You’d think that as an adult, you could stand back and say, “Sure, my mom said those things, but I know they’re not true and they don’t affect me anymore.” But if you have never taken active steps to challenge those messages, and you’re struggling through a painful relationship with your mother, those very false beliefs are almost certainly still running the show.
I want to caution you about one final set of false beliefs that’s particularly problematic for daughters:
• If only my mother would change I would feel better about myself.
• If only she’d realize how much she hurts me, she would be nicer to me.
• Even though she can be pretty mean to me, I know she has my best interests at heart. I’m overreacting.
These “if only” beliefs keep you stuck in an alternative reality of yearning and longing. They keep you passive and reactive rather than proactive because you are waiting for your mother to change instead of doing the tough work of changing yourself.
It’s time to stop waiting. It’s time to reclaim your own power.
SEPARATING LIES FROM TRUTH
There’s another word for the false beliefs that have been running your life: lies. And now, I want you to call them by their correct name and feel the enormous gratification of telling yourself the truth about who you are.
With the Lies and Truth Exercise below, you’ll actively challenge your false beliefs. The exercise will convey your truths powerfully to both your conscious and unconscious mind. It’s designed to reinforce your dignity, self-respect, and confidence, and I know you’ll find it both wonderfully clarifying and freeing.
LIES AND TRUTHS EXERCISE
Part One
Take out a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. At the top of the left-hand column, write in bold letters the word LIES. At the top of the right-hand column, write TRUTHS.
Now, in the lies column, write the lies you can remember being told about you by your mother, the ones that really wounded you. Put the lies down as they were said to you: “You are a …” (You might want to scan the lists of false messages above to be sure your list is complete.) Next to each lie, write the contradicting truth in the truths column. The best way to challenge the lies is to give specific evidence that they’re wrong. Stand up for yourself. Your truth is valid—much more than the distortions your mother has fed you. Even if you don’t completely believe the words in your truths column right now, they will light the way for you and show you the person you want to be and are becoming.
Many people do this exercise with great ease and relish, but some women have difficulty counteracting opinions they’ve heard all their lives. If you get stuck, pretend you’re talking to your best friend, or a loved one who has described herself to you with the false beliefs in your lies column. What would you say to her? How would you challenge her narrow, hurtful description of herself? What would you say if someone said things like this to your daughter? It’s often easier for us to defend other people, and see the good in them, than to stand up for ourselves.
Let me give you some examples of what my clients have written.
Lies
Truths
You’re selfish.
I’m generous, giving, and considerate of others.
You’re so unforgiving.
I’m forgiving if people take responsibility for their behavior and make amends.
You’re too sensitive.
I have feelings and vulnerabilities that make me a more open and loving person.
You owe me respect.
In a healthy relationship, respect is a two-way street. I respect my conscience and my integrity.
You’re not a good daughter.
Anyone would be proud and happy to have a daughter like me.
It’s your job to make me happy.
I’ve tried my damnedest but nothing is ever enough for you, so I’m quitting this lousy job.
You can’t survive without me.
Just watch me.
I can’t survive without you.
You’re going to have to find a way. I’m no longer willing to be controlled by guilt and obligation.
You should put my feelings first.
I did that for a long time, but now I have a family of my own, and they come first.
You can’t do anything right.
You’re jealous of me and can’t stand it when my life is going well.
You’re not good enough to succeed.
I will succeed despite you and your attempts to tear me down.
You have to take care of me.
Where is that written?
It’s your fault I drink/take pills/I’m so depressed.
I don’t accept the blame for your destructive behavior. You need to get help.
You will always be my little girl.
I’m an adult with a life of my own. I choose freedom, not smothering.
No one will ever love you the way I do.
I sure hope not.
When you make your list, I suggest you put about ten items in each column. Your truths can be as long as you want to make them.
Part Two
When you’ve finished your list, cut the column of lies from the paper on which you’ve written it, crumple up the lies, and, in a safe place, burn them. As you do this, say out loud: “I am now burning many of the lies my mother told me about myself. I am now burning many of the false beliefs I had about myself. I am now reclaiming the truth and my good feelings about myself.”
Take the ashes and dispose of them somewhere outside of your living space—don’t put them in a wastebasket or flush them down the toilet. These ashes have powerful negative energy in them, and you want them gone. Bury them in a vacant lot or put them in a Dumpster on the street. Get them out of the place where you live.
