The Mother Who Cannot Let Her Daughter Bloom

Posted on by helpingsoul

Maternal Envy, the Daughter’s Emerging Sexuality, and the Slow Work of Naming What Most Mothers and Daughters Will Not Name Aloud

A substantial revision of an earlier 2010 post on mother-daughter envy. The original was a personal reflection. This version is clinical, drawing on cases at appropriate distance and on current research that the 2010 piece did not yet have access to.

In my clinical practice, I have sat with a particular kind of grief many times. The grief of an adult daughter who has slowly come to recognize that her mother envied her. That the mother who was supposed to celebrate her emerging womanhood instead competed with it. That the mother who was supposed to teach her that her body was good was the first person to communicate, through small gestures and large ones, that her body was a problem. That the mother who was supposed to want her flourishing instead, in some difficult-to-name way, needed her to not flourish quite so visibly.

This pattern is not rare. It is not, despite the cultural insistence that all mothers love their daughters unconditionally, a marginal phenomenon. Maternal envy of daughters is a well-documented dynamic in clinical literature. It just is not often discussed openly, because it violates one of the most protected cultural narratives we have — the mother as the unconditional source of love for her child.

This article addresses what the pattern looks like, where it comes from, how it affects the daughters who lived through it, and what the work of recovery and repair can look like for both parties. The territory is sensitive. It deserves both clinical precision and the recognition that mothers who envy their daughters are themselves usually carrying significant unprocessed material from their own lives. The work is not to identify mothers as villains. It is to name a dynamic clearly enough that the people who lived through it can recognize themselves and begin the work of healing.

What maternal envy of daughters looks like

The dynamic shows up in many forms. None of them is universally diagnostic on its own. The pattern emerges from accumulation rather than from any single behavior.

The mother who criticizes her teenage daughter’s clothing not for actual modesty concerns but because the daughter’s emerging body is genuinely attractive and the criticism is the mother’s way of damping the attention the daughter is receiving. The criticism is framed as protection. The felt sense underneath, often unconscious to the mother herself, is something closer to resentment.

The mother who, when men in public respond to her teenage or young adult daughter’s appearance with attention or cat calls, shames the daughter for inviting the attention. The implicit message: your body is the problem. Your appearance is the problem. The fact that you are being noticed in ways I am no longer noticed is a flaw in you rather than a function of biological aging in me.

The mother who undermines her daughter’s accomplishments with subtle critique. The straight A’s that are met with concern about the daughter’s social life. The scholarship that is met with comments about how lucky she was. The successful relationship that is met with skepticism about whether the partner is good enough. The pattern is not consistent criticism. It is the precise targeting of whatever the daughter is most flourishing in.

The mother who competes with her daughter for the attention of the same men. The father whose attention the mother needs and who is suddenly noticing the maturing daughter. The boyfriends or husbands whose admiration the mother monitors for any indication that they have noticed the daughter. The dynamic produces specific kinds of damage in the daughter, who learns to dampen herself in male company in order to avoid triggering the mother’s reaction.

The mother whose stated values and lived behavior contradict each other around female sexuality. The mother who preaches abstinence while the daughter knows the mother lost her own virginity at fifteen. The mother who shames the daughter for sexual exploration while the mother herself has a complicated sexual history that is not openly acknowledged. The hypocrisy is its own teaching — it communicates that female sexuality is shameful for the daughter while available for the mother, that the rules apply differently in different generations, that the mother’s right to her own sexual history does not extend to permission for the daughter’s.

Where this dynamic originates

Maternal envy of daughters does not come from nowhere. The mothers who carry this dynamic are not, with rare exceptions, monsters. They are women carrying their own significant unprocessed material from their own lives. Understanding where the dynamic comes from is essential to the work of recovery, because it allows the adult daughter to name what happened without having to demonize the mother who happened to her.

The mother who was not loved well by her own mother often carries a particular kind of injury that surfaces when her daughter reaches the age the mother was at when the mother’s own injuries were forming. The daughter’s blooming activates the mother’s unhealed adolescence. The mother does not consciously decide to envy her daughter. The envy arises as a somatic response to seeing in her daughter what she did not get to have in herself.

The mother whose own youth was traumatic or curtailed often experiences her daughter’s freedom as an unbearable contrast. The mother who married too young, who became pregnant before she was ready, who had no opportunity for education or self-discovery, who was sexualized as a child — these mothers may genuinely love their daughters and may also carry a specific grief about what they themselves did not have, which makes the daughter’s having of those things activating.

The mother whose marriage is unhappy, whose own sexual life has been disappointing, whose physical body has aged in ways she has not been able to accept, often finds her daughter’s emerging sexuality intolerable in a way she cannot fully articulate. The daughter has what the mother is losing. The daughter is at the beginning of what the mother is ending. The biological mathematics of aging produces a felt sense in the mother that, unprocessed, can manifest as competition with the very person she is supposed to be welcoming into womanhood.

The mother whose cultural and religious framework treats female sexuality as dangerous often has more conscious access to her envy because the framework gives her permission to express it as concern. The criticisms can be delivered as protection. The shame can be delivered as moral teaching. The mother can simultaneously envy her daughter’s freedom and condemn her for having it, without having to feel the contradiction directly.

None of this excuses the harm. Naming the origins is not the same as forgiving. It is the recognition that the mother who envied her daughter was usually a woman who herself had been failed by the women who came before her, and who has not yet done the work that would let her break the pattern. The recognition allows the adult daughter to hold complexity — both that her mother caused real damage and that her mother was herself damaged. Both can be true.

How the envy affects the daughter

Daughters who lived through maternal envy carry specific patterns into adulthood. The patterns are not unique to this dynamic, but the dynamic produces them in characteristic shape.

