Mother’s Reach Long And Complex
Does your mother control your life? Most men would answer this question with a resounding no. They moved beyond her control, they’d say, when they turned 18, or went to college, or - at the very latest - when they took their marriage vows.
But Michael Gurian doesn’t buy it. The Spokane counselor and author believes most adult men, even years after leaving the nest, are still deeply, and often perilously, entwined with dear old Mom.
Gurian sees the symptoms among his clients: men who can’t live with women. Men who can’t live without them. Men who are inexplicably angry at women. Men who feel like a child whenever Mom comes to visit. And so on.
Gurian, who is 37, does not blame mothers for these symptoms. After years of counseling men, examining his own background and writing a book on the subject, he believes 1950s-style American culture is to blame: It encouraged fathers to be absent from the lives of their kids, and mothers to be omnipresent.
Gurian’s own childhood was typical. He grew up with a father who worked most of the time and didn’t know his kids very well. Gurian’s mother stayed home with the children and became frustrated and isolated because of it.
By the time he was a teenager, Gurian felt overwhelmed by his mother’s attention, which he says ranged from very loving to very cruel. He needed the guidance of men, he says, to offer him some balance. Yet no adult man was available.
Thus, Gurian headed into the adult world feeling like “a boy in man’s clothing,” he says. In his relationships with women, he practiced what he calls “push-pull intimacy” - wild vacillations between an extreme desire for closeness and an extreme desire to turn tail and run.
Eventually, Gurian realized that he was replaying, again and again, his ambivalent, push-pull relationship with his mother. She had been caring to him and cruel. He had loved her and feared her. Until he sorted things out about that relationship, he decided, it would continue to disrupt his relationships with other women.
Gurian’s first conversations with his mother, in which he expressed resentments about her explosive temper, were explosive themselves. She reacted with guilt and anger of her own. On several occasions, Gurian says, these talks led them to break off contact for months at a stretch.
Through this process - which also involved some heated discussions with his father - Gurian gradually defined himself as a person separate from his mother. He felt more sure of himself, he says. He didn’t worry as much about her opinions. And most revealing of all, he began having relationships with women without fear that he would either be overwhelmed or betrayed.
Today, he says, his relationship with his mother is warm and respectful. They have forgiven each other and accepted the other’s imperfections. Meanwhile, he has tried to break the cycle of paternal neglect by becoming an involved father to his own children.
Based on these experiences, Gurian last year published “Mothers, Sons and Lovers” (Shambhala, $13), a book designed to help men understand their relationships with their mothers. In it, he says the pain involved in his separation process was worth it. He’s proof, he writes, that a man can “gain strength by honoring the wounds” he received in his mother’s house.
For a perspective on the mother-son bond that’s very different from Guarian’s, check out :The Courage to Raise Good Men” (Viking, $21.95). Authors Olga Silverstein and Beth Rashbaum argue that adult men have problems not because their mothers hold onto them too long, but because mothers are convinced to let go too soon. xxxx