Mothers are the most influential figures in any child’s life. Their reach extends far into their child’s life. And this also applies for romantic relationships. Do you have issues in your romantic relationships? Ever wondered why? It might just be because of the toxic nature of your relationship with your mother!
Surprised? Well, the environment you grew up will definitely have colored the way you deal with your relationships with others. So, it’s natural that your romantic relationships start mirroring your toxic relationship with your mother in your childhood.
So, what you can do now to address those deep-seated issues is first to introspect yourself , to look into yourself and find where the toxic parenting by your mother has left its marks on you. This action will help you understand more about your relationships and your role in them. It may even aid you in avoiding painful relationships and noticing your own toxic behavior.
And do you think you are alone in going through this learning process? No! And there are common patterns in identifying these types of childhoods. Lets see some of them.
5 Issues Caused In Children’s Relationships Due To The Behavior Of Toxic Mothers
1. Unrealistic expectations
You might have grown up with a ridiculously high standard that your toxic mother set. And no matter how much you try you probably couldn’t achieve or meet that benchmark and might have even been punished for that.
In your later life, you still hold on to these unrealistic expectations, not only on yourself but also on your partner. This causes you to feel insecure that your partner will leave you because you couldn’t meet those high standards you set. Or your partner might feel suffocated with all these expectations on you. You may even become abusive to those who don’t meet your standards. This causes you to exhibit the same toxic attributes as your mother.
2. Communication issues.
When you grow up being unable to communicate with your own mother due to the toxic nature of your relationship, obviously you are going to face communication issues. Your mother might have not listened to you, expected you to read her mind and never really shown the care that your ideas needed. But these characteristics have a definite way of mirroring in your much later romantic relationships.
So you start doubting the validity of your partner’s communication, not communicate properly or frequently with your partner and probably give them a cold shoulder when they try to reach out.
3. Expectation of a ’fairy tale’ romance
When you don’t get a great relationship with your mother, you want to fill that void with a great romance. But this leads to expect a fairy tale quality in your romance. Seeing unhealthy and toxic relationships around you, you create an unrealistic and impractical view of romance.
So you start seeing all of your partner’s faults as unforgivable, have an impressive list of deal breakers, and run off at the first sign of trouble in your relationship. But when you finally learn that fairy tale romance doesn’t exist, you become depressed and believe there cannot be any good romance in the world, according to the Clinical Psychotherapist Reverend Sheri Heller.
4. Trust issues
When you grow up with an untrustworthy toxic mother, you lose your capacity to trust because mothers are supposed to be the ones that the children could put their trust on. Thus, you also don’t trust anyone easily, including your partner.
You become easily jealous and constantly fear your partner backstabbing you. You may even go through their personal items without consent. And these behaviors quickly become the reasons that your partner loses trust in you as well.
5. Inability to maintain and respect boundaries
Most toxic parents do not respect boundaries. They try to control every aspect of their children’s lives. And this leads the child to be unaware of boundaries. Healthy Boundaries are essential for healthy relationships. And this is also true for romantic relationships.
And when you don’t know about creating and maintaining boundaries consistently with your romantic partner, they may take advantage of your lack of boundaries and start being manipulative or abusive, you may swallow your unease and never breathe of it fearing backlash, and you may even start lashing out when your unknown boundaries,which you didn’t tell to your partner, are mistakenly crossed.