Self-dampening. The daughter learned, early, that her flourishing produced consequences. The good grade led to subtle critique. The boyfriend led to undermining. The accomplishment led to attention being shifted away. The adult daughter often unconsciously continues the dampening. She underdresses for events where she might shine. She undermines her own accomplishments in conversation. She makes herself smaller in the presence of women, particularly older women, who feel similar to the mother.

Sexual ambivalence. The daughter learned that her body was simultaneously something to be protected and something to be ashamed of. Her emerging sexuality was met with both watchfulness and condemnation. As an adult, she often carries complicated relationships to her own sexual desire, her own body, her own right to pleasure. The straightforward access to her own erotic life that her mother did not allow her to develop in adolescence has to be developed, painfully, in adulthood.

Difficulty receiving from women. The daughter who experienced her mother as a rival rather than as an ally often struggles, as an adult, to fully trust other women. Friendships with women carry an undertow she may not be able to articulate. Compliments from older women trigger old wariness. The capacity to receive care from female mentors, female friends, female therapists has to be built deliberately because the original maternal template did not allow it to develop naturally.

Hypervigilance to other women’s reactions. The daughter learned to monitor her mother’s emotional state continuously, because her mother’s state determined how the daughter would be treated. The adult version of this is the woman who is exquisitely attuned to how other women are responding to her — who notices, before they themselves notice, when another woman has registered her in some way. The capacity is genuinely useful in some professional contexts. It is also exhausting, and it reflects a developmental history in which female regard was always conditional and never safely received.

Difficulty with her own daughters, if she has them. The pattern is intergenerational. The daughter who has not done significant work on the dynamic she lived through often passes some version of it forward. The work of breaking the cycle is conscious work and is rarely complete in a single generation. It requires recognition, grief, often clinical support, and the deliberate development of capacities the original conditions did not produce.

The work of recovery for the adult daughter

If you recognize yourself in this description — the adult daughter of a mother who, in retrospect, envied you — the work of recovery is real and possible. It is also slow. Several elements support the work.

Grief is the first task. The adult daughter must allow herself to feel the specific grief of having had a mother who was not capable of unconditional welcome of her flourishing. This is harder than it sounds, because the cultural narrative around mothers protects them from this kind of recognition. The grief includes the loss of the mother the daughter needed, the recognition that the actual mother could not be that mother, and the acceptance that no amount of effort on the daughter’s part as a child could have produced the welcoming response she needed.

Naming what happened, clearly. Not to confront the mother — that may or may not be appropriate depending on the specific relationship — but to name it to herself, with someone who can hear it. Often this is in therapy. Sometimes it is in journaling, in conversation with a trusted friend who has lived something similar, in the slow private work of articulating to oneself what had not previously been allowed to be named.

Working with the somatic legacy. The dampening, the sexual ambivalence, the hypervigilance to women — these live in the body. The work of restoring access to fullness in adulthood requires somatic attention. EMDR for specific memories that carry the weight. Somatic experiencing for the chronic patterns of holding back. Parts work for the internal voice that has internalized the mother’s criticism. Attachment-focused therapy for the relational template that filters all current female relationships.

Rebuilding the capacity to receive from women. This often happens through specific relationships — a female therapist who consistently welcomes the client’s fullness, female friends who do not require dampening, female mentors who genuinely celebrate the client’s accomplishments. These relationships are corrective experiences. They slowly teach the nervous system that female regard can be unconditional, that flourishing in the presence of another woman does not have to produce consequences.

The relationship with the mother, in real time, becomes its own ongoing question. Some adult daughters find ways to maintain limited contact with the mother while protecting themselves from the worst of the dynamic. Some choose more substantial distance for periods of time, or permanently. Some find that the mother, herself doing her own work, becomes capable of a different relationship in later years. There is no single right answer. The right answer is the one that allows the adult daughter to continue her own healing without being repeatedly retraumatized.

On the rare possibility of repair between mother and daughter

In some cases, repair is possible. It is rare. It requires the mother to do her own work, to recognize what she did, to take responsibility for it, and to find a way to genuinely welcome her daughter’s flourishing now even though she could not welcome it then. When this happens, it is significant. It does not erase the original damage. It does add a new chapter to the relationship that allows both women to continue knowing each other on different terms.

More commonly, the mother is unable or unwilling to do this work. She may deny the dynamic entirely. She may agree to it superficially without changing her behavior. She may simply not have the resources to face what she did and what her own life produced in her. In these cases, the adult daughter does her own healing without the mother’s participation. This is possible. It is also harder than healing with the mother’s participation would be.

The cultural pressure on adult daughters to maintain close relationships with their mothers regardless of the cost is one of the things that prevents necessary healing for many women. The right amount of contact with the mother who envied you is whatever amount allows you to continue your own work without being repeatedly returned to the original wound. For some daughters, that is regular contact with appropriate limits. For others, it is significant distance. For others, it is no contact at all. None of these is morally superior. They are different responses to different relationships with different mothers.

A closing thought

The mother-daughter relationship is one of the most consequential in any woman’s life. When it goes well, it shapes the daughter’s capacity for self-love, for trust in other women, for owning her own flourishing without apology. When it goes badly, particularly through the specific dynamic of maternal envy, it shapes the daughter’s life in ways that take years of adult work to unwind.

If you are the daughter of a mother who envied you, the work of recovery is real and worth doing. You did not deserve the dampening. You did not deserve the shaming. Your flourishing was always welcome by the universe, even if it was not welcome by the woman who was supposed to welcome it first. The work of recognizing this, of grieving what you did not get, of slowly building the capacity to flourish in spite of it, is the work of becoming yourself.

You did not deserve to be dampened. You deserved to bloom.
It is not too late.

