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Introduction
How many times a day does a mother put the needs of her child before her own? Is it even possible to meet the needs of two people, simultaneously and congruently?
What do we do if we realise that both our child and ourselves are hungry? Do we feed them first and push through our hunger? Or do we grab ourselves some food so we’re in a better place to look after them? Both choices can easily cause discomfort for the mother, whether through hunger or guilt. Does this inevitably mean incongruence? It can be extremely easy not to think of our own needs when we are personally, ethically and legally obligated to care for our children, and we feel a deep desire to care for them.
A common theme in my dissertation interviews was the struggle to find congruence as a mother. The women I spoke to talked about the challenges of caring deeply for their children whilst also keeping in touch with their own needs and the constant juggle this brought. I have spent the past few years thinking about this maternal incongruence and what it might mean for person-centred theory and for these mothers. I have wondered if there is an inevitable incongruence with being a mother. Is it even possible to authentically be ourselves and authentically mother?
What is Congruence?
The concept of congruence was introduced into the Person-Centred Approach by Carl Rogers in his 19 propositions (Rogers, 1951). Congruence is often used interchangeably with authenticity, although some researchers see congruence as an internal state of alignment, whereas authenticity can also include how we outwardly act. Congruence is described as the accurate symbolisation of our experiences without distortions or denial and, interestingly, was illustrated by Rogers with the following example:
‘The mother who ‘rejects’ her child can lose the inner tensions connected with her relationship to her child if she has a concept of self which permits her to accept her feelings of dislike for the child, as well as her feelings of affection and liking.’ p. 513.
If we are being congruent, we are open to everything that is happening to us, whether that is the love we feel for our child or the resentment we are feeling towards them for their demands. In the hunger example above, if we are congruent in that moment, then we might accept that we can’t meet everyone’s needs immediately, and it’s okay to choose who eats first, even if it means we are the first to grab a quick sandwich.
In contrast, incongruence is a state in which there is a difference between what we are actually experiencing and the image we have internalised of ourselves. For example, we might believe that we are a ‘good’ mother and, having heard descriptions of mothers being patient and putting their children first, we might then find it very difficult to meet our own needs when our child also needs our help. Using the hunger example again, if we then choose to get ourselves some food first, we then need to make sense of the two conflicting ‘facts’. Are we no longer a good mother because we met our needs first? Or do we tell ourselves that our child is impatient and in a bad mood today?
In person-centred theory, congruence is associated with wellbeing and growth, whereas incongruence is associated with emotional distress and difficulties. Neither is an all-or-nothing state, though, and we all move continuously between the two states. As Schmid puts it, ‘the task is to learn and improve congruence, not to have it or not.’ (2001, p. 222)
Being congruent doesn’t itself ensure instant happiness, but being aware of our own personal responses to the things that we experience can lead us towards a life that feels right for us and reflects our own individual values.
The Challenge of Finding Congruence As A Mother
Being congruent can be a huge challenge. We have all been subject to pressure to act and think in certain ways and to be the person others think we should be. These rules are referred to as conditions of worth in person-centred theory – the conditions we have to meet if we wish to be seen as worthy to those around us.
Being a congruent mother is especially challenging as there are so many conditions of worth around motherhood. Mothers are constantly hearing messages about what makes a good mother from family, friends, health professionals, parenting experts, government policies, social media and many more sources. One thing that many new parents notice is that everyone is very quick to offer advice, whether they were asked for it or not.
I regularly hear new mums describe a smile-and-nod-but-ignore response to this advice, but although they may not be following the advice themselves, the implicit message is clear: others have opinions about the best, right or wrong way to do most things around motherhood. It can therefore be extremely hard for each mother, among all these messages, to get in touch and stay in touch with what’s right for them.
Priya Joy describes this constant dissonance in her book ‘Motherland: A Memoir of Motherhood, Race and Identity’ (2024):
‘I’ve never met a mother who is exactly on the inside as she seems to be on the outside, myself included. Becoming a mother seems to involve signing a contract of permanent cognitive dissonance. Wanting our kids to be musical, sporty and arty while bitching relentlessly about taking them to those extracurricular activities. Hating the pressure to make Halloween costumes or bake cakes, while also wanting to be effortlessly great at them. Or vice versa, knocking out tray bakes like we’re TV show contestants while yearning to just slide a Colin the Caterpillar into our supermarket trollies instead. Motherhood strips away several layers of skin and makes everything feel more raw, more visceral, the highs exquisite and the lows excruciating. But it can also make us swallow our true feelings, squash them down somewhere between layers of cellulite, tiger-striped stretch marks and the silky soft scar tissue of childbirth.’ p.157
Alongside these pressures and conditions of worth, the time we may have had to reflect on where we are and process our day is also greatly reduced when we become parents. We struggle to even sleep, shower or eat three square meals a day so quiet reflection is a dream. We also don’t often hear the realities of motherhood before we’re there. Mothers day is all flowers and chocolates, so it can be a shock when reality hits.
