by Peg Streep
The unloved daughter learns none of that. She’s Goldilocks, always finding herself in a place that’s either too hot or too cold and without the tools to make it just right. When bad stuff happens, the memories that her brain offers up are negative and dispiriting—recollections of being rejected and alone— and will probably make her even more frantic and worried than she is or, in fact, needs to be. She doesn’t know how to regulate negative emotion and so will either flood with feeling or cut herself off from what she’s feeling entirely. The anxious Goldilocks won’t be able to stop talking or thinking about what she’s going through, and will even unconsciously exaggerate her feelings and fears to get attention. The avoidant Goldilocks puts her emotions in lockdown, convinced that there’s no one out there to help her anyway and that the only person she can depend on is herself. The problem is that, deep-down, she really doesn’t believe it .
Positive emotions don’t need regulation or management. But your degree of happiness—at least the roughly 40 percent of happiness that science thinks we’re actually in control of—has to do with how well you manage your feelings of unhappiness.
That’s exactly where her childhood experiences have damaged the unloved daughter the most: her inability to self-regulate emotion and self-soothe. Her inability to self-soothe productively, alas, can lead her to fill the hole in her heart in other, destructive, ways. Often, she doesn’t understand the connection between these behaviors and her childhood experiences.
BEHAVIORAL RESPONSES TO THE LACK OF A MOTHER’S LOVE
In her groundbreaking book, The Hungry Self , Kim Chernin detailed and explored the primal connections between food and female identity, as well as between mothering and emotional hunger. These connections are both subtle and obvious. In response, a daughter may seize on eating or not eating as something she can control, as a way of countermanding her mother’s vision of the world or her place in it. Some daughters will develop clinically disordered eating while others will simply carry their complicated relationships with food and its connection to self-image into adulthood.
Food is often a freighted issue for daughters, and not just those who have emotionally unavailable mothers. In most households, the mother prepares the food, and what she serves and to whom she allocates the best or most favored portions can be part of both favoritism and scapegoating. In her book, When Food Is Love , Geneen Roth (the daughter of a physically abusive mother and an emotionally distant father) explains that disordered eating may be an act of self-protection, a way of armoring the self against pain. It may also be a way for the daughter to locate a small piece of her intimate universe she can actually control. Recent studies more closely exploring the connection between insecure childhood attachment and disordered eating have made some interesting discoveries. For example, Jenna Elgin and Mary Pritchard found that while it was true enough that secure attachment was negatively correlated with disordered eating, not every type of insecure attachment was positively correlated. Only the fearful attachment style (which includes both a negative view of self and a negative view of others) was positively correlated with bulimia, but neither the dismissive or preoccupied styles were associated with disordered eating.
Self-harming may be another way of bringing emotional pain to the surface, to a place where it feels more manageable. Many emotionally neglected daughters often comment that they wish the maltreatment had been physical because, as one woman put it, “then, at least, the scars would show and I wouldn’t have to prove their existence to anyone.” It’s been hypothesized that self-harm or cutting is intimately connected to lack of love, another effort both to fill the emptiness and to feel pain that you are able to control. In their book Bodily Harm , Karen Conterio and Wendy Lader write, “self-injury represents a frantic attempt by someone with low coping skills to ‘mother herself.’ . . . Bodily care has been transformed into bodily harm: the razor blade becomes the wounding caregiver, a cold but available substitute for the embrace, kiss, or loving touch she truly desires.” Following up on previous lines of research, Jean-François Bureau and his coauthors looked at specific dimensions of parenting and their relationship to NSSI (nonsuicidal self-injury) in young adults. What they found was that among those engaging in self-injury, their descriptions of childhood included portraits of parents who failed to protect them and abdicated their roles as parents, of parents from whom they felt alienated, and of parents who were overly controlling. These parents were generally seen as less caring, untrustworthy, and more difficult to communicate with. Generally, research has confirmed the link between self-harm and emotionally distant or abusive parenting and insecure attachment.
Substance abuse, compulsive shopping, and even sexual promiscuity have been understood as ways of filling the hole in the heart. Unloved daughters may turn to the instantaneous self-soothing and oblivion offered up by alcohol or drugs. In her book Mothering Ourselves , psychotherapist Evelyn S. Bassoff writes that, “For some, alcohol—which warms, fills, and anesthetizes the inner emptiness or aching—becomes the soothing mother . . . the alcoholic stupor replaces the sensations of being wafted to a sound sleep in mother’s arms.” Writer Hope Edelman describes the “emotional hoarding” of the unloved daughter and writes, “Back-to-back relationships, overeating, overspending, alcoholism, drug abuse, shoplifting, overachieving—all are her attempts to fill that empty space, to mother herself, to suppress feelings of grief or loneliness, and to get the nurturing she feels she lost or never had.”
As Andrea, age 39, confided, “I remember throwing myself onto my mother’s lap when I was three or four, and she would swat me away. I would try again and she would get angry, telling me I was mussing her clothes. I became a promiscuous teenager—desperate for love and attention. I grew up to be a desperate adult, always, inevitably, finding the wrong partners. It took a long time for me to realize that every guy was a stand-in for Mom and the love I never got in the beginning.”