Further reading: Estela Welldon, Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood. Rozsika Parker, Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence. Terri Apter, Difficult Mothers. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born. Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness. For clinical support with attachment and maternal trauma in California or Florida, visit thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida specializing in EMDR, sex therapy, and couples counseling. She trained in sex and couples therapy at AACAST at UCLA. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

What Actually Builds a Lasting Partnership

Posted on by helpingsoul

A Therapist’s Reflections on What the Research and Eighteen Years of Clinical Work Have Taught Me

A substantial revision of an earlier 2009 post on meeting and marriage. The original used a prescriptive timetable that real relationships rarely follow. This version draws on current research and clinical experience to describe what actually produces lasting partnership across many forms.

In 2009, I wrote a post that mapped what I thought of as the path from meeting someone to marrying them. The post laid out an eight-step timeline — meet, build friendship, set boundaries, develop respect, love revealed at nine months, marriage at one to two years. The framework reflected what I believed at the time about how the strongest relationships developed.

Sixteen years of clinical work later, I would not write that post the same way. Several things have changed.

The most important change is the recognition that relationships do not follow timetables. The couple who knew they were going to marry within three weeks of meeting can have as durable a partnership as the couple who took five years to decide. The couple who lived together for a decade before committing to marriage may have stronger fundamentals than the couple who married within months. The timing varies. The fundamentals do not.

The second change is the recognition that lasting partnership takes many forms. Marriage is one. Long-term cohabitation without legal marriage is another. Partnerships within queer relationships have their own histories and forms. Polyamorous and non-monogamous structures, when they work, work according to similar fundamentals as monogamous partnerships. The legal and cultural form of the relationship matters less than the underlying dynamics. The work of building something that lasts is recognizable across forms, even when the forms differ significantly.

This refreshed essay describes what I have come to understand about those underlying dynamics, drawing on current research and on the work I have done in my practice with couples across many configurations.

The conditions that produce lasting partnership

Several conditions, present together and developed over time, produce the kind of partnership that endures.

Friendship as foundation

This was true in the 2009 post and remains true. The strongest partnerships have a deep friendship underneath them. The capacity to enjoy each other’s ordinary company. The genuine interest in each other’s inner lives. The willingness to spend time together that is not about romance or sex but simply about being with this particular person.

John and Julie Gottman, who have studied couples in their laboratory at the University of Washington for decades, identify friendship as the foundational element of relationships that last. Their research consistently shows that couples who maintain what they call a sound relationship house — the underlying friendship and shared knowledge of each other — weather conflict and transition far better than couples whose connection is primarily passionate or primarily logistical. The friendship is not opposed to romance. It is what allows the romance to continue across decades.

Secure attachment within the relationship

Sue Johnson, who developed Emotionally Focused Therapy and has spent her career applying attachment theory to adult couples, identifies the felt sense of secure connection as the central work of lasting partnership. Each partner needs to know, in their body, that the other is reliably there — that emotional reach will be met, that need will not be dismissed, that distress can be brought to the other and will be received.

Building this kind of security is the work of years. It develops through small repeated experiences of being met. The partner who turns toward you when you reach out, even when they are tired. The partner who returns to repair after a conflict rather than letting the disconnection settle. The partner who notices when something is wrong before you have named it. These small moments accumulate into the felt sense of being securely held by the relationship itself.

For partners who arrived in the relationship with insecure attachment patterns from childhood, the work is more demanding. The nervous system that learned not to reach has to learn to reach. The nervous system that learned to defend against connection has to learn to receive it. The relationship itself, when it is functioning, becomes the corrective experience that updates the original conditioning. This is slow work. It is genuinely possible, particularly when both partners understand what they are doing.

Respect as daily practice

Respect is the felt experience of being treated as someone whose thoughts, feelings, and choices have weight. It is not the same as agreement. Two partners can disagree substantially and still treat each other with respect. They can fight hard about what matters to them and still convey, throughout the fight, that the other person remains worthy of consideration.

The Gottmans’ research identifies contempt — the felt sense of looking down on the partner, dismissing them as beneath you — as the single most reliable predictor of divorce in their studies. Contempt is the opposite of respect. When it enters a relationship and is not addressed, the relationship is on a trajectory toward dissolution that is statistically very difficult to reverse.

Maintaining respect requires daily attention. The small ways you speak about your partner when they are not in the room. The small ways you respond to them when they share something with you. The small ways you handle conflict when you are tired or activated. Respect is built or eroded in these small moments. It is rarely built or eroded in dramatic events.

The capacity for repair

All relationships experience rupture. The strongest relationships are not the ones in which rupture never occurs. They are the ones in which both partners have developed the capacity to repair after rupture has occurred.

Repair is its own learnable skill. It involves the willingness to recognize when something has gone wrong between you. The capacity to take responsibility for your part without becoming defensive. The willingness to make a genuine acknowledgment of harm caused, however unintentional. The patience to let the other person have their own response to the repair attempt without controlling how they receive it. The follow-through that demonstrates the repair is more than words.

Stan Tatkin, who developed the psychobiological approach to couples therapy, writes extensively about repair as one of the central practices of lasting partnership. His framing — that secure functioning couples treat each other’s regulation as their joint responsibility — points to something important. The repair is not just about the specific rupture. It is about the ongoing maintenance of the relationship’s underlying safety. Each successful repair tells both partners that this relationship can hold difficulty. Each failed repair, particularly accumulated, communicates the opposite.

Differentiation alongside connection

Esther Perel has written extensively about the tension in long-term partnership between connection and otherness. The relationship needs both. Partners who completely fuse — who lose their individual identities into the relationship — often lose desire for each other over time. Partners who remain too separate, who do not actually allow themselves to be known and to know the other, miss the depth that long partnership offers.

The work is holding both. Maintaining your own friendships, interests, and inner life that are separate from the relationship. Continuing to develop as an individual across the years rather than freezing into your role within the partnership. And also doing the work of genuine intimacy, allowing yourself to be known and to know the other deeply, building the shared history that only long partnership can produce.

