In the period after writing the letter and experiencing the emotions that it inevitably raises, I urge daughters to focus on learning new ways to work with their feelings. This is not the time for confrontations, drama, or battling with Mother.
“It’s better simply to be with the anger, the grief, and to let these feelings teach you more about yourself and what you truly need and desire,” I told Samantha. “What you discover now will become the foundation of decisions you’ll make about how you want to proceed in your relationship with your mother, so don’t try to race past your feelings on the way to a resolution.”
A Toolbox for Handling Anger and Grief
As daughters work toward finding a new path with their mothers, I remind them that they don’t have to let their emotions build without release—there are many ways to express them constructively. Below, I’ve collected some of the tools and insights that have helped bring many of my clients relief when their feelings intensify. Wherever you are in facing your relationship with your mother, I think you’ll find this toolbox helpful anytime you’re feeling agitated, confused, or overwhelmed.
Confronting and Managing Anger
Even when daughters think they’re old hands at expressing anger, it’s likely that what they know best is the “stuff and erupt” pattern, holding in their feelings until they can’t be contained. Some women go from stuffing their anger at their mothers to exploding at anything or anyone who activates old wounds or old memories. They jeopardize their personal and professional relationships, and ironically the person they’re most deeply angry with—their mother—can’t even hear them. Others channel unexpressed anger into physical symptoms.
Women who are actively in touch with their anger, and express it by yelling at their mothers, may think they have this tricky emotion well handled. But yelling is as useless as not saying anything. As I tell my clients, it reduces you to a child and strips you of credibility. Worse, there’s no possibility for change, because she doesn’t hear what you’re saying once you start screaming. All you’ve done is to once again hand your power to her.
There are much better alternatives, which bring much more positive results. Here are the instructions I give my clients to teach them some of the most effective techniques I know for managing anger.
1. FEEL YOUR ANGER WITHOUT JUDGING IT.
I know that for some women, acknowledging anger is difficult because it makes them feel intensely guilty and disloyal. But to be human is to feel anger—all of us do. It’s not a flaw, it’s an essential part of our emotional guidance system. To allow yourself to feel, and be served by, this emotion, try approaching it with curiosity. Ask yourself: What is my anger telling me to look at? What needs to change?
2. ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO FEEL ANGRY.
Tell yourself:
• I have been deeply hurt, and I have the right to be angry about that.
• Anger doesn’t make me a bad person.
• It’s normal to feel guilty about being angry.
• My anger will give me power when I manage it in a healthy way.
3. GET A REALISTIC IDEA OF WHAT ANGER LOOKS LIKE.
If one of the reasons you run from your anger is that you’re afraid it will make you look ugly, pay attention to TV shows and movies in which women express their anger and assert themselves in a strong, controlled way. You’ll see that their faces often take on a kind of strength and firmness that’s actually attractive in many ways. They don’t look like shrews; they’re almost regal. One of my favorite movies is a classic film called The Heiress, in which Olivia de Havilland plays a plain and painfully shy young woman who’s been beaten down by her tyrannical father and betrayed by her fortune-hunter fiancé. As she evolves during the movie, acknowledging her anger and the reality of how she’s been treated, she actually transforms physically. In the last scene, her demeanor and the expression on her face make it clear that she will never be taken advantage of again.
The strength she radiates is the opposite of ugly. She has the beauty that comes with empowerment.
4. RELEASE THE ENERGY OF YOUR ANGER WITH PHYSICAL ACTIVITY.
Run, walk, hit a tennis ball, swim, lose yourself in the loud music and sweat of an exercise class. Moving your body will release endorphins, the vital brain chemicals that are so important to your sense of well-being. It’s one of the best ways to dissipate anger that’s building up inside.
5. PUT YOURSELF IN A MORE PEACEFUL PLACE WITH VISUALIZATION.
Pick a time when you won’t be interrupted for five or ten minutes and sit down in a comfortable, private place—your favorite chair, the top of your bed, even your car. Close your eyes. Breathe in deeply through your nose and let the breath out slowly through your mouth. Visualize your breath as a warm, smooth current that flows in and out, and take four or five long, slow breaths. Feel the breath going into any tight places in your body, and when you exhale, let your breath carry the tightness away.
Now visualize the most beautiful, serene place you’ve ever been. (For me, that place is a sparkling blue bay on the Big Island of Hawaii surrounded by black-green mountains.) See yourself in your special place. Let yourself be nourished by the air, the sun, the wind, the colors, the smells. You’ll notice yourself feeling calmer. Stay as long as you like, breathing it all in and soaking up the peace of this place. All you have to do here is rest and breathe. Let your thoughts float away on the breeze. Feel your heartbeat and breathing slowing down. Linger here in the quiet. When you’re ready to leave, take a last look around and then open your eyes. This place is always there for you. You can return anytime you want to.
