A Closer Look at Recovery
We move now to specifics for healing the unmothered child. The five basic areas to be covered in part 3 of this book are listed here for easy reference:
1. Accepting your mother’s limitations, and allowing yourself to grieve
2. Separating psychologically from Mother, and reframing the negative messages
3. Working on your authentic sense of self
4. Dealing with Mother and your relationship with her in a healthy way
5. Treating your own narcissistic traits and refusing to pass on the legacy to your own children.
Let’s begin with acceptance.
Acceptance of Mother’s Limitations
To realize that your own mother may not be capable of real love and empathy is shocking. If you ever allowed yourself to think this before, you might have been unwilling to accept it. Mothers are supposed to be the most reliable source of love, comfort, and empathy, and if your mother did not provide that for you, you most likely denied your feelings about it. Daughters often blame themselves for their mother’s inability to love them. Remember my client who said, “If my own mother can’t love me, who can?” Accepting their mother’s limitations is difficult for all daughters.
• Martina, 25, says, “My mind has given up on having a loving relationship with Mom. I have 25 years of evidence, but in my heart it hasn’t sunk in for real. It’s a twofold thing. When she is nice to me, shopping for suits for work, or chairs for the house or paint chips, I get lulled back into it. I get my hopes up that maybe this time will be different.”
• Many daughters never give up the hope. Sandy, 32, claims, “I always wanted a normal mom. One who doesn’t dress like a hooker, who doesn’t flirt with your boyfriends, who has normal holidays, who loves me and my boyfriend and showers us both in love, goes on family trips and has fun; one who doesn’t compete with me and isn’t threatened by me and is proud of my achievements and what I have done. Do I have to give up on all of this?”
Before you can grieve, you have to accept the reality of what you have gone through. Think of it like this: A teacher trying to teach a three-year-old to read at college level might feel disappointment, anger, even shame at his failure to accomplish this goal, until he realizes, of course, that the student is not really capable of the task. Most narcissists lack the capacity to give significant, authentic love and empathy, and you have no choice but to deal with this reality. Accepting that your own mother has this limited capacity is the first step. Let go of the expectation that it will ever be different.
Most daughters I know have gone through long periods in their lives not understanding this, always wishing and hoping that the next encounter with their mother will be different. This sets up not only unrealistic expectations for the daughter, but encourages her to keep going back to try again, for which the reward is additional sadness, disappointment, pain, anger, and exasperation. After all, we are talking about your mother—the person who was the center of your world and whom you loved and needed more than anyone else. I want to acknowledge again how difficult this is to do, but you must do it so you can move on toward your own recovery.
Remember also that narcissism is a spectrum disorder and our mothers may have varying degrees of narcissism. Mothers with fewer narcissistic traits are more likely to have some hope of recovery if they are motivated to do so. But the further along the spectrum your mother is, the more likely it is that she will not change or seek treatment and therefore you must accept this fact.
Many of my clients wonder, “How do I do that?” Remember that you cannot change others. You can change only yourself. How you view things and how you deal with your perceptions is within your control. Changing your mother is not. You may wish that you could drag your mother to therapy with you, and many women do that. Sometimes this is worth pursuing, sometimes not.
In all events, however, the success of the recovery work rests entirely with you, the daughter. Let go of the belief that your mother can or will be different, and will ever be able to give you the love you deserve. Letting go will free you and allow you to find yourself. Decide to accept and realize that Mom’s inability, her incapacity, her illness, her limitations have hurt you. This beginning step takes you out of denial and forces you to deal with reality. It is a move toward health. Decide now. This act will give you back the control you need to pursue the important grief process that follows.
How Do I Know I Have Totally Accepted Mother’s Limitations?
To determine where you are in this process of accepting your mother’s limitations, you can ask yourself the following questions:
1. Do I continue to wish and hope that my mother will be different each time I talk to her?
2. Do I continue to have expectations of my mother?
3. Have I accepted my mother for who she is?
4. Am I expecting someone else to meet my childlike needs because I have given up on my mother?
5. Do I continue to try to get my childlike needs met in relationships instead of relying on myself?
6. Am I looking for a man to replace my mother?
7. Do I feel a sense of entitlement about my needs?
8. Am I now relying on myself to meet most of my needs, and when someone else is there for me, do I see it as an added blessing rather than my due?
When you have successfully completed the acceptance part of recovery, you realize that no one can really meet your childhood needs, and you choose number eight above. The part of life when you were entitled to that kind of maternal nurturing is gone. You are willing to grieve the loss but fully understand that you can’t go back and get it and you can’t make it happen now with someone else. Remember, as an adult, you are not entitled to this. You are responsible for yourself, now willing to accept this accountability for your own needs and to find a way to meet them. With this in place, you are ready to grieve.
