Comrades! most men who enter life with a strong sense of themselves and emotional stability, a strong character and clear direction – most men who enter life that way – stand on two legs of their own. Two strong pillars of support for their masculinity. One is an involved dad and the other is a nurturing mom. The fact is that’s how nature intended it to be. That’s how every boy was meant to have legs, for his manhood.
The problem is – and that’s what we’ve been seeing the last several days – is that oftentimes those pillars of support for our masculinity have cracks in them. Those cracks weaken and as a result as we’re growing up through the critical moments of life, those pillars give way and strength is replaced by instability. Health is replaced by hurt, and for us growing up as little boys and finally stepping out into the full sunshine of manhood, oftentimes what we find is not legs to stand on, but amputations. Those amputations then make life as a man difficult and hard and a struggle.
The Mom Factor
These last few days, we’ve been looking at the first of those new pillars, and that is ‘dad,’ - a pillar of manhood. What we want to do here in Session 7 of the Quest for Authentic Manhood is look at that second one, called ‘mom.’
Mom is a very important influence in a man’s life, as we’re going to find out in this session. I want to make one qualification here as I start. Please Note: I’m not picking on your mother. Okay? What I’m going to be doing is exploring the influence of a mom on a man’s life. How, sometimes unknowingly, that influence which she meant for good can end up as a wound in a man’s life.
“Other than dad, no one has influenced more the person you are today than your mother. The way she has handled your needs as a child has shaped your worldview, your relationships, your marriage, your career, your self-image, your life. What we learn in our relationship with our mother deeply affects every area of our adult life now.” And we know that to be true. Mom goes deep in the male psyche. She’s a powerful influence over a man’s life. Unfortunately, sometimes the influence that mother has in your life can leave a wound.
Two Significant Breaks with Mom
A healthy relationship with mom requires two significant breaks.
1️⃣From physical bondedness. When a newborn baby who’s been part of the mother’s body for 9 months – like you were at one point, you were literally one with your mother for those 9 months - suddenly there comes a moment where you have to be separated from her. But to be separate from her requires an unnatural break; one that she can’t necessarily do for herself. And at birth, there has to be this cutting of the umbilical cord.
Did you know that for many moms that moment is deeply significant? Because in that cut, the comfortable relationship that mom had with her child – that she had grown accustomed to, suddenly that radically changes, and she can no longer relate to the child the way she once did. That relationship has literally been cut off. A change has occurred, and for some women, that change is so difficult emotionally, that she suffers from what is called ‘post partum blues.’
Sometimes it becomes ‘post partum depression,’ because it’s so difficult to deal with. Literally, after the parting blues, Because the relationship has changed.
2️⃣ From emotional bondedness
Now, most every woman eventually gets over the above transition from oneness to separateness. But there’s a second separation that a lot of moms don’t make and never get over; or have difficulty handling. It is a separation that is far more important than cutting this physical umbilical cord. It occurs when a son is seeking to go from being a “mama’s boy” to being a man in his own right. In that moment, another kind of cut is desperately needed. That cut is the cut from emotional bondedness. It is extremely important for mom to willingly give up or lose her emotional hold over your life, and my life. This is a very traumatic thing that far exceeds the physical separateness.
A lot of cultures recognize this need. It’s interesting that many primitive cultures recognize the need for the emotional cut. Many Traditional Cultures do this Kind of Rites of Passage, But Modern Urban Culture has kind of suppressed this.
There is a story of a primitive tribe. They have a very elaborate ceremony to bring this about. When the son is just about at puberty, the tribe arranges for this traumatic moment. The women in the tribe are given kind of a ‘heads up’ on it. Then late in the night, the men in the tribe dress up as warriors and they come, beating drums with lighted torches, yelling and screaming. They rush into the mother’s hut and grab the child – the son. The mother, knowing all this is going to happen, still plays into it and she’s screaming, “My boy! My boy!” And he’s screaming “Mama! Mama! Mama!” The warriors pull the son from the mother’s arms, as he cries and reaches out for mom. Then with drums beating, they carry the son out into a new life, and from that day forward he lives with the men – never to live with mama again. In that traumatic cut, he understands – as painful as it is – that he’s no longer to relate to mama. He’s to relate to the community of men. He’s crossed over.
