It's bandied around television shows and films as either a joke, an insult or simply a red flag - to the point that it's become pop culture shorthand for a form of troubled dater - but what does having mammy or daddy issues mean?
Relationship therapist Rachel Cooke joined the Jennifer Zamparelli show to discuss this complex term, what it means and why there's more to it than a dating profile punchline. Listen back above.
Mammy or daddy issues, she explained, "generally refer to unresolved childhood experiences relating to your parents".
"It's basically recognising that these early experiences that we have growing up, our interactions with our parents, our primary caregivers, that those shape our beliefs, our behaviours, our emotional patterns throughout life", she said. "It basically just means the emotional baggage from however you were parented."
Some of the most common signs of it - though these are not exclusively related to how you were parented - include a low self esteem, difficulty trusting others or with committment, difficulty forming healthy relationships, a struggle with intimacy and a need for a lot of validation and support, among others.
This, Cooke noted, can show up in areas of your life aside from relationships, too.
"It might be that you find yourself to be a massive perfectionist, that you're very hypercritical of other people or yourself, it might mean that you find it really difficult to set boundaries and it might directly mean that you really get activated or triggered being around one or both of your parents, depending on how many there were."
One way that this is portrayed in pop culture is that women typically have daddy issues, while men usually have mammy issues, though Cooke rejects this, saying, "people of any gender can experience ongoing issues as a result of a not particularly fulfilling relationship with either parent".
Cooke explains that being unfulfilled by your parent as a child can come up in many ways, whether it's having an unsupportive parent, an absent parent or manipulative parent - for reasons that may or may not be understandable to us after the fact.
"The point here is to not to kind of name our parents, it's to recognise that their circumstances will have led them to behave in certain ways that are going to have had an impact on us as children, and that also doesn't mean that it's going to have the same impact on each child in the family."
She explained that through therapy and reflection on your own we can start to "inquire" and look into the patterns that may have led to us being raised a certain way, "so that you then have the opportunity to move on from that, to change things and have a better resource of skills in your relationships".
These issues can rear their heads in non-romantic relationships and dynamics, too, Cooke said. She said they are "very likely to impact things like your career decisions, your level of ambition, how you experience authority, your relationship to power and also your sense of self because it impacts your self esteem, your confidence, your sense of belonging and place in the world. Your sense of identity, really".
Cooke added that while therapy isn't necessary, and certainly isn't an option for many people depending on cost and accessibility, a therapist will help support you as you delve into past to examine this.
For more, listen back to the full interview above.
