Mommy's Boy

As time passed, I folded myself up and put “me” away piece by piece like the laundry. His cruelty only worsened. I developed nervous ticks, literally picking away at myself as if I could remove whatever was wrong with me. My body knew I wasn’t safe even when I didn’t understand why. I just kept trying—with less and less of me to get in his way.

My socialization primed me for this with the endless overt and covert critique of women’s bodies, women’s anger, women’s leadership, women’s this and that, as well as the pattern of blaming women for men’s behavior. These were planted deep within me but I was not a quitter, so I keep trying to get it right. For decade after decade, I tried.

But there is no long game with a momma’s boy.

Maybe you resonate with what I’m describing. Most women I talk with aren’t “quitters.” And almost every one of them tells me a story of making themselves smaller and smaller to avoid being “the problem.” They speak of ways they numbed themselves and ways their bodies tried to flag the danger they were in. Very few see it while they are in it—because they are not quitters. They believe they will eventually find a way by taking responsibility for fixing it all. And then one day something happens and they begin to see there is no long game.

This is where “momma” may come in. It usually takes time to recognize the abuse that comes to us through an unhealthy relationship between a momma and her boy. It was three decades before I recognized the behaviors I flagged at the beginning weren’t even the worst of it. But there’s no pleasure now in being right about the tip of an iceberg after the bottom has ripped through your psyche over the course of three decades.

Before we married I raised the issue of his mother and her invasive behaviors. I raised them with multiple people in multiple roles and professions. I sought input for what I could see and what I had experienced. I got nowhere with it. This was repeated in the early years of our marriage. I had outed the problem of her bold jealousy and interference, her constant demands upon him, her emotional begging and sobbing for his attention, her insistence that her needs be a priority over our marriage relationship, and her endless criticism of me. I recognize now, however, that I didn’t yet see his behavior. I was in love. I couldn’t yet imagine the “let me count the ways” he would participate in his covert incestuous relationship with her and protect it over ours, and our children.

But as it turned out, outing what I did see only provided the opportunity for people to suggest it was all my fault and I was overreacting. I was “too this, too that”—the problems were reframed in an endless critique of me. I was isolated. If I couldn’t fix it I would end up living in isolation. I would try harder to be understanding and patient. I thought I loved him and that he loved me.

Although this started 40 years ago for me, I hear stories today from young women that testify to the persistence and resilience of a pattern of mommy’s boy priorities running adult primary relationships. Covert incest is abuse. And using partners to cloak it leads to abusing them, too.

To this day I know that if one person—just one person—had responded to my concerns by saying something like “Yes, this doesn’t sound right”, or “Get this worked out before you marry him,” I would have pulled the emergency brake. Instead I just absorbed all the apparent deficits pointed out about my character, my faith, my personality, my body and pressed on.

But I had no idea just how committed mommy was to him being her psychological slave. I had no idea that his own mental illness would see her mental illness as his best ally for controlling and using every good and true thing about me to make him more believable. I had no idea that abusing me was their coping tool. The truth was unimaginable to me. I had no knowledge, training or support to connect the dots and identify it. In no time at all, they tag-teamed their abuse. And again, when I reached out for help—it was always reframed as my problem.

Listen to me.

Please.

That’s a long chapter of my story and I do not want it to be yours. There is no long game with a momma’s boy. Please don’t waste your life on this. Please do not think that any of it is “fine.

It’s not fine. It. Is. Not. Fine.

I did leave. But first I wasted more time while he learned new ways to offload accountability and continue to use me as his scapegoat in his “recovery” program and from his CSAT. You may not know that male victims of covert incest are a known group within those men called “sex addicts.” This is another reason why, in my opinion, the current treatment model is inadequate to serve the real needs of these men who have been abused by mommy.

I do credit his CSAT for identifying the covert incest of his mother—her grooming of him and the deep damage she did to him by incapacitating him for adult relationships of sexual and emotional intimacy with a life partner. But it stopped there. He was not treated for this abuse. And the consequential and “necessary” individual and joint abuse of me was never acknowledged. The CSAT labelled me co-dependent without meeting me. Of course she had a codependent relationship with the model as an addict herself. Nothing was allowed to suggest the model was not enough.

I’m not codependent. I was a victim of abuse others would not acknowledge was happening, and about which I needed help to identify clearly so I could save myself from it. Eventually that’s exactly what I did in throwing off the illogical, unsupported, and dishonest assumptions about me, and realizing I wouldn’t treat my worst enemy the way my then husband, his mother, and his CSAT were treating me.

What of his 12 step co-ed SA group? Well, every meeting and every step was weaponized against partners. He was emboldened as an abuser in that environment, even telling me when he was taking his 4th step process of completing a “searching and fearless moral inventory” of himself he would take to a spiritual authority for vetting—that before he did his 4th step he did one of me, first. Clearly he didn’t share that with his spiritual authority, but telling me was his way of showing how well it was all working for him. His “program” was all about creating more opportunities to fine-tune his abuse and justify it. And he so enjoyed being the intake interviewer for the new women seeking membership in their sex “addiction” group, creating new opportunities for emotional affairs the whole time he was there.

There were two things that ended it for me. One was him telling me that he first completed “searching and fearless moral inventory of me” before doing his own (which I met with grey rock silence) and the other was a longer process of connecting dribbled information and realizing in the past he had blamed the porn I discovered on our computer on our sons—that he later admitted it was his. That abuse by my husband and their father could not be shrouded in “steps” or explained away as our own fault. In a stew of hideous discoveries and experiences, these two things activated my core values so that I could see clearly how dangerous he was.

I stepped away from whatever cesspool he was soaking in. I stepped away from him. And I stepped away from his mean religious mother. Oh, they went full on in their ongoing scapegoating of me. But I wasn’t in the room anymore. I wasn’t there to absorb it. It bounced around them but didn’t land on me. My hunch is that eventually it was backwash they had to swallow themselves. Their relationship completely broke down. But not because he was “all better.” She was just too much work with no payoff in making me easier for him to use and abuse.

Everything I’ve described is what I experienced and what stands out to me, now. I understand that my story is not your story. But I’m telling my story because every time I do that, someone plugs in somewhere in it and is empowered to understand theirs a little better. The marriage we are in is often a fraud right from the start. Our desperate search to save it makes our lives and our children’s lives worse.

I often write in my blogs that we only get one life on this earth. The joy of loving is mine now. The wonder of being loved is also mine. But when I left I expected nothing more than to live my life alone and out from under the pall of their psychological deformity and abuse. For some years, that’s all I did. And it was utterly enough. It was enough to breathe easier, be comfortable in myself and see life without looking through their distorted lens of their own psycho-spiritual deformity.

Finding love again was the unexpected gift in my unexpected life. So, for the last years of my life, I have hit the bonus round. But it’s not about a “perfect” life. It’s about a real one.

In 2023 I invite you to figure out how you (with all the financial resources you can legally gather and all the job training you can pull together) can run toward a future without abuse from a momma’s boy or any other version of this experience. It’s never too late for a real life.

Never too late.

Never.

With you,

Diane.