Jason Bradshaw grew up in a middle-class home. He was the oldest of
three kids and was the only son. His parents loved each other. But when Jason
was 12, tragedy struck their family. Jason’s father was killed in a car
accident. The family was devastated, and Jason’s mother grieved for several
years.
As Jason got older, his mother poured her life into him. He was the
apple of her eye, and she often saw her husband in him as he got older. “He
looks much like his father,” she thought to herself. His mother doted on Jason,
and sometimes Jason reacted to what felt smothering to him.
Jason’s mother often prevented Jason from doing things that normal boys
of his age do, for fear of him getting hurt or even losing Jason. Gradually,
Jason began to feel controlled and manipulated by his mother. This developed
into a love-hate relationship with his mom. On the one hand, he knew he was now
the male head of the family and wanted to care for his mom, but he hated the
control he felt.
Jason began to date girls as he got older and found that he sometimes
masturbated to relieve the stress and pent-up desires he felt inside. He also
found himself on the internet checking out pornographic pictures. He didn’t
know why he did this. He just thought it was normal for boys his age.
Jason went on to college and kept a distant relationship between him
and his mom. He wanted to respect and care for her, but he wanted to keep his
distance and gain his independence. Jason got engaged after college and things
were great with his new wife. However, over the next several years he found
that there was conflict in his relationship with his wife.
Sometimes he felt the same feelings he felt when he was growing up with
his mother. That feeling of control gave him a sick stomach. He often reacted
to his wife when those feelings swelled up inside, “Stop trying to control me,”
he would say. His wife was surprised at these reactions as she was only trying
to connect emotionally with Jason. She wanted to be a part of his life. Jason
pulled away each time he felt these feelings.
When Jason and his wife visited his mom, his wife noticed that Jason’s
personality often changed when the three of them were together. Jason’s wife
felt like a third wheel. It almost felt like Jason was married to his mother
instead of her. This caused arguments among them and Jason often demonstrated a
very unloving spirit to his wife. Jason would always defend his treatment of
his mother, often at the expense of his wife.
This pattern continued for many years into their marriage. Finally
Jason’s wife decided they needed professional help. Jason reacted negatively to
the idea and felt the only problem they had was his wife kept trying to control
him and she needed to stop. However, reluctantly, Jason agreed to go to
counseling.
Jason, to his surprise, discovered in the counseling that the reason he
reacted to his wife’s “control and manipulation” as he perceived it, was due to
something that happened in his childhood that related to his mother. The
feelings he was feeling were the same feelings he felt when he was a teenager
growing up. In essence, Jason was shocked to discover he was subconsciously
viewing his wife as his mother. As the truth of his situation unfolded, Jason
was able to recognize why he reacted to his wife this way.
Today Jason and his wife are happily married. However, many couples who
have the same symptoms often result in divorce. This same scenario happens when
a father divorces a wife. The mother is often left emotionally bankrupt and she
seeks to meet her emotional needs from her son. However, a son is not made to
emotionally bond with his mother and the pain that is caused within him must be
released through some form of sexual expression. That is one reason Jason
turned to sex to relieve his emotional pain.
Compounded with this is the legitimate need for Jason to have an
emotional connection with a female, but because of his negative perception of
his wife, he often sought that emotional connection through women at his
workplace or in other social settings. He was often seen as a flirt with women
but Jason denied such behavior. This too is rooted in the mother-son bonding
relationship.
There is a crisis in marriage today. Research reveals the Christian
divorce rate is higher than non-believers. There are many reasons for this, but
one of those reasons is rarely spoken about. It has to do with the
inappropriate bonding between a mother and her son during his adolescent years.
Many men never emotionally bond to their wives because of the impact of
being emotionally bonded to their mothers during their adolescent years. The
reason many men are not able to bond with their wives is often due to
mother-son bonding that takes place during adolescence.
Dr Paul Hegstrom explains in his book, Broken Children, Grown Up
Pain, that “a husband without an emotional bond to his wife sees her as
someone who sleeps with him, cleans the house, takes care of the children, and
works—he doesn’t see her as a real, living, emotional person.” As a result, the
husband is often distant emotionally to his wife, but he does not recognize
this in himself. However, his wife definitely knows it. She tries to connect on
an emotional level only to be perceived as trying to control him. This leads to
conflicts in the relationship.
