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Did you grow up in a household where you felt like you had to walk on eggshells, manage your mother's moods and feel responsible for her happiness? That's often a classic dynamic when a parent is emotionally immature or toxic. And this will wire your subconscious mind as an adult to essentially equate love with tension. So that calm often feels boring for you and chaos feels familiar instead. So in today's video, I'm going to break down 10 signs that you were raised by an emotionally immature or toxic mother. We're going to talk about what this means and most importantly, how to actually heal. If you're new to this channel, hello and welcome. My name is Thais Gibson. I'm the founder of the Personal Development School and Gibson Integrated Attachment Theory. And I've been working in this field of relationships both in private practice and in our online programs for coming up to 15 years of working with people. So I'm really excited you're here. I love to share about this stuff. I mean, this has been such a rewarding journey for me. Now, I'm going to be honest. If you landed on this video, you may be bracing for the future projected guilt you feel when you think of thinking of your own mother in a negative way. You might already feel like, I'm curious because you think this might be you, but you also have this feeling of guilt at the same time. Like, what if I do think this is me? What if I am thinking my mother is this way and then I feel badly about it? And that tells you you a lot about your current conditioning because it's okay to explore your childhood from your own perspective instead of always, instead worrying about what your mother or parent is going to think. So toxic we're going to refer to in this way as emotionally immature, narcissistic, volatile, controlling, chronically invalidating. This is what we're going to put under the dynamic of toxic. Unhealthy can be a thing too. Like you can have a parent who's, you know, emotionally unavailable. For example, maybe they're withdrawn or dismissive or they're very busy all the time and we can call that unhealthy. But in this video, we're talking about toxic. Okay, so let's go through 10 major signs that you were raised by a toxic mother. Sign number one, love felt conditional. Okay, if you feel like action or love or care only seem to show up when you performed well, stayed agreeable, looked a certain way, or fit the mold of what she expected from you so that you could meet her needs, then this is already something where you weren't getting loved in a holistically healthy way. You may see as an adult that one of the sort of signposts of this is that you may feel that you constantly need to people please or achieve in order to feel worthy at all. Sign number two. You may have felt extremely responsible for your own mother's emotions. You may have constantly scanned her tone, her mood, anticipated her micro expressions or body language or tone of voice, and constantly felt like you had to adjust yourself in order to keep the peace and again, in order to meet her needs. And as an adult, this will usually cause you to be chronically people pleasing worry a lot. If you see other people being upset, feel chronically guilty all the time, even if it's not your fault. And you may feel like you're the type of person who constantly has this pressure to manage other people's emotions around you. Sign number three. Your feelings in your own childhood were chronically minimized or even made fun of. And this is something really painful for a child to grow up in if they feel like they need their mother for this sense of connection and safety. And instead they feel like their mother's laughing at their emotions, kind of downplaying or deflecting even saying, oh, stop being such a crybaby, you're so sensitive and you're fine, and just kind of laughing it off. This will, as an adult, often cause you to be the type of person who struggles to trust your own emotions and to trust your own intuition and who second guesses yourself because so much of your conditioning was such that you were told your emotions are silly. We can't take your emotions seriously. And our emotions as human beings are our internal guidance system. They're going to let us know when something's out of alignment, when a need is unmet, when a boundary is crossed. And so if you chronically have learned or been conditioned to distrust your own emotions, it's going to cause a lot of confusion for you as an adult. Number four. And this is a really painful one, honestly, for a lot of people. If you felt like your mother kind of competed with you to be the center of attention or compared herself to you as a child. If you felt like your success or achievements triggered some sort of jealousy or criticism or sudden withdrawing of support from your mother, then you're going to end up being the type of person who feels like you have to chronically dim your light or you feel anxious about being seen. You're like, okay, I have to literally shut my light down, not take up too much space, because if I did, there was a subtle form of punishment that happened. Whether it was through jealousy or comparison or criticism or withdrawing of attention or support from your mother. You may think, okay, if I take up too much space, then I'm going to get some sort of punishment for that. And that will cause a lot of dysfunction, honestly, and fear in adult relationships. Number five, if there was a lot of emotional whiplash that happened, if you grew up in an environment where you had a parent who was really warm one day, then super rejecting the next day, and so you just never really knew where you stood. It was like you felt like you had to walk on eggshells a lot. You weren't sure what was going to be accepted about you or what was going to be rejected. If you felt like you were always reading between the lines and you just felt confused, then as an adult, your subconscious comfort zone becomes inconsistency in relationships and you're frequently waiting for the other shoe to drop when waiting for something to go wrong, waiting to be punished for something you can't predict or understand. And you may feel like you're bad all the time, always feeling like you have to prove your innocence. And this really brings me to point number six is if you got punished for everything under the sun. So if you had a parent who constantly took their anger out on you, then you're going to have this huge I am bad wound as an adult. And what this looks like is let's say your, your parent was having a bad day, so they would just get really flustered or really angry with you for like spilling something or you know, tripping and making too much noise or