Differentiation is not coldness. It is the capacity to be fully present in the relationship while remaining recognizably yourself. Partners who maintain this capacity often find that their desire for each other endures across decades, because the other remains genuinely other rather than dissolving into a version of the self.

Shared sense of meaning

Lasting partnerships typically develop a shared sense of what the relationship is for beyond the immediate enjoyment of being together. This may be raising children. It may be building a business or pursuing creative work together. It may be participating in religious or spiritual community. It may be navigating significant challenges — illness, loss, large life transitions — that the partnership has helped both partners through.

The shared meaning is not always articulated. Sometimes it lives in the unspoken understanding that this relationship has been the container for the life both partners have lived. The relationship is not just a source of pleasure or companionship. It is the structure within which a life has been built. That kind of meaning, accumulated over years, produces a depth that newer relationships cannot match no matter how passionate they are.

Commitment as ongoing choice

The 2009 post talked about hundred percent commitment as the defining feature of marriage. I would say something slightly different now. Commitment in lasting partnership is not a one-time decision made at the altar or at the moment of agreement to be exclusive. It is a daily choice that gets remade across the years.

Every long-term partnership goes through periods when one or both partners genuinely consider whether they want to continue. This is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that the partnership is real and consequential. The partners who continue across these moments do so because they have made the choice to continue. The choice is not always certain. It is often made in conditions of doubt. But it is made, and remade, and remade again across the years.

This framing changes how we understand commitment. It is not the absence of doubt. It is the willingness to act in the direction of the partnership despite the doubt, and to bring whatever the doubt is about into the relationship rather than carrying it alone. The strongest partnerships have rooms in them for the difficult conversations about the partnership itself.

What I would tell a younger version of myself

If I could speak to the therapist who wrote the 2009 post, I would tell her several things.

The timeline does not matter. What matters is what happens within whatever timeline the relationship actually unfolds along.

Marriage is not the goal. The goal is a partnership that allows both people to live in a way that feels genuinely theirs, with someone who knows them and is known by them, across the long arc of a life.

Friendship matters more than passion. Passion comes and goes in long partnership. Friendship, properly tended, deepens.

Repair matters more than avoiding conflict. The couple who never fights is rarely the couple whose relationship lasts. The couple who fights and repairs is.

The work continues. There is no moment when you have arrived at a lasting partnership and can stop building it. The building is the partnership.

If you are in the early stages of a relationship

If you are in the early period of a relationship and trying to determine whether this person could be a lasting partner, here are the questions worth asking yourself. Not on a timetable. Whenever they become relevant.

Is there a genuine friendship underneath the chemistry? Do you actually enjoy this person’s company when you are not romantically engaged with them?

Can you imagine being known by this person at the depth that long partnership requires? Are they capable of receiving you, and are you capable of receiving them, beyond the surface?

How do they handle conflict and repair? Are they capable of taking responsibility for their part in difficulty? Can they offer genuine acknowledgment without becoming defensive?

Are their values and life goals genuinely compatible with yours, or are you assuming compatibility that has not actually been tested?

Do you feel respected by them in the small daily moments, and do you respect them similarly? Is there any contempt in either direction that has begun to enter the interaction?

Are there patterns from their family of origin or yours that you can see playing out in the relationship, and is there room to work with those patterns together?

Do you both have the capacity to maintain your individual lives within the partnership, or is one or both of you losing yourselves into the relationship?

These questions take time to answer honestly. The relationships that last typically allow the time for these questions to surface and be addressed. The relationships that move too quickly past these questions often arrive at the larger commitment with answers that have not been earned.

If you are in an established partnership

If you are in an established partnership and reading this article, the questions are different. The work is not whether to commit. The work is how to sustain what you have built.

The same elements apply. The friendship needs continued tending. The attachment security needs daily renewal. The respect needs to be protected from the small erosions that accumulate over years. The repair after conflict needs to remain a practice rather than something that has become rare. The differentiation needs to be preserved so that you do not lose yourself into the relationship. The shared meaning needs to be allowed to evolve as the lives you are living evolve. The commitment needs to be remade rather than assumed.

Couples therapy can be useful at many points in lasting partnership — not only when the relationship is in crisis. Working with a clinician who understands attachment, who can hold both partners’ nervous systems at once, who can address the somatic dimensions of long partnership rather than only the verbal ones, often produces real growth in relationships that are already functioning. The work is not about fixing what is broken. It is about deepening what is already real.

A closing thought

Lasting partnership is one of the most demanding things a human being can attempt. It is also one of the most rewarding. The partnership that endures across decades does not endure because it was easy or because both partners are uniquely well-suited to each other. It endures because both partners have done the daily work of building and rebuilding it across the years.

If you are in a relationship that is working, honor it. Tend to it. Notice what makes it real, and continue investing in what makes it real. The relationship is not a destination you arrive at. It is the daily practice of choosing to remain in it, to develop with it, to be changed by it across the years.

And if you are searching for a lasting partnership and have not yet found one, the search is real and worth doing. The conditions that produce lasting partnership are recognizable. With enough self-knowledge and enough willingness to do the work, the conditions can be met. The path is rarely linear. The destination, when it is reached, is worth the journey.

Further reading: John Gottman and Julie Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work and What Makes Love Last. Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight. Stan Tatkin, Wired for Love. Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity. For clinical work with couples in California or Florida, visit thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida specializing in EMDR, sex therapy, and couples counseling. She trained in sex and couples therapy at AACAST at UCLA. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

Your Brain on Love: The Surprising Neuroscience of Attachment

Posted on by helpingsoul
Dopamine, oxytocin, neural synchrony — discover what your brain is really doing when you fall in love and how neuroscience explains why some bonds last a lifetime.
Have you ever drifted into a dreamy thought of someone you recently met? You can’t explain why, but they just pop into your head. You feel a surge of joy, a slight queasiness in your stomach, and your face lights up with each playful thought of your new mate. A rush of neurochemicals stimulates this euphoric behavior.