WHEN THE PERSON YOU’RE ANGRY AT IS YOU
Once a woman gets in touch with her anger at her mother, she may find that she’s full of questions about how someone who was supposed to love her could have behaved with so much thoughtlessness or even cruelty. The next question that immediately follows is often for herself: How could I have continued to tolerate such treatment for so long (even into the present)?
Samantha, like most daughters, had grown up believing that if her mother was unhappy or unkind, it was because she wasn’t doing things right. But now, she told me at one of our sessions, she found herself thinking: “How could I have let her mistreat me? How did I let her control me like that? Why can’t I stand up to her? How could I have let that happen to me? How could I have been such a slave to trying to make her happy?” In essence, she’d walked away from her old form of self-blame only to replace it with a new one. She was still asking, “What’s wrong with me?”
It’s crucial that daughters look critically at the blame and the anger they may be directing at themselves. This is what I told Samantha, and what I tell all my clients:
First of all, you were dependent, helpless, and programmed to obey authority. Your mother was bigger, older, smarter, and much more powerful than you were, and you had to go along. You didn’t have a choice. What were you going to do, leave home and get a job when you were seven?
It’s natural to be upset at yourself—that’s part of the process when you let yourself see just how badly you were treated. But self-recrimination is an exercise in futility. It doesn’t resolve anything, and it doesn’t make you feel better or improve your life. It only amplifies your discomfort.
I ask my clients to use these phrases to connect with the healing self-forgiveness and self-compassion that they deserve. Read them, repeat them, or write them down, I advise, whenever the thought “How could I have let this happen?” begins to surface.
• I did the best I could with the information I had at the time.
• As a child, I didn’t have the ability or perspective to know what was really going on.
• I was programmed early on to defer to my mother and try to please her, and that programming has been tenacious and powerful.
• My guilt and my fear of the consequences were stronger than my motivation to change the relationship, but that is changing.
• I’m n
ot alone; many people have trouble disentangling themselves from unloving mothers.
• Change is difficult for everyone.
• It was hard for me to give up the hope that things could get better; I couldn’t accept that she was very unlikely to change.
• I was so disempowered that I didn’t have the tools to change the status quo.
• I forgive myself.
Not only did they not have the tools they needed to set firm limits and boundaries between themselves and their mothers, but they also didn’t know they had the right to acquire and use them.
The Truth About Grief
For a time after they write their letters and face the pain of their pasts, almost anything might trigger daughters’ grief. A memory. A movie on TV showing a mother and daughter sharing the kind of intimacy a woman longed for but never had. The sadness is normal. As I tell my clients, it lets you know that you’re a sensitive person with feelings that you need to honor and protect.
I know how frightening this kind of grief can feel. It can be piercing for any woman to truly acknowledge that her mother was unloving. In their sadness, some women tell me it seems at times as though they’re at the bottom of a deep, black river and they’ll never come up for air. Some of them feel panicky as they experience the intensity. But I reassure them that they’re not going crazy, they’re grieving. They’re not going to fall into a million pieces. Their tears are allowing them to heal.
Grief, like depression, is something we always believe will never go away. We fear that we’ll feel this way for the rest of our lives, and for that reason we may pin on a smile and pretend everything’s okay so we can just get on with things. Or we discount what we feel by saying, “I know people who’ve had it worse.” We don’t want to wallow in our sadness.
But if we don’t confront our grief by facing it bravely, it is likely to continue to have a powerful hold over us. We have to go through grief, not behind or around or over but through it. It takes great courage to do this, I know.
I wish I could spare daughters all of this, or hand them an instant, grief-erasing exercise. But there’s no such thing. I can promise them, though, that if they let themselves acknowledge and feel their deep sorrow, it will diminish gradually. And over time it will begin to lessen significantly.
The visualization I described earlier in this chapter for easing anger, and the suggestion about using exercise and movement to release emotion, can help when grief feels overwhelming as well.
Using Your Emotions to Break a Cycle
Every daughter has a pivotal choice to make as the pain of her relationship with her mother continues to mount. She can struggle through the process of coming to terms with her feelings and use them to guide her to clarity and real change. Or she can sit on those feelings and defend herself against the pain by acting in hurtful and inappropriate ways—just as her mother did.
Having the courage to stay with difficult feelings and learn all they have to teach us is a daughter’s greatest insurance policy against turning into her mother. And it moves her along the path that will allow her to fill her life with the kind of genuine love her mother so rarely shared with her.
Chapter 10
Change Your Behavior,
Change Your Life
“I see that change is really hard,
but not changing is harder.”
A daughter who does the demanding work of confronting her emotions comes to know on a deep, almost cellular level that she was not responsible for the pain of her childhood. And as that knowledge replaces the guilt, shame, and self-blame that have controlled her, it becomes increasingly difficult for her to continue accepting her mother’s unloving behavior, and her own self-defeating responses to it.
