Sons of Seductive Predatory Mothers

The taboo of mother-son incest

“I have done that’, says my memory. I cannot have done that — says my pride and remains unshakeable. Finally — memory yields.”~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

The Katey Sagal character, (Gemma) in Sons of Anarchy and the Leila George / Ellen Barkin character, (Janine) in Animal Kingdom epitomize textbook maternal narcissists who wage psychological warfare on their sons through sexualized aggression. Sabotaging their son’s love interests, engaging in shared drug use and crossing physical boundaries with prolonged mouth kisses, sleeping in the same bed, shower interruptions and eroticized overtures reveals the way a character disordered mother uses sex to ensure an incestuous hold. Likewise, in the film Queen of Hearts step-mom Anne played by Trine Dyrholm, takes incestuous abuse to the extreme, resulting in her troubled step-son’s death.

Incest, a sexual transgression involving discrepancies in age, power, and experience mostly occurs between a child and someone known to or related to the child. (Courtois CA., 2010). Given the power differential between a trusted adult authority and a younger person, it is irrelevant that the child seemed to have desired, sought, or given consent, as the victim has been groomed, bribed, coerced and threatened by the perpetrator.

Outside of media depictions, the notion that women actually sexually abuse children is anathema to the one-dimensional stereotypical portrayal of women as the embodiment of benign tenderness and nurturing selflessness. This sanitized characterization suggests that the female part of the species is inherently virtuous and non-violent. While this might seem empowering it is quite the opposite.

Disowning the dark side of human nature results in projecting ‘good’ and ‘evil’ polarizations. As a result, women are regarded as either all nourishing or malevolent. There are no gradations. After all, stereotypes obscure human variability. Consequently, this polarization in either an idealized depiction or a debased projection interferes with accurately assessing female character. Moreover, what is perceived as threatening is denied.

Maintaining a one-dimensional conceptualization of females as soft, sweet and selfless interferes with differentiating healthy expressions of aggression in women from egregious amoral behavior. This proclivity is intensified when the archetypal role of the mother is factored in.

The need to preserve the mother’s virtue as a source of safe respite blinds us to the complexity of her humanity.

An example of this split is revealed in the figure of the witch. Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz, renowned for her psychological analysis of fairy tales said, “the witch is an archetypal aspect of the Great Mother. She is the neglected Mother Goddess, the Goddess of the Earth in her destructive aspect.”

As von Franz suggests, the mother who deviates from perfection and shows a dark side falls from Grace and becomes the witch, an evil supernatural being. Moreover, this vast divide between the Great Mother and the Dark Witch clouds our ability to assign appropriate culpability to mothers who actually do ruthlessly harm. That evil is typically cloaked in virtue obfuscates the maternal predators’ motivations. Remaining oblivious to this paradoxical reality allows mothers free rein to perpetrate traumatic abuse with impunity.

The disordered maternal abuser understands how the bifurcation of the feminine as creator or destroyer obscures the ability to identify predation in women. Hence, she strategically crafts a personae that conceal her malevolent agendas and malignant traits. Her true self hides behind a beguiling, clichéd feminine demeanor.

Yet given my experience for over three decades as a complex trauma therapist, along with the findings documented by psychotherapist and sex therapist Dr. Hani Miletski in Mother-Son Incest: The Unthinkable Broken Taboo Persists, sexualized dynamics between mothers and their sons is indeed an unfortunate reality.

Dr. Miletski explains that there are many blatant misconceptions that contribute to society’s denial. One such erroneous belief is that mother-son incest occurs only when intercourse is involved. The truth is sexual abuse can take various forms, including physical acts, inappropriate touching, verbal abuse, and exposure to explicit materials. In the mother-son relationship, incestuous abuse tends to specifically involve sexualized caretaking, seduction and parentification.

Children who are parentified (Boszormenyi-Nagy & Spark, 1973) have thrust upon them responsibilities and roles typically reserved for adults. These duties far exceed the routine chores and tasks that assist children in developing self-reliance and responsibility. These egregious conditions not only derail healthy maturation, but they can also traumatize the vulnerable child, especially when parentification veers into emotional or covert incest.

The parentified son who takes on an eroticized spousal role is treated by his mother as a substitute husband. He is groomed to abdicate his essential needs for boundaried love and care to compliantly enmesh with his mother. This perverse role distortion and sexualized bond is presented to the child as a badge of honor.

Kenneth M. Adams, Psychologist and author of Silently Seduced: When Parents Make Their Children Partners / Understanding Covert Incest explains, “An important difference between overt and covert incest is that, while the overt victim feels abused, the covert victim feels idealized and privileged. Yet underneath the thin mask of feeling special and privileged rests the same trauma of the overt victim: rage, anger, shame and guilt.”

Conditioned to be a confidant, the son is habitually swallowed up by the unresolved wounds and primal needs of their mentally unstable mother. Required to meet emotional needs suited only to be met by a romantic partner, the son is a recipient of inappropriate information. Accordingly, the mother’s sexual fantasies, exploits of infidelity and complaints about the father’s sexual performance, concomitant to regularly comparing the son to his deficient father, often occur.