Nonetheless, despite all these challenges, I believe that it is possible to find congruence as a mother from a theoretical standpoint. It’s hypothetically possible to be open to and accepting of all that we are experiencing in our days of parenting, but it’s just very challenging.
But is it just challenging because of internalised conditions of worth? After much reflection, I think it might be more than that.
Relational Congruence
There is no other relationship quite like the connection between a mother and the child who has shared her body or between a mother and a child who is so dependent on them for their needs. With such close ties to our children, especially when they are totally dependent babies, I think that it’s worth looking at the congruence of a mother-child dyad as one unit.
In a chapter on authenticity, Peter Schmid (2001) writes that congruence always takes place in a relationship with another person because we are, at our core, relational beings. He describes a plurality of existence, where we are simultaneously seeking congruence as individuals, in our close relationships and also within groups in the wider world and the tensions that this brings. He writes:
‘[Being a person] combines two unrenounceable dimensions of human existence: the substantial or individual aspect of being a person and the relational or dialogical aspect of becoming a person. Both of these ways of understanding the human being are contrary, even conflicting, yet it is exactly this tension of autonomy and interconnectedness (or relationality), independence and interdependence, self-reliance and commitment, sovereignty and solidarity, which uniquely characterises the human.’ p.214
Similarly, Godfrey Barrett-Leonard (2005) describes how we are all members of many groups, including dyads within our family and how these influence us as individuals. He describes each of these groups as having its own consciousness:
‘“we” has a form of consciousness accompanying the “I” consciousness of participants.’ p.66
He says we aren’t ever just an ‘I’, we are always also a ‘we/us’. However, we can come across problems if we struggle to switch between these different selves:
‘Persons who live rather distinctly differing selves in different life contexts may be quite aware that this is so. Through such awareness, the differing self modes effectively are in communication, not shut off from each other. Persons who seem unaware of how much they change when differing subselves come into play suffer an impoverished inner communication that condemns them to more repetitive patterns. In this second case, the subselves are living as though in different chambers in the total personality. When movement occurs from this “chambered” state towards more inwardly open dialogue, this is not just a subsystem change but an integrative shift in the working of the combined self-system.’ p.12
Therefore, as we live in relationship with our families, there is a need to be able to be congruent in these different states but also to switch between these different ways of being, openly and with awareness.
Switching Our States of Being
It is therefore theoretically possible to be congruent as we mother, however, to achieve this level of openness and alignment, we need to be aware of our different relational selves as well as our individual self and to be able to switch easily between them. This, at the very least, will be a big adjustment in matrescence and as we welcome each child to our family, on top of our existing relationship with our partner.
I have noticed in my conversations with mothers that they will often switch between talking about themselves in relation to their baby or child (the relationship) and talking about themselves as individuals. Some seem to move quite effortlessly between these two selves but others seem to feel the incongruencies and contradictions more deeply. These mothers may talk about their individual incongruence while we talk about their relationship with their baby, or talk about feeling incongruent as a mother while we talk about their individual identity, or both. It can feel tangled.
I now wonder if part of the challenge of finding congruence in motherhood, particularly in the early days, is the shifting focus or switch between these states of ‘I’ and ‘we/us’. Our relationship with our children isn’t our only relationship, but it is a particularly close one, which often forms rapidly under intense pressures of endurance. It involves a rapid juggling of tasks, connections, and ways of relating to ourselves, and therefore, it’s easy to see how we can lose touch with our authenticity and congruence at this time.
In my own life, I have noticed that I feel a huge lightness when I have managed to find the time to write for an hour or two. A lot of this writing is reflective, involving me thinking about my own perceptions, viewpoints, and ideas. I believe that this is because it allows me to become more congruent as an individual and to let go of the conflicts that I can feel when I am also switching to being a mother and looking after the needs and thoughts of someone else alongside my own.
Similarly, when I am in the mothering zone, and my child needs my focus, I feel calm and congruent in a similar way to how I might feel with a client (albeit one with much fewer boundaries).
I therefore think that the constant switching between differing selves is a huge part of the challenge of find congruence as a mother. However, I think there is one more aspect to consider.