Is this stage of love fleeting or can long-term committed relationships uphold blissful adoration?

The Stages of Modern Relationships

Whether you identify yourself as heterosexual, gay, lesbian, or bi-sexual, there are various stages to each relationship. According to research, during the initial meeting, it takes between 90 seconds and 4 minutes to decide if you want to move to dating and/or sex and not always in that particular order. During this lustful stage, testosterone and estrogen drive your behavior.

As your attraction deepens and you decide to become sexually exclusive or not, your stress response stimulates the release of the neurotransmitters; adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, and serotonin.

Throughout this stage, your stress response is activated. Blood levels increase with adrenaline and cortisol, hormones secreted by the adrenal glands. The secretion of adrenaline and cortisol provide that rush of energy, increase in heart rate, sweaty palms, and dry mouth when you suddenly think of or startlingly bump into your new attraction.

What Neuroscience Has Added 

Recent advances in Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB), pioneered by Dr. Dan Siegel, reveal that our brains are literally shaped by our closest relationships. The attachment patterns formed in early childhood — secure, anxious, avoidant — are encoded in neural circuitry and predict how we show up in adult love.

Even more striking: cutting-edge hyperscanning research shows that the brains of romantic partners actually synchronize with each other. When you feel truly seen and held by your partner, your nervous systems are resonating together. This is co-regulation — and it’s as biological as a heartbeat.

“Our relationships really shape how we feel, how we think, how we remember things, how we tell the story of who we are.”  — Dr. Dan Siegel

The Good News

Attachment styles can change. Bonds can be repaired. The brain’s plasticity means that with the right support — and the courage to stay present — long-term love is not just possible. It’s neurologically wired for it.

Dopamine

The neurotransmitter, dopamine is increased with ‘love struck’ mates. Dopamine stimulates an intense rush of pleasure, triggering desire and reward. A brain on cocaine has the same effect.

“couples often show the signs of surging dopamine: increased energy, less need for sleep or food, focused attention and exquisite delight in smallest details of this novel relationship” ~ Helen Fisher

Serotonin

Serotonin plays a key role in this early stage of love. Low levels of serotonin explain those constant thoughts of your lover. According to Dr. Marazziti from the University of Pisa, blood samples of couples that claimed to be madly in love for less than six months were comparable to the blood samples of patients who have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Furthermore, newly love-struck couples often idealize their partner, magnify their assets and overlook flaws.

“It’s very common to think they have a relationship that is closer and more special than anyone else’s.” ~ Ellen Berscheid

Oxytocin

Next, a couple decides upon exclusivity, engagement, living together or marrying. The attachment of the twosome instigates the powerful hormone, oxytocin.

Oxytocin is released during childbirth and creates the bond between a mother and her child. The chemical is also secreted by both of the sexes during cuddling, hugging, and sex.

Oxytocin is important because couples that exhibit high doses of oxytocin have a strong bond and attachment that can withstand the ups and downs of life. For the release of oxytocin, it takes between 19 and 23 seconds. Thus to ensure your couplehood survives the test of time; hug, cuddle and have sex regularly.

Vasopressin

Finally, vasopressin sets the stage for long-term committed couples. The hormone is released after sex and like oxytocin creates stable bonding with your partner. Vasopressin also creates the actions of devotion and protection.

The stages of a relationship change as do the release of chemicals in the brain. The surge of dopamine in the initial lustful state creates a rush of pleasure that stimulates, even more, desire and reward. Adrenaline causes the physical reaction of sweaty palms, racing heart, and dry-mouth.

Serotonin creates those compulsive, idealizing thoughts of your partner and oxytocin makes for strong bonds. Finally, vasopressin deepens the connection and generates long-lasting love.

Therefore it is possible to love and to be in love with your partner ‘til death to us part.’ Give your loved one a 30-second hug every day to ensure your love lasts.

If your bond is broken, your trust shattered, or your connection lost, couples counseling can help to mend bonds, build trust and connection again. Email april@thecourageousself.com and let’s get started.

Want to go deeper into the neuroscience of love and attachment? Read the full article over at The Courageous Self ↓

🔗 thecourageousself.com | 📧 april@thecourageousself.com

 

The Secret of Love (Spoiler Alert)

Posted on by helpingsoul

journey by Deepak Chopra, MD

The Internet has taken up the slack from print media by offering tips on love and relationships, which pop up on home pages, in tweets and in news teasers many times a day. If the secret to lasting romance could be shared like a recipe for cinnamon buns, our problems would be over. But love isn’t a fact, formula, or definable in words.

Love is a process, perhaps the most mysterious one in human psychology. No one knows what creates love as a powerful bond that is so full of meaning. If romance was only a heady brew of hormones, genetic inheritance and sex drive, all we’d need is better data to explain it. But love is transporting. It carries us beyond our everyday selves and makes reality shine with an inner light. The reverse can also happen. We crash to earth when the wear and tear of relationships makes love fade.

The process of love is kept alive by evolving and not getting stuck. Infatuation is an early stage of the process. You bond with another person as if by alchemy, but in time the ego returns with the claims of “I, me, and mine.” At that point love must change. Two people must negotiate how much to share, how much to surrender and how much to stand their ground. It would be tragic if romance faded into everyday familiarity, but it doesn’t have to.

Beyond the stage of two egos negotiating for their own interests, there is deepening love. It doesn’t try to turn the present into the past. A married couple of twenty years isn’t still infatuated with one other. So what keeps the process alive? For me, the answer was revealed by reading a startling sentence from the Upanishads, which are like a textbook of spiritual understanding. The sentence says, “You do not love a spouse for the sake of the spouse but for the sake of the self.”