If the father and mother are not bonded to one another, the mother will
often bond to the oldest son. This can happen as a result of an absent father,
either physically or emotionally. If a wife is not getting her emotional needs
met through her husband, she may attempt to draw this from her son.
If the
parenting style is weak in emotional validation, giving words of love, or
shaming of the child, these combinations will eventually surface through
problems in the marital relationship in adulthood.
Resolving an Inner Conflict
When mothers bond with sons during adolescence, the son rebels against this
bonding because he is not wired to bond with any female once they get into
adolescence without some form of sexual expression. When they should be growing
independent from their mother during this time, they find themselves in bondage
to their mother’s emotional control. This all happens subconsciously.
Gordon Dalbey, author of Healing the Masculine Soul, explains
that “beyond the basic fact of initial physical dependence upon the mother, the
quality of that bonding experience also influences the son’s later
relationships with women. If the boy’s maternal bond was painful (perhaps his
mother didn’t want to conceive and thus rejected him) or inappropriate (perhaps
she was seductive toward him), the boy may later associate physical bonding to
a woman with pain and anxiety.
He then may become compulsive about sex—either as the freewheeling
playboy who is incapable of commitment, or the demanding husband who fears
being emotionally vulnerable to his wife. Given the biological and emotional
intensity of the mother-son bond, only someone whose intrinsic identity with
the boy exceeds that of the mother can draw him away into individuality and
adult responsibility. Clearly, only the father meets such a requirement.”
If unresolved, the young male will seek to rebel against this bonding
and control they feel subconsciously. They will have a love-hate relationship
toward their mothers during late adolescence. This can lead young males to
masturbate or get into pornography or have premarital sex in their adolescent
years as a means of dealing with the emotional pain of that bonding from the
mother. The male will eventually pull away from the mother as a result of
seeking to become independent from her. This can be traumatic for the mother.
These feelings are often felt subconsciously as the son grows into
adulthood. Often an unconscious vow is made to themselves: “I will never be
controlled by a woman again.” This personal vow can go with them into future
dating and marital relationships. The wife will often feel like their
legitimate input is being viewed as criticism by the husband and he is
resistant to talking with her at an emotional level. The husband will often
shut down or rebel against his wife’s input.
Dalbey explains that “when a boy reaches puberty, filled with the
powerful physical stirrings of his emerging manhood, the father’s role becomes
critical. If at this point Dad doesn’t call the boy out and away from the
mother to bond with his masculine roots among men, those stirrings are
overtaken by his natural bond with the mother, becoming bound up in her and
thus unavailable later to the woman he loves.
"Without the earthly father to call the son out into manhood, the
boy grows up seeking manly identity in women—whose voices seem to call him to
manhood through sexual conquest. Masculinity grows not out of conquering the
woman, but only out of conquering the man—and not another man, as in war, but
oneself.”
Dalbey explains how this can further affect the man’s identity: “Enmeshed
with his mother, he may find that his heart is unavailable to another woman to
walk with him later as a wife in his life calling (Gen. 2:24). Unable to bond
with either a woman in marriage or a man in healthy friendship, he then may
fall prey to homosexual impulses.”
This is why moral failure can happen even among the most mature
Christian men. Despite a commitment to a disciplined Christian life, they have
never resolved their inner toil rooted in mother-son bonding and he eventually
loses the battle. This is actually God’s grace designed to take the male back
to the source of his pain to become healed.
Fear of Dependency
Paul Olsen, declares in his book, Sons and Mothers, “What a man
is frightened of, more than anything else in the vast possibilities of living
experience, is dependency, regression to a state in which he becomes an infant
in the care of his mother—a mother later unconsciously symbolized by almost all
women with whom he comes in contact.”
If the son has had any male to male sexual exposure in his childhood,
this issue is compounded. Subconsciously he will seek to prove his
heterosexuality by bonding to other women outside the marriage. When a dad
abandons a son emotionally and physically, he is left to gain that validation elsewhere,
often through a female or even another man. If the boy has any male-to-male
sexual exposure he will grow into adulthood leaning toward homosexuality or he
will have to prove his heterosexuality to himself by getting his validation
from women.
