The Mom Factor: Dealing with the Mother You Had, Didn't Have, or Still Contend With
Henry Cloud, John Townsend, 1996
You stopped being ten a long time ago, and one call from your mom can still ruin your day. Clinical psychologists Cloud and Townsend show what everyone needs from a mother and how the lack of it echoes in love and at work. Nobody gets hunted down as the guilty party here: you'll learn where to get what you missed and how to live alongside the mom you actually have.
Who it is for
For anyone who comes away from a talk with their mom feeling like a guilty child again. And for anyone who notices something very old repeating itself in love and at work.
You cannot go back to 1950, 1960, 1970, or even yesterday to deal with mother. But, dealing with mother is possible because, whether you like it or not, she lives with you every day in the present.
Ninety minutes with Mom
Beth hangs up after ninety minutes on the phone. She told her mom that the family was going to the Grand Canyon on vacation and that she would try to visit her next time. Her mom answered: “That won't be necessary. I'm sure you'll be too busy for me then too.” Beth loves her mom, and once again she can't work out who she really is: an ungrateful daughter, or someone people expect too much from.
Sometimes Mom isn't there at all, and she's in the room anyway. Debbie asked her husband whether he had changed the oil in the car. Jim screamed: “What do you think I am, an idiot?” His domineering mother had never believed him. Debbie is completely different, which is why he fell in love with her, but the closer they grew, the more he saw his mother in his wife. There's a name for this: transference. Feelings about someone from the past land on whoever is nearby.
Henry Cloud and John Townsend, clinical psychologists, write as believing Christians, and their faith is part of their argument. Their main idea: what we learned at our mother's side deeply shapes our whole adult life. By mother they mean whoever filled that role, a grandmother, for example.
The book isn't looking for anyone to blame. There's no such thing, the authors hold, as the good child and the bad mom. Six types of mothers lie ahead. This is the authors' scheme, not a diagnosis. And above all, the book answers the question of what to do now that childhood is over.
Mom was home, and there's nothing to remember
Keith grew up in a big, dark house. His mother didn't mistreat him: she worked, cooked dinner, and sometimes lay in bed for hours. But he couldn't recall a single conversation with her. As an adult he was gifted and outgoing, yet his girlfriends felt he didn't need them. After a string of breakups and a severe depression, he told Cloud about his childhood and asked: “Does that have anything to do with why I struggle in relationships?”
The book has a name for this kind of mother: the Phantom Mom. She's there, but emotionally she's gone. And a child needs safety, care, trust, the feeling of being wanted, and someone to love. The authors explain the ability to be close through the way a car is built: the car will run in 1996 only if the cylinders were installed in 1960. Either that ability was installed or it wasn't. If it wasn't, it has to be installed now.
You can't ask your mom to start over. This part gets installed where it was left out: in relationships. Val built a whole self-help library at home, but when Townsend asked what had helped her most, she answered: “Relationship, relationship, relationship.”
You need safe people: warm, honest and nonintrusive. The authors compare such a person to a scarecrow: it stays put with its arms outstretched, chases no one, and the crows come and perch on its head by themselves. Lunches with friends aren't enough here. Tell someone what's going on inside you, not just how things are going.
About the author
Henry Cloud and John Townsend are American clinical psychologists and authors of Christian books. Together they wrote the well-known book on personal boundaries, Boundaries.
All books by this author: Henry Cloud, John Townsend
Terms from the book
- Beth
- Jim
- Transference
- Stephanie
- Containment
- Janet
- Dan
- Mark
- American Express
- Grand Canyon: A huge gorge in the southwestern United States, one of the country's best-known travel destinations.
- Debbie: A woman in the book, Jim's wife. Her calm question about the car set off his burst of rage.
- Keith: A client of Cloud's. He grew up with a mother who was home but emotionally absent.
- Phantom Mom: A type in the authors' scheme, not a diagnosis: a mother who is detached and emotionally unavailable.
- Val: A client of Townsend's. She called herself the Queen of Self-Help until she realized she needed relationships, not information.
- Safe people: The authors' phrase for warm, honest, nonintrusive people who give you what you missed in childhood.
- Vicki: A client of Townsend's, Stephanie's daughter. She grew up with a mother who couldn't bear her feelings.
- China Doll Mom: A type in the authors' scheme, not a diagnosis: a loving mother who is fragile and can't cope with her child's strong feelings.
- Controlling Mom: A type in the authors' scheme, not a diagnosis: a mother who finds it hard to accept that her child is a separate person.
- Corinne: A woman in the book, twenty-eight, who always agreed with everyone and first disagreed out loud in her support group.
- Trophy Mom: A type in the authors' scheme, not a diagnosis: a mother who loves the ideal in her child and the child's successes.
- Eden: The garden of paradise in the Book of Genesis. In the biblical story people were driven out of it, and cherubim with a flaming sword guard the way back.
- Cliff: A client of Cloud's, a pastor who confessed his addiction to a group and felt for the first time that love doesn't require perfection.
- Ashley: A friend of one of the authors, who decorated a room for her mother's visit and took her mother's displeasure hard.
- Still-the-Boss Mom: A type in the authors' scheme, not a diagnosis: a mother who treats even her grown child as a subordinate.
- American Express Mom: A type in the authors' scheme, not a diagnosis: the mother an adult never truly left and still depends on.
- Kevin: A man in the book, a husband who never set boundaries with his mother, then turned his wife into his mother and left his wife.
- Regina: A woman in the book. She couldn't forgive her mother's rejection until she noticed that she herself wasn't accepting her mother.
- Stan: A friend of one of the authors, a thirty-five-year-old businessman who despised his mother for years and then became her friend.
- Patricia: A close friend of one of the authors, who wanted to grow close to her terminally ill mother.
All terms
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