UNDERSTANDING THE CORE CONFLICT
One of the significant differences among individual daughters is the timing of two events: when they first recognize the lack of maternal love and attunement and when they begin to glimpse the degree to which they are wounded. These two perceptions are not necessarily simultaneous; in fact, they may be separated by years or even decades for some daughters. This seems counterintuitive but is explicable when you consider what I call the “core conflict.”
The core conflict is between the hardwired need for a mother’s love, attunement, and support and a daughter’s own perceptions of her pain, her unfulfilled needs, and her continuing struggle to give voice to herself. Because the world of a child is small and the interactions that go on in it are familiar, most daughters begin by accepting their mothers’ treatment as “normal.” That’s reinforced by the fact that the mother doesn’t just rule that little world but also dictates how actions and interactions in it are to be understood. For example, a mother often labels her harsh words and castigation as “discipline” that is “necessary” for correcting flawed behavior or character. Even if her mother treats other children in the house differently, the daughter subjected to this kind of labeling is likely to believe that it must be her fault that she’s treated one way and her siblings another—and besides, she remains hopeful that, somehow, she’ll be able to change things. The effort to make sense of things—especially for adolescents and young adults who don’t seek counsel from either friends or a therapist—is emotionally turbulent and confusing, and can keep a daughter locked into the patterns for years.
There are other factors, too, that contribute to what I call the daughter’s “dance of denial.” Her own ability to trust her perceptions has been eroded by her mother’s treatment so entertaining the possibility that her mother is right about her—and that it’s some innate character flaw that keeps her mother from loving her—keeps floating to the top. (That’s another example of what psychologists call “self-criticism.”) Few daughters ever discuss the problem with anyone—they keep the code o
f silence because of feelings of shame and fear—so that there’s little chance of getting support for those perceptions. Gaslighting by her mother or other family members such as siblings—manipulative comments meant to make the daughter doubt her perceptions and thoughts—also may get in the way. Then there’s hopefulness that somehow she’ll be able to wrest that love from her mother in the end—by pleasing her, by saying or doing the right thing, or by making her proud.
Caught in the conflict, the daughter continues to deny or rationalize her mother’s behavior as she desperately tries to come up with a reason—a fixable, answerable reason—that her mother doesn’t love her. This can go on for years until there’s a moment of crisis—the daughter becomes sufficiently unhappy that she has to change the status quo—or revelation, sometimes provided by a therapist, spouse, or friend who confirms her perceptions.
The real problem is that until you can see the wounds—which entails not just jettisoning denial and rationalization but also giving up on the hopefulness inspired by the need for maternal love—you cannot begin the process of healing. That’s the bottom line.
IDENTIFYING THE EIGHT TOXIC MATERNAL BEHAVIORS
What follows aren’t, of course, scientific descriptions but ones gathered from all the interviews I’ve had with daughters over the last decade or so, and they’re an effort to categorize how unloving mothers act and how, in turn, their specific behaviors affect their daughters. These categories aren’t mutually exclusive; mothers may be combative, self-involved, and dismissive by turns (mine was) or may shift behavior as the daughter gets older (a dismissive mother may become much more aggressive and combative, for example). Her mother’s treatment directly shapes her sense of self—her mother’s face is a daughter’s first mirror—and molds both her reactions and behaviors.
Use these descriptions as a way of organizing your own thoughts about your childhood experiences as you read, and consider which you found personally hardest to take or most hurtful. At the end of each description of maternal behavior is a brief summary of the ways in which each maternal pattern of relating potentially affects the daughter’s own development.
THE DISMISSIVE MOTHER
What does it mean to have a dismissive mother? Some daughters describe their mothers as simply ignoring them in very literal ways. One daughter, now in her forties and married with a child of her own, remarked, “The pattern has always been the same. My mother asks me what I want to do and then proceeds to make other plans as though I haven’t said a word. This extends to every realm of life. When I was a kid, she’d ask if I was hungry, and if I said I wasn’t, she’d pile food on a plate and get angry if I didn’t eat it.” Daughters of dismissive mothers describe themselves as feeling invisible—unseen and unheard—as did Barbara, 43: “I grew up this quiet, interiorized little girl with practically no social skills at all. I couldn’t make friends because I didn’t understand how exchanges work—you know, deciding what game you want to play or what you want to do. I was used to saying nothing, the way I did at home.”
Dismissive mothers marginalize their daughters’ thoughts and feelings by not assigning them importance or not paying attention to them. As Ruby, 39, explained, “I would tell my mother I was unhappy and explain why, and she’d keep doing whatever she was doing as if I’d said nothing. Then I’d ask her if she heard me and she’d nod her head and say something like, ‘Well, you’ll get over it. It’s not a big deal.’ By the time I was a teenager, I didn’t even bother talking to her about anything.” Other dismissive mothers may actually voice contempt for their daughters and engage in subtle or not-so-subtle put-downs.
It’s what a dismissive mother doesn’t give her daughter that does the most damage. By ignoring her daughter’s presence, along with her feelings and needs, the dismissive mother’s message is: “You’re not important to me, and neither is what you feel and think.” It’s a crushing blow to the developing self and a subtle form of emotional abuse.
