This piece has been SO difficult to put together. I can find plenty of anecdotal evidence with a quick Google search. Lots of gay women have questions about whether they are gay because of the negative relationship they had with their mother. However, trying to access research papers even when I know they exist has been nigh on impossible. I will present to you everything I can on the subject of gay women and abusive mothers aka the mother wound.
What should a mother provide?
According to indiaparenting.com – which echoes what other pages and psychologists say, mothers provide;
the strongest emotional bond with their child the right environment for development overseeing the child’s behavioural development instills trust and security in the child family bonding positive atttitude
The mother’s role is to establish love and security, comfort and closeness in her child. The mother is the first role model a girl has in being female. The mother is the trusted carer of the daughter.
What are types of maternal abuse or mother wound behaviours?
The mother was;
hypercritical
unpredictable
gave conditional love
lacked empathy
was demeaning
had poor boundaries
was emotionally absent
overly demanding
prioritised work, addictions, other siblings
forbade the child to express difficult emotions
didn’t provide comfort or security
treated the child as a peer
treated the child as a nursemaid
was physically, verbally, sexually or emotionally abusive left the child unsure of her love
Some therapists tell women to be compassionate towards the mother who abused them because their mother was a rape survivor.
- Most mothers are not rape survivors, and even if they were, nothing excuses child abuse.
- It is the mother’s job to provide a stable and loving environment for the child and it is their job to get therapy if they need it.
- These therapists are all woke women and most of the information and advice on their pages was utter nonsense. They just want to blame men for everything, even when there are no men around, and they want to keep their middle class statuses and so spout woke nonsense. Do not listen to these charlatans.
My mother was not abused. My grandparents were the most gentle, loving, caring and stable people around. They raised my mother in the village we are all from. They were not rich, but they were able to provide a good life and some luxuries. My mother struggled with her weight all her life and so had an inferiority complex because of that. My mother was one of the first in the village to go to college and she had a long career as a teacher. She was not a victim of any kind and she spoke most days about being anti-victim.
Does the mother wound make girls gay?
I have known women who have said this was definitely the case for them, women on the internet are asking the question so it’s in their minds and there is some research, but it is SO difficult to access it.
There is a researcher called Bieber who published papers on gay women and their mothers in 1967 and 1969. His research made the link between gay girls and over critical mothers who starved their daughters of affection and did not teach them homemaking skills. Bieber claimed that after therapy with him, 27% lesbian patients turned straight.
Socarides in 1978 found a link between gay girls and poor relationships with both the mother and the father, and after therapy with him, 44% lesbian patients turned straight.
My one question would be whether the girls who turned were bisexual. People are known to move between gay and bisexual or straight and bisexual, or gay to straight or straight to gay depending on experiencing trauma or healing. I am sorry that I cannot find any more up to date research.
The main theory of child development and disrupted development are attributed to Erik Erickson (1958, 1963). Please go and look at the full article and definitions on simplypsychology.org for a full run down of Erickson’s eight stages of development and what happens if all goes well, or if it goes wrong.
What does the mother wound cause in girls?
- Neediness in relationships.
- Difficulty expressing affection, detachment and fear of abandonment in relationships.
- Codependency or emotional dependency in relationships.
- Caretaking or mothering others, including in relationships.
- Self sabotage.
Real Life Examples
This woman was employed to work with LGBT Christians and she had many strange beliefs and was sacked as a result. All I can say is if someone shows you a flowchart about why Jesus doesn’t want us to masturbate, hand them their P45. Anyway, this woman was candid about herself.
She said, “I am like a child constantly crying for her mummy.” She said she was very manipulative. She said if she liked a woman, even a straight woman, she would manipulate her into spending time with her. She said she could spend all day with a friend, and 10pm would come around and the friend would get her coat to leave, and the manipulative woman would burst into tears and make up some “crisis” that would make the friend stay and also give her hugs. So she not only got to spend more time with that friend, but also got physical contact. She took ownership of this behaviour and stopped doing it with help from friends.