At this point, though, most of my clients have no idea what to do or how to carry the profound changes in their inner worlds into their everyday lives. Daughters of unloving mothers had terrible role models who never taught them their responsibilities to themselves or their rights as independent women. They got few or no lessons in how to stand up for themselves, handle conflict and stress in a healthy way, or set protective limits on other people’s behavior.
But a daughter needs all those skills to break the patterns of a lifetime, and she needs new tools for becoming the woman she was meant to be.
In this chapter I’d like to show you the blueprint for a new way of being, and teach you a set of behavioral strategies and communication skills that have given my clients the resources to begin shifting their relationships with their mothers, even as they were processing the intense inner work you’ve seen in the previous two chapters.
Every one of us needs to master the art of using self-protective, assertive behavior. It’s the most effective defense against mistreatment, and I feel comfortable telling you that you can practice it on your own, regardless of whether you’re in therapy or how much meaningful emotional work you’ve done on yourself. This chapter is behavioral, strategic, and technique oriented. We think of behavior as the end of the growth process that involves changing feelings and beliefs, but I think you’ll be surprised to see how these new behaviors will dramatically shift your feeling state and any residual negative beliefs. The tools you’ll find here can help you make major changes in your life.
An Adult Daughter’s Responsibilities and Rights
Once you disconnect from the belief that you are responsible for your mother’s happiness and well-being, a void often seems to open up—the emptiness of the unknown. You’ve probably been shaping your life in response to your mother’s influence since you were little, and even if you have minimal contact with your mother now, the habit of putting her desires first (or reacting against them) may still crowd out your normal instincts for self-care and direction. Now, as you think about setting your own agenda, you may be slightly overwhelmed about how to begin.
You can start with a set of new beliefs that have the power to supersede “I am responsible for my mother”—and act as a compass that will always lead you back to choices that are both self-nurturing and respectful of others. These are your real responsibilities, responsibilities I believe you’re more than ready to accept.
As an adult daughter you are responsible for:
• Claiming your own self-worth.
• Having the life you want.
• Acknowledging and changing your own behavior when it is critical or hurtful.
• Finding your own adult power.
• Changing the behavior that’s a replica of your mother’s unloving programming.
You are in charge of these behaviors and accountable for them. At first, you may not know fully what it means to honor these responsibilities, or how you’ll do it. That’s okay. This is behavior you’re aiming toward, a new destination on the map. You’re now leaving the world your mother dominated, the one in which “having the life I want” and “having my own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors” were often treated like punishable offenses. You’ll need to make some inner and outer shifts to adjust to the significant change you’ve set in motion. Reflecting on these responsibilities, letting them seep in, is an important first step, so take time to do that.
As you accept your real responsibilities to yourself, you’re also ready to acknowledge your rights, a set of basic entitlements that are yours to claim as a strong woman and daughter. I created the list below on a recent Independence Day. In thinking about the holiday and the inspiring example of breaking away from tyranny that it celebrates, it occurred to me that many women, faced with the coercive and even tyrannical behavior of unloving mothers, have gone through life not knowing they had the right to protect themselves and seize their own freedom. For them—for you—I drafted this Bill of Rights. If you internalize and observe it, you will have withdrawn the permission for anyone to treat you badly.
The Adult Daughter’s Bill of Rights:
1. You have the right to be treated with respect.
2. You have the right to not take responsibility for a
nyone else’s problems or bad behavior.
3. You have the right to get angry.
4. You have the right to say no.
5. You have the right to make mistakes.
6. You have the right to have your own feelings, opinions, and convictions.
7. You have the right to change your mind or to decide on a different course of action.
8. You have the right to negotiate for change.
9. You have the right to ask for emotional support or help.
10. You have the right to protest unfair treatment or criticism.
As an adult, you have always had these rights, but after years of programming, you may not have allowed yourself to act on them. As a child, you may well have been guided in exactly the opposite direction, punished for being less than perfect. And today, you may love the idea of these rights but be uncomfortable, even anxious, as you imagine insisting on them. Your mother has probably been in the driver’s seat for so long that even as an adult you may often feel like a little girl whose feet don’t reach the pedals and who can’t see over the dashboard.
You’re stronger, more courageous, and much more powerful than you think. And you’ll demonstrate that to yourself again and again as you learn and practice the first of several essential life skills: nondefensive communication. This skill can help you make major changes in the way you communicate and deal with conflict. And, perhaps for the first time, you can begin exercising your rights and following through on your responsibilities to yourself.
Using Nondefensive Communication
It’s likely that your mother is still pressuring you to let her have her way by cajoling, criticizing, threatening, crying, sighing, trying to make you feel guilty/inferior, or bulldozing past disagreements with “Don’t talk back to your mother!” or threats of repercussions. Your exchanges probably fall into a predictable pattern. She goes on the offensive, sometimes very quietly, and you are forced to play defense.
Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters Page 17