Will I Ever Be Good Enough?

by Karyl McBride

  • Martha, 62, tells me, “I had a guilt attack before this interview. My mother’s favorite expression was, ‘The bird shits in its own nest. Don’t take it elsewhere.’ She would be horrified and furious if she knew I had talked about her.”

  GRIEVING THE LOSS OF THE CHILD YOU DIDN’T GET TO BE

  The next specific area of grief is grieving for the little “you” who didn’t get to exist because you had to be an early caretaker for your mother, and sometimes for the whole family.

  Think about what you might have been able to do if you had been allowed just to be a kid. Imagine yourself doing those things right now. Write them down and again look at what you missed out on. Let your feelings be there. Feel them. If you are artistic, draw some pictures of you doing those things you wanted to do. Maybe as an adult you can do them now. We will be discussing this more in chapter 12.

  When I first worked through this stage of grief in my own recovery, I used an exercise that I often use with clients now. I would sit in a rocking chair after my children were in bed and rock, close my eyes, and imagine myself as a small child. I would get this visual of a little girl with long blond braids and red cowboy boots. I would then hold out my arms and ask her to come to me and tell me what she needed from me. At her first appearance, she was a sad, stomping, red-booted, angry kid, with flailing braids, but as she talked to me, I became aware that I had to take care of her now, and recognize what she had missed as a child. We would cry together in that rocking chair. I spent a lot of time doing this exercise repeatedly. Your inner kid will talk to you, too, if you invite her in. Write down in your journal what happens in each interaction.

  Another technique that is helpful in getting in touch with your little-kid needs is what I call “doll therapy.” Go shopping and find a little girl doll that resembles you between three and eight in age. Look until you find a doll you love, then bring her home and talk to her. Keep her on the bed, dresser, or couch so she is in plain sight to remind you that she has needs. Ask her what she has missed out on and what she needs from you now. Write down the thoughts that come up so that you don’t lose them as you get busy in your day-to-day routines, which is easy to do. You want to be able to refer to the list to see where you still need to grieve and how to give yourself what you didn’t get as a child.

  As you engage in this grief process, allow the child or doll to speak to you at different ages. Allow her to go into her teen years, even up to age 18. Branded into many daughters’ memories are the moments when they needed a mother to be there for them during the difficult teen years. If your memories begin to go even into your twenties or into adulthood, go with them. If you give yourself the quiet and the time, the feelings that you need to process will surface.

  It is reasonable to seek a therapist for help during this part of your recovery. Try to follow the suggestions here on your own first, as they have been helpful in my sessions with daughters. But if you are stuck and nothing is coming to the surface, using professional help in the process can make a big difference. You may want to find a professional mental health provider who knows a technique called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), an area of expertise that is particularly helpful with processing feelings. Go to the emdria.org Web site to find an EMDR-qualified professional in your community. This Web site also provides articles on EMDR and helps you understand how the technique works. In short, it is a treatment that is designed to process trauma and desensitize the related emotions. Having used it for years with my clients, I can attest to its effectiveness. And it works more quickly than straight talk therapy.

  Finding the right therapist means finding one with the proper qualifications and with whom you can connect personally—the key to a successful therapeutic experience. For this particular kind of therapeutic work, I even recommend a female therapist who is older than you are. It is also helpful if the therapist is a mother or grandmother. These are not absolutes, but helpful in establishing trust and emotional connectivity.

  The most important aspect of the first steps of recovery for daughters of narcissistic mothers, however, is doing the acceptance and grief work on your own as much as you can, before moving on to the next chapters and suggestions. If you don’t work on acceptance and grief, the rest of your recovery won’t “take.” You want to have a true and lasting recovery. If you think you have grappled with acceptance and grief, start on the next few chapters, and if you find they are not working for you, simply come back to these “first steps” and work them again. You want to—you have to!—clean this house first before you move along into emotional and spiritual home decorating.

  • Lou, 44, tells me, “I have to admit, Dr. McBride, that I hated this part of the recovery, but, oh, was it worth it! I have tried over and over in my life to do the rest of the recovery you told me about and nothing seemed to work until I just broke down and felt this bad stuff!”

  • Mimi says, “I have never seen myself as a raging, angry person. I always thought that meant I was being bitchy, and I avoided it like the plague. This step was very hard for me to do, especially the feelings part. I could talk up a storm about my mother, but I never wanted to admit to myself that she had hurt me so much. It was like she won again and I was once again a victim. I see now that I had to be this raging, bitchy victim to get to the other side.”

  The other side is where you will begin to grow and sustain yourself. When you’re ready, join me in doing that in the next chapter.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  * * *

  A PART OF AND APART FROM

  SEPARATING FROM MOTHER

  Because if everyone just turns out like their mother, then what’s the rat’s ass point?