That requires that mama wants to let go, right? And I’m sure – if we went into that tribe – there are a lot of mothers that would rather keep their sons right there in the hut with them for the rest of their life.
Here‘s the question I want to ask you: Where in your Country/Tribe/Family Today, do we have a clear place for such an emotional separation between mother and son? The answer is, we don’t. Do we? There’s no clear place of separation along the road of life and that is why, Comrades, many men are still emotionally bonded with mom in one way or another.
Now, Let's explore some of those different ways of bonding. Some of them are very deeply entrenched. Some of them are just lightly connected, but because there’s no clear separation, For a lot of guys in their 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and even 60’s, it’s difficult to fully and separately identify into the world of men, and to express manhood at a deeply emotional level, because they still have ties back to mom.
To understand what is going on with men in the relational world, we must first look at some developmental patterns in their childhood. In the beginning, the young male is connected to mom. If things go well, with the “attaching mom” he learns to feel comfortable with his dependency on her, bonding, needing and connecting are comfortable and he enjoys being close. He’s one with mom. But then he begins to separate from her in the second and third year of life, and moves out of oneness into a separate identity. It’s important that he not only become a separate person, but that he become secure in his gender identity.
Later, as he moves away from mom and towards dad for identification with male identity, he accomplished two things:
1) He becomes a separate person, attaching to his father and gaining more autonomy from the oneness with mom, and
2) in his attachment to his father and identification with him as a male, he gains gender identity. From this strong base, he becomes someone who is comfortable with connection and dependence on someone, but separate enough to be autonomous an individual away from his object of dependency. He also becomes secure in his male identity. In short, he can love mom and be independent from her all at the same time.
And then later, he finds a woman to whom he can have a significant attachment and he marries, and with all of this secure identity, he is strong and separate with his new love when it comes to boundaries and limits, and he stays free of her control, and yet, he’s comfortable with both his and her perfections, and now sees her as a person he can relate intimately with. And in this way, he’s come full circle. He has successfully returned to the woman, but as an individual in his own right.
So, real health for a man goes this way.
From oneness with mom literally, to a healthy physical
separation; to a healthy
emotional separation, to finally a healthy oneness with a woman relationally,
called his wife.
Genesis
pictures this really well –Genesis, Chapter 2 says: “For this
cause (that’s speaking of marriage, of ultimately moving into an intimate
relationship with a woman) For this cause,
a man shall leave (and
by the way, the word in Hebrew for ‘leave’ is “to cut.” It’s speaking of this cutting – just like cutting an umbilical
cord)…shall leave his father and his
mother, and shall cleave (in a
healthy way) to his wife, and they are
able to become one flesh.”
The reason they’re able to become one flesh is because his ties are not back to his family and, in particular, he’s still not connected with his mom. That’s how he can relate successfully to his wife.
That’s the way it should be. But often it’s not, because often mom, for one reason or another –in one way or another – refuses to let go and that creates the Mother Wound.
Exploring the Mother Wound
The definition the Mother Wound: It’s an unhealthy emotional relationship with mother that causes a son to either be threatened by the influence of women later on his life, or to over-identify and become submissive to that influence.
It’s an unhealthy emotional bondedness in some ways that later on, in adult life, causes you to have different responses to women, and how you relate to a woman. By the way, how you’re relating right now to your girlfriend or your wife has links back to your home and when you were growing up.
Important characteristics about this wound.
1️⃣This wound is not blatant but subtle. When we were talking about the Father Wound, we were talking about a nasty gash that guys feel. It’s a ragged cut that bleeds. But a Mother Wound is like a paper cut. You’ve had a paper cut where you’ve done it and it stung. You look down and can’t see anything, it’s almost invisible. The point is, whether it’s a nasty gash, eventually, both of them bleed, don’t
they? That’s the Mother
Wound.
