THE MOTHER OF ALL OUR ISSUES?
by
Terrence Shulman
Mother’s Day is around the corner and the holiday often brings up strong emotions which may triggers relapses into addiction. So be prepared and be on guard! The relationship between mother and child–no matter how old we are–is likely the most important, primal and fundamental relationship we’ll have. I can’t tell you how often in my counseling practice that clients’ “mother issues” are at the very root of their addictions and relationship problems. This is not to blame mothers, per se, as no mother is perfect. But it is important for us to acknowledge, understand, and do our best to heal old (or newer) wounds and to develop a healthier relationship with our mothers whether they are actively in our lives or not.
Some of the most common reasons both men and women have mother issues include the following:
- a mother died early in a child’s life or committed suicide;
- a mother was addicted and/or mentally ill and was not able to be physically and/or emotionally present and attuned to her child;
- a mother was overtly/covertly seductive/sexual with her child;
- a mother appeared to favor one of her children over another;
- a mother needed rescue, help, or companionship and her child played the role of partner or parent;
- a mother held unrealistically high expectations of her child and the child became inauthentic to receive mother’s love/approval;
- a mother was physically, emotionally, and/or verbally abusive toward her child;
- a mother had little naturales cultivated interest in being a mother to bor child
- a mother betrayed her child’s confidence in some way:
- a mother was “perfect” and modeled this in a way her child felt unable to compete with;
- a mother was overly critical of her child;
- a mother was overly “smothering,” domineering or controlling
- a mother committed infidelity in her marriage & her child knew;
- mother encouraged her child to tell or keep secrets;
- a mother broke the law and/or modeled dishonesty. Which of the above issues seems to resonate with you?
The core effects of the situations described above often result in persistent feelings of neglect, rejection, abandonment, self-doubt, low self-esteem/self-worth, codependency/care-taking others, as well as loneliness, depression, anxiety, and anger. There may be other wounds or conflicts that develop around our relationship with our mothers than just those listed above.
Have you worked through any of these issues or does it feel like you still need to? Because I didn’t have the best role model for a father, I found myself feeling ashamed to be a man, not trusting men or authority, and quite confused about both women and what I wanted to do with my life. Fortunately, I had a great therapist who encouraged me to read books about men’s issues and to participate in men’s support groups and retreats where I found I was not alone, began to trust men again, and to see the positive aspects of men and authentic masculinity. We rarely talked about or looked into our relationships with our mothers in my men’s groups.
It’s been theorized that the reason the “men’s movement” of the 1990’s petered out was that we didn’t know how to individually and collectively deal with our mother issues and, so, we kind of hit a wall. At least for most men, regardless of sexual orientation, our issues with mother often are more subtle yet also more scary and dangerous. Compared to my father’s more obvious failings, my mother was a saint. But in the past few years, events led me to come to the conclusion that I had to deal with my mother issues, too.
For me, part of this arose in the context of my 18-year marriage to my wife. It’s not uncommon for men to have issues with their wives that are, at the core, issues with mother or “the feminine.” How many men, when asked to do something by their wives, perceive criticism, feel like a 5-year old being ordered or scolded by mother. I also realized that I’d continued to play the good son role despite having made progress on this. I still felt scary to speak up more, share my feelings and truth, and risk my mother’s love– I’d been so used to being her protector, her biggest fan.
I had to come to terms with my mother’s (and my own) limitations in our relationship. I’ve been learning to let go of that primal desire to have “mommy” be there for me as I continue in adulthood and it’s my judgment that my mother has had to learn that I won’t always be there for her as I was in the past. I think we both needed to be knocked off our pedestals a bit. It’s been painful for both of us but necessary, too. It’s natural to look to Mom (or Dad) to be a safe space to share our pain and our opinions (even if it hurts them). It doesn’t mean they don’t share their own pain and opinions back but, I believe, a primary role of a parent is to be strong and mature enough to absorb their child’s expressions, to model this even, and to be secure enough even in their imperfections to listen, try to understand, and try to see the gift in their child’s courageous, if imprecise, offering of their pain, their perspective.