I had one friend who I have spoken about before who said she was not bisexual because she was raped when she was 6 years old, but she wants women to love her because at the age of 6 she told her mother a bad man had done bad things to her, and her mother said, “I don’t believe you” and literally turned her back. So that 6 year old was left to cope on her own.
Celine, a woman whose blog celestinebyceline.com says Celine was a girl who looked after her mother during her father’s violence. As an adult, Celine had a drink problem, she self harmed, had eating disorders and tried to commit suicide. When she told her mother about all of these serious issues, her mother’s response was, “Well, everyone goes through that Celine, you’re not special.”
These are two accounts of total abandonment by the mother of the daughter, and also the child had to become an adult and deal with serious crimes instead of having the life of a child.
My friend H told me that when her (only) girlfriend broke up with her, it was “just like when my mother abandoned me.” H had had a distant relationship or non existent relationship with her mother from a young age. When H came out as lesbian in her 40s, her mother said she will never speak to H again.
H is gender non conforming and is from a Muslim country. She remembers having to pretend to be like other girls and had to wear women’s clothes as she reached puberty, and she hated it, but she would have been murdered by her father otherwise. She had to stop playing football and doing everything she loved doing. She also remembers the majority of women in her village being severely mentally ill due to the violence and sexual violence committed by their husbands.
Could it be there were multiple issues around gender and sexuality going on for H? She was gender non conforming. She was gender non conforming in a country where that was not allowed so she was disconnected from other girls and society at large. She had a non existent relationship with her mother creating a need for a woman to love her. She saw men as people who were violent and sexually violent so was fearful of men or hated the idea of men in a relationship with her.
Some heterosexual mothers are fine with a daughter who is gender non conforming. That is not my experience and some of the gay women who have asked questions on the internet have said their mothers were not accepting at all of having a gender non conforming daughter. Remember this point as we go through some stats.
I have looked at various pages on ncbi.nlm.nih.gov which showed some alarming stats.
30% lesbians, 24% bi women and 19% heterosexual women were abused under the age of 12.
19% lesbians, 20% bi women and 9% heterosexual women were abused in their teen years.
LB women experienced double the rate of child abuse in their teen years as straight women. That is more than significant.
These figures jump higher if the girl is open with her family about being lesbian or bisexual. 28% experienced verbal and 5% experienced physical attacks from their mother, and 19% experienced verbal and 5% experienced physical attacks from their father.
The mother was the more abusive parent when the daughter said she is gay or bisexual.
Also, when all siblings in the family experience abuse, the lesbian or bisexual female sibling is more likely to be targeted by the parents for abuse, and more extreme abuse than their heterosexual siblings.
Lesbian and bisexual girls are more likely to be targeted by their parents for gender non conforming behaviour.
70% lesbian and bisexual women report some type of abuse in childhood compared to 57% heterosexual women. Cochran, Sullivan and Mays 2003 found that the majority of lesbians have been in therapy.
Pilkington and D’Augelli 1995 found that LGB people suffer high levels of psychological and physical abuse in childhood. Harry, McConaghy and Silove 1992 dound that gender non conforming children had a poorer relationship with their parents than other children.
Rather than consider the rather obvious fact that abuse disrupts development including sexual development, the report writers swallow a whole bottle of Copium and say because LB women are already stigmatised, they feel much more comfortable than straight women do to report abuse. Whereas perhaps the case is a disrupted development, attachment to the same sex parent (the mother), being abused by the mother, having a mother shaped wound etc etc a girl would grow up to be a woman who craves love and security from a woman.
So let’s do me.
Not like that perverts.
Am I bisexual because my mother is Godzilla in elasticated nylon trousers? No. I would say my mother’s violence and verbal/emotional abuse and how crap she was as a mother was definitely a part of why I wanted to be a man, and I mean a full man, not the half way house of top surgery and keeping the female groin that a lot of lesbians have opted for in recent years. I hated women for many reasons. A mother is a girl’s role model for how to be a female. My mother was Godzilla in elasticated nylon trousers.