At first glance this seems like a horrible sentiment: We all love on a personal basis and we expect to be loved the same way, for ourselves. But if “self” means your everyday personality, there is much that isn’t very lovable about each of us and as a marriage or relationship unfolds, there’s a guarantee that our partners will see those unlovable things more clearly. Even a knight in shining armor might want to save more than one damsel, and even saint must use deodorant once in a while.

In the world’s wisdom tradition, “love” and “self” are both universal. They exist beyond the individual personality. The secret of love is to expand beyond the personal. When people say that they want unconditional love, they often imply that they want to be loved despite their shortcomings, issues and quirks. But that’s nearly impossible if love remains at the personal level. At a certain point, if you begin to see love itself as your goal, universal love is more powerful and secure than personal love.

The poet Rabindranath Tagore described the spiritual side of love in a single expression” “Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.” The gift of human awareness is that we can locate the source of creation in ourselves. By going deeper into the self, asking “Who am I?” without settling for a superficial answer, the ego-personality fades. A sense of the true self begins to dawn, and it is this self that exists in contact with love as the only reality.

The journey becomes more fascinating if someone else travels with you. Life isn’t about abstractions; it’s about experience. If you have a beloved who stands for the feeling of love, bonding, and affection, your journey has a focus that can’t be supplied merely by thinking. The experiences that love bring include surrender, devotion, selflessness, giving, gratitude, appreciation, kindness and bliss. So if the phrase “universal love” seems daunting or improbable to you, break it down into these smaller experiences. Pursue them, and you will be traveling in the direction of your source, where the true self and true love merge.

That’s where my spoiler alert comes in. Announcing the secret of love cuts short the actual experience. It doesn’t always help to know what’s coming, because you might fall into exaggerated expectations and fall short. It’s better and more realistic to become aware that love is now your personal project. Show kindness and gratitude. Speak about what your beloved means to you. Every step on this journey works on behalf of the two of you but also on behalf of the self that unites you at the deepest level.

Interests and Behaviors in Sexuality

Posted on by helpingsoul

Sexuality ContinuesSexuality between consenting adults is a natural and healthy experience and expression of sexual involvement.  It is important to view sexuality positively; respecting and accepting  diverse values and beliefs.  Individuals, communities, and society reap great benefits when  attitudes of tolerance and acceptance of sexual preference is openly discussed.  Internal and external peace are exuberant and social connection harmonizes.

Attractions, desires, fantasies, and life choices vary from person to person and understanding the fluidity of the life cycle and personal choices can unite us.

Sexual preference transforms in various forms such as heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, fluid, and queer.  There are also several types of sexual activity and classifications; for instance sexual intercourse, oral sex, mutual masturbation, S&M, bondage, and tantric.    These identities are valid and completely normal.  It is just as typical to be attracted to both genders, engage in heterosexual and homosexual activity as it is to be attracted to just one gender.  It’s a matter of genetics, personality, personal choice, and can even change over time.  It is fluid and evolves as we change throughout our lifetime.  It is an individual predilection and genetic make-up that cannot be affected by the influence of others.

Sexual identity naturally changes as our drive and desire transforms as much as humans logically change over time.  It is dependent on our psyche, life experiences, self exploration, belief systems and personal acceptance.  What attracts us and arouses us is extremely variable. At various stages in one’s life, a person may identify as heterosexual, only to get to a point later in life where they can acknowledge that they are also attracted to members of their own gender. At that point, they may decide to identify as bisexual.

Similarly, someone who has identified as gay might discover that they are attracted to someone of another sex, and their self-identification may change because of their experience. It is common and not strange or uncanny to change sexual identity.  Sexual attraction is a personal endeavor and cannot be converted or influenced by anyone else.  Biology, physiology, and psychology components make it difficult to change an individual’s sexuality.  Gay or lesbian sexual orientations cannot be transformed to heterosexual and vice versa.

Sexual studies have proven that people’s sexual attractions and sexual identification cannot be changed by peer or societal pressure. It is an assumption that everyone is born heterosexual, and that it takes an experience with someone who is already gay, lesbian or bisexual to “convert” a person to being gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Many gay, lesbian, and bisexuals are aware that they have non-heterosexual attractions from the age of three with no adaptation or sexual experiences necessary.

Bisexuality is having the ability to find people of more than one sex attractive.  It’s the capability of being attracted sexually and/or romantically to members of more than one sex. You don’t need to have had sex with someone of the opposite sex to be a heterosexual, or to have had sex with someone of the same sex to know you are a homosexual – you just know what you like and what you find attractive. If you know that you find people of more than one sex to be eye-catching and sexy, you may call yourself bisexual, whether or not you ever have sex with partners of more than one sex.  It’s all a matter what we accept about ourselves and our willingness to express it within our community or to society. Bisexuality is also varied in terms of attractiveness.  Some people find themselves equally attracted to men and women, but many bisexuals find that they are more attracted to people of their own sex, or more attracted to people of another sex. It’s a matter of identifying what group or particular community; straight/heterosexual or queer/homosexual you can relate to most.   The attraction to one or more genders is proportioned differently for each person and can change with time as well. A person may be attracted to one sex forty percent of the time, and members of another sex sixty percent of the time when they are sixteen and then change at the age of thirty-five to seventy-five percent and twenty-five percent.   Bisexuality is not an excuse or a prerogative to have sex with whomever and whatever you want at any given opportunity.  Bisexuals are not sex fiends and just as normal in their sexual frequency as homosexuals, heterosexuals and other Trans identity.

