Breaking the Mother-Son Dynamic: Resetting the Patterns of a Man's Life and Loves

by John Lee

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Author: John Lee

Publisher: Health Communications Inc

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ISBN 10: 0757318665
ISBN 13: 978-0757318665

Therapists and the general public are familiar with the terms "(s)mothering," "helicopter moms," and "boomerang sons" because they have been popularized in films like Monster in Law, Cyrus and Failure to Launch—but what makes for humorous fodder onscreen depicts a troubling issue that's being played out for real in therapists' offices, bedrooms, and divorce courts across the nation: an epidemic of men who are enmeshed in unhealthy, energy-sucking, and emasculating relationships with their mothers. Even though these men are grown and living away from Mom, her influence has left them unable to fully commit or to fully love, and they are plagued with anger issues, indecisiveness, depression, or toxic stress.

In Breaking the Mother-Son Dynamic, John Lee takes an eye-opening look at how a mother's love or lack thereof impacts a son's life choices as well as their wives, girlfriends, or lovers. Perhaps you are one of these men (or maybe you recognize these behaviors in the man you love). Do you hold back, swallow, or bottle up things you wish you could say to your mother for fear it would upset or 'kill' her? Did you grow up hearing negative things about men, masculinity, being a male, and how you shouldn't be like "the rest of them"? Does your mother, or did she, fail to respect your boundaries as a child, adolescent, or adult? Does your mother keep referring to you as her "baby" or her "little boy" even after you became an adult? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you may be caught in an unhealthy mother-son dynamic that is negatively affecting key areas of your life.

Several years ago, John Lee wrote what came to be the most authoritative book on why men run from relationships, The Flying Boy: Healing the Wounded Man. Here, he visits the mother-son relationship and gently but assertively shows men how to separate from the mother energy that has a massive pull on their hearts and souls, no matter how young or old they may be. In a work that is a combination of memoir, self-help psychology, recovery and personal growth, he discovers: why a relationship of 50-50 responsibility doesn't work, and what does work; how men can stop 'sonning' mothers, lovers, and wives; why one must learn his or her own "rhythm of closeness"; how to be really present to those we love and to life itself; and much, much more.

Using case studies, personal stories, and assessments, the book helps men release any anger and grief toward their mothers and teaches them how to take responsibility for their adult selves; most importantly, Lee provides an understanding of what healthy adults should—and shouldn't—expect from each other. Lee shows wives and girlfriends how to stop being their man's surrogate mother and shows well-meaning mothers how certain behaviors may perpetuate an unhealthy cycle and how to better relate to their sons in healthier ways. By helping mothers and sons identify this dynamic and providing them with the tools to dismantle it, this book will change lives. For anyone who is ready to make a clean, clear, and guilt-free separation from the kind of (s)mothering and "sonning" that just hasn't worked, John Lee will show them the way.

Book Description

Bestselling author John Lee offers tools and solutions for men, their mothers, and their partners.

About the Author

John Lee has spent 30 years guiding lives and relationships through addiction, recovery, emotional ruin, rage, grief, and desperation, and into new strength, hope, functionality and fulfillment. He wrote the bestseller The Flying Boy, as well as twenty other books, and he has been featured on Oprah, 20/20, Barbara Walter's The View, CNN, PBS, and NPR. He has been interviewed by Newsweek, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and dozens of other national magazines and radio talk shows. John earned his master's degree at the University of Alabama, where he taught English and American Studies. At the University of Texas, he worked on his doctorate and taught Religious Studies and Humanities at Austin Community College. He is founder and former director of the Austin Men's Center where he ran men's groups and sessions for individuals and couples. Along with poet Robert Bly and others, John became a recognized leader in the Men's Movement and an early pioneer in the field of recovery and addictions—he has keynoted hundreds of clinical conferences around the world. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Breaking the Mother-Son Dynamic has been written with you in mind from the start, to help you view your relationship in non-shaming, non-blaming ways so you can clearly see, break, and dismantle what has become destructive. It provides men and women with fresh and sometimes frightening insights into the mysterious bond―or bondage―between millions of mothers and sons and how this bond impacts women as lovers, wives, and girlfriends.

