Will I Ever Be Good Enough?

by Karyl McBride

  • Laura, 50, was the youngest daughter in the family and had a close relationship with her father. “But Mom didn’t want me to be around him; it was like she was jealous of our relationship because she always needed the focus to be on her! She used to say things like, ‘You love your father and not me, and you will do anything for your father.’ ” I think that what Laura’s mom really meant was that she felt threatened by the attention that her husband was showing their daughter. Laura told me that her mother once threw rocks at her and her father while they were planting flowers together in the yard.

  4. Your mother does not support your healthy expressions of self, especially when they conflict with her own needs or threaten her.

  When children are growing up, they need to be able to experience new things and learn to make decisions about what they like and don’t like. This is partly how we develop a sense of self. When mothers are narcissistic, they control their child’s interests and activities so that they revolve around what the mothers find interesting, convenient, or nonthreatening. They do not encourage what their daughters truly want or need. This can even extend to a daughter’s decision to have a child of her own.

  • In the movie Terms of Endearment, the family is at the dinner table when the daughter announces that she is pregnant. Her mother screams and runs from the room, saying that she is not ready to be a grandmother. Clearly, the daughter’s pregnancy is not about her—it’s all about her mother!2

  • Like the daughter in the film, Jeri’s ability to express herself was inhibited by her mother’s inability to see beyond her own needs. Jeri was always artistic as a child and began winning awards for her art in the third grade. Later she won an award for a painting that included a full scholarship to an art school, but she never took advantage of it. “I never got to use the scholarship,” Jeri told me, “because my mother didn’t want to drive me to the school. She thought it was a hassle.”

  • Ruby longed to be involved in various school activities, but when she got the lead in the school musical, her mother was furious. “You don’t have time to go to all of those rehearsals! You won’t be able to get everything else done around here,” she screamed. Her mother made Ruby do all the household chores each day before she could even begin her schoolwork, let alone memorize her lines in the play. Ruby’s mother gave her a hard time throughout the rehearsal period of the play, but when the night of the performance came around and Ruby did a good job in spite of her mother, Mom threw a huge party for her own friends to celebrate “my daughter the star.” Yet none of Ruby’s friends were invited to the party and Ruby’s mother somehow forgot to tell her she did a good job.

  • A mother can feel so threatened by her daughter’s success that she won’t even bring herself to attend a graduation. Maria told me that her mom gave the excuse that she couldn’t attend Maria’s college graduation because it was too hot that day. Maria wasn’t surprised; her mother had never shared any of the trust fund money left by Maria’s late father but had used it on herself, rather than helping her daughter pay for college as her father had intended. “I had to work my ass off to put myself through college and never got a dime from her,” Maria told me.

  5. In your family, it’s always about Mom.

  Even though “It’s all about Mom” is one of the central themes throughout this book, I’ve added this stinger here to illustrate some specific examples of how this plays out in the mother-daughter connection. Narcissistic mothers are so self-absorbed that they don’t recognize how their behavior affects other people, particularly their own children. My own mother recently acted out this fifth dynamic, but this time I knew how to handle it. While I was in the midst of deadlines writing this book, my mom wanted me to come visit her and my dad in their new home. Not only had they just recently visited me in our home, but, as I had explained to her, this was a very busy time for me writing as well as running a full-time practice. I made it clear to her that a better time for me would be after I’d completed more work on the book. She responded with, “We all have goals and some of them don’t get done. You need to start doing some things that ordinary people do.” In other words, it didn’t matter what important things were going on in my life at the moment; it was all about what she wanted me to do: visit her. In years past, I would have done what my mom wanted me to do regardless of how it worked for me, my schedule or my finances. Thank God for recovery! This time around I held my ground and told her I’d visit when the time was right.

  • Sophie was very relieved after seeing her doctor about her depression, which had lasted for months and was affecting every aspect of her life. The doctor had started her on antidepressants, and for the first time in a long time she hoped that she would be feeling better soon. She told her mother that she was about to try Prozac and showed her the prescription bottle. Her mother grabbed the bottle and threw away the pills, saying, “How could you do this to me? Have I been that bad a mother?”

  • “It’s all about Mom” can play out in fairly obvious displays of maternal competition. Penny’s mother usurped the spotlight that normally would have been on the daughter before her wedding. “I had seen a beautiful silver sugar bowl and creamer at a local shop, and told my family that I planned to buy these items with the wedding money we had received. But when I went back to the store the following week to buy the set, it was gone. I thought nothing more about it until Christmas morning, when I was opening presents with my family. My mother had gotten a gift of that very sugar bowl and creamer from my dad. Turns out she had sent him to the shop I’d told them about—to get it for her. Then to top it off, she used the silver set to upstage me at a pre-wedding party. In the South it is customary before the wedding to have a tea and set up a table to show off your wedding gifts. My mother actually arranged a display table of her own. After people looked at my table, my mother would say, ‘Now come here and look at the really beautiful sugar and creamer I got.’ She never realized how her competitiveness affected me.” Penny’s mother goes to elaborate lengths to demonstrate that it’s all about her.

