THE ICE QUEEN
One of the most crazed ‘mother-types’ is the Ice Queen: an imperious, power-hungry woman who has a hidden feeling of inferiority. While she intimately desires emotional warmth, she keeps those around her from approaching her because she responds coldly to the feelings of others. She is a woman who rejects and abandons. She uses cold rationality and overvalues order and perfection.
If her daughters lack a sense of discipline and perfectionism, the Ice Queen will punish them with humiliating remarks. This type of mother does not feel comfortable with gifts or acts of generosity. She wants to be heard but she does not want to hear from others, especially when it comes to matters related to the emotional life of those around her.
Some daughters of Ice Queens never learn to receive warmth from other sources and, already cooled, they become Ice Queens themselves. These daughters learned that whatever warm expressions their mothers deigned to give them came with a psychological or emotional price tag.
They find it difficult to receive the gift of love and constantly search for ulterior motives to explain such attitudes. The daughter of an Ice Queen who repeats the pattern of her mother, wishes for love and adoration from friends and partners, but she cannot reciprocate these feelings in the same way.
Other daughters, who seek to melt the icy atmosphere they inherited from their mothers, yearn for the warmth that they did not receive as children and can become very dependent — always in search of the emotional nourishment that their mothers denied them.
The Ice Queen mother can be very controlling, ambitious, manipulative, impenetrable and insensitive to the feelings of others. At the same time she is cunning — she knows how to sell herself in the world to achieve what she seeks.
Healing an Ice Queen requires the thawing of frozen feelings. If they can leave the icy atmosphere, growth will happen naturally. A dramatic thaw is often needed to begin this process.
Some women trapped in ‘Ice Queen syndrome’ try to achieve this thaw through addictive behaviours such as excessive alcohol consumption or sexual promiscuity or excessive food intake. These are external and destructive and do not provide lasting change.
The Ice Queen needs to accept the suffering and the deeper wounds that she carries internally, due to her formation. She needs to achieve a ‘decrease’ in shame and in the feeling of inferiority that she secretly feels.
She must learn not to equate tears with weakness. She needs to learn that a cry from the heart can melt frozen feelings. Tears of empathy for herself can help her heal the Ice Queen within.
Good humour is also a healing element for the Ice Queen — she needs to learn to laugh at herself and her imperfections.
