In the contemporary culture, people often complain about various aspects of their mothers.
The most common causes – on the mother’s side - of conflicts between mothers and adult children include:
- Mother's dominance
- Mother's ambivalence
- Reserve in the family, rejection by the mother, domination of the child
- Mother's mental illness
- Delegation of mother's unfulfilled needs to children
- Mother’s unrealistic expectations, her overload and powerlessness or dominating nature
However, adult children often take over their mother's hostility. It is difficult to say what is the reason for this behaviour. This article (podcast) tries to answer a part of this question.
This article is about aspects of the mother that we would define as predatory and cruel. The phrase “mother as a predator” evokes strong fear and aggression in people. These feelings are hard to contain. People deny the cruel aspect of the mother, they do not see their predatory aspects, or talk about mother's cruelty with "a mental illness" in mind (e.g. my mother is cruel but it is due to her mental illness). The topic of a predatory mother is omitted and redirected to the ilness. This topic can also be noticed, noticed and worked through.
Fairy tales express deeply hidden human experiences and longings or desires. The easiest way to talk about the predatory aspect of the mother is through them.
PSYCHOLOGICAL MEANING OF THE FABLE "THE WOLF AND THE SEVEN YOUNG GOATS"
In the fairy tale "The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats", the old goat had seven young kids whom she loved with all her heart. She had to leave her offspring to bring food from the forest. The goat warned the kids about the evil wolf that wanted to devour them. However, the wolf managed to lead the kids into the field, and devour six of their siblings, and the youngest kid managed to hide himself. The mother returned from the forest and found the hidden kid. The mother saved the rest of her offspring by cutting open the wolf's belly and freeing her children. Out of revenge, the mother sewed stones into the wolf's belly. The wolf woke up, and wanted to run away, but instead died, falling into the water and drowning.
A goat is as good of a mother as a mother can be. She is a single mother raising children, without the presence of a father, there is no one to support her in raising the kids. In real life also the father may be absent. He may be absent because of his job, because of his emotions, because of addiction or illness. The goat defines herself by her role as a mother, she sacrifices everything for her offspring and has no life of her own. She tries to excessively protect the kids from the outside world and remove all obstacles from their lives. The mother's main concern is to feed her children, to nourish them, her entire attention is focused on the presence or absence of food.
The goat warns her children not to let the wolf, who is a predator, in. The mother says "I am a mother who sacrifices herself for her children." The kids try their best not to let the wolf into the house, in the end, they open the door to the cruel aspect of their mother and are devoured by it. By warning her children about the bad wolf, the mother wants to protect them from her own predatory aspect.
An example:
A mother works overtime to educate and feed her sons. The father is a miser and does not give to the family the money it needs. The mother does not show her aggressive side towards the children for a long time. While she is a young person, she fulfils the role of mother and wife successfully, but later she lacks strength. The husband becomes aggressive and burdensome, and the woman ceases to be a wife and becomes only a caregiver or a nurse. He begins to demand more and more from his sons and pushes them to their psychological limits. She demands as much sacrifice from her children as she does from herself. For example, after the husband's surgery, the mother asks her children to stay by their father's bedside. Objectively, this is an issue that requires the help of a professional nurse. The patient's condition is serious.
PSYCHOLOGICAL MEANING OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM'S FABLE "RAPUNZEL"
In the fairy tale "Rapunzel", a young married couple lives next to the garden of a powerful witch. The woman wanted a plant from the witch's garden and her husband agreed to steal the plant for her. Unfortunately, the witch catches the husband stealing and forces him to promise that he will give her the soon-to-be-born child. After the birth, the parents give the girl to the witch who locks her in a tower and keeps her for herself. Rapunzel's mother and the witch are one and the same person.
The tragedy of the mother-daughter relationship is that the mother is unable to love her husband and focuses entirely on their daughter. She pays attention to her and is very present in her life. The husband is powerless and passive towards his wife's behaviour. Later a young man appears in his daughter's life and falls in love with her. The cruel aspect of the mother then locks her daughter in a tower again and cuts off her hair. The mother's anger prevents the young couple's relationship from developing.
Both young people, the daughter and the prince enter a crisis. To get out of it, the young man must recognize his destructive impulses, and understand the tendency to withdraw and give up, and the young woman must allow herself to be found by a man. In this fairy tale, the woman sings, which allows the man to find her.