As the daughter gets older, her mother’s consistent lack of attention—ignoring requests, not listening to her, acting as though she’s said nothing worth answering—often ramps up into a cycle of protest behaviors initiated by the daughter. She’ll engage her mother in any way she can, both productively and unproductively, to get her attention. As a young child, she may act out or even do things that she knows are forbidden just to get her mother to respond. When she’s older, she may go much further than that, as Jenna describes: “By the time I was nine or ten, I was pretty sure that no one would ever like me or want to be my friend. It was made worse by the fact that while my mother ignored me, she heaped attention on my older sister who could do no wrong. By the time I was an adolescent, I was willing to do anything—and I mean anything—to get attention. I was a hot mess, and I count myself lucky that nothing bad happened to me during those years.”
Some daughters embark on proving themselves worthy by becoming high-achievers, only to be put down and marginalized by their mothers, no matter what, as Adele recounted: “I decided that I’d have to be a star to get my mother’s attention, and so I became one at school. I got every honor in grade school, junior high, and high school, and then went on to a prestigious college. My mother’s response was always the same: She’d say things like, ‘Well, the competition must not have been too tough,’ or, ‘Being good at school doesn’t do much for anyone in the real world.’ And I believed her. I felt like nothing, no matter what I did.”
Even high-achieving daughters often feel deeply insecure, worthless, or not good enough. A dismissive mother robs a child of her sense of belonging, whether she’s an only child or has siblings. But the effects can be different. Patti, age 40, was a singleton and says, “I didn’t realize until I was in my twenties that how my mother marginalized me wasn’t normal. It was my very caring mother-in-law who pointed it out. It was only then that I began to understand why I was always anxious, worrying about failing or disappointing people. It took therapy to stop me from being the world’s doormat, the girl who could never say ‘no.’”
It’s true enough that many daughters of dismissive mothers become habitual pleasers, always putting their own needs last, in part because they’ve absorbed their mothers’ words and gestures and don’t believe that what they want matters. Ironically, the combination of needing desperately to please and feeling that they are invisible to everyone may cause them to be drawn to those, both in friendship and romantic relationships, who treat them just as their mothers did. And the daughter who is dismissed by her mother may be further damaged by the constant comparisons to her siblings, who, she is told, outshine her in every way, as well as the differential treatment and affection given to them. Her unmet needs for validation and approval may become even more poignant if she is also the “odd girl out.”
There’s a further irony in being the daughter of a dismissive mother: Often, these daughters find it hard or impossible to break free of their mothers’ influence as adults. Without conscious awareness, even though she knows intellectually that the well is dry, this daughter may keep going back, hoping for the validation she never got in the first place and staying on the merry-go-round, to her own detriment.
Common Effects of Maternal Dismissiveness
♦ Difficulty identifying and articulating her own needs and wants
♦ Avoidance of conflict and argument with others even when she’s been wronged
♦ Tendency to please or mollify by default
♦ Social awkwardness and trouble making and maintaining intimate connections
♦ Being interiorized and unable to assert herself even when she’s angry or upset
♦ Low self-estee m
THE CONTROLLING MOTHER
While the dismissive mother makes her daughter feel invisible by withholding the validation and attention essential to her child’s inner growth, the controlling mother does much the same thing, although it looks very different on the surface. Here’s what Ella, now 48, had to say about her childhood: “My moth
er was widely admired in our community for how perfect her life looked: a tended-to house, gorgeous garden, and an outwardly successful child. That would be me: the all-A student, the cheerleader, the beautifully turned out little girl. But I wasn’t allowed to make a single decision growing up. Not one. Not my clothes, not my friends, not even the college I went to. And you know what? I didn’t realize I was being controlled until I fell apart at the age of 30 when my marriage imploded and I looked inside and there was nothing there.”
The controlling mother deprives her daughter of her own voice, her ability to choose for herself and to learn from her mistakes, and most important, to be seen for who she is, instead of as a projection of her mother’s needs and wants. While the dismissive mother has little involvement in her daughter’s life, the controlling mother throws herself into every aspect of it, and the messages she communicates are always the same: “Without me, you are nothing.” “If I weren’t here to do for you, you would fail at every step.” “It’s my way or the highway.”
While she may be a perfectionist—needing everything in her life, including her children, to be “just so”—the controlling mother is often deeply insecure, afraid of making mistakes and looking “less than” in the eyes of others. She sees her children as an extension of herself, not as individuals in their own right, and is determined that they reflect well on her. And when they don’t, she takes immediate action. “If you didn’t fall into line, you got scapegoated,” Marnie, 44, tells me in an email. “My mother encouraged us to tattle on each other as a way of gaining favor with her because the more you pleased her, the better she treated you. My older sister dared to rebel against her and, boy, did she ever pay for it! I didn’t have the courage to but I wish I had. My sister left at 18 and never looked back. She is a personal success, and I’m still struggling.”
It’s a pity that “helicopter” parenting has crept into the contemporary discussion because I think it sounds more benign than the word “controlling,” and it really isn’t.