As we grow up (and, hopefully, we do) we learn to differentiate from our parents, need them less (emotionally, financially, etc) and develop compassion for them (they did the best they knew how to do given how they likely were raised). But this doesn’t mean it’s easy. We are taught to honor thy parents but that doesn’t mean we don’t speak our minds our share our hearts. I also am slowly coming to realize, as my mother ages, that she won’t always be around: Mom is mortal. She just turned 82 this year and is suffering from mid-stage Alzheimer’s Disease.
The question arises: what do I/we need to say to my/our mother or feel in my/our heart so /wel can be as complete as possible when she passes? I can only say that when my wife and my friends are able to hear each others’ grievances and concerns without attacking back or defending (and when I can hear them), it creates safety and trust and deenens our relationships I can’t think of a better way to bonor each other In
this context, wouldn’t it be great if–this Mother’s Day–instead of cards and flowers, we could give the gift of honesty, our mother could receive it lovingly, and we would return the favor?
DON’T CALL IT A LOST YEAR:
DISCUSSING RESILIENCE AND HELPING YOUNG PEOPLE TRANSITION FROM COVID
by
Judith Warner (New York Times April 11, 2021)
They’re calling it a “lost year.”
Eyan Gallegos, 11, a seventh grader in Washington, D.C., doing his homework. He hasn’t met a single one of his classmates at the middle school he began attending during the pandemic.
On and offline, parents are trading stories – poignant and painful about all of the ways that they fear their middle schoolers are losing ground.
“It’s really hard to put my finger on what happened exactly,” said Jorge Gallegos, whose son, Eyan, is in the seventh grade in Washington, D.C.
When Eyan was in fifth grade, he had a lot of friends, Mr. Gallegos said. He was home schooled for sixth grade, and he seemed to thrive.
But spending this year at home because of the pandemic has just been too much.
Eyan transferred to a new middle school for seventh grade, where nearly all of the other students had started in the sixth grade, pre-pandemic. He hasn’t met any of his classmates in person, and he hasn’t made a single friend.
Eyan has told his parents that he’s lonely. So lonely, in fact, that he has started posting on Discord and Reddit. Sometimes, when he’s bored, he even starts chatting with those strangers during class time.
His dad is sympathetic. “He wants to talk to people, and he doesn’t have anybody,” Mr. Gallegos said in a recent phone interview. But he’s also worried.
As a teenager, Mr. Gallegos went off the rails for a time. He was kicked out of high school, withdrew from community college twice and spent years fighting his way back, ultimately graduating from college and building a successful career with the federal government. There’s no way he’ll let the pandemic similarly spin his son’s life out of control.
“I’m going to make sure that we’re on top of this stuff,” he said. “I think as a parent, I have to do more.”
Virtually everyone has waded through hardships this past year – job losses, relationship struggles, chronic stress and, in the worst of all cases, the loss of loved ones to Covid-19. And parents with school-age demands of combining their usual work and family responsibilities with at least children have battled the some degree of home-schooling. But mothers and fathers of middle schoolers – the parenting cohort long known to researchers as the most angst-ridden and unhappy are connecting now in a specific sort of common misery: the pressing fear that their children, at a vital inflection point in their academic and social lives, have tripped over some key developmental milestones and may never quite find their footing again. Experts say some of their worries are justified-but only up to a point. There’s no doubt that the pandemic has taken a maior toll on many adolescents’ emotional well-being. According to a much-cited report from
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the proportion of emergency room visits that were mental
health-related for 12 to 17 year olds increased by 31 percent from April to October 2020 compared with the
same period in 2019. And there’s no question that witnessing their loneliness, difficulties with online
learning and seemingly endless hours on social media has been enormously stressful for the adults who
care about them the most.
Yet, as the nation begins to pivot from trauma to recovery, many mental-health experts and educators are trying to spread the message that parents, too, need a reset. If adults want to guide their children toward resilience, these experts say, then they need to get their own minds out of crisis mode. That challenge is likely to be especially tough for the parents of young adolescents, whose emotions run high and whose ability to put feelings into words tends to be limited. But it’s also one that parents of middle schoolers in particular really need to try to meet.