The awareness of this dynamic will improve and perhaps change or save marriages, dating relationships, and the experience of living together, as well as increase the functionality of the family by showing everyone who is ready how to make a clean, clear, shame-free, guilt-free separation―to break free from unhealthy mothering and 'sonning' that just hasn't worked. All of this will be a conscious, compassionate uncoupling of mothers and sons. Here comes the best part: I'm going to show you how to do the 'work' and what the payoffs are for saying good-bye to Mom.

Who This Book Is For

Breaking the Mother-Son Dynamic is for you if you are a son of any age who knows or feels that your relationship to your mother is not quite right. Thousands of men, old or young, can see that their relationships with their mothers have had a huge impact on how they relate to their lovers, wives, and girlfriends. In addition, the Mother-Son Dynamic also often negatively impacts sons' relationships to their fathers and may even result in a lack of or unsatisfying male friendships.

This book is for the man who wants to let his mother go and experience a healthy relationship with her as a separate adult. The women (or men if you are gay) you love don't want a 'mama's boy'; they don't want a boy in men's clothing. Today's women want to know and feel that their lovers, husbands, or boyfriends always have their backs when push comes to shove, especially if his mother is doing the shoving. These strong women want men who are emotionally available, connected, and who are clearly comfortable with their masculinity, who won't be s/mothered, and who will still open up and let them in.

And for women: congratulations all you brave mothers of adult sons for being ready to stop seeing, treating, and thinking about your sons in ways that have been less than fruitful, less than correct, and perhaps even inappropriate! You are courageous enough to try to let your sons become the men they were meant to be and therefore treat women, wives, girlfriends, and lovers with respect and dignity and allow themselves to cherish and be cherished. All you have to do is let go. I'm going to show you how and, at the same time, show your sons how to compassionately let you go.

My compliments go to you proactive mothers who are raising sons with your eyes on their futures. You want to mother your sons in ways that feel right; you want to have boundaries and increase your sons' abilities in the future years to love and be loved in ways many of us older men had to learn through trial and error and broken hearts.

To the wives, girlfriends, lovers, and partners of men who may be caught up in this dynamic, I hope an understanding of how this happens will give you greater insight into your relationship. You, too, are perhaps suffering in a major or minor way because of this dynamic. By the end of this book, you'll gain knowledge, techniques, and tools for navigating and negotiating your relationship with both your husband, partner, or lover and his mother.

What This Book Promises

In this book I provide both men and women with solutions, insights, stories, information, and tools that can turn relationships around, possibly even save some. I show men how to gently but assertively separate from what can be an overwhelming mother energy that has a massive magnetic pull on young and old men's hearts and souls. I teach women how to keep from being seen as a man's surrogate mother. I instruct well-meaning mothers how to stop acting in ways that minimize their sons' energy, even if they are doing it unknowingly or with no malicious intent.

Most of the men and women I have worked with (I include myself in this) thought as children that we were the reasons why our fathers or mothers drank, drugged, or beat us, or why they were emotionally or physically absent. Whatever was wrong in our families, we were to blame, causing us to be angry at ourselves instead of holding the adults in our lives accountable and responsible for their behavior. Even if we were ignored, left, or smothered with attention, we assigned ourselves accountability from childhood on. My young mother's life ran smack into my life when I was young, and she wrecked it with her smothering and abandoning. If I get angry at myself for this, I'll never heal, never trust other men or women, and will perpetuate the same behavior on to my children.

What I did, still do, and suggest to my clients and workshop participants is to assign accountability and take responsibility. Most of the time this is never done face-to-face but is done in the form of writing letters we do not send, fantasy dialoguing, sharing with a therapist, storytelling, creating, and other means.

I've worked with many people who are angry with themselves for many things. They don't know how to pray and they hold themselves accountable for this instead of the ministers, preachers, and teachers whose job it is to teach them how to pray. There are angry fifty-year-olds who blame themselves because they 'don't know how to do a relationship,' as if they were supposed to be born with this information and skill. We do, we repeat, we parrot what was shown to us and what was taught to us until we get out from under the weight of holding ourselves accountable and then get responsible for educating ourselves about prayer, relationships, child rearing, learning how to love, being intimate, making love, and so on.

