How Attached Are You To the Role “Stepmom?”

Jul 25, 2010 by Peggy Nolan

“You become most powerful in whatever you do IF the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.” ~ Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”

What I see in forums and groups are stepmoms in quiet desperation trying to protect, enhance, or conform to their role as a stepmom. I would like to suggest that being a stepmom is a fabrication your mind makes up. Is it you? No. You just are. Stepmom is just a role. (Tolle’s insights and wisdom on Roles and Identity are powerfully thought provoking!)

So many stepmoms buy into this “fictitious sense of self.” Once we attach our “self” and identify our “self” with being a stepmom, we make our “selves” the same as the role “stepmom.” From this mistaken identification we distort and corrupt our true authentic Self.

As a stepmom, do you find yourself “an unconscious player in an ego mind game” between your husband, his ex, and their kids? Do you try to insert yourself into this game, thinking you should be able to fix relationships, broker peace, change parenting styles, and do a better job raising his kids? This game looks important; makes you feel important, and when you insert yourself, doesn’t it prove to all that you love your husband and his kids “like your own.” This game looks important but it is “ultimately devoid of any true purpose.” (Unless collective suffering is your aim)

In the words of the great bard himself, William Shakespeare, do you find yourself caught in or the creator of “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?”

And all this sound and fury creates a whole lot of unhappiness.

Think of the unhappiness churning around you, your spouse, and your remarried family. Tolle states that “unhappiness is an ego-created mental-emotional disease.” Unhappiness is your own BP oil disastrophe in the center of your heart; oozing black magic into your blood stream, your organs, your bones, your muscles, your tissues, and into each and every cell.

Unhappiness arises from negative emotions: anger, jealousy, envy, etc. According to Tolle, “negative emotions are not recognized as negative but as JUSTIFIED” (and we go about enlisting others to our cause to further validate and justify our negative emotions).

Very rarely do I see a stepmom pause long enough to realize she’s created her own negative state. More often I see stepmoms blaming their negative emotions on other people or outside circumstances.

Anger, resentment, jealousy and other negative emotions increase a “sense of separateness and otherness” and they create an “unassailable fortress-like mental position of rightness.”

(Right now I hear a collective, “but, but, but…”)

Right now I bet your ego may be taking this very, very personal…because the ego takes everything personally. I know mine does.

Tolle asks us to “recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind.” Just think of the chaos and insanity your ego stirs up in your remarried life just because you need to be right or to be seen better than or because you’re caught up in stepmartyrdom. Recognize that it’s not really you; but rather your ego.

As you unconsciously pursue your need to be right what if you paused and asked yourself the following questions:

• What’s my payoff?
• What pleasure am I deriving from my need to be right?
• What purpose does being right serve?
• In my pursuit of righteousness, who am I making miserable?

As you find yourself resisting this article (because I know that if part of me strongly resisted writing this, you just might be resisting this as well), ask yourself, “Is this my ego resisting this? And if so, then is it really possible that my ego is what is attached to all the doing and being of me identifying with the role stepmom?