Part Three
Now (and this is the fun part), I want you to go to a party store and buy a helium-filled balloon. Take your list of truths, fold it into small sections, each containing several truths, and attach your truths to the string of the balloon. Then take the balloon to a place where you feel good—the beach, a lake, a lovely park, mountains if they’re nearby, anyplace in the outdoors that makes you feel calm, refreshed, and happy. Breathe in every sensory detail: the warmth or chill in the air, the smells and colors and textures of your surroundings. Then pick up your balloon, think about the truths of who you are, and send the balloon up to the sky. As you let it go, know that it will join a whole community of balloons that have carried the truths of other daughters I’ve worked with. Watch it ascend and feel your spirit and strength lifting inside of you.
You’re much better, much smarter, much more courageous than you were told. And you can carry all of those strengths into the work to come.
Chapter 8
Acknowledging the Painful Feelings
“It feels so good to get it all out.”
We’ve looked closely at the hidden beliefs that have powered the destructive patterns in your relationship with your mother. Now it’s time to examine the feelings they produce, the intense undertow of emotion that pulls you into self-defeating behavior.
This work requires great courage—a willingness to enter parts of your inner world that in some cases hold lifelong pain, disappointments, fears, and anger. Bravely acknowledging this material and bringing it into the bright light of consciousness will drain its power over you, and the liberation that results can be life-changing.
In this chapter, I’ll open the doors to my office and let you watch as I guide other wounded daughters through this process. The emot
ions that are likely to come up can be intense, and for that reason if you decide to try the exercises in this chapter on your own, I encourage you to connect with a strong support system before you begin, trusted people who can calm, comfort, and encourage you. Even as you’re reading, if you feel overpowered by emotions that come up, stop and take a break. Breathe deeply. Drink water. Go for a walk. Take things at your own pace—there’s no rush.
As I’ve said, you may find counseling especially valuable in doing this work. A good therapist’s office is a safe setting that will free you to go as deeply into your emotions as you need to, to produce lasting changes.
The Moment of Truth
Of all the tools I’ve used in working with people, I’ve found letter writing to be the most direct and effective way to get to the core of a woman’s relationship with her unloving mother. In a series of letters, a daughter can tell her story fully and lay out her emotional truth without fear of criticism, contradiction, or interruption. The first letter I ask daughters to write their mothers is not to be mailed, and I ask women to write it after our first session and to read it to me the next time we meet. It’s important to share the contents of the letter with a trusted person, a process that both lightens the emotional load and demonstrates the power of speaking one’s truths aloud, even when they’re difficult.
Many of my clients have reflected seriously on their pasts, and believe that they’re somewhat in touch with what happened to them. But their letters always bring a new clarity. A letter like this is so personal that I ask women to write it by hand if they can, just to experience seeing their words in their own handwriting. Many of my clients use a computer, but I believe that holding a pen and putting the words on paper can take the writer more deeply inside, and move her truths from her hand, through her arm, to her heart.
I’ve designed the letter in a structured way to make it easier for daughters to get to the core of their negative experiences and what continues to haunt them today.
This letter has four parts:
1. This is what you did to me.
2. This is how I felt about it at the time.
3. This is how it affected my life.
4. This is what I want from you now.
I’ll explain each part in detail, and also show you excerpts from the letters my clients read to me in our sessions, to give you a better sense of the range of memories, beliefs, and emotions that emerge in this seemingly simple exercise.
Part One: This Is What You Did to Me
My client Emily, who had struggled all her life with feelings of rejection after being raised by a cold, distant mother, approached the exercise with trepidation. But she promised to try because she was eager to get to the root of why she always seemed to wind up with men like her boyfriend Josh, who kept pulling away. (You saw Emily’s earlier sessions with me in the chapter on mothers who neglect, betray, and batter.)
EMILY: “I don’t know what I’ll say. On the one hand I feel as though it’s all a very old story that I don’t need to get into again, and on the other hand I kind of like the idea of just laying it all out there once and for all.”
I urged her to simply dive in. “As you sit down to write, remember: This is your moment,” I told her. “It’s a time when you can tell exactly what happened and get all the experiences, feelings, and thoughts that have been floating in your head for so long out into the open where you can see and work with them. You’ll find that the demons of self-blame, guilt, and shame start to lose their power when you take them into the light.”
The healing process kicks into gear with the words “This is what you did to me.” That statement is not gentle or polite; it’s absolutely direct. In fact, I know that seeing it might feel like a punch in the stomach. I deliberately removed the distancing veil of “objectivity” from the words “This is what you did” by adding to me. This is personal, and acknowledging that in words, and on paper, goes a long way toward freeing women to see and accept their experiences.
“Your mother’s behavior hurt you,” I told Emily. “Spell it out, starting with that bold, honest indictment: This is what you did to me. Tell your story and don’t minimize it. I don’t care how graphic you get. Put it all down. Did her behavior hurt you? How? How did she devalue you? What was your childhood like under her roof? Were you afraid of her? What burdens, secrets, and shames did she load you up with? You’ll need to overcome your feelings of guilt and disloyalty for saying these things about your mother, but I know your desire to make your life better is stronger than your fear. Things that were extremely important and harmful may seem small to you because you’ve pushed them down so much, so write down the ‘small things,’ too. You’ll gain perspective on them when you see them on paper.”
