The Emotionally Absent Mother: A Guide to Self-Healing and Getting the Love You Missed

Of course this was paired with having done their own healing work. Without this, we tend to repeat the dysfunctional patterns of our own upbringing.

When the child has a positive experience of Mother, he gets the sense “I am of Mommy. I come from her. I’m part of her. I’m like her.” This becomes a building block of identity.

These nutrients include unconditional acceptance (“I accept you just as you are”), respect, and value, in addition to the mirroring and attuned responsiveness already discussed. You need to be valued for who you are and also valued simply because of the fact that you are. If you don’t get this, you feel out of place and like you don’t belong. This

it is also empowering to know that we can change our internal experience, such as our mental patterns or our mood.

And to be sure, it is a question we ask ourselves: How long will this go on? My sense is that we let go of the past when we’re done with it! When we’re complete. It’s that simple.

Sometimes the mothers start reaching out when they are widowed, lonely, and need more support themselves. It is often in their advanced years that the mechanical mom finally becomes human.

They also believe that parents heal themselves when they are able to stretch and give their children what they didn’t get themselves.

The feelings that our parents had a particularly hard time tolerating will usually be the ones that we have the hardest time tolerating if we have not yet healed this.

He explains how a child who has not been sufficiently touched becomes locked inside his own skin and then experiences normal touch as threatening.49 This is called tactile defensiveness