Bisexuals may even be celibate.   Bisexuals in conjunction with any other kind sexual identity have a variety of kinds of relationships over the course of their lives; from one-night-stands to long-term, committed relationships, and they are just as likely to be responsible, loving, faithful partners as anyone else.   Bisexuality doesn’t mean you must have a male and a female partner to feel fulfilled. While some feel best in unconventional relationships where they have more than one partner of whatever sex or gender; it’s not a requirement for being bisexual.  Bisexuals have the same feelings and emotions as all humans.  Persons who consider themselves bisexual bond, fall in love, and have committed relationships.  And like everyone else, bisexuals are capable of being fulfilled or unfulfilled in their relationships dependent on the health of the relationship. Being bisexual doesn’t mean you are hiding the fact you really are gay or lesbian.  It’s still as difficult to pass or identify yourself as gay, bisexual or transgender in our society.  Heterosexuality is falsely accepted as the norm.

People of bisexual nature are not the same as individuals who consider themselves straight.  It may be confusing at times to see a person romantically involved with a person of the same sex and then a few months or years later romantically involved with a person of the opposite sex.   There shouldn’t be an automatic assumption that same-sex partners are gay and a bisexual person with an opposite-sex partner is straight.  A bisexual person doesn’t change their identity from gay or lesbian to heterosexual, they are bisexual consistently.

Having sex with a person of the same sex, doesn’t mean you are gay or bisexual.   The way you choose to identify yourself is up to you. The only person who can determine personal labels is you.

Be realistic and truthful about what that may mean for you in terms of knowing how to have safer sex with someone of the same sex as you.  Bisexuality is not the determent to spreading STI/HIV/AIDS because people of such orientation have sex with homosexuals and heterosexuals.   Sexual preference is not the culprit; unprotected sex with infected partners and passing it to an uninfected partner is the origin of the problem.  It is the responsibility of each person to be honest, conscientious and make healthy sexual choices.

Borderline Personality, Codependency, and Love Addiction

Posted on by helpingsoul

cycle of addiction

Borderline Personality tendencies, codependency, and love addiction are self-destructive behavioral patterns. Each personality seeks constant approval and love from others while abandoning themselves. Through people pleasing, compulsivity, and dependent patterns of behavior, a sense of self is lost. Relationship dynamics runs the extremes from idealization and domination to being controlled. The extremes create a false sense of safety, self-worth, and identity. This articles covers the characteristics of all three behavioral types and relates it to the cycle of addiction.

Everyone embraces some cycle of addiction, whether it be the way you towel off after a shower or mindlessly move through the grocery aisles. Regardless of the activity, the ritual involves unconscious thoughts, feelings and actions that repeats cyclically.

There are four parts to the cycle of addiction. The first stage is preoccupation, the second is the ritual, the third is acting out, and the fourth phase is feelings of guilt and shame.

Many dynamics of relationships exist but for the purpose of this article, codependency, borderline tendencies, and love addiction will be discussed with an emphasis of the cycle of addiction.

During the first stage, thoughts begin to preoccupy themselves with a lover. Persons consume the majority of their time and attention toward their imago. The imago is the image we place on our partner who mirrors our original caretakers. The psychological term for this is transference. The image feels right because it is familiar much like eating macaroni and cheese. Admiration for their partner is comfort food that feeds the attraction to excitement, chaos, and emotional intoxication.

The intense attraction is due to an unconscious drive to heal and resolve childhood wounds. This overwhelming state of infatuation is part of the first stage of addiction called preoccupation. During this phase, the love addict feels high (emotional intoxication) as parental fantasies to heal the abandonment, emptiness, and lack of self-worth are perceived to be met even if for a splitting moment. Thoughts and energy of their partner preoccupy all the love addict’s time. The majority of the day is conceiving ways to hold onto them and bring them closer so that they don’t abandon them.   Love addicts relinquish total control and power to their partner.   Any sense of spiritually becomes impaired as a grandiose persona transfers to their image.

Love addicts relation to family, friends, and personal care begin to change during the second phase of addiction. This stage is called ritual. Compulsive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of their partner override any sense of independence.   Control completely transfers to other. Love addicts become dependent with learned helplessness and neediness. Trust and judgment projects on their partner and smashes their personal values and feelings. Love addicts give up control while abandoning themselves and becoming dependent on their lover to make personal decisions.   Over time love addicts’ careers, relationships, and personal care diminish.

Love addicts deny and refuse to open their eyes to the reality of their false, fantasy love. Similarly, codependents do not acknowledge their partner’s defensive wall, inability for real connection, and love themselves. Codependent relationships create enmeshment just as love addicts take on their partner’s morals and values and blur boundary lines. Relationships are viewed through unconsciously filtered fantasy. Relational dynamics continues between colossal cycles of intense passion and extreme anger. The sense of excitement in the emotional extremes is drunken in like an alcoholic drinks whiskey. The high of emotional intoxication deepens to obsessiveness that then is mistaken for authentic love.

The third period is acting out. Negative consequences of lost identity, irresponsible behavior, and diminishing life conditions are overlooked. Symptoms of loneliness, despair, and self-hatred continue in a downward spiral of intolerable circumstances. Self-worth bottoms and depression creeps in.

As the spiral continues downward, bottom hits with feelings of guilt and shame making up the fourth stage. Love addicts feel stuck as if they cannot cope on their own. Codependents feel they need their partner to survive just as a dependent child. Guilt, shame, internalized anger and resentment grow until the pain is too great, and the hurt is too much to bear. Finally, a glimmer of hope emerges, and awareness unfolds. Denial slowly lifts as light shines down on their partner’s defenses, emotional unavailability, controlling, and manipulating behavior. Further consciousness arises in financial and career sacrifices if they still have a job. Understanding of their isolation surfaces the notions of little contact if any with family and friends. It’s a rude awakening to the mess.

Shame and guilt stage causes love addicts to feel like failures, remain hopeless and lose sight of their discovery. Consequently, they fall deeper into depression. Denial sets in again to lighten the pain, and the cycle begins again.

Borderline personalities obsess again about their partner thinking they will save them from their misery. Codependents shift independence to dependence and as they stay in the relationship; prolonging the cycle of addiction.

