Taking On My Mother's Shame

[primrose]

Growing up my pattern with my mother was that if I shared something about me that was weak, my mother shamed me for it.

It's normal for children to be vulnerable, to struggle with things and to need help with them. It's not normal for a mother to shame her child for not being able to do things.

I reacted to that pattern by withdrawing from my mother and by believing that my feelings of vulnerability were extremely shameful. I felt that I couldn't share that part of me. I realise that my mother shamed me very intensely because I was asking for her help about things she herself couldn't do. I picked up on her underlying anxiety and fear as well as her shame. Being vulnerable was clearly VERY BAD.

I need to get back to that vulnerable child in me and disentangle my vulnerability from my mother's shame. There's really nothing surprising about me being childlike in certain areas. Not only was I not helped when I was fragile, I was harmed for it.

Lots to work through. As always!

[primrose]

Yesterday so many feelings came up about this early break with my mother. I can feel how I made the decision early on that if love from my mother meant capitulating to her will, then I would do without love. I would cut myself off from her and love, and live with a heardened heart. Probably she rejected me first, because I can't imagine any child deciding to do that out of choice. My mother says she is brilliant at cutting people out who displease her, she freezes them out until they decide to avoid her. She says she prides herself on that ability as she is extremely polite to anyone she freezes out, but they absolutely know that they have been rejected.

No wonder I'm so avoidant. Underneath my heardened heart is my child self struggling with the belief that love means capitulation and submission. It means to my little girl self that in order to be close to someone I love I have to give myself up and worship at their feet and be a suplicant. Love isn't safe from a woman. Love from a woman means letting them decide how I should be, letting them decide how I should be treated and letting them hurt me if they want to do that.

So my pattern in female friendships was to give myself to women, then to feel the early fury I have about giving myself away and throw off the friendship and live again without closeness to women. Then I'd get lonely and start the process again.

Love isn't really about submitting myself to a woman. That isn't love. That pattern is a very sick and damaged one that grew out of my mother losing her own mother and then being brought up by a woman who was jealous of her and sought to control her. My grandmother said to my mother "You never say no to me" so my mother never did, and then as her first child she brought me up that way too.

Love may not be about submission but I am still holding onto that belief because I still have a lot of grieving to do about my mother's mothering. It's still stuck in me that early trauma. there's so much shame about giving myself away for love in me, but that isn't my fault. My mother made love conditional, that was HER problem, HER issue, not mine. She didn't know how to love with an open heart.

All I can do is grieve as the feelings come up. I'm grateful that they are surfacing as I'll have a little girl of my own to mother in a few months. I don't want to teach her that love from a woman is dependent on her submitting to me.