Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

by Forward, Susan

  Most societies glorify mothers, as if the mere act of giving birth makes them inherently capable of nurturing. That’s simply not true. There’s no magic switch that turns on “maternal instinct” and ensures that a woman, especially a troubled one, will suddenly bond with her baby, know and respond to what that child needs, and give her the nurturing she craves. Of course the Freudian tradition of mother-bashing—blaming mothers for everything that goes wrong—is erroneous, but it is also a fantasy to believe that the role of mother is automatically synonymous with healthy love.

  The widespread belief in this fantasy is so strong that if your mother was unloving and you try to tell the truth of what happened—how your mother really behaved toward you—you’ll inevitably run into a wall of resistance from powerful external forces (including your mother herself) that pull together to defend her.

  In fact, dealings with unloving mothers are constricted by so many taboos, and attitudes about the mother wound are so charged, that it’s common to encounter skepticism, sharp criticism, and counterproductive advice. If you’ve attempted to chart a new course with your mother, you’ve already seen what can happen:

  • You try to make peace with her and find yourself pulled back into a web of criticism and manipulation. Once more you’re the ungrateful one. The selfish one. The unforgiving one. The one who will always owe her, no matter what she does.

  • You seek advice from relatives and sometimes from friends, who respond, “How can you talk that way about your mother? She gave you life. What’s wrong with you?”

  • You have the misfortune of consulting misguided therapists who urge you to “forgive and forget” and make peace with your mother, no matter how high the emotional cost to you.

  • You try to get support from a priest, minister, or spiritual counselor and you’re met with responses like: “Honor thy mother.” “You won’t heal until you forgive.” “Family is everything.”

  • You even try talking to your partner, who counsels: “Don’t let her get to you. That’s just the way she is.”

  And after all that, you’re back where you started—bewildered, alone, and even shamed by the attempt to face and overcome your history. You may start to wonder if you have the right to feel the way you do.

  Other People Don’t See What You See

  Struggling with the pain and repercussions of having an unloving mother can be intensely lonely and isolating. People with reasonably healthy mothers have a tough time understanding that all mothers are not like theirs, and it’s quite common for even a well-meaning friend or relative to discount an unloved daughter’s pain or blame her when she looks for sympathy. My client Valerie, a thirty-two-year-old computer programmer, came to me hoping to overcome the shyness and anxiety that had made her feel stuck and discouraged about her work and social life. It was hard to break out of her shell, she said, especially because “people just don’t understand me.”

  When I asked for an example, she described a recent incident:

  VALERIE: “A month ago, I enrolled in an adult art class—something I’ve always wanted to do. The instructor, Terry, was very encouraging about my watercolors, and despite a twenty-five-year difference in our ages, we became quite close. Terry told me that she was going to put on an exhibit of student work, and I was thrilled when she told me she had selected two of my pieces. Suddenly I burst into tears. When she asked me what was going on, I told her that I’d had a huge fight with my mother on the phone that morning and I didn’t want to invite her.

  “She said she was eager to meet my mother, who’s an interior designer—and also a frustrated artist, though I didn’t mention that. Terry brought up my mom a couple of times, so against my better judgment I sent her an e-mail. So Mom comes to the exhibit and praises everyone else’s work, and she’s totally lukewarm about mine. But, of course, she was her most charming and effusive to Terry. After she left, Terry said to me, ‘I would love to have a lovely mother like that—I would give anything if my mother were still alive. I hope you know how lucky you are.’

  “I said, ‘Well—what you see isn’t always what you get. My mother can be very self-centered, critical, and competitive.’ It was as if Terry didn’t hear a word I said. She just repeated: ‘You should thank your lucky stars you have a mother who cares enough about you to come to see your work.’ ”

  Valerie felt frustrated and unheard by a woman she thought was her friend. And if the pain is deep for an adult like Valerie, imagine how much worse it was for a young, dependent girl—or your own younger self—as she tried to feel heard and understood.

  Colleen, a single, twenty-eight-year-old manager for a supermarket chain, told me that for as long as she could remember, she had suffered from a chronic, low-grade depression. She was on medication that had helped her considerably, but she had enough insight to see that there was a lot of unfinished business in her past that was contributing to her depressed feelings, and she wanted my help to sort through it. After I found out a little more about her, I asked her to tell me something about her childhood:

  COLLEEN: “I had no one to talk to… . It was no bed of roses. Nobody listened to me, and I just stuffed my sadness. If I tried to talk to my father about my mother, he would say, ‘Just be nice to her.’ Once I got to stay overnight with my aunt Gina. She asked me how things were at home. I felt pretty safe with her—she’d always been okay with me—so I told her, ‘I think something’s wrong with Mom. She’s always screaming at me and telling me I’m not worth anything.’ Gina listened quietly and seemed to understand, but then she said, ‘You have to try to keep her happy—she doesn’t mean those things. She’s very unhappy with your father, and if it wasn’t for you, she would have left him a long time ago. You owe her. Don’t be so sensitive.’ She sounded really upset with me. I felt even worse after I told her—and I thought, ‘Great! Now she’s mad at me too.’ I wished I’d never said anything.”

