This is a really dangerous topic to discuss. Everyone (almost) says, of course a mother loves her child. And the ones where you can see HUGE childhood trauma are the ones that will defend "mother's love" to the death. And, i mean, they will fight you, they will explode, if you question their mother.
However, uncomfortable truths are the best kind to explore, especially if you are looking for reasons why your life sucks.
And finding out that your mother never really loved you, is most uncomfortable of truths to work out. And, i say work out, because one who grew up without mother's love often doesn't have the emotional development to work it out emotionally, and so, it starts with intellectually comprehending it.
Emotions are a language, and if you didn't learn them as a small child, interacting with your mother and seeing her facial expressions in a stable manner, you are likely to be very confused by the world. You lack the language before the spoken language. Social queues, body language, eye contact… all these things may seem very alien to you.
A good definition of love is being able to take the other person needs/desires as your own.
We will find it lacking in these pieces below.
In the Talmud, the sins of the town were placed onto a goat, and then it was set free into the wilderness, or ritually killed, and that was said to cleanse the town of its sins.
There might be some therapeutic meaning to the scapegoat above, but the real life, family dynamic, of putting all of their burdens, all of their issues they don't want to work out, onto a child, is just cruel punishment.
The scapegoat in a family is blamed for all the things that go wrong. It doesn't matter if there is a smoking gun in sister's hands, the brother (scapegoat) is blamed. (can be either sex)
From the child's perspective, they cannot do anything right. They will either turn into a perfectionist, or a rebel, to try to deal with this (to them) very confusing family dynamic. The scapegoated child feels they are misunderstood or the one who is picked on. They almost never figure out that this is a toxic environment, and that the people around him do not care if he gets better (perfect), he is just to be blamed.
Usually this dynamic starts with the mother (the usual head of the family dynamic) and so, can this woman actually love her son? When she is destroying his life (literally, scapegoats often die in their 30s.) and destroying his future?
The definition of narcissist i am using here, is someone who lacks warm empathy. There is no, emotionally mature, compassionate person home.
Narcissists can appear charming. So, the child believes that mother's love for him is hot and cold. Is there, and then withdrawn. And, of course, the child can only blame themselves for this withdrawal of love. It is something that they did to cause mother to pull away. So, this child often become empathic or psychic, to play out the exact correct role, so that there mother doesn't get angry and/or withdraw her love.
The child never realizes that the love you get as a child is supposed to be unconditional.
And they never realize that they have never experienced love. What they experienced was only attention. And so, their future "love lives" are usually horrifying affairs, where they find another person who is shallow, and can't really form connections, just like their mother was. They believe that their mother loved them, it was just a difficult kind of love.
But, there was never any love there.
Unlike the narcissist, this other cluster B the borderline, can actually love. The problem is, they are completely unstable. The loving mother comes and goes. There is no stable identity in the mother, so life for the child trying to learn about emotions and non-verbal communication is VERY confusing.
Often the child of a borderline have to become the emotionally mature one in the relationship. The adult mother has the emotional maturity of a five year old. And the child has to grow up quick and become the stabilizing force in the relationship. Often this goes further, and the child is Parentified. Completely flipping the child-parent dynamic.
So, this child gets to have no childhood. They are the responsible one. When they grow up, they are often very lacking in spontaneity or activities done for joy. They have no idea what a stable, loving relationship is, and their dating life shows it.
The child of a borderline never got to grow up with a mother who loved them.
If you are an adult, who had a mother who didn't or couldn't love you, you have a long road of healing ahead of you.
First you need to learn about your mother and your family dynamic. This is hard because you most likely believe that "this" was just normal. And, so often you need to catalog your issues, and then line them up with which kind of environments causes this.
Like, if you were a scapegoat, you may only notice that you are often misunderstood, and blamed for things you didn't do. Your childhood as a scapegoat was just confusing, you never thought that a group of people (your family) was maliciously using you as a dumping ground for all of their problems. And that this wasn't normal.
This will probably involve watching a lot of videos on family systems counseling. (sorry, i do not have an easy way to narrow down what happened to you, at least not one smaller than a tome)
So, lets say you find out your mother was a Cluster-B, then you have a lot of healing to do, but at least you know which direction you need to go in. After getting the information you can from videos/books, then seek out a therapist or life coach that can help with just that. Most talk therapy only makes things worse for childhood trauma survivors, so make sure your therapist knows and uses other modalities.
The biggest problem you will face is learning, recognizing, grieving and accepting that your mother never loved you.