Early adolescence the middle school years, in the United States – is considered a second critical period, a time of brain changes so rapid and far-reaching that they rival the plasticity and growth that take place in the much more popularly recognized newborn to 3-year-old phase.
These changes, which are set in motion by the same sex hormones that prompt the external physical developments of puberty, make children more capable of higher-level thinking and reasoning. They make them acutely aware of their status and how they appear in the eyes of others. They make them crave social contact, attention and approval. Over all, they provide a hard-wired explanation for the challenges (and opportunities) that are most associated with the middle-school years.
Remote learning and social distancing are in many ways the opposite of what children in this age group want and need.
“It’s been hardest on middle schoolers,” said Phyllis Fagell, a therapist, school counselor and the author of the 2019 book “Middle School Matters.” “It is their job to pull away from parents, to use these years to really focus on figuring out where they are in the pecking order, figuring out what they need from a friend, what they can give to a friend. And all of that hard work that has to happen in these years was just put on hold.” As a result, she said, “there’s more perfectionism, because they’re trying to control the variables they can control.”
“There’s more anxiety, more school refusal, more aggression, chronic worrying, germophobia, depression,” she continued. “There’s more everything.”
Despite all of this, Ms. Fagell, much like the dozen-plus other experts in adolescent development who were interviewed for this article, was adamant that parents should not panic – and that, furthermore, the spread of the “lost year” narrative needed to stop. Getting a full picture of what’s going on with middle schoolers – and being ready to help them they agreed, requires holding two seemingly contradictory ideas simultaneously in mind: The past year has been terrible. And most middle schoolers will be fine.
The reason they’ll be fine is built right into the biology of early adolescence, explained Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University and the author of “Age of Opportunity,” the influential 2014 book on adolescent brain science. The fact that middle schoolers are going through a “critical period” of
heightened brain flexibility, instability and plasticity, he said, means that they are hypersensitive and ultra- vulnerable – and also extra-primed for adaptability and resilience.
“Do kids need certain kinds of experiences at this point in their lives in order to be able to develop normally? Yes, but there’s no reason to think an interruption like this is going to cause permanent damage,” Dr. Steinberg said in a phone interview. “The plasticity afforded by the adolescent brain at this age allows for recovery.”
Engaging in distance learning with your classmates, being part of a pod and keeping in frequent touch with friends online is hardly tantamount to solitary confinement, he noted. And being “unhappy” is very different from being “impaired”
What factors keep adolescents from tipping from one state to the other? Mental health experts point to a few: their connection to at least one good friend; any underlying vulnerabilities like mood disorders; the adversity in their daily lives; the availability of adults to help them cope with hardship – and whether their parents are keeping it together.
This often-overlooked variable has repeatedly emerged as one of the critical determinants of middle- and high-schoolers’ mental health during the pandemic, according to surveys conducted and analyzed by the psychologist Suniya Luthar, a professor emeritus of Teachers College at Columbia University and a co- founder of the research group, Authentic Connections, which advises schools on promoting students’ mental well-being.
Beginning in 2019, and continuing every semester since the coronavirus shutdowns began, Dr. Luthar and her team have polled more than 46,000 students in public and private schools across the United States, monitoring changes in their mental health and looking for answers as to why they do well or poorly. Their subjects have been sixth through twelfth graders, racially diverse – almost 40 percent are students of color – and drawn from schools where students score on average in the top third on national achievement tests. What they’ve found is that children’s perceptions that their parents are dissatisfied with them (as when parents point out all of the ways that their children are falling behind), along with poor parent mood are the strongest predictors of depression and anxiety in teenagers. The effects are strong, Dr. Luthar suggested in an interview, because during the pandemic, adolescents are getting an unadulterated dose of parent distress.
“The safety nets we could have had if you have a difficult parent a teacher, sports, friends – all that’s taken away in one fell swoop,” she said.
