Should I love my mother. What to do if mom doesn't love me: psychology and consequences

This question sounds somehow strange, unnatural. The obligation to love? Our feelings are free, they are not subject to logic and reason, but they move us, fill our life with themselves. Are we obligated to love our mother?

A baby is born into the world thanks to his parents, especially his mother, who carried him under her heart for nine long months, protected him from the dangers of the outside world, gave him all her love and time. The baby grows up, first of all, thanks to his mother's care for him. For the first days and months of his life, his mother is constantly with him: he feeds, swaddles, dresses, bathes, walks, carries him in her arms. And he does it with love, with the desire to make his child healthy and happy!

Mom replaces the little man the whole world. And the baby, in addition to purely physiological needs, experiences unconditional love for his mother, which is growing stronger every day. At first, he tries to express her with a smile, and now he can already express his feeling in quite recognizable words, saying: “Don't be afraid, mom, I love you!”. It seems that with such a course of events, the mother will not even have the thought that if she takes care of her child and devotes time to him, then he is obliged to love her in return.

A child loves his mother not at all because she has beautiful eyes and not because she buys him dolls or cars. He just truly loves his mom! Mom and child love each other with unconditional love and live these feelings. Mutual feeling contributes to the harmonious development of parent-child relationships (although this does not mean that there will be no difficulties and crisis periods).

However, not everything in life is so smooth. Mothers are different. Everyone has their own "laws" and life values. Someone, raising a child, buying him clothes, food and other vital things, visiting the hospital, circles and sections with him, is completely sure that his son or daughter owes him something. Yes, for all the beneficence, children are simply obliged to love their mother. And this thought slips through the woman-mother, grows stronger, she is sure that she is right. And now she already mentally or more clearly obliges her child to love.

The question arises: does she herself love the one whom she gave birth to? Or even in relation to the closest people in the foreground are the market relations “you to me - I to you”? Some kind of calculated love. You can spend a lot of time with a child, work with him in various developmental groups, buy expensive things for him and fill the apartment with sweets and toys - and get indifference in return baby heart. An angry thought flashes: “I am everything to him, and he is ... ungrateful!”

Children learn to love from their parents, especially from their mother. They are so sincere and sensitive that their heart cannot be deceived, they still do not know how to pretend like adults. And if you do not give a child a piece of your soul, love will not appear (although there are exceptions here: it happens that a mother puts her soul into her child, and subsequently receives indifference and complete removal as a reward).

As adults, many of us consciously understand the fact that mother gave us life, took care of us, and, despite various feelings for the mother, we are grateful to her for what we are, for what we have become. Even with complex personal relationships, we tend to respect and honor our parents and feel gratitude for the fact that we gave birth, raised, raised to our feet.

What if the mother is an alcoholic? If she gave birth and threw it into the street? If refused in the hospital? What kind of love, it would seem. From the side of such a mother, she is absent, and she has thrown off all her obligations! But the child in any case dreams of love, dreams of a good and kind mother who will hug him.

Love is something that comes from the depths of the soul. Love is a natural human need, without it there is no life. And children are the flowers of life, and they are drawn to the sun, i.e. to the warmth that mother's love gives them. Is the word "must" appropriate here?

We are obliged to repay a debt if we took money from a bank or borrowed it from a friend, we are obliged to repay a debt to our homeland, we are obliged to pay alimony, we are obliged to comply with certain norms of the society in which we live, we are public institutions Yes, we owe a lot. But no one is obligated to love anyone. And if this ever happens, then it will no longer be our world, it will be an artificial world of new fake people.

Anna, there is no smoke without fire. Mom is good, of course! But sometimes it happens that mothers offend children, even if they don’t want to. Children are very afraid to admit this insult (mother is good, and I am bad, since I am offended by her), insults are suppressed, not accepted, and then you explode like an overflowing steam boiler. Because grievances have been accumulated and you do not know what to do with them, and you cannot accept them.

But resentment is a normal feeling. This is not a recognition that mom is evil and bad, this is a recognition that YOU were offended once. Once you admit it, look for safe ways outburst of aggression.

There are 3 steps to get out of an emotional crisis. They can be useful to you for splashing out resentments. (I'm quoting from my article)

Step one. First, name your feelings. What are you experiencing? Pain? Resentment? Anger? Jealousy? Whatever your emotional crisis is, it has a name, a dominant feeling or several. And you can call them by their proper names.

Now ask yourself the question - how can you express it? Are you angry with your partner? Find a soft, but moderately dense object and hit it until you get tired. Break the plate. Scream loudly unless it disturbs someone's peace. Rip the paper.

