If you don’t have the greatest relationship with your mother, maybe you’ve suspected you have so-called “mommy issues.” But what does that actually mean, and what can you do about it? To find out, we asked the experts.
What “mommy issues” really mean.
Mommy issues can mean a lot of different things, but it typically refers to personal issues stemming from the relationship you had with your mother as you were growing up.
“Really what we’re talking about there is how people’s issues from their childhood—in terms of their attachment with their parents, in this case particularly with their mother—has impacted their development as a whole,” clinical psychologist Nicole Beurkens, Ph.D., tells mbg. She adds that these kinds of attachment issues are particularly pertinent with regard to people’s social-emotional development and how that plays out in their life and relationships.
According to psychology expert and doctor of education Gertrude Lyons M.A., Ed.D., we’ve all been affected by the wiring of our formative years and the caregiving we received—in both empowering and limiting ways. “There is an important truth and possibility that opens up for us when we look into our past and examine everything, from trauma to subtle, seemingly innocuous emotional injuries we experienced in our childhoods,” she explains.
The psychology behind the term.
If you remember the story of Oedipus, perhaps you’ve heard the term “Oedipus complex,” which is a theory in psychology introduced by Sigmund Freud that suggests children are attracted to their parent of the opposite sex. According to Beurkens and Lyons, this is where the concept of both mommy and daddy issues was first considered.
“But,” Beurkens notes, “the more modern, research-based theory that applies to [mommy issues] is attachment theory, attachment styles, and looking at how the patterns of interactions and relationships between children and their parent figures impact their development.”
It all comes down to how (or whether) your needs were met as a child and how those experiences influence you in adulthood. As Lyons explains, “we adapted behaviors as children in order to survive in our individual situations. For some, it meant literal survival, but for every child, there is an element of adaptation to fit.” Based on how secure our attachment is to our earliest caregivers, she says, we decide how safe the world is, what the world expects from us, and what we can expect from the world.
It’s important to remember that “mommy issues” is a loose concept that depends on your childhood, what your mom was like, and how you may have internalized everything. As Beurkens explains, mommy issues can include a variety of things and can show up differently in different people. Here are some examples of behaviors that could be attributed to your relationship to your mother, according to her and Lyons:
One sign of potential mommy issues (aka attachment issues) is “clinginess” in relationships, or as Beurkens describes it, “people in adulthood who are particularly needy.” If someone had a fraught relationship with their mother growing up, a person may cling to other people in their lives (particularly their partners) to fulfill the needs that weren’t met by their mother, she explains.
2. Being demanding or critical
According to Beurkens, another way mommy issues might show up, particularly in women, is demanding, critical, or controlling behavior. Essentially, if a woman had a mother who exhibited these qualities growing up, she may learn to mirror these and display them in adulthood. “Women can exhibit that in their lives and in their relationships, whether with an intimate partner, in relationships with their own children, or with co-workers and employees,” Beurkens adds.
Affection can be difficult if you had a complicated relationship with your mother. This can manifest as being overly affectionate or struggling to show affection at all. If a mother was often emotionally closed off, Beurkens explains, the child may also have a hard time expressing affection.
Depending on a person’s relationship to their mother, Lyons notes some people can wind up being overly dependent on other people in their lives. Beurkens says this can look like wanting their partner, friends, or other people in their life to take care of them. “That can mean everything from tangible things like managing the household or managing practical things in life to taking care of them emotionally, to being clingy.”
If you had a mother who was detached, this can lead to an “inability to get close to people,” Lyons says. This one goes back to struggling with affection and intimacy, and it typically stems from not having that secure attachment modeled for you as a child.
Lyons notes that sometimes, people with mommy issues may caretake for others at the expense of their own self-care. This could be the result of having an overbearing mother, as we learn what love is supposed to look like based on how our parents took care of us.
7. A tense relationship with your mom
Even if you don’t have a specific behavior you can call to mind, if you know your relationship with your mother isn’t great—even if it’s just OK—there’s a good chance you have some residual “mommy issues” you could look into. We’re all influenced by our upbringings, and very few are without some ramifications. So if you know your relationship to mom is fraught, it may be worth looking into how it may be uniquely affecting you and your life.
How they manifest in relationships.
How “mommy issues” show up in relationships depends on what your mother was like when you were a kid and how you’ve responded, internalized, or adapted because of it. But generally speaking, according to Beurkens, how our mother treated us can often manifest in how we treat others.
“Our past trauma, wounds, and resentments, which reside in our unconscious, can dictate how we live our lives, often from a place of reactivity if we’re not conscious enough to see the patterns,” Lyons explains.
We then project and transfer all those wounds onto other people, she adds, whether in romantic relationships, with our own children, and even with friends or colleagues.
“Those resentments are like pillows between us and the other person—directly or indirectly,” she says. “And the more we do the work to repair the relationships from our past, the closer and more genuine our connections can be with other people.”
Resolving the issues & healing.
So, what can be done if you think mommy issues are causing problems in your life? According to Beurkens, awareness is the first step, which takes a degree of mindfulness. “Often people go through their lives really unaware of how their patterns of relating to other people and their patterns of being are influenced by those early attachment relationships,” she explains. She suggests thinking about how those things have affected you and how they may be playing out in life today.
From there, she and Lyons agree that professional assistance can be a big help, especially if your relationship with your mother was particularly traumatic and your childhood involved any abuse or neglect.
In addition to therapy, there are “more resources than ever before out there for people to start to delve into it on their own,” Beurkens adds, from online resources to books to support groups.
Then, Lyons says, “We have to practice new behaviors based on our insights. This is not a quick-fix territory—it really takes a commitment to go into this vulnerable territory.”
Most childhoods are imperfect, and just because you struggle with certain mommy issues doesn’t mean you’re doomed, or even that your mom is necessarily a bad person. With awareness and intentional change, anyone can unlearn the patterns and behaviors we’ve come to know as “mommy issues.”
As Beurkens notes, healing from mommy issues is about “becoming aware and then getting more information, learning and analyzing how [mommy issues] show up for you, and then starting to implement some changes.”