  • Patricia’s mother is from New York and has that city’s distinctive accent. “Whenever she doesn’t want to talk about something I bring up because she really wants to talk about herself, she will give me this certain look and say ‘What eva’ and then go directly into a diatribe about her situation or feelings.” Patricia’s mother’s two-word phrase is quick and cutting.

  • Even an infant’s behavior can be misconstrued by a narcissistic mother who sees everything in terms of how it affects her. In the film Pieces of April, the mother (Patricia Clarkson) describes how she hates her daughter, April (Katie Holmes). She says, “She even bit my nipples when I breast-fed her.”3 Oh, Mommy, we imagine the infant girl saying. I didn’t mean to, I was only a few months old!

  6. Your mother is unable to empathize.

  Lack of empathy is a trademark of narcissistic mothers. When a daughter grows up with a mother who is incapable of empathy, she feels unimportant; her feelings are invalidated. When this happens to a young girl, an older girl, or even a grown woman, she often gives up talking about herself or tuning in to her own feelings.

  • Alice was distraught over her divorce, and her mother constantly pressed her for details, which didn’t help. She would ask Alice, “Who’s getting the house? What about custody issues? Which attorney did you hire?” Reluctantly, Alice answered all her mother’s questions, but when she tried to express how the divorce was making her feel, her mother would have none of it. Instead, she focused on how much alimony Alice should ask for and what her attorney should be doing. Unable to tune in to Alice’s emotional pain, her mother made her daughter feel unimportant. Alice kept asking herself, “But what about how I feel? Do I matter?”

  • Throughout the 1990 movie Postcards from the Edge, the daughter, Suzanne (Meryl Streep), stays angry at her mother, Doris (Shirley MacLaine), who can’t acknowledge or empathize with her pain. For example, when Suzanne enters drug rehab, all her mothe
r can talk about is her hair, her makeup, and the way the room is decorated—anything but how getting off drugs must be affecting her daughter. When Suzanne gets out of rehab, Doris throws a party, ostensibly for her daughter, but invites only her own friends. At the party, the schism between mother and daughter is further highlighted when Doris asks Suzanne to sing a song, and she chooses “You Don’t Know Me.” Doris then upstages and humiliates her daughter by singing the song “I’m Here”—obviously referring to how she was there for her daughter during her awful year of rehab. At this infamous party, Suzanne finally sings, “I’m checkin’ out of this heartbreak hotel.”4 Checking out of her mother’s world, in which empathy was nonexistent, is exactly what this daughter needed to do.

  I remember a point in my own recovery from maternal narcissism when I realized fully that my mother did not want to hear about me. Still, I would persist in telephone conversations to tell her about what I was doing, rebelliously forcing her to listen. She would often wait for a break in the conversation and then turn the phone over to Dad. Sometimes I would time it, gauging how long I could talk before I got the Dad voice at the other end. Unable to empathize, she had to step aside to cede her role as parent temporarily to my father. After she broke another record in handing me over to Dad in only a few seconds, I decided not to push it further. I had my proof and there was no point in making us both feel bad.

  7. Your mother can’t deal with her own feelings.

  Narcissists don’t like to deal with feelings—including their own. Many daughters I’ve worked with grew up denying or repressing their real feelings in order to put on an act they learned their mother wanted to see. These daughters describe their mothers as going “stone cold” or “fading into the woodwork” when feelings are discussed. Some report that their mother can express only anger, which she does often. When a mother’s emotional range is limited to cold, neutral, or angry, and she doesn’t allow herself or her daughter to express her true feelings, the two will have a superficial relationship with very little emotional connection.

  • Brenda tells me, “My mother deals with feelings like a hurricane. Everything in her path gets destroyed. She yells a lot and swears a lot. It’s always everybody else’s fault. She doesn’t deal with her feelings.”

  • Helen was on a wonderful European trip after she graduated from college. She had met a guy and was thinking of marrying him. She eagerly called her mother back in the States to discuss her feelings. Mom said, “I don’t want to discuss this,” and hung up on her. To this day, Helen still wonders what her mother was thinking. Yet, even though Helen is in her forties now, she has never asked her mother about this emotionally charged incident. She learned early in life never to bring up “feelings” issues.

  • Stacy wanted very badly to discuss her childhood with her mother, which she’d never been able to do, because her mother would get too angry. But Stacy had been in therapy and made great strides toward her own recovery. She planned to have a long talk with her parents when they were in town for a visit. This time she felt the changes she’d gone through would help her communicate differently with her mother. In her backyard, chatting about the children and the family barbecue they would have that day, Stacy mentioned to her mother that she would love to be able to speak openly with her, as she now does with her own children, but as soon as she brought up childhood feelings, her mother began to drift away and become preoccupied with weeding the garden. Rather than get angry, her mother clammed up and completely withdrew, leaving Stacy virtually alone. After an uncomfortable moment of silence, Stacy and her mother went back to talking about the food for the family get-together, as though nothing had happened. When Stacy described this to me in therapy, I asked her how it felt. She had no words, but tears fell as she sat very still for a few minutes. Then with a sigh, she said, “There is no me; there can’t be with her.”

