The Focus-On-Me Mother Syndrome

Note the short ring finger. See also page 28.

This, of course, would not apply to everyone seeking career counseling, but we can differentiate rather easily between the two groups. In the latter instance the intervention of the career counselor could contribute to a decision with which the young adult may identify. In the former instance, however, the counselor gets trapped in the murky labyrinth of a “Yes, but…” conundrum.  Every educated and considered suggestion is met with a “Yes, but…” so that with the last of their exhaustive sessions the young person exits as he or she had originally entered. The cost to the counselors, apart from their terrible frustration, can be damaging. Unless well practiced they find themselves unable to escape the erosive experience of their impotence.

Where the Focus-On-Me Mother Syndrome prevails we come upon individuals who cannot identify with anything in their physical, material, external world affairs that affords a natural link to what and how they feel about themselves. This almost suggests a place on the spectrum of autistic disorders. However, nothing here is genetic or otherwise of an organic nature. The communication that normally transpires between any person and himself, or herself was forcibly arrested at an early age. It is in the nature of this communication to have these people learn, in the wake of experiences, with what they can surely identify and what they must reject, what has value in their eyes and what is meaningless for them, what they would like to bring into their lives and what they should best turn their backs upon. They are exposed to models touching on just about every facet of human experience. One or more of these models may become invested with very personal emotional significance. Identifying with these models becomes a most natural human development.

With the years and approaching maturity these people seek to find a place for themselves in the world that had become familiar to them. At this time they would normally be prepared to assume responsibility for their adult lives. Toward this end they enlist their capacities to be willful and enlist their executive functions to effect what they had learned (or should have learned) over the years that best expresses who they are and who they can be. We would indeed speak now in terms of the drive toward self-actualization and self-fulfillment.

The Focus-On-Me Mother Syndrome will have denied the young person access to this developmental program. Who they are and who they can be often remains without substance or definition through the better part of their lives.

History:

Everyone with this uneven digital formula will be partner to the very same stress experiences in their early lives. Their inability in later years to realize a measure of identification between their mental and emotional attunement to their lives and the choices they must make – in short, the direction they must give their lives – is entirely a consequence of the defenses they had originally adopted to find reply to those specific stress experiences.

In each case the young person would have suffered the corrosive experience wherein the mother’s emotional commitment to it was felt by that child as being less than organic. It must be said that the Focus-On-Me Mother Syndrome is only one of several possible responses which may often appear together. Later we shall describe the facets of a False Self and the corrosive Exploration Deficit when entrenched in personality, all unfortunately originating in the context of the child’s mother-experience.

Normally, when the child begins to experience the world and invests these experiences with meaning, a manner of communication with himself, or herself, delivers an evolving program of possibilities relevant to the child’s sense of having an existence apart from his parents. The young person begins to link the experience of itself (talents, skills) with avenues of expression available in the world beyond itself. In adulthood, this evolved program does not always lend itself to total realization, but the sense of an identity delivered by this process of communication between the individual and himself, or herself, delivers a solid foundation to this person’s life.

In all instances where we come upon evidence of the Focus-On-Me Mother Syndrome we know that this mode of communication did not transpire between the young people and themselves, but between themselves and their mothers. The mothers became the primary targets of their attention and the focus of their communication experiences. The child would start the day urgently needing to learn how the mother finds herself. Is she ill, angry, depressed, calm, annoyed, excited, morose, happy, optimistic or perhaps just busy with chores?  The child would then know how best to accommodate her moods and temper and in this way assure some measure of control over the way she would then relate to him. This intense focus on the mother often persists for years.

There is a more insidious circumstance that embeds this syndrome in personality and invests it with a more unforgiving deterministic quality. Imagine a child playing in a sandbox and falling on one of the corners. There is now a tear in the trousers and a cut that bleeds. The frightened child rushes home. If we pause here we find the child intensely focused on himself. That painful cut, the flowing blood and the anguish from having torn his trousers are the target of his powerfully focused attentions.  But then the mother sees him. “See what you are doing to me,” she shouts at him. “See what you are always doing to me.” And with this his attentions instantly divert away from himself and fix firmly on his mother.  The details may differ, but those bearing the Focus-On-Me Mother Syndrome which is defined by a particularly high degree of severity in the hand (the relative shortness of the ring finger) will often have had much the same experience. With the years the mother’s contribution to this circumstance generally dims. In the hearts and minds of her children she gets to bear little if any responsibility for this syndrome having overtaking their lives.