I can see how so many of the friends I have known or women I have met or those whose personal accounts I have read about were women whose childhood were deprived of love, comfort, security, boundaries and safety, and so they crave a woman in their adult life to give them everything their mother did not.
A religious page probe.org talked about Ellen de Generes and her wife Portia di Rossi, and how these women were in relationships with other women when they first met, but they instantly fell in love with each other the moment they saw each other at a party. This website talks about how intense gay women’s feelings can be the instant they meet another gay woman they click with, and how they drop their long term partner for this new, exciting woman who makes them feel alive.
This is the exact same as my experience with women I have talked about in my post on Emotional Dependency in LGBT People.
C said she fell in love the moment she saw me. She said I had not even spoken to her, but as soon as she saw me (at a religious event), she fell in love with me. That is not love. That is someone who is extremely needy. C had been verbally and physically abused by her father. Her mother had had a nervous condition and did not protect C from her father, and did not hug her from the age of 6. C was in a relationship with another woman but fell in love with me the moment she saw me. C was the person I quoted in my post The Danger on Saying Love Is Love, who would let anyone do anything to her, and I mean anything including rape and attempted murder. It was all fine with C as long as the woman or the man made her feel alive.
R was married, she was 20 years my senior and her daughter was just younger than me and was about to get married. R had met me at a religious event, and was spending her evenings sending me flirtatious messages that made me feel very uncomfortable, and when I asked her to stop because I felt uncomfortable, she went on a tirade about what an awful person I am.
Like my mother, R was obese, she did not dress well, she claimed to be following Christ while hoping to cheat on her husband, slating her husband, sending someone 20 years her junior unsolicited messages and was generally a boring person. R’s friend S was also 20 years my senior and had split up from her abusive husband after 30 years of marriage. She also claimed to be a good Christian while contacting me most days on facebook, wanting me to listen to her talk about how depressed she was and the ins and outs of her occupational health appointments. She was also obese with zero personality and did not take care of her appearance.
As I have said before, a lot of women who are seeking a female partner even when they say they are good Christians living a Biblical life try to get with me because they see me as the person who is going to fix their life.
No I am not.
- I am quite ill and only just get by some days myself.
- I am not the one to fix anyone. Jesus is the only One who can fix anyone.
These women have also lied about me. So have other women. When I saw a list of names of “Christian” women who have complained about me coming onto them, I had no idea who most of them were. I guess women have tried to catch my attention, I didn’t even acknowledge them because I don’t acknowledge most women, and so their spite kicked in and they made false accusations.
So if anyone starts filling cyberspace with “Catherine came onto me and she did x, y and z to me and…”, they are lying.
For the benefit of those at the back in the cheap seats, I have no interest whatsoever in older women who are obese, average abilities, boring lives, zero personality and bad dress sense. I have no interest in most women. They simply do not interest me on any level. I am polite to women, but beyond politenesses, I move on and go and talk to men because I find men interesting to talk to.
Anyone who knows me knows my attraction to women is based on more enlightened qualities such as a pretty face, cute butt, big breasts, amazing legs and the same age group as myself. That has always been the case.
On the rare occasion I find a woman who impresses me with her brain and abilities – and that is rare because, well, I am me – I am bowled over. I have just shown my husband a pic of the last woman I had serious gays for two years ago. I told him about her at the time, but it’s the first time I’ve bothered to Google her for him. She is a government minister in her country, handpicked by the king himself or her abilities as a leader and expert in her field of work. Every time I met her (for work purposes only), I was almost on the floor. I was a jibbering wreck. Here was one of the highest performing people in the world in her speciality, wearing the most amazing abayas, and the shade of her lipstick matched her hijab precisely.
