When He's Married to Mom: How to Help Mother-Enmeshed Men Open Their Hearts to True Love and Commitment

A MEM is typically not individuated, because he is enmeshed with his mother. His identity has been lost in serving her needs.

Emasculation doesn’t indicate orientation. It reflects a sense of inadequacy that gets displaced onto sexual performance, a condition that affects gay and straight men alike.

The unconscious mind can be provoked in situations that are parallel to those in a person’s past. When this happens, it may generate some of the feelings and strong emotions from the past, such as fear and anger. It has the power to override the conscious mind when it perceives a crisis.

He must let go of “who he is” to adopt the role of “who he must be.” When he loses his identity, he adopts a False Self—who lives only to please his mother and by extension all others—while his True Self is smothered and neglected.

Lonely men can make do with lives focused on work and pornography and imagine that nothing is amiss. Lonely mothers can turn to their little boys for emotional support, not realizing the potential damage that can result.

It can never be a son’s job to soothe his mother’s emotional wounds, lift the burden of her loneliness, or listen to her while she vents about her frustrations.

The enmeshed relationship with his mother was not his choice. It was forced on him by the overwhelming circumstance of being a very little boy with a very needy mother.

Male Depression, notes that depression can show itself in men as irritability, aggression, anger, complaining, or acting out. Real suggests that both men and women look down on men who allow themselves to be seen as “weak” by admitting they feel depressed. Thus, it is “safer” to convert depression into other feelings. Depression in men, Real argues

Over time, this kind of solitary sexual expression can become addictive, because it’s detached from the other parts of his life and from his value system. This addictive process is described in Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction by Patrick Carnes.