Commonly borderline personalities, codependents, and love addicts develop from an alcoholic family or dysfunctional family who are narcissistic, unable to allow another to have an independent self, and cut-off emotionally. The personality types yearn for real connections and intimate relationships yet don’t know how and continue to play cat and mouse.

Childhood hurt and rage from parental abandonment, neglect, and emotional abuse leads to internalizing thoughts of being bad. The child splits the image of his desire internalizing it as bad and places a good internal object-image onto their caretakers.

If a child’s needs of nurture, mirroring of feelings and thoughts, and care lack, the child continues to split parts of themselves; internalizing they are bad, and their parents are good. This pattern is a defensive survival technique so that the child can tolerate the abuse in an environment where he is dependent.   As adults, a bad internalized image persists as a worthless and inadequate identity thus the perceived need to latch on to others for an identity. The wounded adult attracts partner’s who replicate their parents and place the externalized fantasy image of real parts onto their partner ultimately giving them all power and control.

Awareness of the similarity of borderline personalities, codependents, and love addicts can shed light and understanding of internal emotional drivers of behavior. New knowledge brings more choices and the more power and control for healthy, respectful, and loving thoughts, feelings, and actions. Understanding how one’s personal cycle of addiction originated can then begin to find ways to break the cycle and healing can begin. The goal is to feel whole (independent) while having the capacity to give and receive love.

Monogamy

Posted on by helpingsoul

Monogamy is marriage to one person at a time or the practice of having one sexual partner. The modern world has presented so many choices and opportunities to connect and reconnect, venturing into matrix’s never conceived possible.  All the options can be overwhelming, confusing and exciting at the same time.  Is there a right or wrong anymore?

As humans evolve, we are more open-minded and willing to experiment to find the right answer as individuals not as society dictates.  History has presented the case that traditional methods may not be natural or provide the best solution for a happy couple.

The definition of monogamy strikes me as being quite hypocritical.  If you are truly ‘monogamous’ doesn’t that mean you are committed to the relationship through thick and thin; no matter the circumstances.  Thus divorce is not an option. If that is the case, divorce and affair statistics indicate the majority of humans are not monogamous.

My grandparents are a typical example of a monogamous relationship.  They married as virgins in their mid-twenties and remained together for over fifty years.  In the beginning, they shared a loving relationship, sleeping in the same bedroom, engaging in passion and giving birth to two children as my grandfather worked for AT&T his entire life and my grandmother remained home while she raised the children.  The roles were defined.  My grandmother nurtured the children, cooked all meals, and cleaned the inside of the house.

My grandfather worked during the day, washed the dishes after dinner every night and took care of the outside of the house on the weekends; mowing the lawn, trimming the bushes, painting the exterior, and fixing any broken appliances.  He also ensured the American flag was positioned properly on holidays and times of mourning.  He took great pride in his country and taking good care of the flag was part of our family.

As time progressed, my grandparents moved to separate bedrooms and I really can’t recall them being affectionate toward one another.  It’s as if they just became roommates; not necessarily even friends.  I remember a lot of fighting, bickering and bantering.  They tolerated disrespectful and demeaning behavior from each other.  It was just the way it was.

My parents on the other hand lived a different lifestyle.  Since they came from difficult childhoods, they clung onto their first love, married soon thereafter, gave birth to me, divorced, and continued their quest for love as they married and divorced repeatedly.  They moved from one city to the next living the life dictated by society in hopes of fulfilling their personal voids.

My Dad is single and now searching for his fifth wife.  My Mom is on her fourth marriage and called me after one month of dating and stated, “I am getting married!  We are having the reception and wedding at Millerridge Inn in July, we are going to St. Lucia for our honeymoon, I want you to be my Maid of Honor, Carrieann is going to be my Bridesmaid and the color of the dresses are mint green; I already picked the style of the dress.

I was in shock after only dating for a month; she is getting married and knows all the details of the wedding.  I thought, did you two get to know each other or just discuss the details of the wedding for the past month.  Anyway, I have no reason to judge as long as she is happy at least for the next six years that’s all that matters.

The ‘new’ definition for monogamy should read, stay married to one person as long as the love and lust lasts and then you are free to divorce.   My parent’s history shows monogamy lasts for six years and then it is time to find a new person.  Is that really monogamous?   Is that true commitment?

Now that I have witnessed two generations of bad relationships, I’m wondering is monogamy natural.  It appears I am not the only one thinking this as I read many articles, studies and meet friends who are willing to experiment.  They set their own rules.  Some engage in full intercourse with others and some just flirt or share fantasies or dirty talk with others.  As long as the couple is open with their communication they are happy to allow their partner to interact with others.

Personally I find the later healthier than the two scenarios depicted by my grandparents and parents and couple’s who stay married but have affairs on the side.  At least the younger generation is willing to expose their personal desires and aren’t afraid of judgment or cynicism from other’s.  That takes great strength and confidence; two things I greatly admire.

Hello world!

Posted on by helpingsoul

Welcome, this forum is a place to openly discuss psychology issues, sexual fantasies, desires and realities in a safe and anonymous environment as I share coaching topics, educational material, and spiritual teachings.

Femmevolution is dedicated to empowering women and men of all diversities, bringing social, economic, educational, and spiritual justice to the under served.  Through coaching, education, and counseling services my mission is to increase women’s self worth, their right to have and determine choices, access to opportunities and resources, control of their own lives, and influence the direction of social change.  As women evolve, it liberates men to learn spirituality, feel safe to express their feelings and emotions, and foster better relationships.

My goal is to ensure mutual respect and equality between the sexes. As independent individuals, we are able to make our own decisions based on personal values. The key is to be aware of your behavior, your reaction to the consequences and be secure in your decision without fear of judgment.  This takes a great deal of confidence and self-assurance achieved through mirroring, validation, and empathy from others and accomplishing personal and professional goals.