Parents can’t just take a magic wand and sweep away their own mental health woes. But they can still help their children come out of this period feeling whole; they just have to be smarter about the way that they communicate. Painting this last year as a crucible of loss, for instance, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“We have to start considering how we are going to frame this period as we emerge from it,” said Mitch Prinstein, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the chief science officer for the American Psychological Association. “We need to focus not just on hardship and tragedy. We need to praise them for their flexibility and resilience and ability to change.”
That’s not just a matter of a pat on the back. How we tell ourselves the story of ourselves – particularly after high-impact emotional experiences and especially in the critical period of early adolescence is actually etched into our brain, explains Dr. Prinstein, author of the 2017 book “Popular.”
That’s why,” he said, “we need to link this period to praise about how our kids were able to develop adaptive skills – to give them a positive sense of self.”
For many parents, it shouldn’t be that hard to overcome this particular form of bad news bias.” After all, there are middle schoolers – just as there are some adults and other children – who have weathered the past year with relative equanimity. There are many, in fact, when you look beyond the clinical group who are suffering enough to show up in therapists’ offices or even the E.R. and when you observe them with eyes a bit less anxious (and exhausted) than a stressed-out parent’s.
Diedre Neal, the principal at Alice Deal Middle School in Northwest Washington, D.C., oversees a student body from a wide range of neighborhoods and family cultures. All of her students have struggled this past year, she noted in a phone interview, particularly those on the wrong side of the “digital divide.”
And yet, she added, what has struck her above all has been their resilience, especially in the students who were used to being independent, taking public transportation, helping out around the house and spending much of their free time at home with family before the pandemic.
had a sort of a sense of resilience and ‘grit,’ even pre-pandemic that I think served them well.” she said. “I do see an ability to pivot.”
In Dr. Luthar’s research, reports of loneliness actually decreased for seventh and eighth graders between
the spring of 2020 and the spring of 2021 – a reflection, she hypothesizes, of how alienating and lonely
middle school is for many of them during “normal” times. (“The loners, the introverts, the kids that weren’t
popular-they’re fine, thank you,” she said.)
Other new data suggest that the youngest adolescents may have pulled through the pandemic year with somewhat less wear and tear than older teens. In the fall of 2020, a research team led by the psychologist Angela L. Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania surveyed more than 6,500 high schoolers in a large, demographically diverse school district that allowed families to choose whether their children would attend classes remotely or in person.
They found that, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status, students who attended school remotely showed significantly lower levels of social, emotional and academic well-being except for ninth graders, whose levels stayed about the same. (And who, for most of the 20th century, were considered to be in the same developmental category as seventh and eighth graders, and taught in junior high schools.)
Over all, Dr. Steinberg said, the adolescents who have fared the best during the pandemic have tended to be those who have been able to stay connected to their friends. And that, for many middle schoolers, has meant having parents who are willing to relax their usual rules about social media and screen time.
“Social media is mitigating some of the effects of isolation,” he said.
That message, frequently repeated by experts and educators, should offer some relief to the many parents who feel guilty about the amount of screen time they’ve allowed their children this past year.
Rabiah Harris, a public middle-school science teacher in Washington, has a doctorate in education, which permits her, as the mother of an almost 12-year-old, to take a philosophical view.
“He plays way more video games than would make me happy,” Dr. Harris said in a recent interview. She noted that the games permit her son, Olugbenga, who hasn’t had the chance to meet any of his sixth-grade classmates in person, to stay “tight” with his elementary school friends.
“This is not regular,” she added. “There’s really nothing regular about it.”
9 PARADOXICAL TRUTHS
THAT WILL CHANGE HOW
YOU THINK ABOUT LIFE
by Moreno Zugara (Mind Cafe, March 22, 2021)
Some of the most important truths in life don’t make sense on the surface, but once you get beneath it, the world will never look the same.