  —Elizabeth Strout, Amy and Isabelle1

  To become authentic and whole—this is the ultimate goal in recovering from a narcissistic mother. The next step for you to take toward this is to separate psychologically from Mother as an adult, so that you can grow your own internal emotional psyche. For when you grow your internal emotional being, you become resilient and strong. You can stand on your own. You can sustain yourself in the face of maternal deprivation, bear up under any negative litanies from your mother, and withstand criticism from anyone in the external environment. You will become a woman who can be around your mother and be away from her, and you will remain whole in both situations. This is the ability to be a part of and apart from at the same time, all the while keeping in steady access a solid sense of self.

  Why Is Psychological Separation from Mother Important for Your Mental Health?

  Individuation, a normal part of development, begins at about age two as a child begins to say “no” and “mine,” and continues throughout life as the child matures, develops her own wants, needs, and desires, and deliberately breaks away from her parents to form a healthy sense of self. Healthy parents allow this to happen gradually and naturally.

  The individuation process is stunted for children of a narcissistic mother, because she has either engulfed or ignored them. An ignored child does not get her emotional needs met and cannot work on self and separation because she is still trying to fill up her own tank with Mother’s love. She keeps trying to merge with her mother like a small infant, trying to get Mother’s approval and attention. An engulfed child is discouraged from seeing herself as separate from her mother and from having individual needs, desires, thoughts, or feelings. Neither daughter’s emotional needs are met and each has difficulty in developing a sense of self. If you’ve grappled with issues of control over your own life and feelings, or you can’t enjoy your successes, you are struggling, like most daughters of narcissistic mothers, to separate and individuate. You are probably still searching for and developing the whole you.

  For many years, at the times I felt overwhelmed, I had a favorite saying: “I’m too little for that.” I would find myself using it whenever I faced a big project or was up against a major life decision. One day it dawned on me that this was an unconscious expression of a much
deeper reality. During a therapy session, while I was processing the breakup of a love relationship, my therapist innocently asked me why I had decided to stay in the house in which I’d lived with the man I was getting over. It seemed too big for just one person, so why did I not move and find my own smaller, more practical home that could be “just mine”? I remember feeling blank and numb, and responded, “I’m too little to move.” My therapist’s eyes glistened, and he smiled. I felt instantly defensive and annoyed, but he gently explained, “That’s the issue right there.”

  I did feel “too little.” When you haven’t completed individuation with your mother, it leaves you unfinished and emotionally immature, a half person aspiring to become a whole person. If your emotional self has been stunted, it doesn’t grow in proportion to your physical, intellectual, and spiritual self. You have to heal in order to become whole.

  Years ago, in times of stress, I would unconsciously recite the words “Oh, Mommy.” Thank goodness that impulse is gone, but I do remember how infantile and orphaned I felt. It makes me smile to write this today simply because I can acknowledge this and be grateful that I have grown beyond it.

  Part of separating from your mother and childhood is ridding yourself of negative self-talk, such as, “I’m not good enough,” “I’m unlovable,” “I can’t trust myself.” Because you have internalized these messages, they speak to you now as your mother once did. Decide for yourself what those messages say, block them out, and override them. As you do this, you separate in a healthy way from your dysfunctional mother and her self-defeating belief system. You will recognize yourself as an individual woman.

  • Gracie, 35, remembers her struggle to individuate with painful clarity. “It took me a long time to feel like a separate person from my mother. She merged into me and then it was all about her—no distance.”

  • Marianne wants to be close to her family, but needs to maintain her hard-won sense of self. “I seem to do really well with my established sense of self until I get around my mother and the family and then it’s like I get sucked back into the old roles we all used to play. I want so badly to just be me even when I am around all of them.”

  What Does Separation Mean, Exactly?

  Psychological literature explains separation-individuation as defining a sense of self and as differentiation. Every person has to undertake individuation from her family of origin to grow up fully. Psychological separation is an internal process and has nothing to do with geographically separating from your mother or family of origin. According to renowned family therapist Dr. Murray Bowen, an adult can regard herself to be further along with her individuation process the more she (1) becomes less emotionally reactive to the family dynamics, (2) becomes more objective in observing the family dynamics, and (3) becomes aware of the “myths, images, distortions, and triangles” she had been blind to while growing up.2 As you undergo the acceptance and grief processes in the previous chapter, you can undertake these steps successfully. As Bowen states:

  The person who acquires a little ability at becoming an observer and at controlling some of his emotional reactiveness acquires an ability that is useful for life in all kinds of emotional snarls. Most of the time he can live his life, reacting with appropriate and natural emotional responses, but with the knowledge that at any time he can back out of the situation, slow down his reactiveness, and make observations that help him control himself and the situation.3

  How Do I Release Myself from the Mother Orbit?

