Too much mother, not enough father

9 February 2026

 A common issue my male clients bring, even if they don’t realise it at the time, is an overly close relationship with their mothers growing up. This has left them with a dependence on the good opinion of the women in their life and, frequently, an unconscious anger towards women and/or fear of being dominated/suffocated.

As I say, most of these men would not be aware of the complicated relationship they had with their mothers growing up. Instead, they are aware of the symptoms of that ‘enmeshment’. These symptoms include

• finding it hard to commit to intimate relationships

• Addictive behaviour, particularly related to sex

• Sexual problems

• a difficulty identifying their needs and getting them met appropriately.

Along with a very close relationship with mother, the male client has typically had a distant or confrontational relationship with the father. This can be summed up as, ‘too much mother, not enough father’.

What sometimes happens is that there are problems in the parents’ relationship with each other, perhaps because the father is absent a lot, either physically or emotionally, and mum feels lonely. The father may have actually left the relationship, which means the boy may be alone with his mother. 

Absent fathers

Because the father is not around much, or at all, the mother may then, unconsciously, begin to put more energy into her relationship with her son in order to get some of these emotional needs met that would typically be met by her husband/partner.

But for the boy this is a heavy burden to bear. He may begin to feel that his mother seems ‘needy’ with regard to her expectations of him. Perhaps she gives him the impression that part of his role is to reassure or listen to her when she is feeling unhappy. He may feel uncomfortable with this kind of closeness, especially if she shares intimate thoughts or confides in him about her disappointment in his father. 

But for the boy it is a very difficult situation. He may feel on his own because of the distant relationship with his father, and even though he feels slightly uncomfortable with the closeness to mum it also makes him feel special. 

These conflicting feelings can cause problems for the boy later in life. He may find it hard to hold appropriate boundaries with women, taking on too much responsibility for their feelings. He may get very nervous if he feels a woman is getting too close, because he associates that closeness with being slightly manipulated and having his own needs squashed. As a result, he may go from relationship to relationship, constantly finding fault in the woman he is with and moving onto someone else.

Hard to connect

Having not had a good relationship with his father the boy can grow up finding it hard to connect in a healthy way with other men, instead shying away or becoming over competitive. 

Deep in his psyche the boy has internalised the message that ‘women’s feelings must come first and my own feelings are less valid’, but also ‘if I let a woman get too close to me emotionally, she will castrate or suffocate me.’

Such men often feel intense guilt if their girlfriend or partner is upset with them, as it makes them feel that they are a ‘bad person’ deep down. At the same time they feel great discomfort at the power the woman’s feelings have on them. They may seek to combat this discomfort in different ways. They may decide it must be the wrong relationship, and end it. They may got out to ‘play the field’ again. Or they may seek to somehow placate the woman or escape into some form of addiction, workaholism or sexual acting out. 

In order to deal with this problem the man needs to, over time, recognise what happened when he was a child and work through the feelings of grief and anger that will be present. These are feelings that will be felt not just towards the mother but also the father, who was not present in his life when the boy needed him.

It is important that we do not blame the mother for what happened. She did not intentionally establish a too-close relationship with her son but instead it emerged from her own loneliness within her marriage. 

Iron John

A great metaphor for this process appears in the book Iron John, by Robert Bly, which tells of how the boy/man must steal the key from beneath the mother’s pillow in order to get his power. In the Iron John fairy story a ‘wild man’ is imprisoned in a cage by the king and the key to the cage is under the queen’s pillow. By freeing the wild man - a man’s instinctual energies - the boy/man has developed the internal resources to separate psychotically from his mother. 

A man’s girlfriend or partner may pick up on the fact he seems to have an entangled relationship with his mother. For example, she may notice that he goes out of his way to avoid saying or doing anything that his mother may not like. The man will usually get defensive if this is pointed out to him.

One of the things the entangled man needs to do, if it’s possible, is to spend time with and get to know his father better. This may or may not be possible, depending on the emotional availability of the father. Another important process for the man will be finding other men he can spend time with and get to know. He will probably have avoided trying this because he feels rather uncomfortable around other men, often viewing them as competitors rather than potential friends. 

The man will also have to do work on letting go of any addictive or compulsive behaviours that have been a way for him to anaesthetise the pain of his isolation. The entangled may will probably also have to learn how to deal with the feelings of guilt he has when getting his needs met. As a boy he learned that he had to prioritise his mother’s feelings, so it will feel strange for a while when he allows himself to have valid feelings and needs and to take responsibility for meeting them.