Teach Yourself to Grieve
Deal with your feelings before they deal with you.
—The rehab counselor in the movie Postcards from the Edge1
The grief process begins with another decision: to let your feelings be there. I had to teach myself how to do this, particularly when my feelings were sad or angry. As I learned to feel, there were some days when I would stay home from work, send the children to school, close the blinds, get the pillows, and just let myself cry, scream, hit pillows, or do whatever I needed to do to let out steam. At first, I just sat there and no feelings would surface, but I knew that there were mounds of feelings because they would come out in other ways when I least expected them. Eventually, giving myself this time, my tears would begin to leak and then pour. The trick was to let them be. To feel them. This is difficult when you have been taught to stuff it or suck it up or not to feel anything, to be phony, to pretend everything is all right when it isn’t.
Sit with those feelings. Sit with the pain. Manage the anxiety and depression that come with it so you can work through it. Don’t try to talk yourself out of it. Others around you may try to do this. No one wants to see you hurt, and your loved ones may not understand how important this is, so don’t listen to them. Let yourself feel! When the old denial tries to reassert itself, or the critical internal messages begin again, chase them away. Tell yourself that you deserve this time to heal.
It is common for you to feel like a wimp or to call yourself a baby. I do this on a regular basis, even now when I have feelings to process. I have to tell myself, “It’s okay to be a baby right now. Babies are sweet and innocent.” You won’t be a baby forever, I promise. It doesn’t last, because you work through it in this very way.
You may begin to try to rationalize away the pain. “I shouldn’t feel this way,” or “I didn’t have it that bad.” This won’t help. Whatever is there you need to release. Let it be. Sometimes in order to do this you have to be quiet and take time to be alone. If you are used to keeping busy to avoid the pain, or to using a substance or some addiction to numb the pain, you will no
tice the feelings coming up when you slow down and sit quietly or allow yourself to be alone. This is very important to do. Set aside some time alone solely for this grieving process. Do it several times until you begin to feel relief.
Try several different things until you find what works for you. I do best when I am home alone with shades drawn. Some women like to take long walks, go for long runs, hike in the mountains, go for long drives, or sit in coffee shops. Everyone is different, and it is important for you to find your comfort zone. The most important thing is that you allow it to happen. Having been taught not to do this, daughters of narcissistic mothers at first feel awkward giving themselves this emotional attention. But you can do it.
The Stages of Grief
The natural grief process as written about by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in On Death and Dying consists of five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.2 For your recovery, we will be using these stages, too, but we put acceptance first. We have already been engaged in denial and bargaining with Mother for a long time, and without acceptance we cannot move on to deal with our true feelings. Without acceptance, we stay in denial. After acceptance, we can process the anger and depression of our loss so that we can free ourselves from the pain we have felt over a lifetime. Let’s look at some examples of how this works for us.
OUR STAGES OF GRIEF
1. Acceptance. We have to accept first that Mother has limited love and empathy to give, or we cannot allow ourselves out of the denial and learn how to feel our feelings. Acceptance is our first step in recovery, after we have realized our problem.
2. Denial. As children, we had to deny that our mothers were incapable of love and empathy so we could survive. A child yearns for love above all else, and we needed the denial to keep growing and surviving.
3. Bargaining. We have been bargaining our whole life with Mother, both internally and with her. We have been wishing and hoping that she will change, that she will be different the next time we need her. We have tried many things over the years to win her love and approval.
4. Anger. We feel intense anger and sometimes rage when we realize that our emotional needs were not met and that this neglect has affected our lives in severe, adverse ways. We feel angry at Mother and ourselves for allowing patterns to develop and for being stuck.
5. Depression. We feel intense sadness that we have to let go of the hope for and the vision of the kind of mother we wanted. We realize that she will never be as loving as we want her to be. We feel like orphans or unmothered children. We let go of all expectations. We grieve the loss of the vision of these expectations.
During this grief process, you will bounce around through all the stages, back and forth. Don’t move on until you solidly accept that your mother was indeed narcissistic and did not give you the love you needed and wanted. For only then can you properly grieve. If you find yourself not accepting, go back and work on it again. It is the prerequisite for the work to come.
Use a Journal
Using a journal to get through the recovery process will help you immensely. Throughout this recovery program, I will be referring to how writing things down in a journal keeps everything in one place. Journaling is a way to record the feelings that are coming to the surface and also helps you to review them and check on your progress. Some daughters like to write things out longhand, while others are more comfortable typing a computer journal. I have a grief file on my computer that I visit at the end of each day. There I can dump feelings that have surfaced that I need to deal with. Writing down feelings is another way of getting them out of your system, and by journaling you are reinforcing the release of your trauma. Do not worry about spelling, grammar, or sentence structure. Just write whatever is coming up for you.
