7 Ways Your Mother Relationship Can Trigger a Rejection Mindset

I have spent years helping people to heal the father lens in their life, so that experiencing God as a Father can be embraced with greater clarity. Yet at the same time, there has been a wound that is often left unaddressed. It is a pain and emptiness that can lie under the surface, involving the wounds people carry regarding their earthly mothers.

The mother carries a massive influence all her own. If the mother in the home releases love, acceptance and nurtures properly, the children will walk with emotional stability and a greater capacity to handle difficult times. The lack of emotional presence and feminine acceptance in a child’s life will give the enemy tremendous access to perpetuate a rejection mindset’s poison.

Recognizing the Mother Wound

We have observed a pandemic problem in today’s generation, where many struggle with emotional stability and lack the tools to walk through challenging times in life. This often can be the outcome of a mother wound. In fact, many mental illness issues can run rampant in the generations of the mother. If not addressed and healed, rejection can step into the void left by the mother and fill it with daily emotional and relational instability and dysfunction.

A rejection mindset can develop when our experience of nurture is missing or distorted in our mother relationship. Nurture is one of the most powerful aspects of love, because it teaches us experience comfort and emotional recovery during challenging times. Your reference of nurture is what you access when you are going through a hard time or are in need of love to recover from adversity.

A Lack of Nurture

When a mother does not nurture her children in healthy ways, it can open the door for a rejection mindset to develop. Children can grow up with few references on how to comfort themselves and maintain emotional stability through difficulties.

Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to be the Comforter to our lives. Nurture is a way we are able to receive comfort. Those who have mother wounds and lack of nurture in their history can often struggle with receiving the comfort of the Holy Spirit. They are not able to receive God’s comforting presence and they may be unable to comfort themselves.

Men who have mother wounds can develop mental health struggles and not know how to connect to females. Women with mother issues can often struggle with deep guilt and confusion in processing relationships. They can even replicate what their mother manifested, unless they process some healing of those unhealthy experiences.

Manifestations of Mother Wounds

A lack of nurture coming out of mother wounds can also lead to:

Emotional instability
The inability to receive comfort or comfort yourself.
Addictions
Mood imbalances and even mood disorders
Struggles with guilt.
Mental and emotional confusion in relationships.
A vulnerability to being hard on yourself.
Self-hatred issues.

Here are some ways that mother wounds can unleash a rejection mindset and distort the power of nurture from settling into your life.

1. Not Being Present with You

Because of her own pain and burdens, her mind is always preoccupied, so when you wanted her attention, she was often distracted, not able to give you the love and care you needed to be safe in nurture. She was often so focused on her own pain or worries that she was not able to give herself fully to you. Maybe she left all together. This brokenness cuts the deep when you needed her the most.

2. Not Being Able to Apologize

One of the most powerful exchanges a mom can make, or any parent for that matter, is when they are able to say “I am sorry.” Taking responsibility and recognizing where she was wrong, cultivates a humble exchange where healing can take place.

She thinks that if she takes responsibility and apologizes, then she will be labeled with a sign that says, “Terrible Mother.” So she instead avoids any conversations of vulnerability that requires her to repent or humble herself about her life. She spends more time defending herself and holding stubborn stances, while not seeing how her life negatively effected some in the home.

3. Being Emotionally Cold

When a mother was not raised with healthy affection and nurture, she will struggle to give it out to her own children. Emotional coldness is a pandemic problems in many cultures and generations. In the age of achievement and performance driven living, it’s easy to hide the fact that many are very uncomfortable with emotional expression. Out of her own brokenness, many mothers were not able to deposit the emotional capacity of nurture in a fruitful way.

4. Punishing You in Unhealthy Ways

I believe one of the most powerful habits in a mother relationship, is how she chooses to discipline or deal with problems in her children. Those moments of tension and conflict can make or break the quality of the relationship. The enemy would love for those moments of discipline to not go well, so that a rejection mindset can settle in.

Here are some unhealthy ways a mother can punish, that leave rejection wounds behind:

Yelling at You: If yelling is the only way you are corrected, then you will have trouble receiving comfort or any corrective instructions from the Holy Spirit. Many children begin to tune out the yelling anyway, while a bitter root seeks to cultivate anger with that rejection mindset.
Demeaning or Shaming You: Those moments when you are caught doing something wrong are incredibly vulnerable moments. When shame or a demeaning posture becomes the common thread, then you can easily form a guilt and fear based perspective when it comes to sin issues in your life.
Blaming You: Instead of empathizing with your struggles and walking with you through the corrective pathways, she can easily do a blame thing on you. Whenever you want to talk problems over, she doesn’t apologize or take responsibility, she blames. She blames God, her husband, her upbringing and you. So when you face challenges in life, you always think YOU are the problem.
The Silent Treatment: One of the most common demonically-inspired responses is the silent treatment. In that moment of vulnerability, instead of relationship being enhanced, silence is used as a weapon, inflicting deep pain that will take years to unwind. The silent treatment empowers hate, because hate involves the withdrawal of love. This becomes a field day for a rejection mindset to fester in the painful silence of punishment.

5. Twisting Reality

I have worked with more people over the years who have struggled with mental health issues, coming out of how their mother twisted and distorted what life was even life. Talking to her about family matters feels like someone from an alternate reality. She chooses to see things in a way that keeps her from having to deal with her own life. Over time, she has projected a family life that was not reality and not what everyone else experienced. Her tricks have mind binding effects on the children’s minds, where they don’t know how to make sense of certain situations.

6. Not Setting Boundaries with Your Father

Unfortunately, many children grow up in abusive homes, where the father was violent, an addict or lived in unsafe ways. The problem many times is that the children experience the negative effect of his brokenness. Because of her own inability to love herself, she can enable the father to perpetuate an abusive environment.

Yet at the same time, many moms do not have the support and equipping to put up boundaries to his negative behavior. She can fall into codependent patterns, while not standing up for the health of the children.

7. Getting Lost in Herself

Her brokenness led her to becoming obsessed with her pain. She became very distant, introspective and lost. As a result, she made many decisions, without understanding how they would affect you. Her decisions on marriage, moving, relationships and finances were too often done in a way that neglected what you needed. She can often say, “I need to take care of myself,” when in reality, she cannot see that is she living selfishly.

The mother wound can be a deep place of pain and woundedness for so many. But it is one that God can heal, as you give yourself space and time to heal. With proper insight and support, you can learn what nurture is and how to process healthy patterns of connection.

Empowering You to Live Healed and Free