Dear Amrita:

In my own experience, when you don’t get that “she is happy/ proud of me” feeling from your mother as a child, for months and years.. it creates an emptiness in the heart, and that emptiness hurts and yearns to be filled.

People react to this painful emptiness in all kinds of ways, some, like you, “go to a maximum limit of helping people or doing something for someone”; others get angry at everyone they meet, sooner or later, arguing and fighting. There are people who do both. Others perhaps stay away from people.

A child’s need to be approved/ liked by her mother has a time limit to be filled, and that time limit is in earlier childhood. By the time you are a teenager/ an adult, even if your mother changed and liked you, and was proud of you- she can no longer fill the emptiness that she created, nor can anyone else.

The way to fill that painful emptiness is sometimes in quality psychotherapy where you express how this emptiness feels, how it was created, how it felt all along, and after enough expression and a growing understanding, you will finally be able to accept some people’s liking of you, to really take it in and feel that you are indeed  liked, and that you like yourself, and that emptiness will be filled.

I am glad you invited me to ask you questions. Here are my questions:

1. Are you currently in a relationship/ married?

2. Are you a mother: do you have a child or children?

3. Are you living with your mother, or close to her (same town/ city)?

4. What did you do for your mother as a child, so to make her happy/ proud of you?

5. What are you still doing for your mother, as a 40 year old woman, so to make her happy/ proud of you?

anita

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