This fairytale tells the story of the cruelty of a mother who wants to "own her daughter" and be better than her partner at all costs. Such a relationship with the mother may cause women to quickly break up with men. Over time, daughters become closer and strengthen their relationships with their mothers.
Example:
A 24-year-old woman becomes pregnant, marries and gives birth to a child. She moves into her husband's studio apartment. The man, like the woman’s father, has a professional education and also abuses alcohol.
The woman's mother has a higher education and is the one who supports the family. After a year of marriage and living together, the woman leaves her husband, returns to her mother's house, and becomes her right hand. Meanwhile, her parents are divorcing. The woman uses her mother's financial resources and lives with her child at her mother's place. She is not remarrying.
Another version of such a relationship is when a woman gets married but has no children of her own and redirects all her attention to her mother. The daughter offers her relationship and her motherhood to her mother, e.g.: she calls her mother every day, listens about her illnesses, buys gifts, and asks questions. The close relationship between daughter and mother is not hindered by the fact that they live on opposite ends of the world.
PSYCHOLOGICAL MEANING OF THE FABLE "ALL-KINDS-OF-FUR"
In the fairy tale "All-Kinds-of-Fur", a dying mother expresses her wish to be forever remembered. When the queen dies, she orders her husband and the king to marry a woman as beautiful as her. He cannot find a partner other than his daughter and discovers a sudden, impulsive love for her. The entire public opinion (court, councillors) is against the king marrying his own daughter. The daughter is terrified of her father's intentions and sets impossible conditions to be met. The father, however, fulfils them. The daughter runs away from her father's house and finds shelter and employment as a cook outside the family home. She works hard and fulfils difficult and dirty tasks. The daughter finds a way to show all her wealth and beauty to another man. She learned the lesson well with her father. She ran away from a home where too much was demanded from her.
In this fairy tale, the mother's memory lives forever at the expense of the daughter's life. If a daughter accepted her mother's order, she would be condemned by the community and would lose her dignity.
Example:
The client is a 38-year-old woman and has two younger siblings, including one half-sibling. The mother has great difficulties in her relationship with her husband and does not maintain contact with her in-laws, she is an impulsive and violent person. The mother delegates her daughter to visit her husband's family with her father, and to go on holiday with her siblings with her father, without the mother's presence.
PSYCHOLOGICAL MEANING OF THE FABLE "HANSEL AND GRETEL"
The fairy tale tells about hunger and the cruel part of the stepmother. In this fairy tale, a woman believes that in a famine situation, there will not be enough food for everyone and o that she must get rid of her children. The mother wants to survive at the expense of her children.
The father loves his children but does not decisively defend them against the cruel part of the mother. The father yields to his wife's cruel decisions. The mother is duplicitous and pretends to be a caring, protective mother. She gets rid of the children from home. The children are so hungry that they fall into the hands of a cruel witch who wants to eat them. A witch in the real world represents all situations in which "Hansel and Gretel" may be at risk of being "devoured" - e.g. destructive relationships, partnerships, peer groups, and stimulants.
Example:
The client is 45 years old and has raised two younger siblings. She was her father's confidante when he returned home briefly from working abroad. The mother was not employed and took care of her father. She paid attention to her daughter only when her daughter did something she didn't like.
PSYCHOLOGICAL MEANING OF THE FABLE OF "THE SIX SWANS"
This fairytale is about the hostility of a mother-in-law towards her daughter-in-law. The daughter-in-law has no mother, she died and her father remarried with a woman he was afraid of. The daughter-in-law has six brothers and she is hated by her mother-in-law. In this fairy tale, the daughter-in-law did considerable work for her family by weaving six shirts for her brothers. When she finished the shirts, she regained the ability to speak and defend herself against her mother-in-law's aggression. It is important that the mother-in-law first presented her daughter-in-law in a bad light, slandered her, and then accused her of infanticide.
Example:
A hard-working, educated woman, well-earning, got married. She gave birth to two daughters. After a few years of marriage, it turned out that the husband was mentally ill, which was not talked about in the family. No one in the family spoke out loudly about the fact that her husband had no contact with his daughters or the outside world. The woman was the main breadwinner in the family, she got the apartment and the family lived thanks to her job. Her mother-in-law criticized her almost every day. The daily ritual included reminders of what had not been taken care of or cleaned up, what parenting mistakes she made, and how poorly she raised her children. The woman resolved the conflict passively, left her and her husband's apartment and bought a new one. The husband stayed in the apartment with his mother.
This article discussed some of the aspects of the predatory mother
Further characteristics will be discussed in Part II.
