Jewish Life Digital Edition September 2015 | Page 113

GOT ISSUES? SERENNE CAN HELP EMAIL: [email protected] Dear Fed Up Your mom and you have lost the way in managing your relationship in a healthy way and have entered into a power struggle which could have a seriously negative outcome. She is imposing a rigid style of parenting, DEAR SERENNE which you are finding unyielding and dictatorial. As ’m feeling so fed up and frustrated you begin to explore your emerging adult identity and at home. My mom is hectically frum some independence, her will is being pitched against and forces so much stuff on me. I’m yours, ushering conflict and a combat zone, particularly in the area of religious observance. 16 years old and she finds fault with The clue to what I believe is going on lies in what you say about your mom everything I do. She just says no to having been allowed “to do whatever she wanted growing up”. It seems your everything. It’s either that my skirt gran may have had an indulgent, more permissive style of parenting, which is too short, or my top is too low, or lacked boundaries and left your mom feeling without a firm anchor. Perhaps, I can’t go somewhere where there in hindsight, your mom wishes she had felt more firmly grounded, with are going to be boys. I feel like she’s safer parameters in place as she went through her teenage years. Because breathing down my neck. She gets of this, she is probably unconsciously drawn to the structure that halacha hysterical about what I am allowed provides. But it’s her ‘packaging’ and ‘marketing’ strategies around religious to read, eat, and she recently decided practice that are really failing her. She is using control without negotiation to get rid of our TV. I’m sick of her and compromise to enforce what she believes is best for you. She is trying dictating to me and feel like she’s to protect you, but it is being seen by you as authoritarian and perhaps even putting me off being religious with all punitive. In the process, she is unwittingly recruiting religion as the enemy, and runs the risk of turning you against the very thing she sees as offering her obsessions. My gran allowed her you a wholesome path to follow. I believe she has a ‘blind spot’ in recognising to do whatever she wanted growing this, and this knee-jerk way of handling you without two-way dialogue puts up, so how come she’s like this with you at risk of becoming more oppositional to what she represents and your me? How do I get her to back off? behaviour going underground. Fed Up This is not in the interests of open and transparent relating, and does a lot to undermine the trust between you. Your mom needs to give you the space to construct your own unique relationship with Hashem on your terms, within the wide framework of halacha, and your religious expression needs to reflect who you are, not just a one-size-fits-all prescriptive cloning of her and every stringency imaginable. She needs to honour that you are not just an extension or satellite of hers, but a young Jewish woman trying to consolidate her religious identity. She may need to relook at how she is presenting religion to you and the extreme approach she is taking, and find a way to do so that is more appealing. You need to realise that rebelling against religion is a bit like “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”. You are resisting what your mom stands for and her stringent interpretation, which feels suffocating, not the religion itself or its baseline requirements. If the two of you are unsuccessful in making these adjustments to your interactions, you may need a mediator in the form of a therapist, who could offer some objectivity, and help you both to learn to pick your fights, see things more globally and from each other’s perspective, rather than getting stuck on details, and hopefully, move towards a less turbulent path with better connection. GOOD LUCK! PHOTOGRAPH: BIGSTOCKPHOTO.COM; (PORTRAIT): SUPPLIED I Serenne Kaplan is a clinical psychologist in private practice. She has three children, two of whom are teenagers. JEWISH LIFE ■ ISSUE 88 109