Toxic relationships hit us hard at any age, but our greatest vulnerability is in childhood. When we are in toxic situations, especially with a parent or caregiver, we may have experiences that remind us of those memories.

A toxic mother-child relationship, specifically, impacts throughout our adult lives if not dealt with in a healthy way. The first step is to recognize the signs of this toxic dynamic.

Here are 6 signs that you have a toxic relationship with your mother

1. You have negative feelings

If you admitted to your mother’s abuse, you also admitted how you felt.

When you experience thoughts of your mother, a cauldron of negative emotions boils inside you. These negative feelings are often a combination of dread, fear, anxiety, rejection, suffocation, or general emotional pain.

You have difficulty connecting with friends and colleagues who enjoy their relationships with their mothers. You may also imagine what it would be like to have a mother who evokes positive, loving feelings.

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If you excuse your mother’s behavior, you are suppressing your negative feelings and still shoulder some of the blame. You might say to yourself:

“I was not an easy child to raise.”
“I could have done more to help her.”
“She had a lot of her own problems to deal with.”
“That’s what my mother is.”
“She did her best.”

These expressions are okay if they come from a place of healing, but they are not okay when they are used to avoid reality and suppress internal trauma.

2. You react to conflict with submission or aggression

Toxic parenting causes children to develop ineffective conflict resolution methods to deal with a hostile authority figure.

If your mother crushed your morale when you were growing up, you learned to deal with conflict by submitting at all costs. You’ve probably thought to yourself: What’s the point of standing up if you’re going to fall?

Because of the way you were treated as a child, now, as an adult, you avoid conflict, neglect to stand up for yourself when necessary, and hold back from standing up for others so as not to cause conflict.

However, if your mother failed to break your spirits, but trampled on your entire heart, you have learned to remain passive in your position of weakness, but have developed and internalized the aggression caused by pain.

You decided that no one would ever hurt you like that again. As an adult, you experience conflict forcefully and may lash out without any provocation or provocation. A toxic relationship with your mother causes you to throw the first and last punch when you feel emotionally vulnerable.

3. You are withholding affection

Toxic mothers withhold their affection from their children as a form of punishment. They learn that their mother’s love is conditional, based on how much he pleases her.

Some mothers may offer little or no affection, even when the child is doing well. In response, some children constantly seek approval, hoping for the slightest sign of affection.

Others decide not to bother, isolating themselves emotionally and avoiding contact. Either way, children are emotionally manipulated and learn that loving affection is a conditional and rare commodity.

One of the strongest signs of a toxic relationship with your mother is your inability to accept affection healthily.

For example, as an adult, you don’t know how to handle free affection, and you live waiting for it to be suddenly taken away. Your joy and fear result in extreme emotional mood swings that your romantic partner does not understand.

It is not uncommon to withhold your affection as a means of self-defense or to punish your partner for the slightest indiscretion. It’s your way of protecting your vulnerable feelings and expressing your pain.

4. Seeks to establish dependent relationships

Codependent relationships involve a passive and a dominant partner who both find satisfaction in the emotional and/or practical dependence of the passive partner on the dominant partner.

A passive partner feels loved when another person is willing to do everything for him or her. The dominant partner feels love when it is needed. The more dependence on a partner, the more loved that person feels.

In this toxic mother-child relationship, the mother plays the role of the controlling partner. She resorts to extreme measures to ensure that her child will always need her, which hinders his healthy development.

Dependent parenting produces children who are emotionally and/or practically dependent. The child will become the passive or dominant partner as an adult, depending on his personality and willpower.

In the case of an adult who has a toxic relationship with his or her mother, this rings true. But there are also strong differences between passive and controlling dependence.

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