All right, gentlemen, welcome back to the Man Talk Show. Connor Beaton here. Have you ever felt like you can't seem to get it right with women or that your needs don't seem to matter to them or...
You just feel small and insignificant or there's like this strange, almost push-pull dynamic where you really, really, really, really want women, but you don't trust them. You're afraid of them and you're kind of all messed up around them.
These are just some examples of having a mother wound, right? Dr. Robert Glover and No More Mr. Nice Guy talked about this a lot, but the nice guy is really a result of having some type of core mother wound. And today we're going to dive deep into the mother wound. We're going to talk about what creates it. We're going to talk about how it shows up in your life. And then we're going to talk about what you can do to move through it.
So, with all that said, let's dive straight in. Some of this was really popularized with Carl Jung. He talked about the great mother and the mother archetype. He also talked about something called the devouring mother, which is actually where we're going to start.
So how do these mother wounds form? Well, we all have, and again, this is Jung's frame, we all have an archetype baked into us of the great mother, of this sort of idealized version of what we need from mom, what we desire from mom. And those are some pretty straightforward things. There's safety, trust.
nurturing, care, compassion, being able to go to mom when you're hurt or scared or wounded, those types of things, right? Mom is really meant to be the womb of safety and the place of safety that every child goes to, but specifically for young boys. And in doing this, you as a child learn that women are safe,
the world is a safe place, those types of things. Because in the first few years of your development, there's really, especially in the first 18 months, there's not really a lot of difference between what your body and your nervous system experiences and what mom is going through. Another way of saying that is what she feels you feel. So there's kind of this idealized archetype of what we all need from mom growing up, and then there's what we get. And the discrepancy between that can create some very deep wounding mistrust
animosity, et cetera, towards women and the feminine. So let's dive straight in. How is the mother wound created? The first place that I want to start is with the devouring mother. The devouring mother, or I like to call it the smother mother. I know that Peterson, Jordan Peterson has talked about the devouring mother quite a bit. I like to call it smother mother. It's a little bit different.
But she can be very obsessive. She can be invasive. She can be intrusive, almost penetrating, like you have no real privacy. She wants your thoughts to be an extension of her thoughts. She wants your emotions to be extension of her emotions. She cuts her son off. She cut you off.
from any type of risk-taking. So there's a couple hallmarks of the devouring mother or the smother mother. And you kind of had to feel into, because for some men it felt devouring, like mom was sort of like really all-consuming. And for other men, it felt like she was just smothering the living crap out of them.
So here are some hallmarks of this type of motherhood. So number one is overprotection, right? She really prevented you from experiencing any type of pain or failure or risk-taking and thereby halting your development, halting your maturation process and almost inadvertently and unintentionally keeping you stuck in this very, very youthful orientation.
And in certain parts of psychology, there's something called puer eternis, that is the eternal boy. You can think of Peter Pan. That is the sort of quintessential mother wound, right? Where you have a grown man who's in his 30s or 40s or 50s, but internally very childish, right? His reactions are very childish. His thought process is very childish. He has a terrible relationship to risk.
doesn't really like responsibility or is afraid of responsibility. And that's no judgment, right? Because we have to remember a lot of this is a developmental thing based on the environment that you grew up in. So overprotection, emotional enmeshment is the next big one, kind of treats. Maybe your mom treated you like a substitute partner, substitute husband, an extension of herself. So whatever she went through, she wanted you to go through, right? And she would
sort of say things or inadvertently bring you into her emotions in a way that was just not good. So if she was sad or angry, she would want you to sort of commiserate with her in that way. Or she just blurred the emotional boundaries where you never really knew if you had caused what she was feeling.
Or the last piece is that she directly or indirectly tasked you with solving her emotions, getting her to feel better, doing things to make her feel better. And you kind of turned into this
puppet, for lack of a better term, that she would use to help herself feel better. And so maybe anytime that she was feeling upset, she would need something from you. She would need physical touch. She would need you to take care of her or rub her feet or her back or something like that. And in doing so, you then became responsible for her emotions.
The next thing, number three, in terms of the smother mother or devouring mother is dependency creation. So she will have done a whole bunch of things. She'll have basically encouraged you to become more and more dependent
on her. So you probably didn't develop certain skills. She probably didn't teach you certain attributes in life. Maybe she didn't teach you about whatever it is. I was going to say filing taxes, but I mean, that's not the thing. Just basic things, right? Maybe she brushed your teeth until you were 13. Maybe she was the one that always cut your hair or
She handled all of your money and your finances even after you moved out of the house. And so she kind of urged this dependency or any relationship problem that you had in your life, she kind of demanded that you bring those to her. And so she became your unofficial therapist in your life, creating this dependency on whatever decision that you had to make or anything that was going on in your relationship, you had to go and talk to mom first.