2️⃣This wound is not one of abuse, neglect, or absenteeism, but a wound disguised as love and care. It is not mom being bad. That’s part of the reason this wound is so hard to deal with -because it looks so nurturing, and caring and loving. It’s like the Trojan Horse. Some of you guys – if you remember your Greek mythology, you remember the Greeks trying to conquer the city of Troy and they couldn’t get in because the walls were so high. So what they did is they built this giant wooden horse and they gave it to the Trojans as a gift. At least, the Trojans thought it was a gift. Inside were enemy soldiers. They set the horse outside the gates, and the Trojans opened the gates and brought the horse in thinking, ‘look at this wonderful gift.’ Then while they were sleeping that night, the top of the horse opened. The Greek soldiers got out and they conquered the city. That’s the way the Mother Wound works. You invite it in because it comes in as a gift. But once inside, it opens up, and things hurt that weren’t intended to hurt. That’s how it actually impacts a man’s life.
3️⃣This is not a wound of inattention (like it is with the Absent Father Wound), but over-attention. It’s over-involvement, and over-identification with mom. It’s over-concern which keeps the relationship between a son and a mother in over time, fused and connected in inappropriate ways.
4️⃣This wound looks like love, but feels like control, over a period of time
5️⃣This wound is so powerful, it can wrongly shape or warp the masculine in adulthood. Comrades, there’re men who are still tethered to mom’s wishes, to mom’s feelings about him - about his marriage - about his children and about what he does. He’s still tethered in some emotional way to mom’s control over him, even though he is 40 or 50 or even 60 years old!
How does this wound occur?
1️⃣It often begins with an absent or distant father. It doesn’t mean that dad’s not in the home; he may be in the home. He’s just not involved in the home and so mom tends to move in and fill the void in some ways. There are kids who are go to school, Monday-Friday, all over the city whose mom is filling the dad void. Dad’s making the money, but mom’s filling the void because dad’s absent in one way or another.
More and more over the last years our modern society has given our young men over to
the world of women. They grow up in homes where mom is the primary
presence because dad’s not there. They
go to schools where the schoolteachers are primarily women. They go
to churches where in their
Sunday school classes, they have primarily female teachers and so their whole
world becomes a world of women. Men these days have to figure out
masculinity in absentia - without
men.
Interestingly, there’s a new phenomena where more and more sons are finishing University and then coming back home to live with mom and dad. Dad’s thinking, ‘they need to get out on their own’ - but mom’s welcoming them back. “Come on home, live with us, Son. I’ll wash your clothes, I’ll continue to feed you and I’ll take care of you. I want to continue to be your mom.’ Because there’s no cut—there’s no break - and that’s so unhealthy.
The over-abundance of females mentors, and lack of interaction with male mentors “…is a historical peculiarity unlike anything we’ve ever seen…” and the product that we are reaping is the ‘feminized man’.
The term: feminized man. What is it? Don’t confuse it, with the effeminate man, the man who has feminine physical characteristics or mannerisms. That’s not what we’re talking about. The ‘feminized man’ can be the toughest, roughest guy you ever want to be around - on the outside. But he can still be feminized.
A feminized man is a man who has learned to act or think in ways that are more appropriate for women. He’s frequently passive. He waits - he doesn’t initiate - he doesn’t lead, he follows. He doesn’t take risks; he lets somebody else assert themselves in the moment. But he’s physically strong and tough looking – but he defers - with a lot of young men in his generation, to women - Let the women be the warriors, the risk-takers, the leaders. The roles are reversed and our culture is pumping out dogma that reverses the roles, while it claims to be making them equal.
And with young men being in the world of women, and hearing all of that – suddenly their world is turned upside down. If there’s no a dad to help correct that, which frequently is the case, since most young people are growing up today without fathers, it creates tremendous emotional confusion and it keeps sons connected to mom. So this wound begins with an absent dad.
