Why do you expect your wife to be your emotional mother?

I’m addressing men here, don’t you get tired of pretending that your wife was your mother? Because let’s be honest, it’s so much what I see in the sessions. She’s the one who thinks about everything, she’s the one who anticipates, who organizes, who takes care, and you? And you, you let yourself be carried away as if it were normal.

But deep down, what does it say about you? What does it say about your couple? And what does it mean to wake up all that?

On the psychoanalytic side, well, when you expect your wife to be your emotional mother, it can be about an archaic injury. Maybe when you were a child, you didn’t have enough contentment, frame, emotional security. And today, your unconscious is trying to play this scenario again, to find a maternal figure who will take care of you, unconditionally.

Yeah, but except that in a couple, this role is toxic. Why?
Because it unbalances the bond. One becomes the parent, and the other becomes the child, the teenager. And the adult dynamic, adult partner with an adult partner, well, it disappears. On the TCC side, cognitive behavioral therapy, well, this scheme is maintained by implicit beliefs. Like, she handles better than me, it’s not that serious, I do other things.

She likes to take care of that, but her thoughts are biased.She justifies a passive behavior that, over the long term, uses your partner, and takes you away from a real active role in the relationship.

So, what do we do with that? First, identify your root beliefs. Am I looking for a partner or a mother? Am I afraid to take my full place as an adult? Am I waiting for the other to repair me? And yes, go scratch your unconscious, go discuss strongly, intensely. Take your time with yourself. And then, deconstruct your automatic script.

Start with small concrete actions. Take the initiative of things that she usually manages, not only to please her, but also to get out of the child’s posture. And be careful, I’m not only talking about housework, I’m also talking about daily activities, everything that gives a little bit of pleasure in our lives, in our weekends, in our weeks.

And then, re-educate your thoughts. Every time you hear in yourself, it’s okay, she’ll do it. Well, replace it by, “if I want an equal relationship, I have to act as an equal partner”. If I want to receive, and if I like to give that thing, well, I have to learn to give too. Your wife is not your mother. But be careful, because this article, it’s like, but in the end, if the man takes a father’s place, it’s the same. You can also switch a little bit what I’m telling you here, of course.

And you here, well, you’re not a child anymore. A couple is two adults who choose each other, who choose each other and who build together. So there are still two actions. I choose because what I see from this partner seems good to me and does me good. So I keep choosing it day after day to make my life with, to build with him. We are still on something that is the order of action. In a couple, we build together. Otherwise, it’s not really love anymore, but it’s going to be a kind of relationship of dependence, a little disguised.