean to you. And yet, treat others so well. Hopefully, after some meetings, she can contemplate her attitude toward you.
5. Narcissism
Another possible reason why you do not get along with your mother and feel that she doesn’t love you is that she may be a person who focuses a lot on herself (parental narcissism). She worries too much about “what people will say” and how what happens to you affects how they perceive her.
From her, It moves almost exclusively for her own interests, and this makes you not feel truly valued (a) and loved (a) by her. Children of narcissistic parents may present behavior and coexistence problems that later affect them in adulthood. This is another reason why you may both need professional counseling.
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6. The Blame
These kinds of situations could lead to demonizing and blaming those women who do not love their children. We would fall into easy judgment. Unfortunately, we wouldn’t see that this lack of maternal love is the tip of the iceberg of heartbreak.
If women were loved and respected in their freedom of choice and supported in childbearing and upbringing, they would have fewer unwanted children. As a result, they could face caring for them with more zest and energy. Thus, little by little, this great chain of heartbreak would diminish.
The first job to break this chain is to heal one’s own wound with their own mother if one exists. In this way, they will love each child more and better. Eventually, they will love themselves more and better.
7. The Motherly Function
The relationship with the mother or with the person who performs the maternal function marks the intimate relationship with oneself. The mother’s function is to welcome the child from the moment they are conceived, given birth, fed, embraced, and protected.
Furthermore, the biological mother usually performs this function. However, other people from the family, like grandparents, can perform this task. Through what a child receives, they are charged with unconditional love for themselves, and their hearts are nourished.
It programs them for self-care, self-esteem, and self-protection. Additionally, it opens them to empathy for others, to be able to feel love towards their equals, and to be loved by other people. The different deficiencies that they suffer leave these emotional and psychological mechanisms empty of the necessary substance to relate in a loving way with themselves and with others.
8. Learned Behavior Displayed
If there is no nurturing love available from a mother, a child will latch onto whatever substitute is available, doing everything possible to receive even a little. When love is conditional, it leaves a deep wound.
Consequently, the survival and adaptation mechanisms that the child has begins to deteriorate. This is especially true if the child sees the mom doing the opposite to others, such as a sibling, friend, or family member.
Love from a nurturing mother helps the child become a well-rounded adult, free from self-destructive behavior patterns. Without this maternal love and care, a child could view abuse, callousness, and rejection as something natural.
9. The Wounds
Those children who grew up with a robot mom who fed them, cleaned and dressed them like things, without seeing them, or being affectionate and empathetic towards them, feel like empty shells. They cannot feel empathy toward what happens to them or to others.
Their wounds will be different, depending on when their mothers stopped feeling unconditional love for them. The damage is greater when that mother who brought them into the world could never love them and yet love others. In that case, it will depend on how much maternal function was available in their environment.
Signs Of Lack Of Empathy Mom
It is common knowledge that a mother is perhaps the most empathetic person in the world. However, some cases speak otherwise. Because of several reasons, a mother can be a person who is not empathetic, even to her children. Some of the signs of a non-emphatic mom include:
- Gaslighting and blaming the victims. In this case, her kids.
- Extremely critical. It seems like everything her children do is wrong and not enough
- Forgiving is a no on her list. She is the right one, and everybody else is wrong.
- She shows no remorse for invalidating behavior she has toward the kids.
- Doesn’t show any affection. If it exists, it is barely seen.
- She loves to speak but is hesitant to listen, especially to those with different perspectives
- Can’t keep track of her kids’ emotions, even if they are genuine.
10. Saved By Unconditional Love
For example, there are many adults saved by a grandmother, an aunt, or a sister, who exercised a powerful mother role in their childhood that anesthetized the child from the pain of lack of love, relieving the wound of a mother who did not love them. Something similar to what happens with orphaned children who are adopted and grow up in loving families.
In all these cases, the amount of unconditional love makes the difference between someone with holes in her personality and whose love machine has been damaged and someone with a well-oiled and functional love machine for herself and others.
11. Making a Change
We have to learn to differentiate between the love that nourishes us and the one that is only the expression of a mother who puts her selfish and narcissistic needs above ours. This awareness will help us to break the chain of lack of love and not transmit the wound to our partners, friends, and children.
We have to realize that all mothers are also daughters of this system of heartbreak. It is necessary to demystify our role once and for all to be able to access the damage we receive from our mothers, healing it and breaking our link in the chain once and for all. Mothers are not goddesses. They are human with their own stories of heartbreak engraved in their hearts and in their unconscious.
The mythification of motherhood only distances us from the reality of flesh and blood and makes us complicit in the collective taboo and silence. Perhaps in this way, we will change a system in which the lack of unconditional love damages each new being.
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