Many daughters have resisted using a journal at first because they do not like to write or they are fearful of someone finding the information. Nonetheless, I encourage you to use a journal because it means you are taking your recovery seriously. You commit to writing down, keeping track of it, and monitoring your progress. Your health and happiness are worth this investment of time. You want to take control of your own healing and deal consciously with these lifelong feelings or they will control you.
Grieving the Mother You Never Had
Every little girl deserves to have a mother who is crazy about her. If you didn’t have a loving mother, you have a right to grieve the loss.
As you let feelings come up, recognize them, and write them down. Start with a list of what the ideal mother would look like to you. Think about either what you wanted or what you saw in other mothers you know. Contrast what you wanted to what you had with your own mother. Face the disappointments and the pain you felt. This is extremely important at this phase of the recovery. Find the holes. Write them down. It is okay to do this.
Some women wrote the following in their ideal mom list:
• “I would want to have someone I could call and tell things to. Someone who understood me. I could talk to her about my feelings and she wouldn’t say a thing about herself.”
• “I would want a mom to talk about me and be proud of me in real ways, in accepting ways. Interested in things that I am interested in. Caring about my stuff. Acknowledging me. Not everything has to be about her.”
• “I always wanted to be able to let down and tell her the truth and know that she would take care of me. I wanted to have feelings and have her stand there and feel them too. Tell her stuff and have her handle it and not make things worse. The ability to comfort me, protect me.”
• “I wanted a mom who had a clue about my life, not one who was distant and unsupportive. I wanted her to ask about and care about her grandchildren. Every year or two she asks me how I am. Would sure want that different.”
• “I so wanted and needed a mom who dealt with real feelings and was strong emotionally. A mom who let me develop my real self and didn’t expect me to be such a showpiece for her. Some empathy and comforting would have been a blessing, and I can’t even imagine that with her.”
Even though most daughters feel sad that they did not receive the proper love from their mothers, they have a deep belief system ingrained from childhood that they do not or did not deserve a loving mother. But you deserve it! And if you didn’t have this love, you must acknowledge that you didn’t get it and that, as a result, you have this hole, a void, in your emotional development. Facing this sadness is crucial to developing your sense of self today. I’m not saying that you become permanently sad about this, but that you recognize it, face it, and allow yourself to feel sad about the pain this has caused you. We will move beyond this stage of grief. This is not where you will live the rest of your life.
Don’t listen to others as you go through this process. Well-meaning friends and loved ones often say things like “Forget it already.” “You can’t undo the past—quit trying.” “Quit thinking about the past and be in the present.” Those closest to you (and some not so close) will discourage you from doing this important work because they do not understand just how important it is. They may not want to see you suffer, so they try to fix it. They don’t understand that if you don’t face this sadness, it will remain part of you forever. Do not listen to this unqualified advice. This is precisely why so many people today are projecting their feelings, misbehaving, creating crises for themselves and others, suffering from depression and anxiety, and are not being accountable for their own actions and emotions—they’re not facing the truth about their own pain. I am giving you, from personal and professional experience, the “key” to working through the third step of recovery so that it is effective. If you ignore this step out of fear or because you listened to others’ opinions, your recovery won’t work. This step is the most important step of recovery.
Sometimes children understand the need to grieve and cry better than adults do. As I was writing this chapter, a friend e-mailed me a story about a four-year-old who understood something that many adults have forgotten.
This child’s next-door neighbor was an elderly gentleman who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old gentleman’s yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there. When his mother asked what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy said, “Nothing, I just helped him cry!”
Your grieving may take the form of intense sadness, anger, and even rage. Don’t act on these feelings other than to write them down. Don’t be destructive to yourself or others, but let yourself feel these emotions. Grieve until you can’t stand yourself anymore. I know I’m done with grieving something when I am sick of myself! Eventually you will go from feeling like you are carrying huge luggage with you every day of your life to being a light traveler who has discarded her baggage and is now feeling only intense relief.
The Expected Guilt
Guilt will rear its ugly head. Our culture teaches us that “good girls don’t hate their mothers,” so as you feel the anger, rage, and sadness, you can expect to feel guilt too. Let it be okay to feel guilt for right now. In nearly every interview and clinical session I have done with daughters of narcissistic mothers, the daughter will mention how bad she feels that she is talking negatively about her mother. It is a taboo that you must work through to get to the other side. I am not advocating that you hate her or express your anger to her. The rage will not last if you allow yourself to feel it now. You have to face your losses and disappointments before you can get past them. You are aiming to get past blame to that point of deeper understanding and peace within yourself. This will allow you to be at peace with your mother too.
Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Page 14
