Many people reach middle adulthood confused as to why they have felt significant amounts of suffering throughout their lives. Most of my listeners who write to me are still trying to pick up the pieces in their lives from broken childhoods. They are still confused about who they are and where they are going.

People who have experienced emotionally absent mothers often struggle with problems at work, problems in future relationships, and problems with raising their own children. They feel that they have outgrown the control that their mothers once had on them. They embark on their journeys into the world with high hopes and then find themselves, decades later, still unable to rid themselves of the little voices inside their heads.

A mother's voice instills in us our morals and values in who we choose as partners later in life. If our mothers tolerated emotionally unavailable mates, it is likely that we will also tolerate them. If our mothers didn't teach us how to bring out the best in other people, we will always wonder why we seem to bring out the worst. We will become disparate, distraught, and discontent.

If our mothers were content in wallowing in their misery instead of implementing positive growth and change, then they may also pass these traits onto their children. A child who is not constantly taught patience and perseverance will always be impulsive, cranky, frustrated, and chronically unhappy.

Many people think that their mothers made conscientious choices that caused them to have a poor quality of life. The truth is that some of these mothers had underlying brain wiring and genetics that may have caused them to struggle all of those years. Their problems may have gone largely undiagnosed. These caused them to choose the wrong partners, be unable to attune to their children, and to sometimes fail in their career pursuits.