I noticed this the first time I fell in love. There was a girl in my high school class I liked a lot. Shoulder-long, brown hair, beautiful face, a heart-melting laugh, and eyes I could’ve stared into forever, or at least until the bell announced the next algebra session.
Like most high school kids, I thought I just needed to be nice and loving for her to reciprocate my feelings.
Spoiler: It didn’t work. My advances got rejected more often than Mike Tyson’s credit card in 2003.
After another few similar incidents, I had enough. I stopped being anice guy and started giving fewer fucks.
I teased I said mean things I reiected the aids And all of a sudden Lwas drowning in female attention
At first, I didn’t
truth.
understand it, but later realized dating isn’t the only part of life with an inherent paradoxical
Unfortunately, these are often hard to uncover because if you don’t understand them, it’s like flipping your kitchen switch to see your bedroom lights turn on. But it only works every second Wednesday during a full moon.
Yet, there’s also some good beneath
all the confusion.
Once you get behind the mechanisms, you’ll understand life a lot better and will be able to navigate it with confidence instead of wrecking your ship on a cliff every two weeks without knowing why and how. Here’s what I’ve learned about the paradoxical truths of life – may they open your eyes as much as they did mine.
- The More YouTry to Impress, the Less Impressed Everyone Will Be
If you asked my girlfriend about the most impressive thing I ever did, the answer would be shockingly trivial.
We were cooking and one of my roommates had left a cold pack filled with gel on the counter. Without looking, I tossed it over my shoulder and straight onto a towel hook. My girlfriend stared at me with absolute disbelief.
The throw itself wasn’t impressive. But I made it look effortless-no-aim, no-look, just a casual toss.
This doesn’t only hold for throwing cold packs through your kitchen, but also job interviews, public speeches, first dates, and showing your boss you’re worth your money.
Nobody likes a try hard. The more people see you struggle, the less fascinated they’ll be. If you want to be impressive, make it look effortless.
- What You Hate Someone Else for Is Likely What You Avoid in Yourself
When I was a teenager, I was insecure about my body-big surprise.
I was tall but lanky and got teased for my scrawny appearance. I’ve always been sporty – swimming, running, soccer, tennis, skiing, you name it. But when one day I stepped foot into a gym, I knew I had found my athletic calling.
However, all the additional muscle mass didn’t do much in terms of body insecurity. I had deep, underlying issues that surfaced in very ugly ways: I talked shit about fat people.
Subconsciously, I projected my insecurities onto others, making fun of their bodies and how many burgers they had for breakfast. I was an idiot who was unaware of himself.
Carl Jung calls this reflection, Sigmund Freud projection, but the result is the same. You often avoid what you don’t like about yourself only to release the inner tension through another outlet.
You might not bitch about someone’s BMI, but about their lack of punctuality, bad presentation skills, or taste in fashion.
questionable Coming to terms with these requires you to drop your ego and be humble, but when you do, you can get to the root of the trouble and start working on yourself.
“The flaws you see in others are actually a reflection of yourself.” -Eve Branson
- People Who Don’t Trust Can’t Be Trusted
In line with the above, here’s what this often looks like in practice.
We’ve all heard at least one story about a super jealous boyfriend or girlfriend, going through their partner’s phone and accusing them of infidelity, only to be caught in someone else’s bed a few months later.
You see the world through your perspective, just as everyone else views it through theirs. People often form assumptions about others’ behavior based on their own. If they don’t trust others, chances are it’s because they know others can’t trust them. - You Succeed Not Despite Your Failures, but Because of Them
There’s a simple reason every successful person has failed hard before they became top dog. Without failure, success is impossible. Jack Ma got rejected from KFC. Michael Jordan got kicked out of his high school basketball team. Elon Musk got ousted as CEO of his own company, had Paypal’s first product rated one of the ten worst ideas in business, and then promptly got ousted again as CEO of Paypal while he was on honeymoon. Ouch.
Successful people aren’t successful because they failed so few times, but because they failed so many. Success comes from relentless improvement and failure is the best teacher.
Don’t be afraid to fail. The only bad thing about it is the narrative you still have in your head from school days when green checkmarks meant success and red crosses meant flipping burgers at McDonald’s.
