May 9, 2010

What Did Your Mother Teach You?

Posted in Child Alters, DID Education, DID/MPD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, emotional pain, Family Members of Trauma Survivors, therapy, Therapy and Counseling, Therapy Homework Ideas, Transference Issues, Trauma, trauma therapist tagged Abandoned by my mother, Abandonment, Abuse, AbuseConsultants.com, Abusive mothers, Bad Mothers, Caring, Child Parts, Compassion, Compassionate Women, Corrective Emotional Experience, Dallas TX, DID / MPD, DID Survivors, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Dissociative Survivors, Dissociative System, Emotional Healing, emotional pain, Female Therapist, Gentleness, Good Mothers, Guilt, Healing, Hurtful Mothers, Kathy Broady, Kid Parts, Kindness, Mother Issues, Mother Transference, Mother's Day, my mother abandoned me, Neglectful Mothers, Patience, Projection, Safe Therapists, Self-less, Separate the past from the present, Shame, SurvivorForum, therapy, Transference, Transference Issues, Trauma, Trauma Survivors, trauma therapist, Trauma Therapy, Understanding, Working through mother issues at 10:41 am by Kathy Broady

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It’s Mother’s Day 2010.

Mother’s Day – it’s a hard day for a lot of dissociative trauma survivors.  It’s a day full of mixed emotions, painful longings, unhealed heartbreak.  This day hurts the people who were hurt so much by their mothers.

Mothers are a complicated subject, to say the least, and the impact a mother can have on her children can and does change their lives.  Abusive or neglectful mothers can teach some very damaging life lessons.  Their children will carry those scars for decades of time.

I’ve seen this over and over with the DID survivors I work with.  Years later, the ways their mother treated them affects so much of their life – maybe even more than they realize.  People who were deeply wounded by their mothers often cannot view other maternal figures (Including other female authority figures) without getting confused in that relationship because of who their mother was.  The crimes of the original mother spill over onto the relationship any children they might have, making it harder to be a good mother in their own life.

That original mother relationship affects how DID survivors see the world, how they experience people, what they believe about themselves, what they believe about the world around them, and how they interpret others.  It is very central to the very core of their being.

Working with mother-transference issues is one of the hardest parts of being a DID therapist.  It is the area where the therapeutic relationship is at its most tender.  It is the most vulnerable place.  It is the spot where issues and feelings can get messed with by people who wish harm upon that therapeutic relationship.

To explain this, let me start from further back.

For example, I was blessed to have a very good mother and she taught me a lot of valuable life lessons. She wasn’t perfect, but she was and is about as close to perfect as one could ever hope for in a mother.  She is kind, loving, compassionate, caring, generous with her time, good with children, full of wisdom, patient, gentle, and self-less in so many incredible ways.  She has been an example to me for how to interact with people, especially with children.  My mother is non-judgmental, and she is willing to dig in and help anyone that she meets.  She is a beautiful soul, and she leaves a positive impact wherever she goes.

Yes, my mother has taught me a lot.  And almost all of what she has taught me has been good.  I do much of what I do because I had an incredible mother who taught me to be kind to others.

Those that spend time with me will see this in my work with them.  They will see that kindness, acceptance, gentleness, and generosity in what I do.  They will reap the benefits of what my mother gave to me as I pass that on to those that I work with.

So what makes that so hard?

If I am pulling from a good place, what makes mother issues so complicated and difficult to work with?

It’s because not everyone can interpret today’s kindness as genuine kindness.  The past wrinkles in and rolls up into the present, and the present becomes twisted into the past in an emotional kind of way.

Sometimes the damage done to trauma survivors confuses kindness with abuse.  Sometimes the damage done by an abusive or neglectful mother is so pervasive that it colors all acts done by other females, and the perspective becomes so tainted that nothing is seen clearly.  Female therapists are seen through the perspectives of “mother figures will abuse me”, “mother figures will hate me”, “mother figures will think I’m bad”, “mother figures will abandon me”, “mother figures are to be hated”, etc.

