I realize now that during this time I was giving off negative aspects to my self in behavior with other people. I would have dramatic realization issues, as I gave deliberate efforts that highlighted characterizations of my situation with my mom. Every so often I stressed my problems with my mother, and talked badly about her to others on a regular basis. I wanted others to understand my frustration with her, when in reality I just added to the vicious cycle I was going through at the time. Rather than forget and go forward, I consistently thought about the communicative problems we were having such as bad silences, snapping, and ignoring.
This affected my relationships with my friends. They didn’t know how to cope with my bad talking, and negativity and anger towards my mother. They all thought of her as she actually was and is, as a great mom and warm-hearted person. I then got in a gloomy self-fulfilling prophecy. I was being overly pessimistic. But this combined with my mother’s self-reinforcing cycle that I think started our problems, as she made comments about certain friends, comments that I hated and disagreed with. When I interacted with others the coordinated state was then at odds with both groups.
I felt ignorance from my friends simply because they could not show the understanding I wanted at the time. I felt this caused rejection feelings, and non-synchrony. A self-imposed prophecy came about because whenever I talked with others the negative issues of my relationship with my mom always arose. John Bowlby’s theory of attachment and imprinting fully relates to my discussion. The attachment theory applies to the insecure attachment I felt with my mom, because of anxiety and bad communication at the time.
I felt insecure and uncomfortable even talking or looking at her. As she is my mother I had attachment security of love and mother guidance. But in contrast I also had situations of insecure attachment because of the non-validation from the negative self-reinforcing cycle at that time. We both couldn’t be expressive to each other, and so the only expression I could vent was with others less as important as my mom was. My mother is supposed to be my most trusted companion, but our critical feedback between each other during the bad phase, destroyed this at the time.
The imprinting theory enables me to understand how we gain our attachment forms. In our early interpersonal experiences the attachment we form with the parent become imprinted on us, and become the ways we create attachment relationships with others. Whether it is with my mother or others such as family and friends, and peers. How we handle and have communicative coordination with others is affected in this early phase, as this attachment is the result of evolution and natural selection. We try to get as much proximity to the caregiver, which in my case is my mother, as much as we can.
The interpersonal events in Bowlby’s four focuses of attachment relate to the relationship with my mom. What was and was not communicated between myself as a baby girl and my mother affected the development of my growth in communication coordination. My mother has since told me that when I was an infant she did not tolerate some behaviors between my two older sisters and myself. I regularly threw things at my sisters, and fought with them, violently at times, pulling each other’s hair and my mother would get mad.
But my mom’s anger provided enough to give off signals in her communication, which affected me early on. This obviously affected me early in life, and the attachment I felt with my mother became insecure at certain times, because of upsetting her, and realizing what she would and would not tolerate. As I discussed, later in my life when I wanted (or did not want) to discuss situations that I felt strong about such as friend’s problems or relationships, my mother’s non-validation can be related back to the “imprinting” earlier in our lives’ communicative experiences.
I am now an adult and I can see and appreciate the relationship and communicative interactions with my mother and social self with friends, and peers. I love my mother more than anything, as she loves me. And I know we will always have our disagreements and upsets together. But looking through the interpersonal and social communication I have learned about, I can hopefully not fall back into the same bad habits we both have had before.