Guilt and shame, this is number four. Guilt and shame were big, big, big controllers. So this is a big thing with the smother mother is that she uses guilt and shame to basically create emotional manipulation.
After all that I've done for you and don't you know how much I love you? I can't believe that you would do that. I can't believe that you would say that, you know, maybe I had my imperfections, but I was such an amazing mom to you. And I can't even believe that type of stuff. Right. And you experienced that as a boy growing up. Like, how could you do that to mommy? You know, I made you lunch and I made you, right? I birthed you into that type of extreme stuff.
The last piece is a deep, deep fear of abandonment. So very common that the devouring mother or the smothered mother will indirectly or directly sabotage your independence out of her fear of being alone, even if she's in a marriage, right? Even if she has your dad or stepfather around or she's in a relationship.
she will have at some point indirectly tried to sabotage you becoming an independent man. That might mean that she tried to sabotage you moving away, getting a job, moving in with your girlfriend, going to university, those types of things. And either she will have become very, very emotional, maybe hostile, or she literally tried to talk you out of it.
All those types of pieces are the devouring mother. So that's one form of the mother wound. I'm going to give you three more and I'm going to just rip through these and then we're talking about how it shows up in your life and how to fix it. Next is what I call masculine mom. And masculine mom really lacks...
the typical nurturing, compassionate, caring qualities that every child is looking for from their mother. She gives very little in the way of emotional encouragement or emotional connection. Oftentimes, this is hallmarked by a lack of physical touch. She was probably very dominating. She wore the pants in the family. She could be very harsh, very demeaning, maybe aggressive.
And she was very likely almost never, ever, ever stood up to by your father or stepfather. That is almost always a hallmark of this type of mom. And the experience that you had was being, as a boy, being sort of very suppressed and repressed growing up because masculine women, masculine moms specifically, often go through a power struggle with their sons.
and they see other men as a threat because somewhere along the line, they were wounded by a man or hurt by a man or they were taught that in order for them to just be able to protect themselves, they had to be very, very masculine and very sort of male-oriented. And so because of that,
A lot of masculine moms try and raise their children, try and raise their sons as a father, you know, and they try and be dominating and they try and discipline their son in a way that can sometimes be very harsh and critical. They can criticize them into oblivion and be extremely, maybe sometimes physically aggressive. I've heard of that as well, but more so it's like emotionally and psychologically aggressive.
And so she will be not just shaming and guilting, but it's usually an extreme form of criticism and harshness and a complete disconnection. The next form of a mother wound is what I call ghost mom. And ghost mom is either emotionally or physically absent.
Often these moms are there, they're present, but you don't really know them. You don't really feel like you can connect to them. They're very sort of shut down or collapsed within their identity. Maybe they have a personal life outside of you and outside of the family, but
it feels very, very hard for you to get to know them. And again, it's a very strange thing because they're around. And usually when I work with men that have a mother wound that's the ghost mom, that's what they say. They're like, well, my mom was around a lot, but I didn't really know her. Well, my mom was around a lot, but I didn't really get a lot of physical touch. Well, my mom was around a lot, but she never ever told me that she loved me.
She wasn't cold. She wasn't mean. I just didn't get those things. Well, my mom was around a lot, but I don't remember her ever really hugging me a lot. And so there's a presence. She's there. But all of the kind, caring, compassionate things, nurturing things that you would want from mom as a boy growing up are absent.
And she's not running the family or dominating the family. She's not aggressive. She's not hostile. She's just lacking in presence almost entirely. And then the last one is what I call man-obsessed mom, man-obsessed mom. These are generally the women...
who give all their time, all their energy, all their attention to sometimes the large rotation of men that they have in their lives. And so a boy grows up in an environment where he sees a single mom rotating through a lot of men. And so that boy will have seen a lot of men come through his life. And she's very obsessed. She's like the love addict, right? She falls in love and, oh, this guy is amazing. And oftentimes she will have talked to you
about her love interest. She'll be telling you about how great Sean is or how great Tom is or how great Frank is or whatever it is, whoever that guy is. And she's very obsessed. And her whole life seems to really revolve around trying to lock some guy in that never really manifests.
