Daughter Detox

by Peg Streep

  ASSESSING GROUND ZERO

  While some unloved daughters recognize their mothers’ behavior relatively young—by late adolescence or young adulthood—the preponderance of women, anecdotally at least, do not. That said, even when a daughter recognizes the lack of love and attention, as I did, she usually considers it a specific problem, not one capable of affecting her in myriad ways. Daughters who come to the recognition later in their lives—and these moments of epiphany happen anywhere from late twenties and thirties to forties, fifties, and beyond—have been aware of their unhappiness or malaise but haven’t understood its point of origin. They may become aware of the problem through a series of failed relationships, for example—in which they are treated as their mothers treated them—or their attention is drawn to the problem by someone pointing it out.

  The truth is that none of us is able, at the beginning at least, to see more than the broad strokes of the problem. Without a working knowledge of psychology, there’s no way that the true wounding is visible to the naked eye.

  IT’S THE LACK OF LOVE WE FEEL, BUT THE REAL DAMAGE LIES ELSEWHERE

  Whether we deny it, fight against it, or recognize it, it’s the lack of our mother’s love in childhood and later that we feel most keenly. It may make us angry, frustrated, desperate, despairing, and/or determined to somehow get it from her, but that’s our focus. We feel her lack of support if she’s ignoring us; we smart from the blows if she’s combative when all we want is love; we go along with the plan of pleasing if she’s self-involved or controlling in an effort to get what we need.

  But the lasting effects aren’t just about love and its lack. We think they are, which is why some of us continue to engage our mothers because we believe that will fix things. We’re wrong because we are not looking at the real effects. What are they? They’re about what we didn’t learn in infancy and childhood. They’re about what we did learn instead of the things we needed to learn. That’s where the real psychological damage, the hobbling stuff, resides.

  UNDERSTANDING THE EMOTIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF LACK OF ATTUNEMENT

  In the first chapter , we saw how, in the “Still Face” experiment, infants and toddlers emotionally collapsed in the wake of their mothers’ withdrawal—becoming frantic at first and then, depending on how well they were able to self-soothe, turning away from the stress-inducing lack of interaction either quickly or slowly. Keep in mind that these were infants accustomed to attunement. What about those infants for whom attunement is absent most of the time, all of the time, or unreliably present? That brings us back to the findings of the “Strange Situation” and the core of attachment theory.

  Perhaps the single best statement—and the most eloquent—is from the authors of A General Theory of Love . I continue to quote it because there is simply no way I can write it better than they did. Here it is, and please spend a moment letting it sink in: “The lack of an attuned mother is a nonevent for a reptile and a shattering injury to the complex and fragile limbic brain of a mammal.” Yes, it’s true for monkeys, and it’s true for us. We’re born with the hardwiring for emotional connection, but we need interaction—an attuned parent—to activate it so it develops properly.

  Lack of maternal attunement affects us on a myriad of levels, the most obvious of which are the mental models formed in our brains about how relationships work and make us feel. These representations—internalized, unconscious, and absorbed by the brain to insure the individual’s survival—are among the most lasting of the unloving mother’s legacies, though not the only one. They are hard to deal with not just because they’re unconscious (which, thank you, is bad enough) but also because they’re stored in the brain’s default position. So even if you’ve recognized them and their consequences on a conscious level, either through therapy or on your own—“I am afraid of emotional demands and connections; they make me anxious and I have to deal with triggers; I know that I panic when someone withdraws”—when you’re stressed out, the likelihood is you will revert to the default position nonetheless.

  That’s the first giant step you have to take as you begin to discern: recognizing your default position of stress and how it’s affecting your ability to live the way you want to. Understanding that your childhood experiences cause you to panic quickly when someone acts in a way you perceive as less than loving, and fully realizing that you need to check whether your perception is actually founded in the present or simply an echo response to the past and the way your mother used to treat you. Or alternatively, when someone gets too close for your comfort or makes demands on you, you actively pull away and shut down when you really want to live differently. Those intersections of past and present must be identified first .

  BEYOND THE MENTAL MODELS OF RELATIONSHIP

  Science tells us that we’re in control of about 40 percent of the factors that contribute to our happiness, and much of that has to do with our ability to manage stress and negative emotions, and to be able to self-regulate effectively during those times when life gets hard. But without attuned connection, a child doesn’t learn to self-soothe effectively, nor does she learn that negative emotions—fear, sadness, anger, among them—are a part of life and can be dealt with.

  Instead, as a child, she either turns away from those feelings or she becomes totally immersed in them; neither strategy allows her to manage her feelings, and both put her, one way or another, at the mercy of her emotions. The behaviors associated with insecure attachment—anxiety or avoidance—are, in fact, coping mechanisms learned when we were young, but you will be quick to note that they are ineffective ways of coping. And, of course, what’s laid down by the initial lack of maternal attunement only gets hardened and cast in cement as the daughter gets older and more articulate and she tries to claim her feelings only to have her mother marginalize, deny, or put them down. Practically all unloved daughters—regardless of whether their mothers were essentially dismissive, combative, self-involved, emotionally absent, enmeshed, unreliable, or controlling—report that they were told in ways that were both subtle and obvious that their feelings were “wrong” or didn’t count or that the real problem was that they were too sensitive or exaggerating. Maternal verbal aggression is often used as a way of maintaining control and often targets a daughter’s efforts to voice her feelings and have them recognized.

