Relationships June 18, 2018
Looks like dads don't have a monopoly on causing emotional damage after all.
Everybody loves their mom. Right?
Well, maybe not always. Welcome, my friends, to the world of mommy issues, the companion to the ever-so-infamous daddy issues.
Like daddy issues, mommy issues involve a person who has a somewhat estranged relationship with their parent. Unlike daddy issues, which usually involves a daughter and her father, mommy issues typically focus on a strained mother-son relationship.
So what does it mean when someone has mommy issues?
Most often daddy issues imply that a female has an inadequate or absent father. However, sometimes mommy issues mean that a guy is overly attached to an overbearing mother. If he’s talking to her several times a day every day, he might have mommy issues. Think momma’s boy to the extreme.
If you’re dating a guy with mommy issues, he might expect you to mother him. That is, maybe they won’t be so likely to do their own dishes or laundry. Basically, he’ll do absolutely anything for his mom, which is almost sweet, until you realize it means you and everyone else in his life gets thrown under the bus. Oh, and that he’s essentially a man-sized child.
If a mom isn’t there, this can cause a guy to have mommy issues. In relationships, he may become quickly attached in order to hold onto a close connection, trying to fill the void that his mother left behind.
As one male Reddit user shares, “I filled that void with someone who would give me that attention, disregarding whether or not I was in a healthy relationship, because I simply needed to be with someone.”
Mothers usually encourage their children and offer them support. So, people who grew up without the warmest mother can often experience feelings of inadequacy.
These feelings can reveal themselves in their relationships– and not just those they have as children. “Yet in all stages of life, children of difficult mothers struggle with self-doubt, on the one hand, and close relationships, on the other, or project dissatisfaction and doubt onto people who love them,” says Dr. Terri Apter.
That’s right, an unstable relationship with mom can mean trust issues in the future.
Because mothers are usually the main supportive and nurturing forces in a family, the absence of a mother figure can cause someone to develop a strong sense of independence from an early age. It’s even been speculated that our current president has mommy issues.
A lot of times, people assume that girls get along fairly well with their moms. If a girl’s going to have issues with one of her parents, they will most likely be, you guessed it, daddy issues.
However, as one writer shares, females can have a great relationship with her dad while her one with her mom may suffer.
So that emotional damage a woman has? Don’t always attribute it to dad.