Do something where you could apply physical effort. Because emotions accumulate and live in the body, and it is there that they risk getting stuck in the future in the form of diseases of various kinds. It is important that you allow yourself to act - this is exactly what your body wants, to survive the pain, to make it less acute, and for this it needs to throw out the growing energy of feelings somewhere.

With this technique, you will kill two birds with one stone - you will throw out the first wave of anger, do not let it accumulate in you, and at the same time you will stop the flow of thoughts that could lead you to another worst feelings- self-accusation, impotence and despair.

Despite the seeming simplicity of reception, it is very effective. Thinking is the last thing to do at a time like this, especially about “this will get you nowhere” and “you can’t fix cheating by hitting your pillow.”

You can't fix it, I agree. But you can correct your reaction, and radically, and thereby insure you against rash acts that could only aggravate the situation. I remember many cases from practice when a person, getting into an emotional funnel after such news, took steps that literally ruined the situation.

For example, he began to sort things out in a sharp form and provoked his partner to the final departure. Or harmed himself, which was then quite difficult to deal with. Or he himself broke off relationships that could still be restored. And in some cases it came to heart attacks and even heart attacks. Yes, we cannot, of course, not react emotionally to such things, but we can make this reaction as environmentally friendly as possible and extremely harmless to the whole organism as a whole.

So, it is necessary to throw out the first emotions. By doing this, you will achieve a decrease in their intensity and the appearance of purely physical fatigue, which will not allow you to perform unnecessary actions.

Step two. Sublimate a possible reaction. Of course, your desire to tell the offender everything that you think about him will not go away at all. And at this moment it is better to take a pen and paper, and express everything in writing. It will occupy the mind and keep it from doing what you personally feel guilty about. And at the same time it will help to deepen the removal of acute emotions.

Why a pen and paper - because the paper can then be burned. What you write in the first impulses does not always make sense to say to the offenders, even if the “offender” turned out to be fate or the world in general. And even more so if your own body turns out to be the “offender” - here you can do harm if you take offense without destroying the consequences.

Burning will help in a symbolic form to say goodbye to some of the difficult emotions. You can not only write but draw. You can talk if no one can hear you. At this stage, it is important, by inertia, to splash out emotions in a calmer way.

Step Three May include work with your body. You can take some position that calms you - curl up somewhere, or vice versa, lie on your back with your arms outstretched. You can sway while sitting on a chair, wrinkle some object in your hands, the touch of which calms you.

Whatever your emotional crisis, you can always find at least a comfortable position for the body. Even if it happens in public place You always have your muscles and your breath with you.

You can alternately strain and relax some muscle groups, you can focus on breathing, there is a way that calms nervous system: a shallow and fairly active breath, and the exhalation should be calm, smooth and at least 2 times longer than the breath in duration.

If an emotional crisis overtook you in a public place, start immediately with the third step and try to focus on breathing as much as possible - this will stop the development of thoughts and will not give you the opportunity to fall into an emotional funnel. Steps 1 and 2 can be taken when you are alone.

Often I have heard that such methods are not possible when a person is faced with traumatic news, they say, all this is very sterile and unnatural. In fact, people have resorted to such methods for centuries, partly thoughtfully, because they saw the reactions of their loved ones, who expressed their anger and anger even publicly, partly intuitively, because our body has a feeling of mechanisms that preserve our psyche.

It's just that in our culture it is more common to suppress feelings, and therefore such methods began to seem unnatural. But in the end, no one but you will take responsibility for whether you fall into an emotional funnel or not.

And only you can decide what is more important for you - to save face in front of yourself and others, and then do stupid things and wallow in feelings of guilt and despair, or competently blow off steam, and then look for constructive solutions. Remember that the most constructive decisions come later, not for nothing there is a saying "the morning is wiser than the evening."

And when you cope with the usual reactions of resentment and anger, irritation and anger, you will be able to talk normally with your mother and find out what specific moments between you do not suit both of you. And the situation will hopefully improve.