When trauma survivors truly believe, in their deepest selves, that women are there to abuse them, it is not an easy job to overcome that belief.  The fear is too huge.  The expectation of horrible doesn’t end.  The fearful expectation of abuse can often overtake everything else.

Frequently the pain-anger-guilt-shame at not having a good mother can get thrown at the female therapist, and displaced and projected onto her as a safe place to express such deep heart-wrenching emotions.  Therapeutically, this is expected to happen, and the goal is to work through that in a healing way.  Most therapists and clients understand that, and will work through it as a team.  It can be done, and when it is, very deep healing can occur.

However, sometimes trauma survivors get a little messed up along their journey.  They truly get confused in this area, and understandably so.  It’s an emotionally complex point, and trauma survivors are extremely vulnerable in this place.   And because of those vulnerabilities, they can be easily misguided.  They can get easily confused over who is the “good mother transference figure” and who is not.  They listen to poor advice, or bad rumors, or are too unwilling to let go of their fears in order to heal.  They stay convinced that women are out to get them, and they quickly join in with thinking that female therapists are abusive.

This breaks my heart.

I found it horrifically sad that some trauma survivors are willing to hold onto such beliefs that they would bring harm to themselves and to others.  This only continues the cycle of abuse.  It is not about healing.  It is destructive.

(Yes, there are a few female therapists who are harmful to their clients, but those are few are far between, and those are not the people I am writing about in this particular article.  That’s a completely different topic, to be discussed another day.)

This article is about genuinely good therapists who are mistaken as the “bad mother”.  This article is about finding ways to heal from your abuse.  It is about finding a woman of kindness, and not confusing her with your not-so-kind mother.  It is about recognizing the differences, and not being pulled into old fears, old beliefs, and old ways, just because they are more familiar to you.

It is about learning to recognize someone that can be positive, helpful, and kind to you, and to your inner children.  It is allowing that healing to occur.  It is keeping clear on what happens in the present, and not distorting it or twisting it into something negative from your past.

It does not help your healing to project your “bad mother issues” onto a good therapist and then stay stuck in that spot.  It only confuses you, and it prevents your healing.  It brings harm to you and your system to stay stuck there.

Your female therapist can and will teach you something very different from what your mother taught you.   Don’t assume the two women will be the same, because they will not be.  Don’t project so much of your abusive past onto your current day therapist that you cannot see who she really is.  Work hard at recognizing true kindness and gentleness for what it is.

Let yourself and your inner child parts have those corrective emotional experiences with a kind therapist and don’t let anyone mess with that.  If you let someone distort those experiences – if you let someone convince you that something was abusive when it wasn’t — then you have brought emotional pain to your inner world that didn’t need to happen.  If you weren’t abused, don’t let yourself believe that you were just because that is more familiar. Separate the past from the present.

Haven’t you been hurt enough?  Why add to that?

It is important to try to believe that women are not out to get you.  Female therapists are not here to harm you.  What your mother taught you can apply to her, but it really and truly does not have to apply to everyone else.  Your mother may have been cruel, cold, uncaring and abusive towards you.  But not everyone will be.  Not everyone wants to be.

Don’t assume the worst, and please don’t treat other women as if they did what your mother did.

It is very hard for trauma survivors to come to terms with these truths.  But the sooner you do, the sooner you will find that place of genuine healing.

Don’t let the harmful lessons that your abusive or neglectful mother taught you ruin or destroy any more of your life.  You truly can heal from the hurt and the trauma that you went through – I promise!

There are lots of good, helpful, kind, compassionate, caring women out here in the world.  I encourage you to be one of them.

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By:

Kathy Broady LCSW

www.AbuseConsultants.com

www.SurvivorForum.com

Copyright © 2008-2010 Kathy Broady LCSW and Discussing Dissociation

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