Dear Andrew:

In your last post, do you mean that you considered cutting ties altogether with your mother, for one, but there is emotional pain (“getting hurt initially myself”)  that you suffer considering cutting all ties?

If so, reason is, that as children we simply have to have our mother’s/ parents’ approval. It is not negotiable (who will take care of us if … our care taker doesn’t approve of us, is the biological/ survival reasoning). And so we will do anything and everything to gain that approval.

As adults, we still long for that approval even though practically, we no longer need it. We still long for it because we have longed for it for so long, the longing is part of our brains. As adults, we shed our skin but we don’t shed our childhood brain. The longing is in the brain.

When we displease our parents as adults, that is, when they disapprove, it triggers the same terrible feeling that it did when we were children, the dread of our survival being threatened. So we will, again, do anything to get their approval, no matter what it is.

To gain freedom from this incongruence with reality, it takes learning, over time, to relax into the current reality: that your mother’s disapproval has no consequence to your survival; it was so when you were a child, but is no longer so.  It will take managing and enduring that distress, that “terrible feeling”. It may take competent, quality psychotherapy to get there. It will probably take extricating yourself from this dynamic (cutting contact).

If you cut contact and attend best psychotherapy, you will still feel distress at times. With emotional skills and social support (wife, therapist, others), you will manage the distress involved, so it is not overwhelming. You will gain freedom from the people who harm you, freedom from this form of servitude to the people who harm you (as in apologizing for their wrongdoings, and inviting them for another round of mistreating you); you gain confidence in yourself, a sense of empowerment and so, better life ahead.

anita