The more you fail, the more you learn, and the more likely you are to succeed.
“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.” – Stephen McCranie
- What Scares You Most Is Your Biggest Chance for a Better Life
Growth happens when you leave your comfort zone.
When I started dating, I was afraid of approaching women on the street since they could reject me. But once I did, my social skills and love life improved tremendously.
When I started my own coaching business, I was afraid to post onInstagram because people I knew from high school could judge me. But once I mustered the courage, I stopped worrying about what others thought of me and found a highly engaging community.
When I disagreed with others, I was afraid of apologizing and admitting mistakes because my ego didn’t take them well. But once I did, my relationships improved by a truckload.
I know this shit is hard. It took me more than 20 tries to first walk up to a woman and stammer a simple “Hi.” But growth is about leaving your comfort zone – and your fear is a great indicator for where it ends.
“What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.” -Tim Ferriss
- The More You Can Have It, the Less You’ll Want It
can’t tell a Chanel handbag from an Aldi one, but I’m still flabbergasted every time she shows me something. Some of the handbags and watches sell for as much as a few million Euro, the equivalent of a Malibu beach front villa. How in the world do they get people to pay these prizes? One word: Scarcity.
- You value things more when they’re less available.
Subconsciously, your brain tells you this must be something special, so you better get your piece of the cake before it’s gone. It’s why manufacturers like Prada rather burn their handbags instead of selling them at a discount – it keeps supply low and perceived value high.
Life becomes a lot easier when you know about this trick. Not only can you spot attempts to lure you with limited offers, but it also explains why being too available kills sexual attraction, and saying yes to every request devalues your time and work.
“Nowhere is water so beautiful as in the desert for nowhere else is it so scarce.” -Edward Abbey
- More Choices Mean Less Satisfaction
I love restaurants because they serve good food and I’m a little fat kid at heart. But there’s one thing I can’t stand.
Long menus confuse the hell out of me. I’m there to eat, not to read a book. In the end, I always pick a random dish and spend half my time wondering what no. 83 would’ve tasted like and if I shouldn’t have ordered it instead.
In psychology, this is known as overchoice. The more alternatives you have the less satisfied you are with your choice because there could’ve been something better.
Keep it simple. Be pragmatic. Don’t overthink. Yes, you could’ve swiped through another 200 people on Tinder, watched another ten movie trailers, or thought about another 50 ways to spend your evening.
But more choices don’t always bring more satisfaction-sometimes they only bring regret.
“The fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better.” -Barry Schwartz
“The Only Constant in Life Is Change”
Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, was way ahead of his time when he said these famous words.
Nothing lasts forever. From the tiny cells in your body over the weather to the position of planets, that. everything changes all the time.
There are two lessons you should draw from that.
First, enjoy good situations while they last. The sun feels nice on your skin but clouds will soon cover it. The phase feels amazing, but the wild emotions will calm down. Your investment does well, but always comes a bearish one. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Second, bad situations aren’t forever as well – yay! Your long, boring workday will be over at one point. be heartbroken forever. Even your annoying neighbor will either move out or die at one point. Don’t despair – bad things aren’t here to stay either.
The only Constant life is change.
- Problems Make You Happy
I’ll question the mental health of anybody who says “I’d like another serving of extra-large issues with a side of difficult challenges please.” Yet, problems are crucial to your happiness, albeit not directly. What makes you happy isn’t the problem itself, but solving it.
Trying to lose weight means problems. Hitting the gym is hard and diets suck. But if you push past the pain, great about yourself and the way you solved your problems. You’re happy. Unfortunately, this doesn’t last forever. A six-pack today won’t keep your happiness levels high a year from you feel now. You need a new problem to solve.
If you didn’t have any obstacles to overcome, life would quickly get dull. What would you do without challenges? You can only enjoy Mojitos in the sun for so long until it gets boring.
The next time you face a problem, don’t get angry or sad. See it as what it really is another opportunity for happiness.