Memories of Mother Haunting Current Romance

Reader’s Question

I lost my mother 4 years ago (brain cancer). I have a very cold relationship with my dad and we never actually talked about the situation. My problem is the following: once I have a girlfriend I seem to look for everything I do not have at home and look for what I lost in my mother. Every single second I feel uncertain whether my girlfriend will leave me. I constantly ask and look for confirmation. By doing so, I put an enormous amount of pressure and weight on my girlfriend.

In this way, I also lose all sorts of attraction towards her. I act like someone who cannot live alone. This way I already lost 2 girlfriends. Once I ‘get over them’ (never really) and thus live kind of ‘alone’ I feel better. It feels like I close that feeling all off. I wonder where this feeling comes from and how I can work on it. I know it needs to be different if I ever want to feel well in a relationship.

Our Consulting Clinical Psychologist’s Reply

You will need to remove your mother from your love life! A root of your situation is “Emotional Memory“. Our memories contain emotions — so when we remember certain events and/or people, our brain changes our emotions today to those emotions of yesterday. Your memories of your mother are interfering with your life in 2008. If you think about the emotions connected to your mother’s memory, you’ve got emotions like grief, loss, depression, loneliness, and her leaving you. Guess what happens when you do as you say — that you “look for what I lost in my mother”. Sadly, your mother’s memory contains feelings of being lost — that’s why you feel every girlfriend will leave you. That’s also why your romance for your girlfriends slowly dies. Comparing your girlfriends with your mother — fearing they will also leave you — kills any romantic feelings you may have. I’d read my article on Emotional Memory on this website. You are dating in the present but living in the past.

To fix this, you must let your mother and her memories stay out of your love life. Your memories are focusing on the depression, loss and grief. Instead, when you meet a new girlfriend, only think “I bet my mother would like her”, then focus on the girlfriend, not how she compares to your mother. If you keep using memories of your mother in your love life, you will never be happy. This also works the other way as well. If you compared a new person with your memories of your father — they would be seen as cold and unable to communicate — just like your feelings for him.

If you can’t fix this on your own, counseling would be helpful. I would also recommend using some of the techniques I’ve written about in my Emotional Memory article to handle the memories of your mother differently.