Finding Balance
If rapid switching between selves were the only challenge, a solution would be to focus on our child or find time away from them. However, I also hear the challenge of both of these situations. Extended time with our children with no time to ourselves can be very difficult, but so too can extended time away from them. I often hear the challenges of the intense mothering of the first year, but I also hear how hard returning to paid work, the growing independence of a child or a child leaving home can be. I therefore think that finding a balance of congruence in different relationships is also needed.
In her book, based on her work with many new mothers, ‘What Mothers Learn’, psychotherapist Naomi Stadlen devotes a chapter to anger and writes:
‘In overstretching and forgetting about themselves, they have ‘overbalanced’ in the child’s favour. Their angry outbursts make sense as an effort to redress the balance by swinging an equal amount towards their forgotten selves. But it doesn’t achieve justice because neither extreme feels right.’ p.102.
Stadlen was a psychoanalytical psychotherapist, but I think that what she writes about here could also clearly be described as incongruence. Using my own example, I feel congruent writing alone, and I also feel congruent caring for my child but in order to feel an overall congruence in my life, I need to find a balance of the two that feels right for me.
Maternal Congruence
I think, therefore, that the challenges in finding congruence as a parent are two-fold. Firstly, we need to be comfortable switching between ourselves as individuals and ourselves in relationship with our children. Secondly, we need to feel balance between ourselves as mothers and as individuals.
If we look at life with a newborn baby in this context, it’s very easy to see how rapidly new parents need to switch between their own basic needs and caring for their baby. There is also very little balance, with the baby’s needs usually coming first. As time goes on, this becomes easier as life becomes a little more predictable and the balance also tips a little more in the parents’ favour.
However, some parents find this tension and shifting harder than others. Maybe their baby was ill, so the focus was necessarily more on them. Maybe their birth was very difficult, so they needed more time to process this. Maybe they have introjected more conditions of worth around parenting that make it harder to be in touch with their own experiencing. Maybe their family and friends aren’t able to offer an accepting environment for them to find their feet.
This also describes other often difficult challenges for new mums. The return to paid work involves finding new balances and relationships with our selves as can an increasingly independent child or a child leaving home.
Conclusion
Mothering involves a huge amount of adjustment, switching and juggling between our needs and those of our children. Furthermore, this adjustment takes place at a time of intense sleep deprivation, a steep learning curve of new skills and a very physical recovery from birth. Add to this a new intense relationship with a child, as well as a shifting relationship with a partner and other children, and it’s easy to see how keeping in touch with our own experiencing and finding congruence can feel like such an impossible task.
Finding congruence is only one of the many challenges of motherhood, but it underpins so much else. It’s very easy to ignore amongst so many other demands and changes in early parenthood; however, I have seen first-hand the difference that offering a little space for new mothers to talk about these shifts in identity can make.
As therapists, we can offer our clients some shelter from the relentless conditions of worth around motherhood as well as an accepting space for them to voice their honest responses to this transition. It can be taboo to say that you resent your baby or even hate them at times, but in the context of the impact they have on our lives, it may be entirely congruent to feel that way about them. That doesn’t mean that we don’t also love them and would sacrifice so much for them, too. As Jo Cohen Hamilton (1999) writes, ‘Fortunately, for most people, the pain of being without their children overshadows the struggle to be with them.’ p.114.
If we are open and honest about our relationships with our children, this can only help ourselves and others who will hear that they’re not alone in their ambivalence. It also has the potential to be the foundation for an open and honest relationship with our children, where they gradually learn that we have needs too. What better relationship could there be for them to learn their own empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard for others?
Points for Reflection
- How do your own relationships affect your congruence?
- What helps your own congruence as you move between different groups and one-to-one relationships?
- Godfrey Barrett-Lennard writes about the importance of being mindful of the groups and relationships that our clients are part of when we listen to them. How has this come into your work?
Author’s Reflections
I have been thinking about congruence and mothering since 2020. My thoughts have evolved a lot in that time from thinking it wasn’t possible to working out that it is, along with some possible reasons why it can feel so difficult. I’m sure my ideas will keep developing, but it feels good to get them to a point ready to share. I really look forward to hearing what other people think rather than them just circling in my own head.
Resources and Further Reading
- ‘What is Authentic Mothering?’ is an article on this website aimed towards parents covering similar ideas to this page.
- ‘Matrescence by Lucy Jones’ is a fascinating book about the transition to motherhood and the wide range of psychological and emotional change that this brings.
References
Barrett-Lennard, G. (2005). Relationship at the Centre: Healing in a Troubled World. Whurr Publishers.
Joy, P. (2024). Motherland: A Memoir on Race, Identity and Belonging. Penguin.
Rogers, C. (1951). Client-centred therapy: Its current practice, implications and theory. Robinson.
Stadlen, N. (2020). What mothers learn without being taught. Piatkus.
Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash
