The 'devouring mother' dynamic – where a parent's care slowly but surely strangles any attempts at independence – can result in dependence, anxiety, and a lack of confidence.
“Mother always said the world was a dangerous place, and it was her job to protect us by keeping us inside her own shadow.”
– From We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Katherine was 40 years old – but not in her mother’s eyes!
Katherine was the centre of her mother’s world. Katherine couldn’t breathe under the weight of her mother’s expectations. Katherine was stunted in many ways. And now Katherine was suffering from depression. (She had, of course, been brought to see me by her mother!)
Some – myself included! – might say Katherine’s mother met the ‘devouring mother’ archetype. And that’s what I want to talk about here.
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Killing with kindness
Some mothers nurture you until you can stand on your own. They hold your hand gently until you finally grow into independent adulthood, and then they let go.
Others squeeze desperately for your whole life.
The devouring mother dynamic might be encapsulated as love entangled with control, where a parent’s care slowly but surely strangles any attempts at independence. Think emotional boa constrictor.
The mother comes to identify almost solely with her child. Parental and child separation, that central facet of the maturing human, fails to happen.
Care becomes a cage. Love becomes a leash.
This dynamic can result in dependence, anxiety, and a lack of confidence. Let’s look further.
Jung was onto something
The concept of the devouring mother is a psychoanalytical idea based on Jungian archetypes. Like many theories, it might be described as overcomplicated – yet the pattern has a central element of recognizable truth to it.
Who among us hasn’t witnessed overnurturing as a form of stifling restriction, or even unconscious coercion and control? ‘Love’ is used as a weapon to colonize another’s soul.
Its opposite archetype, the ‘good mother’, nurtures and releases the child. The flower of childhood is nurtured, watered, given what it needs – but given space to breathe and grow and become an independent entity.
Of course, children need love, protection, and the wisdom of an adult to help appreciate dangers as well as opportunities. But human autonomy is the ultimate end of genuinely nurturing love.
I’m not suggesting men never overprotect and emotionally suffocate their offspring in the name of love. Of course that can happen. But in my experience, this kind of pattern is more common in mothers. (Difficult fathers may, of course, present all kinds of other problems!)
Okay, that’s quite enough base-covering, caveat-making, PC pandering!
So what are the main features of this kind of smothering mothering?
To everything a shadow
In archetypal terms (Jungian), the devouring mother is the ‘shadow’ side of the nurturing mother: the life-giving force that refuses to let go, becoming life-stifling instead. It’s the same energy, just turned inward until it smothers rather than supports.
This pattern is rooted in a kind of enmeshment, where personal boundaries blur and the child becomes an extension of the mother’s identity and may therefore lose their own.
While the mother may say, “I only want what’s best for you”, the underlying drive is often to keep the child dependent, not out of hatred but out of fear of losing relevance, love, or control.
These are generally unconscious drives.
In essence: Care morphs into control and love prevents growth.
I asked to speak to Katherine privately. Her mother, Judy, immediately protested, saying that her daughter didn’t like to speak to people without her being there.
Katherine quietly said that actually, it would be fine to speak to me privately, and her mother finally prised herself from the room with all the readiness of a superglued barnacle being wrenched from its rock.
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I never used such an outdated term as ‘devouring mother’ with Katherine. But it was clear that she felt her mother had all the main manifestations of the pattern of this pernicious style of parenting. She was quick to add that she was sure her mother always had the best of intentions.
As I listened to Katherine describe Judy’s behaviours, I recognized many of the typical patterns as to why and how this kind of maternal overcontrol forms.
Why the devouring mother pattern forms
The devouring mother pattern is not always malicious and often it grows out of the mother’s own unresolved issues. This mothering pattern may develop through:
- Unmet emotional needs in her own childhood – Perhaps she lacked nurturing or stability or a sense of status and relevance, and unconsciously uses her child to fill that void.
- Loss of a child – If they have ever lost a child, the surviving child may be seen as super fragile. This might also happen if a close friend or family member loses a child.
- Loss of identity outside motherhood – Some women tie their entire sense of self-worth to their role as “needed caregiver”. When the child grows up and becomes independent, it can feel like abandonment.
- Fear of the outside world – The mother might project her own anxieties onto the child, believing she’s protecting them when she’s really stunting their growth. She may be overattuned to imagined as well as real threat, teaching the child to be unduly risk averse.
- Generational patterns – If her own parents were controlling or enmeshed, she may repeat the same dynamic, believing it’s normal.
- Narcissism – The mother may exhibit narcissistic patterns in which, solipsistically, “everything is the self”, or more specifically herself. There is no real separation in her mind between her and her offspring. Her child’s successes are really her successes. When she is ‘protecting’ her child, she is really protecting herself.
- Autistic traits – The mother may have some autistic traits which make it hard for her to truly separate her own identity from that of her offspring or intuit that her child may have different perspectives from herself.
I’ve noticed this control in the name of nurturing love more commonly among mothers of an only child, and indeed Katherine had no siblings.
Identities fused together
Emotional enmeshment to an extreme extent always creates problems.
We saw some of this solipsistic pattern with Judy. I noticed that when Katherine tried to speak, Judy would say things like “Oh, you wouldn’t like that!” Meaning, of course, that she herself wouldn’t like it.
It was clear that for Judy, there was little differentiation of identity between her and her daughter. This emotional fusion had, it seemed, prevented all kinds of natural development for Katherine.
She’d never had many friends (“We don’t need them!”), pursued jobs far away (“You wouldn’t like it there!”), or travelled independently of her mother.
Escaping the clutches of this dynamic can be hard, not least because of the following emotional bind.