The popular comedy TV sitcom series Everybody Loves Raymond is
a classic portrayal of two sons who have been doted on by their mother and
conflict consistently arises between the loyalty of the sons at the expense of
their wives. The father is emotionally bankrupt and emotionally abuses the
mother. The mother seeks to get her emotional needs met from Raymond, the
favored son. Many of the situations are quite humorous, but sadly, are
portrayed very accurately as to the depth of the problem.
Ken Nair, author of Discovering the Mind of a Woman, cited a
perfect example of this when counseling a couple and the husband was reacting
to his wife’s treatment of his wife. “I’m thinking of a situation where a wife
said, ‘On Mother’s Day, you made sure that your mother got to sit at the head
of the table and was waited on first.’ He retaliated, ‘Well, it was Mother’s
Day!’ His wife defensively said, ‘I’m a mother! In fact, I’m the mother of your
children. But that doesn’t seem to carry any weight with you!’ He illustrated his
deafness to her spirit by saying, ‘I’m not going to stop loving my mother just
to make you happy!’”
This man always gave deference to his mother’s needs at the expense of
his wife’s. The husband was never emotionally bonded to his, but was still
bonded to his mother. When this happens the husband will pull away from his
wife because he subconsciously views her as his mother who he believes is
trying to control him. Whenever a son’s behavior changes in the presence of the
mother and the wife feels like a third wheel, you can be confident there is a
mother-son bonding issue that exists.
This usually results in the son bonding to other women outside the
marriage in a subconscious attempt to deal with the pain of the mother-son
bonding. He is often a flirt with other women usually unknowingly.
Subconsciously he is meeting an emotional need in himself to prove his manhood
through other women.
John Eldredge shares a very personal account of his discovery of
similar deep rooted issues he described in his book, Wild at Heart. He
discovered what happens when a man cannot offer himself emotionally to his
wife. “If the man refuses to offer himself, then his wife will remain empty and
barren. A violent man destroys with his words; a silent man starves his wife.
‘She’s wilting,’ a friend confessed to me about his new bride. ‘If she’s
wilting then you’re withholding something,’ I said. Actually, it was several
things—his words, his touch, but mostly his delight. There are so many other
ways this plays out in life. A man who leaves his wife with the children and
the bills to go and find another, easier life has denied them his strength. He
has sacrificed them when he should have sacrificed his strength for them.”
The Father Wound
Another reason that we are seeing more moral failure today is due to
the fatherless generation that was ushered in through the baby boomer
generation. Since the 1960s we have seen a steady increase in divorce and
fatherless families. This has created an open wound in both men and women
today.
Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky in the White
House brought shame to him, his family, and the nation. To make matters
worse, he tried to cover it up by lying to the American people on national
television, and later explained it away as “not being sex.” Clinton will
forever be remembered in the history books for his indiscretions. Dalbey
explains:
“The shame from moral failure in men urges men into a variety of
compulsive/addictive behaviors—from drugs and pornography to workaholism and religious
legalism. In hiding his wound, the man eventually fulfills the awful impact of
the Malachi 4:6 curse upon the land, from abortions and sexually transmitted
diseases to crime and domestic violence. He’s left fearful of women,
distrusting of other men, shortsighted in his view of God and, therefore, cut
off from his destiny.
"In a classic example, during the shameful exposure of former
President Clinton’s sexual sins, few political commentators noted that his
father had died when Clinton was in his mother’s womb, and that his several
step-fathers were alcoholic and/or abusive. With such a deep wound in his
masculine soul and the constant negative models at hand to fill it, the boy
could only grow up looking for security in the one constant relationship,
namely, his mother. He thereby learned to seek confirmation of his manhood from
women. But since no woman is capable of doing that, and if he never goes to
Father God with his wound, he’s condemned to the eternally fruitless exercise
of going from one woman to another seeking his manhood.
"The nation has paid dearly for this with a skepticism and even
scorn for his leadership and authority. Certainly Clinton must be held
accountable for his choices and eventually suffer their consequences. But—as
destructive as the father-wound is—there’s not enough brick and mortar to build
enough prisons to hold the men who are acting it out. It’s a deadly epidemic
among us, which hides in the shadow of shame.”