2️⃣ It can also be inflicted by one of four types of Moms.
1) Ignorant Moms. By ‘ignorant’ – I don’t mean ignorant in their intelligence. She can be brilliant, but ignorant in the sense that she doesn’t understand the power she has over a son’s life. And so today, with the idea of manhood being so vague, and with little done by dad to help a boy know how he joins the community of men, she by default continues to interact with her son in ways that she always has: as a mom to a boy. She’s still talking to her son like a boy.
She stays oblivious to the need her son has to disconnect from her emotionally. She’s ignorant of the fact he needs to develop a healthy separateness in his masculinity. He’s 18 years old and she’s still going in to wake him up for school. Do you know sons like that in your home? She’s still covering for him. She’s still looking/Applying Jobs for Him. She’s so over-involved with love that she is suffocating his masculinity. No wonder when the TV camera has a sports moment on all those young athletes, they wave to mom. “Hi, Mom! You’re number 1!” Absolutely. They may be 23 years old, but she’s still taking care of them.
Mom’s are not doing it because they want to hurt their sons. It’s the opposite; they want to love their sons, but they’re loving them in the wrong way. They just don’t understand it. On top of that, here’s no community of men that come in and say, ‘Enough! We’re going to cut that cord.’
2) Needy, hurting moms. These women who, for one reason or another, have lost their relationship with their own husbands. So their son is grafted in as the next best male companion. In a sense, they "marry" their sons. Their son becomes an unsuspecting surrogate husband to fill in some way for her unmet needs. As the son seeks to move into adulthood, losing her son means that she’s going to become lonely and alone. So she tries to hold on.
She strives to stay in touch. She gets over-involved. She becomes intrusive n the son’s life as he moves into adulthood. Even after he gets married, she moves into the marriage with him – in one way or another. Often that creates conflict in his marriage between him and his wife. The wife says, ‘why can’t you keep your mom out of our lives?’ And the son just wilts, because he doesn’t know how.
3) Unwilling-to-release moms. These are the strong and strong-willed dominant types of mom who want and need control. They’re the ones who say to their son when he’s 48 years old, ‘John, you and Mary are coming to our house for Christmas, aren’t you?’ And he’s powerless to say ‘No, we need to stay home for Christmas this year with our kids.’
She’s the one who comes over to John’s house and says, ‘John, you don’t mind if I drink?’ She’s the one that says, ‘Carl, your children need this; or your house needs that’ - and then goes out and buys it for him – without his approval or his wife’s approval. The wife says, ‘Send it back! We don’t need her being involved like that.’ He finds himself suddenly between this rock and a hard place. Now he’s between two women – and he doesn’t know what to do. He loses the respect of his wife as he stays bonded to his mom. If the wife does stand up to his mother, then there’s real problems, because he’s got divided loyalties - and boy, what a war that is!
4) fill-in-the-gap moms. That’s where dad is absent all the time so mom, of course, fills the gap. But in doing so, she bonds too deeply to her son. The thing she really needs to do - is to find male mentors, whether it’s Boy Scouts or a church group, or an older man to get involved, but often she won’t do that. What she’ll do is she’ll stay involved in his life and try to cover for the dad who left, separated, died or whatever.
Tomorrow, when we talk about how to resolve this wound, we’re going to see that Jesus had that problem with His mom. You’re going to get some surprising insights tomorrow.
Well, this is how the wound is inflicted. Now let’s look at how this wound manifests itself in adulthood.
How This Wound Manifests Itself in Adulthood: Two Responses
Basically this wound creates in men 1 of 2 extreme responses. When mothers lead the family because the fathers fail to lead, either by absenting themselves from the home or taking a passive role, boys are deprived of the most important natural model of manliness. Growing up mainly under the supervision of women, many experience insecurity over their identity as men.
One tendency, for boys growing up in such circumstances is to rebel against women who are authorities over them, and become socially disruptive, irresponsible in family and work commitments; overly-assertive about their manly prowess, especially in sexual areas, or leading lives characterized by violence and crime, alcoholism, and other addiction.