  What didn’t happen in infancy and childhood—that healthy dyadic dance of mother and child that leads to the daughter’s being able to regulate her emotions—is often further complicated by the daughter’s sometimes deliberately distancing herself from her feelings just to avoid being a target, especially if there’s scapegoating in the home. Many daughters learn—as I did—that showing vulnerability simply amped up the volume for painful interactions, whether that was with their mothers or with their siblings. A very young child can adopt this as a way of making life easier without, of course, understanding the consequences. Here’s what Fern, 37, recounted: “In our house, tears were a sign of weakness. I was picked on by my mother and my brothers, and I was probably six or so when I realized that crying egged them on. So I taught myself not to cry. I’d dig my nails into my palm or bite my tongue, and somehow, feeling that pain made it easier not to cry. I didn’t realize until a few years ago, when I went into therapy after my husband left me and I had two kids to take care of, that I had cut myself off from feeling almost everything. People said I was calm and so impartial and fair but, really, I was a zombie.”

  Cutting yourself off from what you’re feeling—even if it’s a defensive gesture that helps in the short term—only compounds the damage that the original wounding caused. While the mental models of relationship are recognized first as we move into the stage of discernment, our inability to manage emotion may be harder to see. After all, we’re used to either being flooded by the waters or protected by high walls. And we’ve been reacting this way for so long, years past childhood, that we’ve come to think of it as normal. Another consequence is that many of us have problems knowing wh
at we’re feeling—a key component of what’s called “emotional intelligence.” Understanding emotional intelligence—and why each of us needs to cultivate it, given the deficits of our childhoods—is part of discernment.

  SEEING YOUR EMOTIONAL BLINDERS

  Here’s the thing: If your upbringing has made you feel that you have to quash, deny, or push off from your emotions, is it any surprise that instead of helping you to navigate life—which is what emotions are supposed to do—they’re consigning you to a leaky boat in stormy seas, either some or all of the time?

  In the best of all possible worlds, our thoughts and emotions work in tandem to mutually enrich both the processes of thinking and feeling. That’s how John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey define emotional intelligence: “the ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote intellectual thought.” The idea here is that “emotion makes thinking more intelligent and that one thinks intelligently about emotions.” (By the way, the definitions I’m using are drawn from Mayer and Salovey’s original research, not the best-selling book by Daniel Goleman.)

  As you read about the branches of emotional intelligence—there are four, and they become increasingly complex—think about your own abilities so that you can start to discern where your own deficiencies lie and begin to work on them. The first branch of emotional intelligence is straightforward and emanates from the positive, secure childhood attachments.

  ♦ Able to identify your own emotions

  ♦ Able to identify emotions in others

  ♦ Able to express emotions and needs accurately

  ♦ Can distinguish between faked and real emotions, honest and dishonest expressions of emotion

  This first branch is all about perception, and the extent of your skills in this branch affects most of your interactions with others, whether they are strangers, colleagues, friends, or real intimates.

  The second branch includes the ability to use emotion to inform thought and action. Again, this involves not only knowing what you’re feeling with some accuracy but, additionally, trusting in both your knowledge and the legitimacy of your feelings, not always an easy task for an unloved daughter. This second branch includes:

  ♦ Using emotions to prioritize thinking

  ♦ Using emotions as aids to judgment, assessment, and memory

  ♦ Managing mood swings (optimistic and pessimistic) to expand your point of view

  ♦ Using emotional states to encourage fresh ways of looking at problems

  It should be clear to some daughters that this is the area in which their abilities begin to falter—especially when it comes to using emotions to sort through and prioritize and to manage mood swings. By and large, it’s not just that unloved daughters have trouble identifying what they’re feeling (branch one) but that the self-trust necessary to rely on those feelings as outlined in this second branch is often missing or impaired.

  The third branch of emotional intelligence is even more nuanced, and affects our ability to know ourselves in depth. It includes :

  ♦ Being able to label emotions with precision and understanding the relationship between words and feelings

  ♦ Being able to interpret emotions

  ♦ Being able to understand complex or blended emotions

  ♦ Being able to recognize the transitions between emotions

  Some situations arouse emotions in us that are relatively easy to pinpoint and label; we are sad when our dog or cat dies, hurt when a friend forgets our birthday, disappointed when something we were looking forward to falls through. But an argument with a close other—a spouse or partner or intimate friend—may involve not just one emotion but many, some of them coinciding and others washing over us in waves. We may feel angry, sad, and even guilty either in simulcast or at different moments, making it hard to keep track of both what we’re feeling and, more important, what actions we want to take based on those feelings. Is it any wonder many unloved daughters lack the skill set this branch of emotional intelligence demands?

