"The Mom Factor" (Recap #3) - The China Doll Mother

Typical Response to a Crying Child: "Are you all right sweetie? Are you breathing? Please don't let my baby die! Jim! (spouse) Vicki is crying and I don't know what's wrong!" (Vicki's father would then walk in the room, pick up his daughter, realize she is wet, and change her)

Typical Response to a Frustrated Child: "Please don't yell. That hurts mommy's ears and makes her sad" (while she puts her hands over her ears to block out her daughter's screams)

The "China Doll" mom is often unable to deal with the unpleasant or stressful situations in life. She has difficulty setting limits and controller herself and her environment. She is unprepared to handle the adult world which translates into her being overwhelmed with her daughter's problems as well as her own.

Even though she loves her child, she is soon in a panic, rage, sadness and fear that renders her incapable to deal with the moment. Several coping measures include:

• Catastrophizing - reading more danger into her child's tears or yells that what is really there .. an over-reaction.
• Withdrawing - When the child is calm, the mom is calm but when the child is cranky or scared the mother will pull away emotionally meaning the child must sooth themselves so mother can return to normal.
• Overidentifying - The mother lives in her own painful emotional world and therefore reads everything through those glasses.
• Regressing - Often the mother  in a sense becomes a child again when her child is unhappy. At the time when the mother should be there for her child it is the child that is looked to to support their mother.
• Smothering / Hovering - The mother's effort to put out the "lighted matches" in her daughter's life with a "fire extinguisher: causes the daughter to retreat further inside of themselves.
• Shaming - The mother actually blames the child for having negative feelings, failing to see beyond the symptoms to the root issues of her child's life. Typical statement includes: "If you love your mother, you'll stop crying"
• Reacting in Anger - Punishing children for having wrong feelings is typical of the "China Doll Mom". 

The first basic human need is to make an emotional attachment to mother, the second is containment. Containment is the mothering function in which the mom literally KEEPS the child's feelings until they can handle them on their own. Containment helps the child manage the "storm and stress" emotions as well as other immature parts of him or herself.

A child's emotions are raw, strong and unpredictable where anxiousness quickly gives way to panic, where feeling lonely escalates toward clinging dependently for deal life where irritated goes in seconds to rage and where sadness goes to depression. Emotions are our built-in signals from our Creator that alerts us to danger or to loss. Those that are cut off from these signals is like a malfunctioning dashboard which allows us to get into trouble and fast. We wind up getting hurt in love or work because we "didn't see it coming".

Babies are born not just intellectually immature, but emotionally immature as well. Children love or hate with little room in between. The early years the child is focused on their mom as source of life, nurture and safety. This myopia will cause the mother to be the recipient of the love and hate that the child experiences outside of mom in the world they are entering more of every day. The child's basic fear is that they AND they mom are in danger and so they are passionate about not being destroyed or hurt. This is where the mothering comes into play, to handle the things that the child can't handle while helping the child understand the process of dealing with life, a sometimes scary journey. She helps the child take more and more responsibility for their feelings over time.

Besides intellectual and emotional immaturity. babies are also immature in their character. There are needy attributes that has them seek out love and care. There are weak attributes that helps them realize they need others and there are autonomous attributes that drives them to be independent and take responsibility for themselves. All these attributes are maturing at different rates which can result in a child seeming independent at one moment and then totally dependent on mother the next.

Mothers are in tune with the process and offer containment by soothing their children, validating their children (hearing what they say without having to fix the issue), providing structure that helps put things in perspective and emphasizing that emotions are only symptoms of a problem and not the problem itself. Address the problem and the emotion (dashboard light) goes away. Confronting children is also containment which brings reality into the situation. Thinking is another containment action that helps unpack and analyze where things are at and the condition is only temporary and will not last forever. Thinking also helps the child understand that it is love that drives the mother to sometimes say no to the ice cream bar or other treats. China Doll Moms usually fail big time on the "thinking" aspect of containment as they are unable to get a grip on things as they really are.

Results of fragile mother can include:

• Relational problems - pushing away the ones they need the closest
• Care-taking - rescuing friends and interjecting control on their problems that help you avoid the pain from your own unmanageable feelings.
• Aggressiveness - being critical of those people that admit they have feelings and might say "get your act together"
• Withdrawal - when emotions overwhelm you, you choose to disonnect physically, emotionally or both.
• Functional Problems - like career snags, where pressure at work becomes THE problem so this signal or dashboard light distracts from the ability to get promoted to the next level. Life-problem-solving also takes a hit as one tends to choke on big decision-making events. Rigid thinking styles that rely solely on cognitive sphere keeps one off balance as anything to do with feelings is discarded.
• Emotional Problems - Depression is a common result in a world of despair but can also come from being disconnected from others in the feeling avoidance world. Angry feelings lead to more anxious thoughts, a cycle that is hard to break. Behavioral problems along the lines of various addictions to numb the pain.

As an adult child of a China Doll Mother, as she grows older you fear the dangers ahead as you can predict that mother will break down and cry and manipulate/control you once more. You tend to feel guilty about "hurting mom", something you heard often as you grew up. Sometimes siblings will identify anyone "not playing the game" anymore as the black sheep of the family and ignore the very real manipulation going on.

There is hope for the China Doll Mother's child without having to walk the tightrope of compliance. The resolution of this is in the next chapter called "Getting It Together". It is a good one!