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The Observable Unknown
Mailbag Installment 26: The Uninherited Mother | Childhood Trauma, Mother-Daughter Relationships, Alcoholism, Parenting, Generational Patterns
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Welcome back to the Observable Unknown. For tonight's Mailbag installment, a listener has written in regarding a topic that I've heard expressed many times amongst my clients, indicating that as a society, this problem may be far more widespread than most of us understand. Dear Dr. Ray, for the past few years, since the birth of my second daughter, I've been spiraling into a real identity Cris. I struggle with my weight. I struggle with what kind of a wife I am, what kind of a housekeeper I am, even what kind of a mother I am, something I've always prided myself on. And I feel like all of this goes back to how challenging I really feel like my childhood was. My mother was always moving between multiple men and never providing me with the kind of home that I thought was right for a girl with the kinds of talents and insights that I had. She has an ongoing problem with alcohol and drugs. Her poor choice in mates has now started to impact my daughters. But I feel like I still want to understand why she didn't want to be good enough to represent the sort of role model I needed. And if she had believed in herself more, maybe I would believe in myself more. I guess all of this is just to say, is my mother my problem? And what should I do about this? I don't want to get heavy. I don't want my marriage to end in a divorce, and I don't want my children to go through any more trauma. But I also feel like I need to understand this in order to keep her in my life. What do I do? Sincerely, Hannah V. Dear Hannah, There's a particular grief that emerges when adulthood begins, forcing a terrible realization into focus. Your parent may not have been capable of becoming the person you needed. Not unwilling in every moment and not necessarily evil, not without love, simply incapable. That realization destabilizes. People merely receive care from parents. They build identity through reflected belief. Most children study their parents constantly asking, what does my existence mean to the person responsible for protecting it? And when the answer becomes unstable, fragmented, distracted, intoxicated or emotionally unavailable, the child often reaches the same conclusion silently. I must not have been worth stabilizing, for that conclusion survives long after childhood ends. It enters one's weight, one's marriage, one's self worth, one's role as a parent. Sometimes it settles in the strangest manners of illness and disruption. It becomes a highly somatic kind of conclusion, one that the body carries. You asked whether your mother is your problem? No. But she may be part of your architecture. That's different, because unresolved Childhood structures don't disappear as we age. They become invisible operating conditions. A person raised inside instability often develops hypervigilance toward abandonment. A person raised without emotional containment often struggles to regulate internally. A person raised around chaotic attachment often confuses love with unpredictability. Those aren't character flaws. They're adaptations. What concerns me most in your letter isn't your mother's alcoholism, not even the instability around men. It's this sentence. I feel like I need to understand this in order to keep her in my life. That sentence contains a hidden contract. You're still attempting to earn emotional coherence through explanation, as though enough understanding might finally reorganize the relationship into something safer than it was. But explanation doesn't always produce repair. Sometimes it only produces clarity. And clarity can be painful because it removes fantasy without immediately replacing it with comfort. You're also approaching a threshold many parents encounter quietly. The fear of repetition. You don't merely fear weight gain or divorce. You fear transmission. You fear becoming the environment that formed you. That fear is understandable. But fear alone doesn't interrupt inheritance. Structure does. In my book, the 12 Constitutional Bodies, I examine how human beings often confuse condition with destiny. A predisposition is not a prophecy. Patterns become dangerous when they remain unconscious and unstructured. You're already doing something critically important. You're noticing. You're observing the architecture instead of merely living inside of it automatically. That matters matters much more than you realize. Now we become practical. Your daughters don't need perfection. They need consistency, predictable affection, predictable boundaries and predictable emotional climate. Children stabilize through repetition long before they stabilize through explanation. You have to stop measuring your worth through impossible maternal retroactivity. Your mother can't return to your childhood and suddenly become the person you needed. Then no amount of insight changes chronology. The nervous system suffers deeply when it keeps negotiating with irreversible history. You also need boundaries around active destabilization. If your mother's alcoholism and relational instability are now affecting your daughters, then the question is no longer purely emotional. It becomes structural. What enters your children's environment repeatedly becomes part of their conditioning. Love doesn't exempt people from consequence. This is where many adults fail. They confuse compassion with permeability. They believe understanding someone obligates unlimited access. It doesn't. You can understand your mother deeply and still restrict the influence of her unresolved chaos on your children. Those positions are not contradictory. They're mature and finally, your body. Don't treat weight as merely aesthetic. Here very often, weight becomes symbolic protection, containment, numbing exhaustion, deferred self attention. Not always, but often. The body frequently carries emotional negotiations the mind can't articulate cleanly. Your task isn't to become the mother you wished you had. That fantasy will exhaust you. Your task is simpler. Become a stable environment for your husband, for your daughters, for yourself. Not perfect stable, because children raised inside stability don't emerge unscarred, but they do emerge with somewhere inside themselves they can return to when life becomes difficult. One thing I'd like to point out that I believe needs to be recognized is try asking other people who know your mother about her personality, about her past. Not to explain it, not to forgive unforgivable deeds, but instead to understand that maybe you're constructing a narrative that isn't as factually anchored as you believe it to be. Memories are strange and curious beast it tends to fill gaps in with what makes us feel good sometimes or justifies a specific argument that's important here. Don't necessarily accept that you misremembered, but don't presume that your memory is flawless. There might be a lot more to the story, so getting objective outside opinions input from people who don't have an emotional connection to the conversation is a very valuable tool as well. If this mailbag stirred something quietly in you, make that known. Leave a rating or a review not for recognition but for signal so it reaches the places where inheritance is still being negotiated. Until next time. Remember, you don't become what you feel you become what you return to. And what you return to returns as you.