The grudgingly gradual recognition that I have been paralyzingly afraid of all of the significant women in my life came as a great shock to me. I’m certain that each of the women in my life legitimately experienced themselves in the one-down position. Yet the truth remains that I was deeply frightened of each of them in ways that have profoundly shaped the core of whom I am.
As is the case for most men, my first significant relationship with a woman was with my mother, and it took me most of my life to understand how afraid I was of her. It never occurred to me that I might be afraid of her because I was raised to hold her in such contempt. Again, I am sure that my mother experienced herself as the least loved, least empowered person in the family, and she had good reason to believe that. As far as I can ascertain, my mother was profoundly unhappy for most of her life, and I experienced her unhappiness as the force that controlled the emotional life of our family. When my mother was distressed, she abused prescription medications and took to her bed, which, incredibly, was the room we had to walk through to get to the family room where we watched TV together. This meant that we literally had to walk through her unhappiness to spend any time together as a family.
My mother threatened to kill herself on a regular basis, I imagine whenever the loneliness or lack of love in her life threatened to overwhelm her. Consciously, my biggest fear was that she would kill herself and leave me feeling responsible for the rest of my life. One day, in response to another in a long litany of these threats, filled with rage at being held hostage in this way, I told her that I knew she was full of shit and would never really kill herself. I immediately fled to my room and lay in my bed, terrified that I had given her the ultimate weapon to destroy me with.
More deeply buried, and far more difficult to allow myself to know and come to terms with was the fear I bore from the realization that my mother hated me. I came to know this one day, completely out of the blue, an unbidden and unwelcome thought that came to me with the shocking clarity of something that you let yourself know for the first time while simultaneously recognizing it is a truth that has always been there to know. The idea that a mother might hate her child might seem outlandish to you, but hate and love live side by side. Where you find one you will likely find the other.
What could lead a mother to hate her son?
My mother was a bright, ambitious, highly competent woman who married my father and moved to the suburbs, away from her vibrant career and supportive community in the city, which I believe was the death of her. My mother turned to me, her first-born, to fill some of her needs for loyalty and intimacy, which were so painfully lacking in her marriage. Sadly, my mother was not well equipped to bond with a child, and I deeply disappointed her by emotionally allying with my father, who although intermittently and unpredictably rageful and violent, was also warm and loving. This alliance of mine with my father left my mother feeling even more horribly despairing and alone, and I can understand why she might blame me for her suffering. I learned to defend myself against my mother’s hatred with anger, disdain, and a faux emotional self-reliance, defenses I still instinctively turn to whenever I feel threatened by a woman.
Not surprisingly, my next effort to find a loving relationship with a woman that was less constricted by fear came in the form familiar to most young adults. I unconsciously sought out a romantic partner with whom I believed I could have a corrective emotional experience. I found what I was looking for, in spades. My first serious romantic partner and I forged a powerfully regressive bond, glomming onto each other with a fierce attachment that neither of us could really understand but each relished. We needed each other openly and voraciously, in ways that had not been possible for either of us in the families we were raised in. Here, at last, was a love I could indulge in fully, without fear.
What neither of us had the maturity to understand at the time is how much easier it is to unconsciously surrender to that kind of deliciously regressive dependency than it is to work your way consciously out of it to a more mature relationship. It was a long time before we dared have our first significant conflict, but when we did, we were both horribly wounded to discover that we were completely unable to work our way through it. In some ways, we really never recovered from that painful recognition of our separateness and were never able to build a mature connection that included the integration of our differences.
It was only towards the end of our relationship that I could tolerate knowing how unhappy I was, and how trapped we were with each other in ways that profoundly diminished both of us. My partner snored badly at night, and no matter what I tried I could not sleep when she was snoring. She did finally get a sleep study done, which confirmed a severe, life-threatening case of sleep apnea. It was another year before she got a CPAP machine, and for that year, I lay next to her every night, rageful at her for keeping me awake. Now here’s the kicker: there was an empty bedroom right down the hall. I was so afraid of my partner’s disapproval that I chose to lay there every night, steeped in my own rage, rather than get up and take care of myself by simply moving to another room. That, my friends, is a powerful, life-shaping fear.
I am currently married, and I’m happy to report that I am more secure, and less ruled by fear in this relationship than in any previous intimate relationship with a woman. I’ve had a lot of good therapy, and the work I’ve done has been very helpful. Nonetheless, it is also important to understand the lingering power of these issues for many men. It is still true for me that whenever my wife and I are in conflict, if I get activated enough, I still instinctively go right back to the same defenses of anger, disdain, and self-reliance that I learned to use with my mother, the same defenses that protect me against realizing how scared I still am, and how much those fears affect my ability to be in a loving relationship.
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