It can be easy to identify that you were raised by a toxic mother, but it’s not that easy to notice the psychological scars she left on you.
To avoid being taken by surprise and be on top of how much your mother influenced your today’s behavior, here are a few signs to keep an eye out for.
Few signs that you were raised by a toxic mother:
1. You have trust issues:
Being raised by a toxic mother means that she used lies and manipulation on you more than once and never showed remorse for it.
Unfortunately, now you may find it hard to trust people in general. You feel like you are always prepared for the time when they reveal their true colors and turn against you or start manipulating you.
2. You find it difficult to believe people:
If you were raised by a toxic mother, it means that she probably lied and got caught more times than she will care to admit. Of course, an ideal parent will not tell lies at all, but it’s alright if parents tell a white lie from time to time to protect their kids from harsh truths or age-inappropriate topics.
What’s horrible though is if your mother chose to lie to you for no reason, instead of making the effort of having an honest talk with you and explaining things truthfully.
Now, every time someone tells you something that you find odd in the slightest your mind immediately jumps to the conclusion that you are being lied to, instead of considering any other possibility.
3. You have anger issues:
When you were growing up, you probably experienced a lack of interest from your mother in what you had to say. She never cared about your perspective nor did she take anything you had to say seriously.
This constant indifference may have made you feel frustrated and, since your mother never changed her ways, you now find yourself getting extremely angry over the smallest things. If this happens more when you feel like someone is not listening to you or like they’re not paying attention to what you say then it could be a symptom of having been belittled and remained unheard through your childhood.
4. You feel like your efforts are never enough:
It’s normal for children to seek their parents’ approval. Everything is new to them and as they grow up they are overcoming more and more obstacles with a hunger for proving themselves, skills, and worth.
However, if you were raised by a toxic mother she probably never appreciated your efforts. Maybe even when you got great grades at school and tried to share your achievement with your mother; she would tell you that you could have done even better.
One thing is wanting to push our children to be better, another is to completely disregard their achievements and only hope for excellence. If your parents were like that, you probably have the constant feeling that you could be doing better in all aspects of life today and are never happy with where you’re at.
5. You struggle to like your appearance:
Toxic mothers tend to pick on their child’s appearance. And they often do this by comparing them to other children. If you weren’t capable of seeing that the problem wasn’t you but your forever-unsatisfied mother then this could very easily have created many insecurities.
If this was your case, you probably have a lot of doubts surrounding your physique today. You will not be able to do anything other than question every aspect of your looks, even if you have loving people in your life praising certain physical attributes of yours.
6. You try to please everyone in your life:
As we established, being raised by a toxic mother means being influenced from a young age by a negative person who is unhappy with almost everything.
Growing up, maybe you subconsciously sensed that your mother wasn’t happy so you tried to make her happy and bring a positive environment to the household. However, with a toxic mother, you would not have been able to achieve that. So now you feel responsible for the happiness of everyone around you and want to try very hard to make the most ungrateful and entitled people happy and satisfied.
People-pleasing can be quite exhausting as you can never please everyone at the same time. You also need to remember that just because someone in your life is going through a hard time, it doesn’t mean you’re the cause.
If someone has gone through something negative or even traumatic; then it’s their job to pull themselves out of a bad mood and mindset. And, if they are not ready to heal then no amount of help and support will be able to do the trick and help them out.
7. You never feel safe:
It’s true that when children reach a certain age they start wanting to have a bit of privacy and parents can struggle with it at the beginning. The difference with a toxic mother is that she will never make an effort to understand your needs and won’t respect your boundaries or privacy.
Growing up with such a parent would have put anyone on high alert mode, where they always need to be cautious and expect harm or an invasion of their privacy at any point. You may grow into becoming a very successful person but in this case, you could still struggle with wanting to feel safe or put extra security around your apartment or house.
This could also lead to a lack of sense of security that may affect your mental health. You feel like at any minute there’s going to be a source of danger on the lookout. You can never truly relax because you are waiting for another random person to breach your privacy and invade your personal space.
8. You don’t prioritize your feelings:
Toxic mothers will not really care to make sure that their children are happy. They just assume that they are because they don’t want to overthink or make the effort of providing whatever it is that the child may be lacking even if it’s just a hug or more affection. Unfortunately, this means that you never learned to process your feelings and often disregard them in favor of others’ feelings.
If that’s the case, you need to remind yourself to assess what you feel at different times of day and if there’s anything you could do to improve your mood, should it be necessary.
At the end of the day, holding a grudge against your mother or not being able to forgive or forget her shortcomings can poison your adult life too. So try and find a way to forgive and reconnect with your mother, even if she was less than perfect. But, all you can do is make sure you’re not a very strict or toxic parent yourself when the time to start your own family comes.