laughing too loud or these types of things, well, if you get punished for things that are just human things like it's normal to be a child and laugh or to make a mistake sometimes, or to knock something over. If you got more severe punishments or more projection of anger onto you for those types of things, then you get wired to think, okay, I'm going to be punished for anything at any given moment. And so you're constantly feeling as an adult like you have to over explain yourself and prove your innocence. And like, oh, I have to explain my intentions behind everything so that I'm understood and people don't think I'm a bad person. Even though consciously you'll know you're not a bad person, but subconsciously you're perceiving or fearing that everybody else might think you are. So you always have to prove your innocence. Really common theme that often Comes from this kind of dynamic in childhood, if your boundaries were punished. So if when you said no to something or you felt uncomfortable with something, if you were sort of diminished or judged or shamed as being selfish or dramatic or ungrateful for things, this means as an adult, you're going to struggle to who set boundaries without again over explaining or people pleasing. Number eight, if you were parentified. So if you had to become the adult as a child, you may have been your parents therapist or mediator or caretaker. And sometimes this is parentification in a very instrumental way. So like maybe you have a parent who was struggling with alcoholism and you had to tuck them into bed and bring them water when they were too drunk. Like things like this that are very instrumental where you're physically taking care of them. But a lot of times it's also emotional and there's a lot of enmeshment where you feel like, okay, you have to just constantly make sure that you change yourself and be hypervigilant in your environment, not just for yourself, but to make sure that your mother is okay. As an adult, you may love a good project or somebody who's wounded, and you may actually feel uneasy being the one to receive support because it could even feel very foreign to you. If you want to do a deep dive into this, you get to keep the attachment styles and intimacy course for life. It's all about attachment styles. Each of their patterns around sex, intimacy, closeness, bonding, the things that cause them to want to pull away and that they fear and that you should watch out for, and the things that they like and enjoy and appreciate. So I'll put that down below as well. It's a free gift just for a limited time. Our next one here, number nine, is if you felt like your mother controlled your identity. So this is a really common theme for a lot of mothers. It makes this sort of along the narcissism spectrum. But you may have had a parent who's going, okay, this is what you should believe. This is how you should feel. If your feelings, beliefs or needs didn't line up with your mother's, you may have found yourself trying to literally change how you feel internally in order to fit into this box or paradigm that you think has been created for you. And as an adult, it's going to make you feel confused about who you truly are. It's going to make you feel guilty for being the type of person that chooses yourself. It's going to make you feel like you're not sure what you want or if you're allowed to want what you want. And that will feel very confusing. And number 10, if you feel like your relationship to your mother was run by obligation and fear, if you constantly felt trapped, if you constantly felt guilted for how your mother did things, or you felt like there were silent treatments or threats of abandonment, or these big health scares or emotional blackmail, and these things were manipulated around you to cause you to feel like, okay, you know, am I in a position where I should worry? Should I caretake? Is everything going to be okay? If you felt like you had to always be on eggshells just to figure out how you should be behaving or whether or not this person was going to be okay, and if you're always on high alert, worrying about the punishment or the consequences of doing your own thing, or having time with your friends or wanting to have space away from your home, if that was met with so much guilting and shaming, then obviously this is a big sign that you may have had a toxic mother. So some really big things that you can start by practicing doing is number one. You need to learn what your needs are as a person. Okay, you need to look for, like, what do I need as a person? And in relationships from other people, like in an ideal relationship, what would that relationship have? Would I also be supported? Would I also be validated? Would I feel like I could be comfortable and safe being myself? Would I feel like somebody is accepting of me? And I want you to actually make a list. Like, literally write mom. And under that list, all of the deepest unmet needs that you had from your childhood. And then you actually, you have to become your own parent. You are going to heal when you start meeting those needs on a daily basis in relation. If the need is validation, for example, sit down and write out three daily wins that you're proud of yourself for. If the need is that you never felt seen or protected, then you're going to start protecting yourself by setting your own boundaries. You're going to start seeing yourself through journaling, through meditation, through introspective work. I want you to literally look at the deepest unmet needs and start meeting them on a regular basis. The second thing I want you to do is to practice on a regular basis setting small boundaries. So noticing, like, what are my boundaries? And even auditing, like, what are my boundaries around career or around, you know, the financial area of my life, or in friendships or family relationships or romantic relationships. Where do I say yes to things that are actually a no for me? And how can I instead start showing up and communicating my nose in a truthful, authentic way so that you are bringing your full, true self into the relationships around you. And as you start doing these two things, meeting your own needs, setting boundaries, these are going to be two really powerful things that start moving the needle in your healing process and journey. I hope this is helpful for you. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this this video today, please like share subscribe to this channel. I put daily videos up here about healing from your childhood experiences, rewiring your subconscious mind, and really healing deeply internally in the relationship to yourself first and I would love to have you as a part of our community. Thank you for watching.