  Stacy saw that her mother can’t deal with her own feelings or her daughter’s, and that the emotional distance from her mother was truly unbridgeable.

  8. Your mother is critical and judgmental.

  It is very hard for an adult to get over being constantly criticized or judged as a child. We become overly sensitive about everything. Narcissistic mothers are often critical and judgmental because of their own fragile sense of self. They use their daughters as scapegoats for their bad feelings about themselves, and blame them for their own unhappiness and insecurity. Children—and sometimes adults—don’t understand that the reason Mom is so critical is because she feels bad about herself, so instead of recognizing the criticism as unjust or a product of their mothers’ frustration, they absorb it. (“I must be bad, or Mother would not be treating me like this.”) These negative messages from our early upbringing become internalized—we believe them to be true—causing us great difficulties later in life. A narcissistic mother’s criticisms create a deep feeling within her daughter that she is “never good enough.” It is incredibly hard to shake.

  • Marilyn’s unique talents were overlooked by her mother, who could focus only on—and criticize—what she perceived as Marilyn’s faults. Her mother was a good dancer and valued people who were “into music,” particularly those who could dance well. She sent Marilyn to ballet and tap lessons as soon as she could walk and talk. But Marilyn was a singer, not a dancer. “Mom told me I was unteachable—a klutz. She would even tell this to her friends, and I remember them laughing about it. Even though I was good at singing, all she could say was, ‘Too bad she can’t dance.’ ”

  • When Sharon married her third husband, she was afraid to announce the news to her parents because she knew her mother would be wary and critical. After Sharon told them the exciting news, her mother said, “I could get a spot in Guinness World Records. I could tell them I have only one daughter, but three sons-in-law!” Sharon cried almost the entire hour when she told me this story, and I have to admit, I cried with her.

  • Ann related in therapy that she tries hard to be independent, but her mother has affected how she views the world and feels about herself. “I’m insecure about my abilities. I always sense that my mother is looking over my shoulder, and if I make the tiniest error it’s like she’s there judging me. Everything I do has a piece of ‘What would Mom think?’ in it. She’s always a voice in my head.”

  • Chris told me that she was fearful of inviting her mother to her wedding. “Mom thinks she knows it all and is so critical and judgmental. I was afraid that during a quiet moment in the wedding she would say, ‘I give them two years.’ ”

  9. Your mother treats you like a friend, not a daughter.

  In a healthy mother-daughter relationship, the mother acts parental and takes care of the child. The daughter should be able to rely on her mother for nurturing, not the other way around. During the childrearing years, the two should not be friends or peers. But because mothers with narcissistic traits usually did not receive proper parenting themselves, they are like needy children inside. With their own daughters, they have a captive audience, a built-in source for the attention, affection, and love they crave. As a result, they often relate to their children as friends rather than offspring, using them to prop themselves up and meet their emotional needs. Sometimes being a supportive friend to her mother is the only way for the daughter to get positive strokes from Mom. The daughter may fall into the friend role willingly, not even realizing there is something terribly wrong with the arrangement until much later in life.

  • Ever since Tracy can remember, her relationship with her mother was like being best friends. She says, “I was only 12, and I would hang out with Mom and her friends. I would cut her friends’ hair, and we would all go on diets together. My mom and I were totally enmeshed. She would tell me everything about her friends, my dad and their relationship, including the sexual stuff. It didn’t matter that I was uncomfortable hearing all that. She needed me to be there for her.”

  • Cheryl’s mother was a single parent and dated constantly. When she arrived home
from dates, she would tell Cheryl all about the man she dated, what they did and how she felt about him. “My mom’s total life was about dating, and I had to hear about every escapade. I really wanted Mom to be into me and what I was doing, but we always had to talk about her boyfriends and her emotional life.” Cheryl also said that her mother left her with a nanny most of the time and didn’t bother coming to any of her school activities. “She didn’t even know who I was dating or what I was involved with at school, but I knew all about her social scene.”

  There are many adult topics to which children should not be exposed. Children need to be allowed to be children, to focus on the things that matter to them, and they should not be burdened with adult concerns. Narcissistic parents involve their children prematurely in the adult world. A narcissistic mother who constantly confides in her daughter about difficulties in her relationship with her husband, for example, does not understand how painful this can be for her child. The daughter knows that she shares traits with her father as well as her mother, so criticizing a young child’s father is like criticizing the daughter too. The daughter needs to be allowed to depend on both her parents, but when a mother shares adult concerns with her daughter, a healthy dependence becomes impossible; the daughter feels insecure and alone because she has no parent on whom she can depend. She also feels guilty about not being able to fix the parental marriage problem or her mother’s issues. Again, the internal message she’s left with is, “I’m not good enough [because I can’t fix Mom’s problems].” In part 2, we’ll see how this self-negating message affects a daughter’s love relationships later in life.