And so you as a boy will have missed out on a lot of the time, energy, attention, affection that you actually needed from mom because she was so focused elsewhere. Now, there's a different version of this, which is the work addicted mom.
And I see this happening more and more and more. This used to be a father wound orientation, but in the last couple decades, this has become much more popular within people that grew up in a household where mom was traveling all the time. She was really addicted to her work. She's super successful. And that creates a very specific mother wound within a child because they're just not the priority.
And not only are they not the priority when they're in their sort of teenage or adult years, but they weren't really the priority growing up. And for children, throughout human history, we have had mothers around children and fathers have sometimes ventured off and come back. And that's been the evolutionary social dynamic
for human beings throughout history, right? Mothers have been the stable presence where they went, the children went, and fathers have gone out and returned, gone out and returned, gone out and returned. And it differs throughout cultures, but that is pretty much baked into us. So to inverse that, where all of a sudden you have a lot of people who have grown up in households where
mom leaves for extended periods of time or is working 14, 16 hours a day and they're very, very young, that's very challenging for children. So this is the formation of the mother wounds. These are different variations of how the mother wound will form.
Next, I want to talk about how it shows up in your adult life. There's a couple very, very basic things and there's a couple little bit more complicated things. So I'm going to break them down. First one is a hypervigilance or a complete shutdown in the nervous system.
Some men will, you'll swing in your relationship specifically, you'll swing between this kind of hypervigilance, constantly fixate on the relationship. Is she okay? Am I all right? Is the relationship okay? This like chronic questioning of is everything all right to just complete, this is hopeless.
I'm shut down, I'm never gonna get my needs met, I don't matter, those types of things, and you'll start to pull away and disconnect from the relationship. So this is where a lot of the times something like disorganized attachment can be mislabeled because the man actually just has a mother wound and there's just a very deep mistrust
of women or the feminine. So hypervigilance, complete shutdown. Next is a heavy projection onto the woman that you're with and a kind of parent confusion. This can show up in a lot of different ways where maybe you are seeking maternal soothing from your wife, right? Like there's this
strange desire to have her really take care of you and nurture you and almost treat you like she's your mom. This might show up in the sense that you see your wife or your girlfriend as somebody who's extremely aggressive and hostile anytime that they bring up conflict. And so there's this hypersensitivity
to the woman that you're with because of mom. And so the main thing here is, and you can ask yourself this question and start to do some journaling on it, is how might I be projecting my mom onto the woman I'm with? What behaviors, what things does she say that really get me reactive or cause me to shut down? What things does she do that feels very similar to mom?
And a good indicator of that is the things that you get really reactive about when it comes to your wife or your girlfriend. Number four, how this can show up is a kind of hyper overachievement or chronic underachievement. So really heavy in one of those directions, right? This, I need to appease mom. I need to be this extreme overachiever to make mommy happy.
If I can make mommy happy, my life will have meaning. This is the absolute definition of a motherhood. If I can just make mom happy, if I can just live my life in such a way where mom is happy and her problems are solved,
then I will be a good boy and I can be happy and my life will have some meaning. Or there's a kind of chronic underachievement, which is like, F this, I'm not doing anything. I'll never amount to anything. Nothing was ever good enough for the great mother anyway. And so it doesn't really matter because nothing I ever do will ever meet her expectations. And there's this internalized critical mother thing
who you as that man or as that boy took on. So the inner critic inside of you, the way that you think about yourself, see yourself, view yourself has been internalized as that hypercritical, hyper shaming, hyper guilting mother that that's how you see yourself. That's how you walk through the world. And that leads to this kind of
really suppressed drive or ambition. You almost entirely lack it. And I've seen in family systems where I've worked with different men where there's like three or four brothers, and a couple of them have the polar opposites of this, right? One's like this hyper, hyper overachiever, and the other one's like this chronic underachiever who's still living at home, playing video games, smoking weed, right? And the other one's like
some executive at some big company making a million bucks a year. And so that can happen. You can actually see that happen within your family system. Next, how it can show up in your life is a real big difficulty setting boundaries with women or expressing desires to women, expressing your needs to women. So
So enmeshment and guilt and shame and all those types of things keeps you in this space of wanting to continue to be the good boy.
So for a lot of men that have deep mother wounds, they never want to disappoint the women in their life. And it leads to the majority of your relationship issues with women. You have to be willing to disappoint the woman that you are with sometimes. It doesn't mean that you're constantly trying to disappoint her. That would not be a good recipe for a relationship. But
Men that have mother wounds are terrified of disappointing women in their life, and they are terrified of disappointing their mother. And so you have to begin to almost expose yourself to disappointing the women in your life by not disappointing yourself.