  The last branch of emotional intelligence involves the ability to regulate emotions and to use emotions to stimulate intellectual growth. That includes:

  ♦ Being able to stay open to both pleasant and unpleasant feelings

  ♦ Being able to engage or detach from an emotion depending on its usefulness to the task at hand

  ♦ Being able to monitor emotions in yourself and others

  ♦ Being able to deal with emotions, both positive and negative, without either exaggerating them or repressing them

  This is called “metacognition”—being able to think about thoughts and thought processes—and it’s the one form of emotional intelligence that’s most out of reach for many unloved daughters. It affects their ability to make decisions and wise choices, to know themselves wholly, to feel compassion for themselves, to still self-criticism, and to form close and lasting relationships.

  EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND REAL LIFE

  People who are high in emotional intelligence (and securely attached) are able to act in ways the rest of us might not. Say you’ve just met someone—a very charming person, who’s well turned out, a successful professional, a bit quiet but fun to talk to, and attractive in a low-key way. He’s not overtly pushy or preening either. You see him a few times yet, afterward, when you think about him, you can’t quite put your finger on why you don’t have a good feeling about him, but you don’t. (It could equally be a woman, by the way.) The emotionally intelligent person tries to identify that feeling: Did he seem insincere because he seemed to smile easily? Or was it the way he kept redirecting the conversation every time you brought up a new topic? Or was it his tendency to talk over you?

  You can’t come up with an answer quite yet, but the next time you meet for drinks and dinner, you’re paying close attention. He picks out the restaurant, where he’s a regular. You sit down at the table and order a glass of wine and he smiles and says, “No, try a cocktail. They’re famous for them.” “Okay,” you say. Light banter and conversation ensue, and then you realize that you’re feeling controlled. It comes to you that he’s scripting and directing the conversation. He insists you order a specialty not even on the menu. That seals it for you, and you’re out of there.

  What I’ve described is meeting and getting to know a covert narcissist, and how a woman could use her emotional intelligence. The truth is that someone less adept would probably not just miss the warning signs but actually misread them as positives: how skilled he is at keeping a conversation going, how thoughtful he is to order for you, how responsive he is to everything you say. This is especially true if your childhood experiences have made you detach from your feelings or have made you distrustful of them. Emotional intelligence helps inform many decisions and choices beyond relationships and the occasional spotting of a narcissist, of course.

  The good news is that emotional intelligence is a skill set that can be worked on and improved. First, though, you need to examine your own facility at both labeling and managing emotions.

  HOW DO YOU THINK ABOUT EMOTIONS?

  People high in emotional intelligence are good at labeling their emotions—distinguishing discomfort from embarrassment, anger from fear, frustration from resentment, neediness from anxiety, and the like. Studies, such as those conducted by Lisa Feldman Barrett and others, show that people who think about emotions in a less nuanced way, labeling them as unpleasant or pleasant (“That made me feel bad” vs. “That made me feel good”) have much more trouble both regulating their emotions and benefitting from knowledge of them. The truth is that the more clarity you have about what you’re feeling in a given moment, the better you’ll be at not just managing the situation you’re in but also deciding on your future actions.

  Be honest in your appraisal of how you think about your feelings—nuanced and detailed, somewhat detailed, simplistic, or something in between�
�because that, too, will add to the growth of your discernment.

  MENTAL MODELS AND EMOTIONS

  Please remember that what we learn in childhood about relationships—how people connect and act—not only gets internalized but also gets generalized into a worldview. If you grow up believing that people are generally responsive and thoughtful and that you are deserving of respect and likeable, your emotional responses to challenging situations—and how you tend to see other people’s motives—are going to be very different than if you’ve grown up thinking that people aren’t trustworthy and that they’re likely to take advantage of you. I’ve deliberately made this as black-and-white as possible for clarity.

  While the anxious-preoccupied daughter desperately wants connection, intimacy, and relationship, deep-down her internal models don’t permit her to ever let her guard down fully. She learned to self-protect in childhood so, in adulthood, she’s like a sailor who goes onto the water on a perfectly clear and cloudless day but can’t enjoy herself because she’s constantly scanning the horizon for storm clouds. That’s what the anxious daughter does in every relationship she has—whether it’s with a colleague at work or the next-door neighbor, with a friend, or with a lover. She needs constant reassurance and is highly volatile. It’s estimated that roughly 15 to 20 percent of us are anxiously attached.

  These are unconscious processes, so that the woman experiencing these feelings and thoughts believes she is acting reasonably and thinking things through when, in fact, she’s not. The truth is that her behavior is being triggered automatically, and unless she gets a bead on the dynamic, she’ll continue to put stress into every relationship, often to the breaking point. Anxious people are likely to be triggered when things don’t go according to the plan they had in mind; their anxiety makes them inflexible so when there’s a discrepancy between how they imagined things unfolding and what actually happens, they become emotionally reactive, evoking an outsized response. Anxious people are also prone to catastrophizing—not just imagining the worst possibility but also blowing it up, which evokes a cascade of emotion.