Emily’s eyes widened, but she nodded and said she’d give it a go.
I know that women who had violent childhoods may have a simpler time identifying their mothers’ behavior as hurtful—and again, I want to caution you that if you were abused, you should definitely not confront these memories without a therapist’s support. Abuse and overt bullying can seem easier to single out and describe than quieter forms of unloving behavior. But the pain and effects of unloving mothering are intense, whether it involved control, criticism, the steamroller of a mother’s narcissism, emotional abandonment, or being forced to be a caretaker.
REAL EXAMPLES OF “THIS IS WHAT YOU DID TO ME”
Emily painted a vivid picture in her letter:
“Mom—You were so critical, there was no real bond of kindness. You would never let me hold your hand or tell me you loved me. You told me once that the only reason you had me was because abortions weren’t legal when you found out you were pregnant. Anything positive you did for me was done for show. You never asked me how I felt, if I was okay, what I was interested in… . I could never be what you wanted me to be. You used to ask me, ‘What would you do if I wasn’t here when you woke up.’ I know you wanted to hear, ‘I couldn’t stand it. I’d die without you.’ But I was just a scared little girl who needed her mother, and all I could think of to say was, ‘Who would feed me? Who would take me to school?’ And you took that as proof that I only thought of myself and wasn’t worthy of your love.
“When I was older, you never encouraged anything I showed interest in, and if I didn’t get the grade I wanted or the boyfriend I hoped for, you told me it was my fault and I was doing something wrong.”
Emily paused as she read.
EMILY: “Am I just being a big baby, Susan? It feels so good to say all this, but I know I should just get over it.”
I emphasized that it was vitally important not to minimize the pain she felt and still feels. “Don’t worry that you’re ‘wallowing in self-pity,’ ” I told her. “You’re not ‘just feeling sorry for yourself.’ It’s about time you gave yourself permission to feel sorry about the things you missed out on.”
It’s not uncommon for women to find that the act of writing gives them access to memories they had pushed away. For my client Samantha—the daughter of a sadistically controlling mother—the first section of the letter was a revelation. Samantha had struggled with explosive anger on her job as a pharmaceutical sales rep (you saw her earlier sessions with me in the chapter on control freak mothers), and as she wrote, she flashed for the first time on how her mother had not just been controlling—she’d been abusive as well.
FROM SAMANTHA’S LETTER: “Mom, the things you did to me when I was so much younger and more vulnerable were so painful that I actually forgot a lot of them. I just remembered how you slapped me across the face when we were on vacation, for no plausible reason. I think you didn’t approve of the way I was eating my spaghetti. And now I remember spitting blood after you punched me another time. I think I even lost a tooth, and the fact that it was a baby tooth just goes to show how young I must’ve been.”
I advise daughters to stop and seek support if memories like that surface as they’re writing. They’re not uncommon. The act of writing is
valuable in part because it can provide access to material that was so painful, it couldn’t be kept in conscious memory but was shelved in the unconscious. In the course of this work, the door to that storeroom may swing open and reveal glimpses of what’s long been hidden.
Some of what’s buried there may be intense anger.
FROM SAMANTHA’S LETTER: “I still remember sitting in my room hating you for not letting me go to my basketball championship in junior high. Shit! There was no plausible reason for not letting me go.”
Part Two: This Is How I Felt About It at the Time
Strong feelings inevitably come up as daughters look at how their younger selves were treated. So the second portion of the letter is devoted to looking closely at how they felt as girls and young women when faced with a mother whose actions made it clear that she would not or could not act in a loving way.
Feelings are the language of the heart, not the mind, and they can generally be summed up in one or two words. I felt: sad, furious, lonely, terrified, ashamed, inadequate, silly, ridiculed, unloved, terrified, angry, burdened, exhausted, trapped, bullied, manipulated, ignored, worn down, devalued. I never felt: worthwhile, smart, safe, carefree, happy, important, loved, cherished, respected.
The distinction between thoughts and feelings may seem obvious, but I emphasize it because so many people are in the habit of putting distance between themselves and their feelings by intellectualizing. That happens when “I felt” becomes “I felt that …” The word that carries you right into your thoughts and beliefs, and away from your feelings.
FEELINGS: “I felt unloved.”
THOUGHTS: “I felt that you didn’t care for me.”
FEELINGS: “When you made me do all the cooking and take care of my siblings when I was only eight, I felt overwhelmed and bewildered and resentful.”
Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters Page 14