Mother-Enmeshed Women: Can A Mother-Enmeshed Woman Sabotage Her Life?

Over the years, a woman may have seen a number of her female friends move forward in their careers and form loving and supportive relationships. However, she might not have moved forward in their career nor had a loving and supportive relationship, let alone be in one.

Thanks to her inability to progress in these areas of her life and perhaps others, she could feel frustrated and angry. What can enter her mind is that she is just very unlucky or that someone or something ‘out there’ is holding her back.

The Next Stage

What she can believe is that if she continues to work hard and even thinks positively, her life will gradually change. If she does believe that her life will change if she keeps working hard and has the right outlook, it might not be long until she has a setback.

So, something can happen that knocks her down, and she ends up feeling helpless and hopeless. At this point, it can be clear that what she is doing is not working and that she needs a different approach.

External Support

Before long, she can look online for answers, and she might even decide to work with a coach or a therapist. If she does work with someone, this can be a time when she will be encouraged to look into what she believes about herself.

What she can find is that she doesn’t believe that she deserves to move forward in her career or be in a loving and supportive relationship. After this, she can be told that this is not true and that this is what she deserves.

Liberated

By questioning her inaccurate beliefs and replacing them with accurate ones, she may find that her life gradually changes. Then again, she might find that it changes but soon returns to how it was before.

Or, she might find that her life doesn’t really change. Assuming that she isn’t able to move forward, she can feel even worse than she did before and believe that her life will always be his way.

Stepping Back

However, although she can feel helpless and hopeless, it doesn’t mean that her life will never change. What it is likely to mean is that she needs to go in a direction.

At a deeper level, she might not feel safe enough to freely express herself and meet her needs. The reason for this is that she can associate self-expression and the fulfilment of her needs with something that will cause her to be rejected and abandoned.

Why Is This?

Now, to go in a different direction, if her mother is alive and is in her life, she can find that it is hard for her to be herself when she is around her. What can be normal is for her to play a role and hide her needs, and to focus on her mother and meet her needs.

She is then going to be an autonomous human being who has her own needs and feelings, but she will act as though she is an extension of her mother and is here to serve her. After she has spent time around her mother, she can typically feel drained and as though her mother wasn’t interested on what was going on for her.

Another part

And, even when she is not with her mother, she can be thinking about her needs and doing things for her. After realising this, she can think about how much of her time and energy is directed toward her mother and how little there is for her.

If she were to think about speaking to her mother, she could start to get a sense of why her life is the way that it is. So, if she were to imagine that she is freely expressing herself and no longer hides around her, she can feel anxious and fearful.

A Big Risk

This can be a time when she will expect her mother to show disapproval or to walk away and leave her. After this, she can have the need to go back to how he was and no longer freely express herself.

A big part of her is then going to believe that unless she hides around her mother, her life will come to an end. Even so, after becoming aware of this, what can enter her mind is what this has to do with her inability to move forward in her life.

The Connection

If she does, what she will need to keep in mind is that to her unconscious mind, other people will symbolically represent her mother, and thus, she will have the need to stay in the background around them. To this part of her, if she were to change her behaviour, she would end up being rejected and abandoned.

This part of her has no sense of time and is blind, which is why it can’t see that other people are not her mother. The outcome of this is that this part won’t realise that she doesn’t have to please others in order to survive.

Back In Time

The reason that she behaves as though she is an extension of her mother and doesn’t feel safe enough to freely express herself is likely due to how her mother treated her very early on. At this stage of her life, she is likely to have missed out on the attunement and care that she needed.

This would have stopped her from being able to receive what she needed to grow and develop in the right way and to emotionally separate from her mother. When she did express herself, she is likely to have been disapproved of and punished, causing her to lose touch with her connected true self and develop a disconnected and outer-directed false self.

A Futile Struggle

She would have come to believe that her needs and feelings were bad, and that she was responsible for her mother’s needs. But, although her mother couldn’t provide her with the love that she needed, she would have lived in the hope that if she struggled, she would be loved.

This stage of her will now be over, of course, but a big part of her will still live in the hope that if she hides herself and pleases her mother, she will be loved. But as this stage of her life is over, it is too late for her to receive what she missed out on.

Moving Forward

Considering this, for her to freely express herself and to meet her needs, she will have beliefs to question, pain to face and work through, and unmet developmental needs to experience. This will take courage, patience and persistence.

Awareness

If a woman can relate to this and she is ready to change her life, she may need to reach out for external support. This is something that can be provided with the assistance of a therapist or healer.