I agree that mothers can teach their sons emotional intelligence - and that's important. But I see a lot of men who never fully individuate from their mothers - men whose wives feel they are the 2nd most important woman in his life. I'm sure Ms. Lombardi is not advocating an unhealthy relationship, but when women start telling men what healthy masculinity looks like, I get cautious.
First up, here is the segment from NPR's All Things Considered - then below that is the review I wrote of Michael Gurian's The Invisible Presence.
Hardcover, 324 pagesApril 8, 2012
There are plenty of pop culture references to the dangers of a close mother-son relationship. From the myth of Oedipus to the movie Psycho, narrative after narrative harps on the idea that mothers can damage their sons, make them weak, awkward and dependent.
But for millions of men, the opposite has turned out to be true, author Kate Lombardi tells NPR's Laura Sullivan. Lombardi — a mother herself — is the author of the new book, The Mama's Boy Myth: Why Keeping Our Sons Close Makes Them Stronger.
Lombardi's own relationship with her son was a major inspiration for the book. "For a long time, I thought that what we had was kind of unique," she says, "that I was somehow blessed with this especially sensitive, caring boy." But in her research for The Mama's Boy Myth, she discovered that she was far from alone.
Her starting point was that mothers and sons face a stigmatization that other parent-child relationships don't. Mothers and daughters, she says, have no problems. "I'm very close to my daughter, and it doesn't raise any eyebrows," she says. Similarly, father-son relationships are viewed as very important, and even father-daughter relationships are valued. "But mothers and sons — that relationship is always looked at with a little skepticism and a little fear."
Lombardi speculates that it might be Sigmund Freud's Oedipus complex at the back of many parents' minds. "I think some of this fear and anxiety around the mother-son relationship really predates Freud," she says. "But that said, Freud codified it. I was amazed how many moms in 2012 were still bringing up the Oedipus complex."
A Healthy, Loving Relationship
The stereotype of the unhealthy mother-son relationship is very familiar — a controlling or dominating mother that interferes with her son's life and refuses to let him come into adulthood on his own. But that's not how it has to be to have closeness, Lombardi says.
"A healthy, loving relationship is one where the mom is emotionally supportive of her son. She recognizes his individuality, his sensitivity, and his vulnerability along with his strengths," she says.
The ideal mother-son relationship is one where the mother can and does respond to her son's emotional needs — and perhaps it's not all that different from a healthy mother-daughter relationship, she says.
It often goes awry, though, when mothers of young boys are pressured to let their child learn to cope on his own. One mother Lombardi interviewed related a story where her pediatrician had accused her of "modeling anxiety" while comforting her son after a fall. "We get the strong message that the last thing a boy needs is his mother, when in fact the research shows just the opposite," she says.
A Good Bond Leads To Better Relationships
The research is actually quite extensive, as Lombardi tells it. Small boys who lack a healthy attachment to their mother are often more aggressive, disobedient and even violent. When boys reach middle school age, the differences are apparent in their views on masculinity.
"Boys who were closer to their mothers ... didn't think, for instance, that every time you got challenged you had to fight," Lombardi said, "or that being a guy means acting tough or going it alone." A better relationship a son has with his mother translates to better mental health.Author Kate Stone Lombardi is the recipient of six Clarion awards.She has written for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
As those boys reach manhood, the differences can be many, Lombardi says. For one, they often have an easier time in adult relationships.
"One of the things that moms tend to do with their boys is they teach them emotional intelligence," Lombardi says. "They teach them to recognize their feelings and talk about them."
Take the classic image of a little boy melting down in a grocery store, and the mother responding, "Use your words." Or when the sullen high schooler comes home, slams the door and yells, "I don't want to talk about it!" The mother with the healthier relationship, Lombardi says, can ask her son to cool off and talk it out when he's ready.
Lombardi knows it works — after all, her own son, now 23, now enjoys the benefits of having that healthy relationship while growing up. And now that his mother has shared it with the world?
"He's pretty proud of it," she says. "He's not ashamed of our closeness."
Read an excerpt of The Mama's Boy Myth
Alrighty then, here is an excerpt from a book I reviewed at Wildmind Buddhist Meditation that argues for better and healthier individuation for sons from their mothers. It's a pretty good review - I would recommend you go read the whole thing (a little shameless self-promotion). I'd also recommend the book - The Invisible Presence: How a Man's Relationship with His Mother Affects All His Relationships with Women, by Michael Gurian.
Now boys live at home until college, and often they return when school is finished until they can find a job and their own apartment. Mothers make this separation process even more difficult in trying to maintain their early attachment to their child, which is the opposite of what a young man needs. An adolescent boy is beginning the individuation process, moving away from the mother and into the world of men, and going to college should finalize this separation. Yet this is not happening for a lot of young men.
So what happens to the son when the mother has been dismissing the role of the father, or dismissing the roles of men in general — or worse, disparaging the father with put-downs or insults? How is a boy to find his place in the male world when his mother has negated what he is destined to become, an adult man?
As Gurian demonstrates, that boy does not become an adult man — he remains stuck in an in-between place where he needs the approval of women and men to feel of value, in essence, because there has not been any internalized male ideal (since men are bad, abusive, or useless: “all men are pigs,” “men suck!” “all men want is sex,” or “men have ruined the world”). While this does not happen in the majority of young men’s lives, it does happen much more than we would like to believe.
The other possibility for this individuation failure is an absent father, either through abandonment, divorce, or death. My father died of a heart attack when I was 13-years-old — and there was no good male role models in my life. I was dismayed to see myself in one of Gurian’s lists of characteristics of uninitiated men (p. 38-39). While I have spent years working on this aspect of my life, it seems I still carry some of the scars.
* * * * *In the third chapter, Gurian looks at how this initiation failure and the impingement relationship with the mother shapes a man’s adult romantic relationships. By impingement (a reference to the work of D.W. Winnicott, a pioneer in parent-child attachment theory) Gurian is referring to the ways that parents fill their own emotional needs through their children. This is a difficult thing to monitor in ourselves — Dr. Dan Siegel spends a whole book on how we can development this skill (Parenting from the Inside Out, 2003) — but we need to be aware of it because it puts the infant or child in the impossible position of taking care of the parent.
For boys, growing up in this environment — which can continue into adulthood, especially when the father is absent due to emotional distancing, work, abandonment, or death, and shows up in comments such as, “Don’t ever leave me,” or “Be my little man” — symbolically forces him to be a surrogate “lover” or partner for his mother. And what little boy does not want to please his mother?
But this sets up the young man to remain more loyal to his mother than to his romantic partner when he begins that element of his life. This was classically known as the mother complex, and although it’s a near cliché, it’s also an accurate assessment of what can happen. The girlfriend or wife ends up feeling she comes second to the mother, and she is correct.
Other elements of this pattern can manifest as a need for approval from the romantic partner. A boy-man who grew up with a “smothering” mother (which is how I look at my own childhood with my mother) has no sense of self outside of that external approval. This man is “spineless” or “weak” or “hen-pecked” — all clichés that pathologize something the man had no control over in his life. He did not choose to be parented in that way.
In this respect, I would recommend this book for women as much as for men. Understanding how the man you love was raised will help you understand those aspects of his personality that you might find challenging. (Gurian offers study questions for women at the end of the book.)
No comments:
Post a Comment