Mother-Enmeshed Man: Does A Mother-Enmeshed Man Need To Develop A Healthy Sense of Entitlement?

One thing that a mother-enmeshed man will probably need to do is to get back in touch with all of his needs. The other part of this is that he will need to realise that his needs are not bad and that they are important.
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Currently, he can be in a position where he is not even aware of most of his needs, and if he was to reconnect to certain needs, he could feel the need to ignore them. As a result of this, it will be normal for him to be there for others and his mother, in particular.

Positive Feedback

Now, although he will be neglecting himself, he could receive a fair amount of approval from others. In the eyes of some people and his mother, he could be doing the right thing.

This will show that these people are not aware of what is really going on and it might not even occur to his mother that he has his own needs. Thus, if he hasn’t even been told that he needs to start taking care of his own needs, it is not going to be much of a surprise.

A Big Difference

Now, being around others who are like this is one thing, it is another thing altogether for his mother to behave in the same way. As she is his mother, she should want what is best for him.

What she shouldn’t be doing is using him to meet some of her needs and playing a part in why her son is not taking care of his own needs and living his own life. After all, he is not on this planet to take care of her.

Something Is Not Right

If this is what is going on, it most likely shows that his mother is not in a good way mentally. She should be able to see that her son has his own needs and his own life to lead, as opposed to seeing him as an extension of herself.

Due to what is going on for her, it will mean that she is not consciously doing what she can to stop her son from living his own life; this will be taking place unconsciously. However, if this was pointed out and she was able to see what was going on, she could deny what is taking place.

Developmentally Stunted

Most likely, her early years didn’t give her what she needed to grow and develop. She will then look like an adult but, on the inside, she will be in an undeveloped state and will feel like a powerless child who has been abandoned.

The defences that she has in place, with one of them likely to be denial, will be there to keep how she truly feels from coming to the surface. Once again, she won’t be conscious of these defences; if she was, they wouldn’t work.

Back In Time

Thanks to how undeveloped she was, it probably wasn’t possible for her to truly be there for her son. There is a strong chance that at least one parent used her to meet some of their needs and she, his mother, would have done the same thing to him.

By using him to meet some of her adult and unmet childhood needs, he wouldn’t have received the nutrients that he needed to grow and develop. He would have had to lose touch with his needs and feelings and been forced to be there for her.

Two Consequences

So, while he would have had a connection with himself very early on, he would have lost this connection over time. It would have been too much of a risk for him to express his needs; if he did, he may have been punished, disapproved of and/or abandoned.

This would have set him up to associate his true self and his needs as being bad; in reality, his true self wasn’t and isn’t bad and his needs were not and are not bad. His true self will have gone into hiding and he will continue to do what he can to hide his needs from others and himself.

The Missing Piece

What these early experiences would have also done is stopped him from developing a healthy sense of entitlement. If his needs had typically been met, he would have come to believe that he deserves to have them met.

With the help of his father, perhaps, he would have also learned that he will need to exert some effort at times as things don't just fall out of the sky and he is not just entitled to receive what he wants from others. In other words, if he had received what he needed from his mother and father, it wouldn’t have set him up to be narcissistic; it would have allowed him to know that he deserves to have his needs met and for this to take place he will need to play his part.

A Very Different Reality

As this didn’t take place, his issue won’t be that he expects the world to take care of his needs; no, it will be that he doesn’t believe that he deserves to have his needs met. It is then not going to matter what he does, as it won’t change how he feels.

For his life to change he will need to reconnect to his body and to realise that he deserves to have his needs met. He will need to develop a healthy sense of entitlement, which can be seen as part of the feminine aspect, so that he can go after what he wants, which can be seen as part of the masculine aspect.

Awareness

If a man can relate to this and he is ready to change his life, he may need to reach out for external support. This is something that can be provided with the assistance of a therapist or healer.

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Oliver JR Cooper
http://www.oliverjrcooper.co.uk