Sublime

In my work with people in the helping professions, I have often been confronted with a childhood history that seems significant to me. • There was a mother* who at the core was emotionally insecure and who depended for her equilibrium on her child’s behaving in a particular way. This mother was able to hide her insecurity from her child and from ev

Every new mother begins as a child-mother. A child-mother is old enough to have babies and has good instincts in the right direction, but she needs the mothering of an older woman or women who essentially prompt, encourage, and support her in her mothering of her children.

Insecure attachment styles are actually strategies for managing the uncomfortable emotions aroused by Mother’s inconsistency, according to author Diana Fosha. “Their coping style— watching Mother like a hawk and clinging to her to reassure themselves she won’t disappear again—is their…

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To avoid the bad feelings, the child slowly learns to identify only with what he thinks of as “good” and to deny anything “bad” as part of who he is. He actually starts limiting his identity to only include what he has come to believe is “acceptable” in the eyes of his parents. Yet another child may despair altogether of getting any good strokes fr

In addition to hopelessness, another primary indicator of an image is a pervasive sense of shame, a feeling of not being worthy or deserving. A specific shame lives in the inner child of all of us, stemming from the time we discovered, with a great shock, that our parents and our world were not perfect. The child has a great need to believe that he

The third layer comes into view when we look at how we mother ourselves and find the same deficits that were present in our actual mothers. We see that we don’t know how to support or encourage ourselves, don’t know how to be patient and tender, don’t know how to take into account our needs and limitations. Here, there is a hole in our inner mother

When adults let children down, children learn to let themselves down.

She teaches her child how to get along with others, how to make good decisions, and how to manage time, meet responsibilities, and pursue goals.