So you have to be willing to not disappoint yourself, which might mean that you might let them down. And simple things like saying, no, I don't want to have that for dinner. I would really like to have X, Y, and Z. Or no, I don't want to go to that place this weekend. I'd really like to do this thing. Or you know what? I'm not going to be available for this weekend for a date because I'm going to be going with the guys on a golf trip, whatever it is.
So you have to be willing to start to disappoint mom and the women that you're with. Last piece is addictive coping. So I like to say that things like porn and booze and weed and excessive video game playing, these types of things, these are all surrogate relationships. They are surrogate relationships. They're sort of pseudo attachments that you start to build because
because the attachment with mom wasn't safe. And because the attachment with mom isn't safe, the attachment with women isn't safe, but you still need some attachment, right? We're wired for attachment, literally. Our brains are wired for attachment in a relationship. Your nervous system is wired for attachment in a relationship. And so that drive doesn't go away.
But when mom and women feel unsafe to attach to and be in relationship with in a healthy, grounded, secure way, you still need something. And so porn, OnlyFans chicks, womanizing, weed, booze, all those types of things, gambling, et cetera, start to take place. Okay, last piece. What do we do? What do you do about this? How do you work through and actually heal this mother wound that can be
honestly plaguing a lot of your life, plaguing how you see yourself, plaguing your relationship, plaguing a deeper sense of purpose and meaning in life. What do you actually do?
Well, the first thing is to do what we've been doing this whole video, which is to name and normalize that this has been taking place inside of you, that this took place in your life. So you break the denial and understand that that wound isn't necessarily a weakness. You have to break the denial because a lot of men that have a mother wound are so protective of their mom.
They are so in denial that there was anything wrong. They're so protective. "Well, my mom was so great, and what do you mean? And I can't possibly, and you know, but she might never talk to me again if I said that she did anything wrong." Those types of things. You have to break the denial that there was anything wrong, and you have to really name and normalize that this happened. So this is about building some awareness. So a couple of things that you can explore.
Mom taught me that love equals. Mom taught me that love equals. What did mom teach you that love equals? Did it equal guilt and shame? Did it equal harshness? Did it equal criticism? Did it equal being emotionally responsible for her and her emotions? What did mom teach you that love equals? The next thing is what did mom teach me about women and what to expect from them?
What did mom teach me about women and what to expect from them? And then the third thing that I want you to explore is how did my relationship to mom or how has my relationship to mom shaped how I view women?
and treat women? How has my relationship to mom shaped the way that I view and treat women? So you can use these as journal prompts to just start to go through. If you want something a little bit deeper, I've got a whole bunch of different guides that you can go through. One of them is a man's guide to self-worth. That might be a great
place to start and to actually dive a little bit deeper, or a man's guide to leading in a relationship. That might also be a good one. So you can check those out. We'll have those in the notes below. Second thing is you need to learn how to regulate your body. When you have a mother wound, one of the biggest challenges is that your nervous system never, and your body, never really individuates or creates independence from mom, or it sees mom as a threat.
So it's either there's a meshment or mom's a threat, right? I have to be completely enmeshed and connected with mom, aka whatever the woman I'm with feels I have to feel or whatever the woman I'm with feels is a threat. Those are the two extremes that show up for men that have mother wounds.
So another way of saying this is that most of you have never really had a independent nervous system that can be okay when the woman that you're with is not okay, when she's disappointed, when she's angry, when she's sad.
A lot of men, all men that have a mother wound will go into a place of, oh my gosh, I have to fix this immediately. Otherwise, I'm not okay and the relationship's in jeopardy. Or F this, what she's feeling is crazy. I can't get anywhere near that. That's hostile. That's dangerous for me. That's a threat to me. I need to move away from this entirely.
So, regulating your nervous system, cold exposure, breath work, somatic experiencing, working with somebody, and somatic experiencing is Peter Levine, by the way. He's got some great work that you can check out. But actually starting to have some practices of being able to down-regulate your nervous system when any type of conflict or hostility shows up with the women in your life, whether that's mom or a woman that you're dating or a woman at work. Yeah.
Using the breath in through the nose, longer exhale out the mouth in moments of conflict, going to be very, very, very supportive.
