Reading Please

[Lindan85]

As I near thirty and having never been married I've recently become very concerned with the state of my love life.  My question would be, is there a serious and healthy relationship in my near future?

Thank you for taking the time to do a reading for me.  I appreciate it.

[eye_of_tiger]

Lindan,

With regard to my readings in the near future means the next six months. While no reading can say with absolute certainty that you will find such a relationship within the next half yearly period the chances of you finding someone who gets your mother's approval is not looking particularly promising.

But I hear you say that you are a 29 year old adult woman, and that you are relatively independent of what your mother thinks about your sexual preferences (assuming that you no longer live under the same roof as her, and that you have a job or your own source of income), and therefore whether or not she approves of you having a female partner does not really matter.

I have heard a similar protest from people who have been brought up in a strictly religious fundamentalist family where they have eventually and understandably rebelled against the severe restrictions having been placed upon their right to decide who they wish to have a love relationship with and ultimately marry. Surely the answer is easy. Simply turn your back on your back on and forget what your parent's religion says is wrong, and stand up for your rights to live your own life as you best see fit to do so.

The problem in both cases is that having lived with their constant preaching and their avoidance of and negative attitudes towards anything which goes against their core values and beliefs over many years, our subconscious minds become conditioned to accept their values and beliefs as our own. Even when our own conscious values are almost completely the opposite of our parent's, their beliefs and values usually win when it comes to how we feel and behave from then on. We call this process internalization.

Their values and beliefs are combined to form what is called our inner parent. Even after our parent is dead their beliefs and values survive within our unconscious mind, usually causing great conflict with our more liberal beliefs and values, in turn causing much suffering as a result. Please do not get the mistaken idea that there is nothing which you can do about this once it has happened.

It would be dishonest and cruel for me to tell you that it will be easy to overcome this challenge and for you to eventually break free of your mother's strong influence over who you want to have a relationship with and/or marry, but at the same time we both need to be practical and realistic with our expectations of it happening anytime soon.

Three symbols or metaphors came to my reader's mind when I was thinking about your situation with reference to your chance of getting both the right partner for you (including their gender) and your mother's idea of who is the right partner for you ........a man. If your mother does not want to hear about your sexual preferences if they are anything other than heterosexual, then she is hardly going to want to hear about her daughter romancing and marrying another woman.

Or if by chance you were bisexual then she is definitely not going to want to do with any other arrangement which offends her values and religious or otherwise beliefs. The first symbol I saw with your reading is a triangle, with you, your mother and your future partner as the three vertices in a clockwise order. It emphasizes to me that for you to be able to have what or who you want you must first get past your mother's suffocating influence upon you, whether it be directly from your mother herself in the way in which she makes it clear that only hetero is acceptable to her in who you want to romance or marry, or if it is instead indirectly through her internalized beliefs and values which you will carry around with you every remaining day of your life (even after her death).

The second symbol was a log jam. It is felt that there is now and have been in the past several soul mates of yours who you can or could have had quite a good relationship with, but the flow of what should have been or could still be is impeded by your mother (specifically some of her more conservative attitudes) being the third party in any relationship which you might have. Do not get me wrong. Your mother is not a bad person and she has many other positive qualities to balance her conservatism.  

In other words she is just another fallible human being like the rest of us. I feel that she was herself in turn conditioned to feel the way that she does about people with sexual preferences different from the average, through her own upbringing. She loves you and wants to protect you from yourself, but cannot see that by trying to protect you from the consequences of your sexual preferences on the way in which people outside of your family would treat you and your female partner, she is stopping the flow of mutual love and respect that exist between a mother and her adult daughter.

Which is a crying pity, as otherwise you and her both have much in common which is good plus much of value to learn from each other, and life is simply too short for us not to make the most of the time which we have, while our parents are still with us. The third and last symbol is a stalemate as found in the game of chess. Nobody actually wins. Or if it is to be counted as a win, it is an empty victory indeed. A victory of stagnation? By trying to win what she sees as the battle to preserve her values and beliefs about what she thinks that her daughter's sexual preferences should be, everyone loses.

Now finally we come to the billion dollar question. That is what can you do about this without you losing each other in the process? It is felt that since you are nearly 30 years of age that the usual general advice which a reading would normally offer you is going to be too little and too late for you to make significant progress towards resolving this problem over the next year or more.

On another forum I gave you a list of non profit organizations in your state who might be able to offer you some confidential advice about how to best proceed from here. Note that some of these organizations are run by churches of several different denominations. If you and the organization could tap into what church your mother was brought up in, maybe the log jam and stalemate could ultimately be broken up, and the triangle could finally become healthy and balanced again.

At the same time celebrate the many positive qualities which you inherited from your mother, and make it clear to her how grateful you are for them, as they will serve you well in the future, as they have already done many times in the past. Spend some quality time together, without always bringing up the subject. This should strengthen your relationship with her, and hopefully soften her attitudes towards your sexual preferences after you have obtained outside advice about how best to approach this subject with her, without at the same time completely losing your mother daughter connection.

Yes there is and will continue to be the potential for you to enjoy a serious and healthy relationship in the future, but probably not within the next six months which is the period covered by this reading. To be able to have the relationship which you want you will need to get out and mix socially with prospective love partners, while doing what you are able to possibly with outside help to condition your mother into accepting that by denying you your right to assert your own sexual identity, she is running the real risk of losing her daughter.

While I cannot read her directly, I feel that your mother has a very strong need for you to love, need and care for her, which cannot happen if this unhealthy triangle of codependency, log jam or stalemate goes on much longer. She needs you just as much or maybe even more, than you need her (although she will never admit it to your face). She does not want to lose you,  any more than you want to lose her.

Be kind to each other and to yourself,

EoT  

[Lindan85]

I am actually bisexual.  A lot of my mom's beliefs are internalized for me since she lives 3 hours away.  For her, she's like me to be with a christian man.  Despite gender issues, most people in my life are athiest.  There are definitely things we need to work on before I move half way across the country.  (Which I plan to do next summer)


Thank you for the reading.  I really appreciate it.

[eye_of_tiger]

I am actually bisexual.

Or if by chance you were bisexual then she is definitely not going to want to do with any other arrangement which offends her values and religious or otherwise beliefs.

Yes I did see that possibility, but is the fact of you being bisexual any worse in your mother's eyes than if you were only interested in other women as sexual partners (a rhetorical question)?

There are definitely things we need to work on before I move half way across the country

When you said "we" did you mean your mother and yourself, as her mind and heart both currently appear to be closed to the idea that your sexual preferences are not going to change, so unless her attitudes towards you not being straight begin to soften sooner rather than later, then your ability to work with her is always going to be severely limited?

Once you move half way cross the country the lack of her physical presence should weaken her influence over your choice of partners the longer you are there, but her internalized messages could potentially become even more of a problem when compared to how influential they are when you are only living three hours apart from her.

I am not saying this in order to discourage you from trying your best to convince her that you will respect her beliefs if at the same time she can equally respect your right to be you, including your sexual preferences.

But I am preparing you for the distinct possibility that you may need to part your ways, without ever being able to fully repair the damage which all this intolerance has already had upon your mother - daughter relationship.

Be as kind as possible to her, but at the same time defend your right to decide who you are, and with whom you want to live. Always easier said than done.

All the best,

EoT