  The great common denominator among women with unloving mothers is the longing for validation—to find someone who will say, “Yes, what you experienced really happened. Yes, your feelings are justified. I understand.”

  Great pressure is brought to bear on daughters to not tell about the verbal, emotional, and even physical cruelties of their past and present. As you can see, for children the rules become clear early: Don’t tell anyone. Don’t even tell yourself.

  That’s how you learn to bury, minimize, and mistrust your own truth.

  How Maternal Rejection Is Internalized

  That impulse to make the best of what you have where your mother is concerned may seem positive, but it masks a whole system of fault lines that run below the surface of your life, a sort of emotional earthquake zone. Maintaining the “grin and bear it” status quo keeps the peace, but it’s less a choice than a form of paralysis brought about by shame and fear. What keeps you in the dark is a neat bit of emotional alchemy and amnesia.

  All the external messages you’ve gotten whenever you’ve tried to tell the truth about your mother echo back at you from the inside as powerful emotions:

  • You feel tremendous disloyalty for “criticizing her” by telling the truth. “After all, she gave you life.”

  • You feel ashamed. “All mothers love their children—and they must have a good reason if they don’t.”

  • You doubt your perceptions and wonder if you’re “too sensitive” or just feeling sorry for yourself.

  These thoughts and feelings are intense, and for many of us they’re so frightening, and touch such a deep well of pain and insecurity, that they spark what I can only describe as terror. It is terror of the consequences of allowing ourselves to experience what we’d feel if we admitted to ourselves that our mothers were unloving and of trying to change the relationship.

  These are the words I so often hear daughters use to explain why they couldn’t possibly label their mothers, even the most abusive of them, as unloving:

  • I couldn’t stand the guilt.

  • I couldn
’t bear the sadness.

  • I couldn’t stand the loss.

  The frightened little child inside the adult woman says, “If you tell the truth, it could mean you don’t have a mother anymore.” And when they hear the whisper of that inner child, even the most accomplished and sophisticated women forget that they’re adults who no longer need close ties to their mothers to survive.

  Once you’ve persuaded yourself you couldn’t stand the feelings that come with acting on your truth, there’s just one recourse: rationalizations that distort both your own self-image and your view of your mother.

  “Listen, she really had it tough,” you tell yourself. “I’ve got to cut her some slack.”

  Colleen struggled mightily to hold on to any shred of evidence that her mother “wasn’t that bad,” and her rationalizations were all too familiar.

  COLLEEN: “I don’t want you to think I demonize my mom—I don’t. I mean, she made sure we had food and a roof over our heads—I never went hungry. I had books for school, nice clothes. And to be totally honest, I was kind of a troublemaker when I was little. It’s no wonder she got upset with me.”

  Colleen was still hoping to somehow salvage something positive from a relationship with a mother who may have given her enough to eat, but who starved her emotionally. Doing that, though, required her to pull out the self-blame that’s so familiar, and so oddly comforting, to daughters of unloving mothers.

  Do you see the cycle at work here? The pain in your relationship with your mother keeps turning to fear, which becomes rationalization and self-blame. It’s a closed loop that keeps you locked in and unable to change. Our intellects may know what’s going on, but our emotions tell us a different story—and most of the time it’s our emotions that we listen to.

  Daughters of unloving mothers are often able to say: “My mother is depressed.” “My mother is incredibly self-absorbed.” “My mother is driving me crazy.” And even “My mother is an alcoholic,” “My mother was verbally abusive, and still is,” or “My mother is such a bitch.” The words sound tough and knowing, but it’s a kind of knowing that often stops far short of giving you any relief. Because until you disconnect fully and completely from the mother myth, you can’t halt the emotional cycle that is programmed to explain everything in just one way: “Whatever my mother did, it was all my fault.”

  All your life, you’ve probably been trapped in the belief that you, not your mother, are flawed. This damaged self-image shaped your developing sense of yourself as a woman, which you carried into adulthood like a steamer trunk. And from that early collection of fears and misunderstandings about yourself, you continue to orchestrate many of the self-defeating behaviors of your life.

  Confronting the Taboos

  This book will give you a detailed portrait of unloving motherhood that will help you bury the mother myth once and for all. In the chapters that follow, you’ll see a wide variety of mothers who, because of serious psychological or physiological impairment, are neither willing nor able to provide the kind of consistent love that plays such a large role in guiding a child toward emotional well-being. They cannot truly love.

  I want to emphasize that none of these mothers wakes up in the morning thinking, “How can I hurt my daughter today?” Much of their behavior is driven by forces outside their conscious awareness, or emotions they are afraid of confronting: a crippling sense of insecurity, an unshakable feeling of deprivation, deep disappointment in their own lives. As they look for relief from their own fears and sadness, they use their daughters to shore up their feelings of power or agency or control. The hallmark of all these mothers is a lack of empathy, and their intense self-centeredness blinds them to the suffering they create. They rarely step out of themselves to see things from your point of view. All they know is that they want what they want, and need what they need, and they find it difficult, if not impossible, to make the connection between their demons and the hurtful actions that come to define their relationship with you.

