- Ghost Mothers:
- How to Heal Abandonment and Neglect, and
Find Forgiveness
- By: Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D.
So many women talk about their
relationships with their mothers no matter how old they are.
For some, their mother, from whom they have supposedly separated
long ago, still occupies a central place in the psyche. She's
too close, she's too much. She has advice, is nosy, and interferes.
The daughter wants time away, she wants boundaries, and fights
for her separation from her mother.
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For others, the mother still
occupies the psyche, but with a wrenching kind of longing-a mother
that is biological and even sometimes present, but also a mother
who is so self-involved as to be emotionally absent, or literally
out of the picture. This kind of mother takes up space and energy
as a nagging, missing piece, a ghost. Her image hovers, her memory,
or perhaps a dream of how it could have been, should have been,
but never is.
Which kind of mother do you
have?
My mother was a dream. I realize
now, 10 years after her death, that I was always trying to get
the dream to come true-to have her be warm and huggy, to have
her want to know me, to visit me in my house, to know my children.
To know me. It never happened. It left a yearning that I played
out with men, it left a hole that I tried to fill in many ways. |
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When I was little, she left me when
I was four years old, and once a year appeared in the landscape
of my life-I lived with her mother-only to disappear too soon
and in a flurry of anger at her own mother, without seeming to
notice how hard it was for me.
So many people, men and women,
struggle with this kind of emptiness, the burn of anger in the
pit of the stomach, the unanswered questions that can't be asked
- why are you like this?
Mothers who are neglectful, selfish,
and abandoning do not set out to do these things, they are a
result of her own problems, her own pain, and maybe even mental
illness. It is hard for us as her child to see this fully, or
to forgive it.
How to help to heal the Ghost
Mother wound:
1. Learn about your mother's life - how she became
the way she is-through talking with relatives, if she won't talk
to you directly, or by sitting down and hashing through history
shown in photos and family albums.
2. Find adoptive mothers who will nurture you, and
friends who understand your story.
3. Learn to mother yourself-through therapy, through
having children of your own. They will teach you.
4. Write your story. Tell your story. Having witnesses
to your story is a part of healing. Seeing compassion in the
eyes of others shows you that you are worthy of it, and deserve
it.
5. Learn to forgive. Work on it. Work on being yourself
and having a life you like and enjoy.
6. Learn to surround yourself with who you like,
people who love and like you, and beauty that makes you feel
part of the web of life. |