A moral trap
Because overnurturing to the point of mental strangulation tends to be couched in terms of love and protection, it can be hard to challenge – and that’s what makes it so tricky to spot and even trickier to break.
Because it looks like love and protection, questioning it can feel:
- Ungrateful (“She’s sacrificed everything for me”)
- Disloyal (“If I pull away, I’m betraying her”)
- Selfish (“I’m thinking about my own needs instead of hers”).
That emotional framing creates a moral trap, a double bind: the child feels like a bad person for wanting independence, and the mother feels like a bad mother if she lets go.
In healthy dynamics, love and protection equip someone to leave and face the world, but in the devouring mother pattern, they unintentionally become tools to prevent them from doing so.
But let’s get back to Katherine.
“It’s only because I love you!”
When Judy brought Katherine to see me for depression, she had in no way entertained the possibility that she may be playing a part in Katherine’s unhappiness. It was plain to see that many of Katherine’s basic emotional needs were being blocked by her mother’s stifling demands.
Judy called her multiple times every day. Judy was still angry that Katherine had “deserted” the family home by moving out to an apartment (in a nearby street, mind you!) a year before. Judy had to know exactly where Katherine was, what she was eating, and how she was spending her money at any given time. If Katherine met a new friend, Judy would insist on giving the friendship the okay only if she felt the friend was ‘suitable’ for Katherine.
But that’s not even the worst of it.
Blackmail by any other name
Some of Judy’s tactics were downright emotionally crippling.
Judy would use all the usual methods of emotional blackmail, with ‘guilt tripping‘ being a prime ingredient. But of course this was always “only because I love you” or “for your own good!”
When I’d interviewed them together, Judy had said peevishly:
“I just want what’s best for you, but if you think you know better than your own mother…”
I could actually see Katherine’s buttons being pushed in real time as expressions of distress and shame passed over her face.
Privately, Katherine told me her mother’s emotional swamping had always been a problem.
“A few years ago I got a job in another city. My mum said, ‘If you move away, you’re abandoning me and you’ll be ending Us!'”
Feeling guilty, Katherine turned down the opportunity. Years of this emotional enmeshment had left Katherine anxious, unsure of her own decisions, and continually resentful. She told me she didn’t know who she really was and had little to no self-confidence.
It was clear to me that Katherine was aware that this issue of filial independence would need to be addressed if we were going to lift the depression.
Here are five core steps I took with Katherine to help her break away from her mother’s apron strings while actually strengthening the mother-daughter relationship.
One: Name the dynamic
Understanding that this is emotional enmeshment, not healthy care, helps break the illusion that it’s “just love”. Katherine had actually known for a long time that her mother’s involvement with her was “not normal”.
As I mentioned, I didn’t bang on about ‘archetypes’ and use scary-sounding terms such as ‘devouring mother’. We just explored the patterns together ‘from the outside’.
Katherine began to feel that it wasn’t just not normal but unsustainable to live as she was: at the behest and whim of her mother “for ‘her own good”.
Describing the pattern calmly gives your client permission to see it clearly.
Next we needed to actually enhance the way Katherine related to her mother.
Two: Start with micro-boundaries
Cutting off contact altogether shouldn’t be necessary in the vast majority of cases. Not just because of the potential guilt but because as with any relationship of this kind there may well be a great deal of love involved. Our mother-smothered client can start small. We might help our client slowly build up more independence through such methods as beginning to delay answering messages, keep certain personal details to themselves, or say, “I can’t talk right now” without overexplaining.
This just helps create a little breathing space between your client and their mother without the wrench of breaking away entirely. In a sense they begin to condition the overcontrolling parent, subtly and gradually, to be less constrictive.
I helped Katherine begin to very slowly separate her sense of self from her mother by enlarging her autonomy.
We can also help our client be really clear about the difference between love and control.
Three: Separate guilt from love
Love is freely given; guilt is a control tactic. I suggested to Katherine that when she felt guilt rising, she could ask herself: “Am I actually doing something wrong, or am I just falling short of her expectations?”
The morality of good versus bad isn’t just predicated on other people’s expectations of you.
Hypnotically I helped Katherine begin to control her responses to ‘button pushing’ tactics by her mother. She could still feel all the love she had for her mum, but separate that from being manipulated.
Four: Build external validation
It was clear that along with Katherine’s internal psychological constriction, her social world had been miniaturized by her mother’s love-swaddling.
We can help our smothered adult clients create a supportive network outside the family or, more specifically, the mother. Friends, mentors, social groups are all components and indicators of an independent adult life. So we can help our client meet their needs away from their mother.
When they are able to find validation and interaction independently, they gain emotional size and strength.
Katherine took a job she wanted to take a couple of hours away from where her mother lived. She joined a sports club and started meeting friends without passing them by her mother for approval.
And this links to the final step I want to address here.
Five: Help your client claim their independent decision making
I encouraged Katherine to practise making choices based on her own needs and desires, not simply her mother’s. When what her mother thought was best for Katherine conflicted with what she thought was best for herself, she was to follow her own dictates more.
We worked on building this up so it started to feel more natural.
This didn’t mean she never listened to her mother’s advice – her mum was a highly intelligent woman – but certainly with things such as her clothing, hobbies, or weekend plans, I encouraged Katherine to make decisions based on her thoughts and wishes. She in no way neglected her mother, but she was no longer ruled by her either.
Katherine’s mother needed to meet her own needs adequately away from Katherine too, and Katherine found that the more autonomy she got for herself, the more her mother began, after a time, to build more of a life away from the claustrophobic, emotionally locked embrace of the mother-daughter dynamic.
Katherine still loved her mum, but she finally felt like she had allowed herself to grow up by becoming, in a small way and for a brief period, mother to her own mother.
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About Mark Tyrrell
Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.
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