Are You Proud of Me Now?

Author: Majken Lorelei Matzau

When Thomas first steps into my consulting room, I notice his clenched energy. He is 43, self-employed, and on paper you might imagine him to be driven by the kind of fire that typically characterizes people who build something from nothing.

But I feel no fire in him. His posture is hunched, his gaze evasive, and he radiates a dark, compressed bitterness.

Thomas tells me he has come to see me because his family has turned away from him. There has been no open rupture. The distance has grown in that slow, almost more painful way, where you gradually sense that your place in the family's inner hierarchy has shifted.

Before, he says, the family listened to him. They sought his counsel. He was the older brother, and there had been a natural authority attached to that position. Now he finds that they increasingly turn to his brother-in-law instead – a man who, having once been self-employed, now works in finance and seems, in his mother's eyes, to represent a more stable and respectable path in life.

This is a tender point for Thomas, who experiences his mother as critical and unwilling to acknowledge the business he has built.

Over the course of our conversation, it becomes clear that Thomas is not simply angry because his mother thinks he should find a steady job. Beneath the anger lies a deeper disappointment. He longs to be seen. For his mother to understand and acknowledge him – and the choices he has made.

In other words, Thomas expects his mother to be proud of him in the way where a person finally feels confirmed in their existence by the one whose love was once their entire world.

You Must Be Proud of Me

And how many times have I encountered this longing before. It appears in many forms, and often in people who have achieved far more on the surface than most dare to dream of – leaders who have built companies and delivered results, yet who, in their innermost depths, still unconsciously yearn for recognition.

There is perhaps nothing more human than the longing to be seen by one's mother or father. And yet it is a force that can hold us fixed in a childlike position – if we never become conscious of it.

When I ask about Thomas's family history, it emerges that his father has long struggled with mental illness. His father is currently hospitalised, and that is the reason Thomas has sought me out. He cannot work out whether he should visit his father – and thereby face his mother, with whom he has not spoken in six months. He does not want to take the first step himself.

Thomas believes it is his mother who should be the bigger person – the mature one, the responsible one.

I ask him whether I may offer a hypothesis. He nods, still with that same clenched energy. I speak with him about the era his parents lived through, and about how mental illness was once surrounded by taboo, silence, and shame – not least in families where maintaining appearances mattered enormously. I speak about how frightening it must have been for her to live with a man whose mental state was so fragile, while simultaneously carrying the responsibility of children, family, and a business. I do not say this to defend her, but to open a different interior space in him – one that anger has locked shut.

"So... can you understand your mother?" I ask Thomas.

He stares at me, stunned – as if the question has come from another planet entirely. For his entire inner courtroom is built on the opposite premise. It is his mother who must understand him.

But I hold my ground: "What if it is not your mother who cannot understand you, but you who cannot understand your mother?"

Thomas falls silent. As if the words have found a crack in his defenses and entered somewhere he had not expected to be touched.

"What if her resistance to your choice to be self-employed is not about whether she is proud of you, but about her own fear? What if she is simply afraid of whether you can manage? That is how mothers are."

Kairos

And here the kairos moment arrives – a landslide in his consciousness. Thomas now discloses that he previously went bankrupt with a business, and that he subsequently started a new one. Seen from his mother's perspective, his self-employment is not an expression of courage and creative energy. It is associated with risk, loss, and potential catastrophe. And suddenly her resistance becomes less demonic, and more human.

This moment was decisive, because for the first time Thomas did not see his mother as the maternal figure who owed him understanding, but as a person with her own fears, her own history, and her own limitations. And he understood here that her reactions were about her – not about him.

It's OK, Mum

I recognize this movement from my own life. When I once told my mother I had received my first book contract – that several publishers had independently approached me to write a book, having read my articles – I was beside myself with pride.

But my mother did not respond with enthusiasm. On the contrary, she exclaimed loudly that I should not do it, because surely I could not earn any money from it.

Seen from the part of me that might have longed for maternal approval, her reaction could have been wounding. But I have done my inner work, and I know my mother. I know she is always afraid of change, and of things going wrong. Her reaction was not a devaluation of me. It was a glimpse of her own fear. And rather than responding with anger, I felt compassion.

When we understand this, something monumental happens in our relationships. We stop demanding that others give us what we are unable to give ourselves. We stop confusing their fear with our deficiency. And it is only then that we truly become adults.

When Thomas walks out the door that day, he is not the same man who came in. The bitterness has gone, and something in him has become softer, more supple. Air has entered the inner room where he had previously sat trapped in his own accusation.

Life's Hall of Mirrors

When I see him again, he tells me that after our conversation he went to his family. He visited his father in hospital, and he met his mother differently than he ever had before – without the demand to be understood, and with a willingness to understand.

This changed the energy between them. It did not happen sentimentally, as in an American film where everything is resolved in one scene, but substantially enough for something to begin to move.

Thomas came to see me four times in all, and with each session his energy shifted. He became more open, more accessible, more in contact with the part of himself that did not need to fight to be right.

He told me with some wonder that his family had also changed their behavior. That his mother had once again begun to seek his counsel. As if the world outside him was mirroring the shift that had taken place within him.

And that is precisely how it is. When we change our consciousness, the view changes. And not just that – reality out there shifts accordingly. People change. Situations that were previously fixed dissolve of their own accord, and solutions arise naturally in their wake.

For when we grasp – and truly take hold of – our responsibility for everything we encounter in life, the solutions to conflicts and entrenched situations become simpler, and love finds freer passage.

The Karma Account

And here the story could have ended beautifully. With reconciliation, insight, and a man moving from victim to creator. But life rarely has any taste for tidy conclusions. For it later emerged that Thomas's mother had, in her own way, been right to worry. Thomas subsequently went bankrupt again – and he never paid his invoice for our sessions.

Thomas has a debt on the karma account. Or perhaps it was I who owed, and he who collected. Who can say.

Regardless, Thomas's story has continued to live in me – both in my sessions and in my teaching. Because his story is yours and mine, and it shows that freedom does not necessarily mean life rewards us with success, recognition, or a happy ending.

Freedom arises when we can step out of the child's demand to be seen and into the adult's capacity to see. When we can set down that old, hungry question that so many of us carry unconsciously through life: Are you proud of me, Dad? Am I enough now, Mum?

When we no longer hunger like ghosts for external recognition, we can stand in ourselves – and love freely.

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