Step number three that you can take to shift this is beginning to reparent that inner child. I have a whole video on reparenting or doing inner child work. You can go check that out. We'll have the link for that in the show notes as well. And then being able to start to individuate. So differentiating and setting boundaries, differentiating between your wants, needs, and desires.
And the women that you are dating or married to or your mom, being able to differentiate what they want versus what you want. And then being able to set boundaries. So to move from a meshment where everything that they feel, you feel or view as a threat or view as something that you have to take care of,
versus adult to adult emotional sovereignty. I feel something, I'm responsible for that. You feel something, you're responsible for that. And we're going to be in relationship from that place. So you might want to start to just ask yourself a simple question. What are some boundaries I know I need to set with mom
What are some boundaries I know I need to set with the women in my life? And those boundaries aren't, you're not going to say like, oh, I need to set a boundary with you. I mean, maybe, but that's probably one of the least effective ways to set a boundary. Just so we're clear. You might say like, hey, I'm going to give you two phrases. Okay. Number one, that wasn't okay with me. I wasn't okay with me.
Number two, I didn't like that. Okay? Those are two great phrases to set a boundary real time. Hey, when you said that, I didn't like that. And you can use it for yourself as well. You know what? I agreed that.
to go to that event with you that I really did not want to go to with you. That's not English, but I didn't want to go to that event and I'm not okay with that. I don't want to keep doing that anymore. So just so you know, I'm going to start to say no to those types of things.
So I'm not okay with that. And what you did, what you said, what happened, that was not okay with me. Those two phrases are going to help you set boundaries real time in the moment. And then practice saying no. Practice saying no as much as you can for the next week, right? Just no. Like, nope, I'm okay. Nope, I'm not interested in doing that. The last piece, and this is kind of a twofold one, is that you have to begin to insource. You
your own sense of self-worth, because most men that have a mother wound are constantly, it's almost like you have this place inside of you that's vacant and empty and feels hollow, and that you constantly need to feed off of female attention, validation, connection, love, in order to just satiate for a brief period of time that hollow spot inside of you.
So you have to start to in-source your own sense of worth and value and appreciation and respect
and care. You have to start to insource those things for yourself. What does that mean and look like? It means actually taking care of yourself, doing simple things, right? This is why Jordan Peterson became popular with like, make your own bed. You stand up straight and dress properly. Those simple things are things that can help you just start to take care of yourself. Be kind to yourself, right? I cannot stress that enough. Be kind.
to yourself in the way that you speak to yourself. Start to set a boundary with the way that you speak to yourself. Ah, I'm going down that path again. I'm shitting all over myself. I'm beating myself up. I'm not going to talk to myself like that anymore. I'm not going to speak to myself like that anymore. Even using that phrase out loud or inside of your mind when you start to go down that path. So really start to be kind to yourself. And then second,
is being able to recognize and end the projections of mom onto partner, mom onto wife, mom onto girlfriend, mom onto the women in your life, whoever they may be, right? The woman in the coffee shop, the woman that you work with. So really start to get clear on what are some of the projections that I have of the women in my life that are not them, but that are mom.
So for example, you might see every single time that your girlfriend or your wife is asking you for closeness, connection, conversation, intimacy, you might see it as some type of threat because you're projecting mom onto her. And something about it might even feel similar, but you have to start to separate, she is not my mom. This person is not my mom. They are their own individual. And then being able to separate mom from you
You. I am not my mom.
I am not my mom. I don't have to think like my mom. I don't have to act like my mom. I don't have to make decisions like my mom. I don't have to, and this is a super, super big one. This is the final step. I don't have to feel like my mom. One of the big, big challenges with men that have mother wounds is that their emotional body and how they deal with their emotions is so infiltrated and influenced by mom
that it can be very challenging to find emotional sovereignty or emotional independence. So your big goal and aim, and this is how I'm going to wrap this all up,
Your big goal and aim is to find your own way towards emotional independence and emotional sovereignty, meaning that you do not deal with your emotions the same way that your mom did, but you're also not dealing with your emotions simply in opposition to how your mother did. You really find
a place of this is how I want to feel. This is how I want to relate to my own emotions, to my sadness, to my anger, to my grief. This is how I want to express my emotions as a man, completely independent from what mom said that you need to do.
and then begin to take some risks, right? Begin to orient yourself towards healthy, grounded risks. All right, thank you so much for joining me. I know that's a good amount of work for you to tackle. Comment below if you're watching this on YouTube and let me know what you thought or comment on Spotify because they have comments now. I'd love to hear what you thought and any pieces that you would like for me to go deeper on. See you next week.
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