  Please don’t look away when the mothers’ behavior you see in these pages seems painfully close to what you experienced. It’s important to recognize it as the opposite of love, and to let that recognition in deeply and fully, even if you have to do it a little at a time. I know it may be difficult, but we can’t repair the damage wrought by the mother myth without taking a clear-eyed look at what your mother did, and the marks it left on your life.

  The mothers you’ll see in this half of the book fall into five recognizable types. There are no firm boundaries among these categories, and an unloving mother may fall into several. You will come to know the workings of:

  • THE SEVERELY NARCISSISTIC MOTHER. Powerfully insecure and self-absorbed, she has an insatiable need for admiration and a grandiose sense of her own importance. She must be the center of attention and lunges for the spotlight anytime she feels it moving from herself to you. She may treat her daughter as a rival, undercutting her sense of confidence, attractiveness, and power as a woman. Criticism and competition flare anytime this mother feels threatened—particularly when her adult daughter begins to thrive.

  • THE OVERLY ENMESHED MOTHER smothers her daughter with demands for time and attention, erasing the boundaries between them and insisting on being the most important person in her daughter’s life—no matter what the cost. Because she relies on her role as a mother to fill all her emotional needs, she can’t foster her daughter’s healthy independence. She commonly describes her daughter as her “best friend,” though she rarely empathizes when her daughter’s needs and preferences don’t line up with her own.

  • THE CONTROL FREAK feels powerless in many parts of her life and uses her daughter to fill that void, seeing her as a person whose role in life is to make her mother happy and do her bidding. These mothers make their needs, wants, and demands clearly known, and threaten severe consequences anytime their daughters try to honor a different agenda. They justify their actions by insisting that only they know the best course of action their daughters can take, and their constant criticism makes daughters believe it.

  • MOTHERS WHO NEED MOTHERING are overwhelmed. Often caught in the undertow of depression or addiction, they leave their daughters in the position of having to care for them, and often the rest of the family as well. Classic patterns of role reversal take hold as the daughter is thrust out of her own childhood to parent her childlike mother, all the while starved for the guidance and protection her mother is unable to give her.

  • MOTHERS WHO NEGLECT, BETRAY, AND BATTER. These mothers occupy the darkest end of the spectrum, icily unable to summon any warmth at all, leaving their daughters unprotected from abuse at the hands of other family members—or even physically abusing their daughters themselves. The damage they inflict is poisonous, and the scars their daughters bear are deep.

  We will see how all of these mothers chip away at the foundation of their daughters’ lives, and through these examples, you will begin to understand how living with your own unloving mother taught you ways of being in the world that have impaired your ability to love, trust, and thrive.

  Repeating Patterns

  It’s an old cliché that women tend to marry their fathers, but the more eye-opening truth is that we often marry our mothers. That is, in choosing partners and situations in adult life, we are frequently propelled by a strong unconscious need to repeat the familiar dramas that produced the mother wound.

  As you saw earlier in the checklists, problematic patterns of caretaking, people-pleasing, and insecurity often have their roots in this relationship. From an unloving mother, a girl develops high tolerance for mistreatment, and at the darkest end, a battered child may become a battered adult or an abusive mother herself. But whatever your mother’s legacy, the links you make between past and present will give you the desire, and the power, to make lasting changes.

  Chapter 2

  The Severely Narcissistic Mother

  “But what about me?”

  According to ancient G
reek legend, there once lived a handsome young man named Narcissus who was so beautiful that both men and women fell hopelessly in love with him at first sight.

  One day, as Narcissus sat at the edge of a lake, he happened to glance into the water and saw the reflection of an exquisite young man. Having no idea he was looking at himself, he became so entranced with his own image that he refused to eat, sleep, or move from the spot. He died fixated on the shimmering boy in the limpid water. The white flower we call narcissus was said to have bloomed below where his body lay.

  It’s a well-known myth—and the source of many misconceptions. People use the term narcissistic to describe someone with self-adoration, like Narcissus. But having known and treated many adults who had a narcissistic partner or parent, I don’t believe that narcissists love themselves at all, although they may appear vain, confident, and extremely arrogant.

  In reality they are deeply insecure and self-doubting. If they weren’t, why would they have such an insatiable need for approval and adoration? Why would they constantly need to be the center of attention? And why would a narcissistic mother need to block her daughter’s developing confidence and self-worth in order to build up her own?

  Narcissistic mothers don’t make us feel unloved because they love themselves too much. They make us feel unloved because they are so absorbed with making themselves seem important, blameless, and exceptional that there is little room for anyone else.

  Young daughters of narcissists quickly learn that anytime the spotlight falls on them, their mothers will step in to fill it. These daughters become accustomed to being pushed aside, treated as an accessory or fading into their mother’s long shadow. Their confidence and natural enthusiasm evaporate as the narcissist takes credit for their accomplishments, and blames them for her unhappiness. Her needs, ego, and comfort—not theirs, they learn—almost always come first.