For a man who is emotionally entangled with his mother, it will be normal for him to focus on her needs. This is likely to mean that he won’t even be aware of a lot of his own needs. His mother’s needs are then going to consume him and it won’t occur to him that he is out of touch with himself.
His mother needs will be seen as his needs and most of his own needs will have been pushed out of his conscious awareness. Part of her due to him not having emotionally separated from her and seeing her needs as his own needs, he won’t feel like an individual. He will look as though he is separate from her, but this will be as far as it will go.
What is almost certain is that his mother won’t be able to see that he is not part of her; as far as she is concerned, he will be an extension of her. He will have his own life to live but his mother won’t be able to accept this. No support the man is going to feel comfortable with what is going on, at least on one level and his mother will be the same.
As a result of this, the man is unlikely to feel the need to change his life and his mother is highly unlikely to encourage him to do so. She will have her own castrated servant and she is not going to want her son to live his own life. This would have meant that he had to lose touch with his own needs and focus on his mother.
The trouble is that as he was totally powerless and dependent, he wouldn’t have been able to do anything about what was going on. He would have simply had to disconnect from his feelings, his pain, and to tolerate what was going on. A cover-up the pain that he experienced and continued to experience, as time went by, would have stayed in his body and he would have been completely estranged from himself.
He would have been connected to himself when he was born, most likely, and, due to how his mother treated him, he would have ended up being a stranger to himself. In other words, he won’t have a relationship with himself and he will wear a mask that covers up how he truly feels. But, not only will other people be deceived, he will also be deceived.
A surface level existence he can typically come across as happy, easy-going and selfless, and he can believe that this reflects who he is. Both of these things will be a consequence of the fact that he is not listening to himself. His need to behave in the same way, however, can be so strong that it will take something drastic in order for him to “wake up” and to see that he is living in the wrong way.
The catalyst what could shake him out of the state that he is in is if he was to get into a relationship and/ or he was to have a breakdown. If the former was to take place, his partner would be able to clearly see what is going on and relay this information back to him. At first, he might dismiss and resist what he hears but, over time, it might go in and this could allow him to gradually break away from his mother.
If the latter was to take place, he might have no other choice than to reach out for support, with this being a time when he will receive the guidance that he needs to move forward. Two parts there will be at least two things that will need to take place: firstly, he will need to get in touch with his needs, and secondly, he will need to realise that his needs are important. Reconnecting to his body will be a key part of what will allow the first thing to take place.
As for the second part, he will need to question what he believes about his own needs and to focus on the fact that his needs are more important than his mothers. Thanks to how he was treated year after year by her, he would have naturally come to believe that her needs were more important than his own. A process it can be as if this is the truth as opposed to something that he has just come to believe.
He could have an idealised view of her and believe that she did the best that she could, for instance, and that she loved and still loves him. Irrespective of whether she did the best that she could or whether he believes that she loved and still loves him, she did a lot of damage to him very early on and continues to do so, and facing up to this and working through his inner wounds is the only way that he will be able to grow and develop and to truly live his own life. This is something that can be provided with the assistance of a therapist or healer.