In other words, growing up in a home of a mom that‘s over-involved without dad, one of the tendencies that will be created in the son’s psyche is to rebel. Rebel against that suffocating control and become overly dominant in his own right or become disruptive.
A second tendency is for young men to identify with the adult women who are authorities in their lives. Then they learn to behave or react in ways that are more appropriate to women than to men. They become what I call soft males.
To the extent that a young male takes on either option - they do not learn the discipline, the responsibility and the character involved in being a man.
So, here are the two responses that this wound creates later on in adult life. You can see if either one of these apply to you.
1️⃣Men become dominant and
controlling towards women if they had an overly-involved mom at home. There are some sons in that environment that feel suffocated by it. There are some sons who don’t like all that over-attention and
that over-involvement. They feel
suffocated by it, so they contend against mom during their years underneath her
care. Rather than folding into mom’s
over-involvement, they fight like crazy against
it. They compete and they contend
with it. They resent
it, but the problem is that is how they learn to relate to women.
So then they go out
in adulthood and they relate to the other women in their lives that way. They see all women as a possible threat to
their independence and sense of masculinity. They come to fear intimacy,
because if they get too close to a woman, that woman might control them. They always keep this kind of barrier up, or what they do instead, is they try to find the woman they can
control. They seek to marry women
they can be safe with, but primarily rule over. They become tyrants in their home. Anytime that soft woman tries to express her rights and her
needs, he sees that as ‘you’re trying to take control of me.’ So he becomes
even harder and more dominant over her life. Do you see that?
The whole time he’s
trying to suppress his wife and he doesn’t understand that a lot of the problem
goes back to his younger life at home. He
doesn’t know how to maintain a relationship with another
fully formed individual who has rights
and needs and expressions and equalities of her own. So
he contends with the women in his life.
That’s one of the ways it manifests. And he can do it in varying degrees. He doesn’t have to be a harsh tyrant. Now if your wife says, “now why did you buy that ....? You know we talked about being a on a budget, and you went out and bought .... today.” You find yourself getting furious because you think, ‘all of a sudden, she’s trying to take control of me.’ When really what you did was act irresponsibly. It may be because back there, you are still fighting a shadow. So that’s how some men become dominant and controlling towards women.
2️⃣ Men become passive and submissive towards women.. Because of an earlier relationship with mom – because she over-did it for him – over-cared, over-nurtured, over-directed – and he let her. Because of this, he became overly-dependent and overly-responsive to women.
Now as an adult with women, his tendency – as he gets close to a woman – is to become passive and to lean on her too much. Letting her lead too much – looking for her to take care of me too much, because that’s the way mom did. In other words, he pulled out that giant umbilical cord he had to mom, and when he got into adulthood – he pulled it out. Then he began to look for some other woman he could plug this umbilical cord into, so he could continue to suck all those things he needed for himself, things like care and concern; taking care of my feelings and leading me and providing for me – out of her.
So he tends to go out and marry a stronger woman. When he marries that stronger woman you can see it in their day-to-day relationship. You see it when they encounter issues, he waits for her, rather than initiate. He shuns risk-taking. He struggles in making decisions. He places a high emphasis on his feelings. He prefers approval from others – especially his wife’s – before committing. He looks like a man but he acts and has characteristics that are a little more feminine. He becomes a ‘soft male.’ What he wants in a woman is a mother-wife.
At the beginning, when he finds her and he marries her, she thinks she’s marrying a sensitive male. The Alpha male. But in time, she learns to resent him because he won’t lead and he won’t protect, and he won’t take risks; and he won’t step forward and she gets tired of it. He’s passive.
The healthy path with mom should have been physical and emotional oneness with mom in the early years. Then a healthy and complete separation in the middle years. Then finally a healthy relational oneness with the woman he marries in the final years. That’s the way it should be. Unfortunately, for a number of men it’s not that way.
▶️ YouTube
No comments:
Post a Comment