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Hello dear psychologist! I turn to you for advice, since the situation does not suit me at all and to some extent prevents me from living. Yesterday I realized that I don't love my mom. We live separately, I don't have a father, she has a man. I came to visit her, and, despite the fact that we rarely see each other, we managed to quarrel for some half an hour of being together in the same territory! And it would be nice if the reason was serious. But she came up to me and began to mock me at the things that I was doing wrong. She always does. It seems that she is disgusted when I have good mood. And in my childhood, she allowed herself to take out her dissatisfaction with life on me, while she has a much better life than most of my acquaintances. Now she teases me in an evil way and accuses me of some things that I don’t want to do (she doesn’t do it either, but in my performance it’s almost a sin). And her catchphrase is "Tell me I'm wrong!" - what's that all about? Is this how you communicate with children? And then she pretends like nothing happened. Life is not a very fair thing, but for some reason I can take insults from strangers calmly, even with humor. Her jokes always bring me to tears, despite the fact that I usually restrain myself quite easily. As a result, I do not feel the slightest desire to communicate with her, I do not miss her, and I also do not want to go to her without unnecessary need. She actually does a lot for me: she helps, makes gifts on holidays, negotiates on various issues, etc., she doesn’t drink, she is very smart, beautiful, she didn’t raise her hand to me. Everyone around her is delighted. As a result, I feel like an ungrateful bastard. But as soon as she opens her mouth to me, this "bastardism" wakes up in me again. It always seems to me that she treats others much better than with me. Of course, others are not obliged to endure it and will certainly answer! And what can I say: if my peer spoke to me in such intonations, he would need a traumatologist. But in front of my mother, I am completely powerless. And she never says anything like that to me in front of strangers. This hypocrisy pisses me off. I must love her, respect her, be grateful for her birth, for her upbringing. How can you love if you don't want to love? If before it ended in insults, now I just can’t love her. And is it normal at all? I still don't have kids, I just don't want to. And one of the reasons is that I don't want my children to think of me the way I think of my mother. Thanks in advance.

Zhanna, Russian Federation, 30 years old

Family Psychologist Answer:

Hello Zhanna.

And it would be nice if the reason was serious. But she came up to me and began to mock me at the things that I was doing wrong.

And why do you think that the reason is not serious? Systematic depreciation is serious. This means that your mother also did not put much love into you. And you can't help but feel it. Parents are expected to accept, support, approve, help. What do you get? And you sound like "she always did this", "as a child she ripped off on me ...", etc. Did your mother give you enough warmth, support, care, understanding, acceptance? Or did you mostly receive criticism, depreciation, proof of your own (her, mother's) rightness, humiliation of you as a person ...? It is clear that it happened, most likely, different things. The question is what was more, and how do you feel now. And now you feel, judging by the story, humiliated by such an attitude, indignant, offended ... And you have the right to such feelings, as well as to a different attitude towards yourself. But you can't force her. You can ask, say, under what conditions you are ready to communicate, under what conditions you are not, but, of course, you cannot force. You can make your choice - to communicate or not. You are definitely entitled to this.

She actually does a lot for me: she helps, makes gifts on holidays, negotiates on various issues, etc.

Are you ready to accept these gifts and help, taking into account the attitude towards you? There is a subtle point here: you accept these gifts and help, and this gives her the right to treat you this way. Stop accepting - perhaps you will have more firmness to say that you do not intend to communicate in this style? Perhaps you feel constantly indebted to her for gifts and help? But, perhaps, in order not to feel due - they should not be accepted then?

I must love her, respect her, be grateful for her birth, for her upbringing. How can you love if you don't want to love?

On my site "Mirror of the Soul" (link in the profile here to Cleo) there is an article "5 myths about children and parents." I think that after reading it, you will have much more thoughts on the topic of who really owes whom and what in such a situation, and also about why you cannot love her. Well, about the normality or abnormality of everything that happens ... more precisely - about patterns.

Sincerely, Nesvitsky Anton Mikhailovich.

Yes! She raised me. Well, so what? It would be better in Orphanage passed. From there, sometimes children go out more successfully, and live happier than me. I don't love my mother , because ... well, I can’t understand why!

And there is no such serious resentment. There is no apparent reason, it would seem, for such a dislike for his mother. But some kind of internal irritation towards her is constant and dislike sits deep in me. I don't love my mother and I can't do anything about it.

Sometimes a feeling of pity and even, perhaps, love wakes up for her. But it passes quickly. I think she's doing everything wrong! Annoying with its primitive outlook on life, and I was brought up wrong somehow. And for this I can not forgive her and love her for real. I do not like my mother because she climbs with her advice and dictates to me how to live. I don't love my mother the way children should love their parents.

To this question: why do I not love my mother? - I can not find the answer for many years. And the tension between us only increases. Yes, I suffer from it. It bothers me.

I don't love my mother - what should I do?

Such a constant permanent feeling of dislike for your mother wears away your life like water stone. In fact, it is imperceptible, but the result ... And the result is your whole unhappy life! Life, consisting of unfulfilled desires and unfulfilled hopes. You say - what kind of nonsense? And here: I do not love my mother - and my life and its quality? What is the connection between these!?

And it says in the commandment: "Honor your father and your mother." Easy to read good parents- when they are successful, healthy and do not require much attention.

But ... it is said in the commandment: "Honor your father and your mother." It does not say: "Revere, except for those who beat and offended you, except for those who require attention and care."

(abstract of lectures of the Second level of training by Yuri Burlan)

I do not love my mother - and what should I do with this feeling?

Until this dislike "decomposed" your life completely, read the article.