Lesson 4: The 7 M’s

Mothering is just that. It is taking care of and parenting someone else. For a child, it’s appropriate to caretake and protect. But, not so much with adults. This parental energy includes things such as offering correction, input, direction, and suggestions to someone without being asked. It is doing things for others that they’re capable of doing for themselves, catering to people, and not allowing grown ups to be responsible for their actions, decisions, and consequences.

As an adult, it can be challenging to keep track of yourself. Yet, someone who monitors tends to mind other people’s business more than their own. This pattern includes things such as observing another person to assess what you think they should or shouldn’t be doing, checking up on or checking in on someone, gauging their mood, status, behavior, and decisions to make sure they stay in alignment with what you approve of.

Managing is supervising, advising, dictating, and asserting authority. It puts you in control of someone else as though you are responsible for the results of their life. Managers tend to regulate the right way things should be done with rules, procedures, and routines; and they have the final say. There’s a place for managers, but not in relationships.

Meddling is getting involved in other people’s business, interfering, inserting your opinion, and occupying yourself in people’s affairs without their request or permission. Butting into someone else’s life can look like a lot of different things: telling someone what they should or shouldn’t be doing, gossip, offering your opinion without being asked, snooping, or otherwise interfering. Sticking your nose in someone else’s business won’t help you build healthy relationships and you’re crossing a line.

This is a sneaky pattern because it’s often so subtle and seemingly innocent that it goes unrecognized. Manipulating encompasses any attempt to orchestrate circumstances, outcomes, or people to do or not do something. These are attempts to influence people, places, or things to create a certain result that you want. It’s common to miss this pattern because you mean well and have the other person’s best interest at heart but trying to arrange life so that things go the way you think they should is still manipulation.

Martyrdom is often dramatic energy that includes exaggerated suffering that is an attempt to get acknowledgment, sympathy, support, love, and understanding; but the torment is done at your own hand. These patterns are filled with constant long suffering, sacrifice, victimhood, and lament.

Martyrdom is self-induced suffering by taking too much responsibility for others and not enough for yourself. It is playing the victim as though you have no choice in the matter. There are layers of guilt and sacrifice attached. It is rare in life that you no choice. More likely, you have hard choices and may not know how to ask for your needs to be met. It may feel scary and vulnerable so you give and give in order to be recognized and valued.

Remember Eeyore from The 100 Acre Wood? He is quite a character filled with heavy, depressed, apathetic energy that he carries into all of his affairs. He has a glass half empty kind of view of the world; and if something is going to go wrong, Eeyore has already thought about it, played it out, and surrendered to it.

Moping encompasses disheartened energy and perspective that influences the way you see and approach situations, and the way people perceive you. It is a gloomy and dejected perspective that can dim hope, positivity, and connection.