  Releasing yourself from orbiting around your mother is the only way to gain true mastery over your life choices and to become who you are meant to be. I take my clients through the following three steps when they are moving through this stage of development: (1) understand how your mother projects feelings onto you; (2) understand and cope with envy from your mother and others; and (3) eradicate negative internalized messages. Let’s go through them together on the following pages.

  PROJECTION

  Projection is best understood as a process by which a person takes her own emotions and sees them as coming from someone else, believing that the other person actually originated those emotions. People do this when they are not dealing with their own pain or inner conflicts and blame other people for their own turmoil. Daughters of narcissistic mothers are generally the scapegoats for their mothers’ projections, including fragile ego and self-loathing. The daughter doesn’t understand this hatred and internalizes it so that she feels that she is bad or not good enough. Because this begins for the daughter at such a young age, it feels normal and real.

  COPING WITH MOTHER’S ENVY

  Daughters of narcissistic mothers commonly feel their mothers’ envy. It’s time to recognize and understand it. Many people believe that to be envied would be a desirable, powerful experience, but in reality being envied, particularly by one’s own mother, is unnerving and awful. The daughter’s sense of self is canceled by disdain and criticism. Her goodness is questioned or labeled bad or made light of, which causes her to feel like “her reality as a person is obliterated.”4 As the daughter analyzes what her mother appears jealous about—her looks, achievements, material wealth, weight, personality, friends, husband or boyfriend, or relationship with her father or siblings—she comes to feel unworthy. It makes no sense to the daughter that her own mother would have these bad feelings about her, and therefore she believes something is wrong with her.

  Daughters typically have a difficult time coming to terms with being envied and being able to discuss it openly. I believe this is because they don’t want to appear arrogant in even thinking that someone could envy them. We can discuss our being jealous of someone or something, but to say we think someone is envious of us sounds haughty, eh? Daughters of narcissistic mothers usually do not see their own goodness enough to recognize envy for what it is, but believe they have done something wrong once again. Well, for you this envy was very real, particularly if you can recall specific comments, criticisms, and judgments your mother made about you or about things you did. You might have tried to make sense of them before, but it is important for you now to write down any comments that felt like envy. Seeing them in black and white in your journal will help you recognize the distortions that came your way and created an awful feeling inside your very soul.

  If you blamed yourself for these comments and tried to right what seemed to you to be a misunderstanding, your efforts no doubt failed, for it is impossible to mend a narcissist’s distorted sense of envy. Envy just allows the insecure mother to feel temporarily better about herself. When she envies and then criticizes and devalues you, she cancels you out of her life and in this way diminishes the threat to her fragile self-esteem. Envy is a powerful tool in the narcissist’s repertoire, and you have likely seen it in your mother’s interactions with other people. When she directs it at you, however, it creates a feeling of helplessness and painful self-doubt.

  To release yourself from your confusion and see the envy for what it is, recognize your own goodness and strength. Do not be spiteful or retaliate with ugliness. The envy that is thrown your way does not belong to you, and you do not have to identify with it. You can be real and feel the hurt and the sadness but not attack back or seek revenge. Hang on to the good that is within you. Most daughters I have worked with are not vengeful, so you most likely are not either. Is it any wonder that Cinderella is the favorite fairy tale mentioned by daughters of narcissistic mothers?

  ERADICATING NEGATIVE MESSAGES

  To rid yourself of negative messages, first think about how you make a wide range of decisions. Do you base your choices on information that you trust? Is that information usually from a reliable source? Do you typically have data that tell you that this source is someone on whom you can rely, someone with the credentials to be giving you advice or assistance? Have you generally had a good experience with this person and been able to trust his or her perceptions, information, and knowledge? Does this reliable source mostly treat you with respect and care
about how you feel? Most likely your answer to each of these questions is yes.

  I ask you, then, Is it wise to take those internalized messages from childhood and believe them, since they came from someone who was not authentic, loving, or empathetic, who could not establish an intimate emotional bond with you, who projected her own feelings onto you, as she was not in touch with her own emotions, and who was also envious of you? Why would you allow this person to define who you are? Consider the source. Remind yourself of this as you take a pen or go to a computer and identify and record those negative messages. Write them down in one column, and in another column, write about why they are simply not true. In doing so, you are redefining what you believe to be true about yourself. Is it really true, for example, that you are not good enough? Who says? You only have to be good enough for you!

  Once you have identified the negative messages and have answered back, saying why they are not correct, your next task is to remember to do this same exercise whenever a message pops up in your mind. This way you will erase the old and put in the new—each time one appears in your mind. It will take some practice, but eventually your persistence will pay off.

  Even though working this recovery program will bring you success, if you have difficulty getting rid of your internalized messages and need additional assistance, this is another time in your recovery that a therapist using Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) could help you. You would take your specific negative messages to your therapist, who will likely ask you to put a traumatic memory with each message for the EMDR therapy to be effective.