This is the kind of woman who does it for me as well as the other kind. When I am attracted to these women, I just enjoy it. I don’t try to hit on any women, Jesus isn’t OK with that, but I can enjoy finding women amazing, which is a great improvement after spending more than half of my life hating women.
So my hatred of women started when I was around 8, being bullied at school, but I also knew at the age of 8 that I hated my mother and father for the way they shouted at and hit me and my sister. I probably loved my mother when I was a toddler, but I cannot remember actually liking let alone loving my mother.
My mother did try to do mother-daughter activities with me, aged 8-12, ie cooking. My mother is not a good cook. How someone can put several carrots into a pan and the soup turns out grey with fat swimming on the surface, I do not know, but it was my mother’s weekly achievement. I also found my mother incredibly boring. She has no hobbies or interests. She did when she was younger. She was part of the Ramblers Association. That was it. Yes, we had no money, yes she was working hard to keep a roof above our heads. But she had nothing to talk about other than to try to teach me how to cook as badly as she did.
I did want to speak to my mother every night after school when I was 12. The first girl I liked was in my class (as they always are), and my mother had taught her the year before. So I wanted to talk about E every night after seeing her all day in school. E and I competed for top ranking in our school year. She was maybe smarter than me and beautiful. She was also a very good friend to me when I needed a friend and it is this that I appreciate the most. She taught me how to be strong and stand up for myself, how to make jokes and have fun.
My mother did not accept me being gender non conforming, and she made it very clear to me. She hated the day I came home from school aged 9 with a trombone instead of a piccolo. I don’t have enough fingers to play any wind instrument, and the school had no more trumpets left, so trombone it was. My mother was vocally not happy about it. She was not happy about me playing football at the church youth club. Even worse, I was in goal, throwing myself on the floor to save the ball. Yes, I have a neuro condition, I can’t run around, but I can play in goal. Me overcoming my disability in this way was not OK with my mother at all. As for me lifting weights, oh! This was back in 1997. I went to the sports store in town and bought a box of weights that had a picture of a muscular man on the front. Back in England in 1997, the only women who lifted weights were gay and they only lifted weights around other gay women. My mother was very vocal about how disappointed she was in me and everything I wanted to do in my life, everything I was interested in and how I wanted to spend my time.
My parents did do a lot of good for me. That is the confusing thing with a lot of abusive families. They also do good things as well as grabbing the nearest item with a hard surface to whack you with. My parents bought me a Boosey And Hawkes trombone for my GCSE (high school exam) years.
They bought me a trombone – about £300 – but didn’t buy me deoderant, and so I stank. My mother never taught me how to wash, use deoderant, how to take care of my strong Celtic hair, deal with the hormone condition I had inherited from her, nothing. Thank goodness for the school nurse! As well as friends telling me what I needed to do. What my mother did do was explode at me, shouting, “You STINK of BO!” But that was it. She was ashamed of me again but was not going to show me how to not stink of body odour.
My dad died several years ago and I had no relationship with him for several years before he died. My morning routine after getting up and going for breakfast before work was being shouted at by my dad for being gay, for being an embarrassment, for pretending to have the illnesses I have… Whatever he could think of to be cruel about, he did, every morning before I went to work. There’s a reason my dad had no friends.
After he died, I was quite severely ill and was not able to work. I moved in with my mother for convenience and to get the good medical care available in her area. After my dad died, my mother absorbed all of his hate powers. You see, my dad had been verbally abusive to my mother, often ridiculing her openly, and then my mother and father were violent to me and my sister. After my dad died, my mother decided to take out all her hate on me.
She would monitor me boiling an egg to make sure I was doing it correctly, or she would advise me to not talk about the priest in Antwerpen who worked with anarchists to do youth work when I go to job interviews. This is me who has worked for international companies, was among the top performers in most work places I have been in and have an excellent CV (resume) and references. She treated me as stupid, she over monitored me, she inferred regularly that I am ugly to look at and whenever I told her to stop and asked her why she was saying those things, she would scream and shout, threaten suicide, raise her fist or call social services and tell them I am mentally ill and need to be sectioned – kept in a locked mental health ward in the hospital. Social services have a file on my mother. There is a reason she has no friends.