I invite you to join me on this journey, one that I have personally taken with my mother and the women in my life―from my wife to my sister, my niece, my grandniece―and tens of thousands of men and women who have shared their stories with me during the last thirty years as a counselor, therapist, workshop facilitator, and author. To maintain my integrity with my profession as a therapist and storyteller, I have changed the names, identifying characteristics, and certain locations and settings to protect the privacy and dignity of those whose stories I've told herein. With that said, everything in this work is true, or at least as true as memory will allow it to be.

If you are a man reading this, you may recognize some unresolved issues concerning how you were mothered. If you are a woman reading this, I hope you will see your husband, son, lover, or father on the following pages and come to a greater understanding of your relationship with him. And I hope both men and women alike will engage in the work that can lead to loving and living more fully and healthily.

Doing the Work

First, no kind of therapy, no counselors, and no self-help authors can make the good things a man or a woman has been taught go away. There's no way to remove the pleasant and positive from one's memory or heart. The work in this book, as indeed all my work with every client or workshop participant, is about healing the dysfunctional and being grateful for the kindness and love we received, wherever it came from. For example, my mother smothered me, and I can diminish and heal the negative repercussions of that. But she also taught me, among many other things, not to be racist, and that can never be diminished or taken away.

I trust that I have made it clear that consciousness has no room for blame. I believe that your mother―and mine―did the best she could with what she was given. If she didn't, I wouldn't be writing this and you couldn't be reading this. While I don't 'blame' my mother, I do something in this book that has been taboo in this culture and others for too long: tell the truth about millions of mothers and sons and hold mothers accountable in the same way many have come to hold fathers accountable.

Accountability, Responsibility, and Blame

Webster's defines accountability as 'liable to pay or make good in case of loss.' Another definition is 'the state of being accountable, liable, or answerable.' Responsibility, says the dictionary, is being 'able to respond to any claim, on one's own initiative or authority.' Blame, however, is nothing like the other two. To blame is to 'harass with constant criticism; to reproach for a lapse or misdeed.'

Let me give an example. If I am driving down the road at the speed limit and I come to an intersection, see the light is green, and proceed through the intersection and a car zooms through the red light and runs into me and my car . . . who is accountable? The red-light runner, that's who. I'm going to get out of my car, shaken up a bit, probably a little scared and a little angry (if I'm not too much in shock) and ask the driver if he or she has insurance to pay for my damaged car, to make good in case of loss. I will hold the driver 'accountable,' and then I'll be 'responsible' and take my car to the body shop to have it repaired. Conversely, if I held myself accountable for the driver's running the red light, I'd tell myself it was my fault for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and tell the red-light runner, 'Oh, I'm so sorry I got in your line of fire. How silly of me to think I could drive down the road and expect others to obey the law. It's not necessary to contact your insurance agent, I'll pay for the damages―mine and yours―have a good day.' Equally ridiculous is a reaction such as, 'Look, you red-light runner, you come by my house tomorrow and pick up my damaged car and take it to the body shop; then go back and pick it up when it's fixed and bring it to me. In the meantime, give me the keys to your wife's car, which I'll be driving until you get mine fixed.' We can agree on the most effective response: You ran into me, so you are accountable. I'll get the car fixed; I'm responsible for getting the repairs done.

Another way to think about this is that if a man carries the weight of both accountability and responsibility for his mother's misdeeds or mistakes, the two together will weigh him down and exhaust him so much that he'll be unlikely to have enough strength to handle both. Instead, he'll probably drink, drug, or get very depressed. By getting angry at what I call 'The Ghost Mother'―not the one living today down in Florida but the one who was maybe too young to drive or be a mother―then I can carry the right weight of responsibility and take my wrecked car/life to the body shop/therapist and get it fixed. And since my mom didn't take out faulty-mother insurance, I'll have to be responsible for coming up with the money to have the work done. But I'm not accountable for the wreck. This story has a happy ending, but hold on! It gets a little bumpy, as any ride worth taking usually does.

©2015 John Lee. All rights reserved. Reprinted from Breaking the Mother-Son Dynamic: Resetting the Patterns of a Man's Life and Loves. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher. Publisher: Health Communications, Inc., 3201 SW 15th Street, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442.

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