Additionally, the mother’s dissatisfaction and insatiable neediness usher in other excessive boundary violations. Her ‘adoration’ and uncompromising need for control may be expressed through erotically charged back rubs, stimulating intimate talks, bathing together, dressing and undressing in front of the teenage son, intruding on the son’s privacy, forced cuddling and sharing the same bed.

Lacking maternal instinct, predatory mothers are too self consumed with their own needs and desires to care about the son’s discomfort with her behavior. Rather, the son is viewed as the panacea to her emptiness. Under these conditions, sexual exploitation progresses when the mother simply refuses to back off in spite of clear indicators of the son’s distress.

However, rather than seeing how the mother has coerced him to satisfy unappeasable needs, to be a confidant, a companion and a caretaker in exchange for morsels of validation and the illusion of being loved, many sons harbor lofty notions of dutiful self-sacrifice. Many even rationalize physical acts of sexual exploitation as an extended expression of love. An initiation into sexual discovery.

Yet difficulties with adjustment suggest that in spite of these coping mechanisms, psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety, complex trauma (C-PTSD), and substance abuse problems are pervasive in male victims of maternal sexual abuse.

Trained at an early age to accommodate and normalize oedipal transgressions, sons of predatory mothers fear abandonment or humiliation if they refuse their mother’s demands. Since perverse over-involvement and dependency are reinforced with equating one’s worth and lovability with exploitation, their dependency and sense of ‘value’ is predicated on how he can satisfy the mother’s needs.

Should this charged symbiotic relationship culminate into sexual relations, the son who is deeply entrenched in romanticizing objectification will struggle with the confusion and mixed feelings that accompany simultaneous arousal and fear.

By the time Ian entered adulthood his sexual anorexia coupled with episodic porn binges induced him to pursue trauma-informed treatment. Although he was a very successful architect, he was unable to sustain a loving committed relationship.

Our sessions revealed that he felt both gratified and icky when he would ritualistically massage his mother’s legs and back. The stimulation he felt when she sighed with pleasure and affirmed how only he could please her was frightening, but also satisfying. “Unlike your pathetic father,” she would add.

By ten years old Ian was privy to all the unsavory details of his father’s impotence and his mother’s revulsion. Sometimes she would even crawl into bed with Ian and cry maudlin tears over some marital crisis she was contending with. Sloppy wet kisses and unwanted caresses accompanied these theatrical escapades. Mommy’s little man always knew how to make her feel better.

Not surprisingly, by the time Ian reached adolescence, individuation and efforts to romantically bond with an appropriate mate were actively subverted by his disordered mother. His mother’s envious reproach towards girls expressing interest in him reinforced their parasitical dynamic and derailed him from leaving the nest. It was understood that her desires and needs were to take priority over actualizing autonomy and developmental milestones. He was her possession.

Like Ian, many of my male clients who were sexually abused by their mothers experience a range of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral difficulties, often similar to those experienced by survivors of other forms of sexual abuse, but with additional complexities due to the unique dynamics of the mother-son relationship.

Originator of attachment theory, psychiatrist and developmental psychologist John Bowlby wrote, “A securely attached child will store an internal working model of a responsive, loving, reliable care-giver, and of a self that is worthy of love and attention and will bring these assumptions to bear on all other relationships. Conversely, an insecurely attached child may view the world as a dangerous place in which other people are to be treated with great caution, and see himself as ineffective and unworthy of love.”

Hence, when a child is abused by a caregiver, especially one as central to a child’s life as a mother, profound feelings of betrayal and difficulties with trusting others and forming healthy relationships ensue. As Bowlby’s observations suggest, when a mother is not a safe haven and more precisely, when chronic exposure to trauma infiltrates the dynamic, an insecure attachment style is likely to result.

Accordingly, the son who was pathologically involved with a predatory mother is beset by intimacy disorders, mood disorders, dissociative disorders and complex trauma. He is tasked with dismantling a self identity shaped by their mother’s projections and insatiable needs. What’s more, male survivors are particularly plagued by fears of losing control due to staggering rage, along with sexual dysfunction and pervasive feelings of emasculation.

Taking all this into consideration, irrespective of evidence to the contrary, the societal denial of sexual predation in mothers reinforces concealment and underreporting. The taboos and stigma around discussing sexual abuse, particularly when perpetrated by a mother against her son, have contributed to a lack of comprehensive data. Additionally, many cases go unreported due to factors such as fear, shame, or confusion.

Ultimately, given that the son’s attachment to his mother is the most important and fundamentally necessary relationship for his survival, it is essential that mental health professionals promote conditions that challenge misconceptions about the reality of mother-son incest and maternal predation. For this to happen, beliefs around women as potential predators and attitudes towards males who are victims need to be reexamined so that male children and adult survivors can safely disclose abuse and access the help they desperately need.