I buggered off to Belgium for a better life, got a better life, lost the gender dypshoria because I was around nice women for a change who treated me well, and I came back to England and married my husband and kicked my mother to the kerb permanently. I had noticed that every time I was away from my family – my mum, my dad and my sister – that my life improved exponentially. Bye bye nasty pasties.
My mother did not like me being gay or bi. She really didn’t. Neither did my dad. With my mum, she would openly ridicule my gay friends, including ridiculing the gay women for their spiky hair and heavy boots. As she did this, my sister would give looks of disdain. My sister says she loves the gays. Only if the gays are men who conform to negative stereotypes of drug taking club whores.
Nothing I would ever do would have been good enough for my dad, who openly told me he was ashamed of me and compared me to his special needs students. Nothing I could ever do would be good enough for my mother… the morbidly obese, friendless, soft as shite, cry bully, average ability loser.
So what can we do?
- Get therapy! Why not join the majority of our lesbian and bisexual sisters by getting professional help. We can give ourselves that space to start to sort through our emotions, our hurts, our needs, our attractions and how we want to move forward with our lives. We can also start to address any of our behaviours that are not as wonderful as we would want for ourselves.
- Report. Go to the police and social services. Make a report. Make sure that that abuser has no more access to children. The police will take action. Been there recently with the police and they were amazing. There were no tears. It was all professional, quick and simple to do.
- Parent yourself. Take responsibility and be a better person than your mother ever was.
Something that has been a nice surprise to me was my boss for a couple of recent years, B. B took care of all her workers. She texted me on birthdays, holidays, sick days and she came in to see me after I’d been to a hospital appointment.
My mother never stood up for me. Never. Not when I was bullied, not when my dad had a go at me for things that were not my fault or for being gay, not when a vicar was verbally abusive and the bishop treated me with disdain. My mother just sat there every single time. It was all about her and how she looked in public and her status. I was an inconvenience to her, and she certainly never told anyone I’m gay.
B and I worked side by side the summer she set up the business. Her eldest son was the company’s financial director and he has his own international business too. He came in to help us one very hot and sweaty Sunday along with his father and his boyfriend. The next day, B checked, “You know M is L’s partner?” She talked about all of her sons and their children or plans to have children and how L and M will adopt. B was not ashamed of L for being gay and she saw him as no different from her other sons.
I asked K, B’s second son who worked with us while recuperating from an operation, about how he grew up and how his mother and father raised him. He said that his mother was 25 with three young sons. She had to keep firm boundaries and standards and expectations of behaviour, but she did so with love.
B has been a wonderful example to me. All her sons are highly successful men, and such lovely people. I stay in touch with B even though we no longer work together. B is the sort of woman who exudes joy. She has a radiant smile and she employs people to help them move forward with their lives. She wants people to move into professions and she is there as a stepping stone along the way. It was a real honour to work with B, to receive the respect that she gave me and the genuine care too. She came to the UK fleeing violence in her home country, but she is just so joyful and positive.
Having B as my boss has been a wonderful experience for me. I am sure the universe, God and life will give you a B. Respond positively when a B does come into your life.
Proverbs 31 was written by King Solomon 600BC. Some people don’t like Proverbs 31 because they think it puts too much pressure on women and asks too much of women. King Solomon is said to be one of the wisest people who has ever lived, so I’m going to stick with his musing. I’m all for reaching for a very high bar.
Proverbs 31:10-31 says women are noble, precious, great at business, smart, industrious, energetic, physically strong, hard working, helps people who are poor and in need, provides for herself and her family, wears stunning clothes, is respected and dignified, speaks carefully and well, oversees her household and behaves well.
You can find Proverbs 31 in the Bible, or just Google it. It’s worth a read.
Don’t forget; the world is a beautiful place. Go and be happy.
catherinehume 