by Peg Streep
DAUGHTER DETOX
RECOVERING FROM
AN UNLOVING MOTHER
AND
RECLAIMING YOUR LIFE
Peg Streep
New York, New York
Copyright © 2017 Peg Streep. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is designed to provide information and motivation to readers; the author is neither a therapist nor a psychologist. It is sold with the understanding that the author and publisher are not engaged to render any type of psychological or any other kind of professional advice. You should rely on the advice of your therapist or medical professional for decisions about your health, care, choices, and decisions; do not do any of the exercises in this book without consulting with him or her first. We strongly recommend that you follow the advice of your therapist or other professional when considering suggestions contained in the book. The author and publisher disclaim any liability for the use of this book. All of the names and identifying characteristics of the people interviewed for this book have been changed and any similarity to any person is coincidental.
ISBN-13: 978-0692973974 (Custom Universal)
ISBN-10: 0692973974
This book was designed by Claudia Karabaic Sargent, and is typeset in the Bodoni URW font family, available through Adobe Typekit .
For my readers and daughters everywhere who seek validation of their experiences and need the support they so sorely lacked in childhood .
A special thank-you to my own daughter, once again .
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
The Truth About Maternal Power
CHAPTER TWO
The Power She Had over You
CHAPTER THREE
All in the Family: Understanding Ripple Effects
CHAPTER FOUR
Adaptation: How Her Behaviors Shaped Yours
CHAPTER FIVE
Flashes of Recognition: Patterns and Partners
CHAPTER SIX
Making the Unconscious Conscious
CHAPTER SEVEN
Reclaiming Your Power
CHAPTER EIGHT
Redirecting Your Life: Making Choices
CHAPTER NINE
Recovery and Works in Progress
CHAPTER TEN
Engaged Detox
Acknowledgments
References
INTRODUCTION
E very week I get messages from women—left as comments on my blog posts, on my Facebook page, and in email—that say the same thing: “I always thought I was the only one with a mother who didn’t love her. I feel better knowing that I’m not alone.” They usually add, “I’m so relieved to discover that I’m not crazy or imagining that this happened. You have no idea how long I’ve worried.”
Actually, I do. I was an unloved daughter myself.
These women are all ages—from early thirties to mid eighties—and from all walks of life. They are stay-at-home moms, cashiers, doctors, hairdressers, lawyers, professors, secretaries, salespeople, and even therapists. In almost every case, their outward achievements belie how they really feel about themselves; they are still made unhappy by their childhoods, despite the work they do and the families they’ve raised. They are women who have become devoted mothers but who are still hobbled and hurt. They are women who recognize that they’ve never reached their full potential, who have hurtled from one relationship disaster to another, unable to get off the merry-go-round. Some have had children while others deliberately chose not to, afraid of repeating history. Some have battled depression, disordered eating, or addictive behaviors and are only now beginning to see how their behaviors connect to their childhoods. They are women who still want their mothers’ love and struggle with setting boundaries, wanting to attend family celebrations but still needing to protect themselves. They are women who have chosen to divorce their mothers, opting for peace along with self-orphaning over the status quo.
If you are reading these words, you are most likely one of these daughters—and, no, you are not alone. In fact, you have more company than either you or I would ever have imagined. You believed and perhaps still believe, as did my younger self, that you were to blame for your mommy’s not loving you. You were afraid—just as I was for many years—to tell anyone because you wanted to be like all the other daughters, the ones who were hugged by their mothers and whose moms smiled when they came into the room. You discovered, when you did confide, that people thought you were being dramatic, because your mom seemed perfectly nice to them, and you were fed and clothed, weren’t you? You were probably hopeful—and you might even be now—that somehow, you’d still get your mother to love you. Somehow, maybe tomorrow, or the next day, or the next.
Ours is a story no one wants to hear. Everyone wants desperately to believe that, in a world where love is so hard to find and even harder to hang on to, one kind of love is inviolable—a mother’s love.
The truth of the unloving mother who actively wounds, dismisses, or disparages her child in words and actions is a cultural secret no one wants to acknowledge. We suffer alone and in silence in a sea of pastel-tinted sentiments plastered on T-shirts and mugs that say, “Home Is Where Mom Is” and “World’s Best Mom.” Over the last few years, I’ve come to see that the sense of isolation—of being singled out in this way, of being labeled as damaged or less than, of being afraid that there is something terribly wrong with you—is just as wounding as the lack of mother love itself. The hole left in our hearts fills with shame, self-doubt, and sometimes, self-loathing. But the discovery that there are others like us—that this is actually a shared experience for countless numbers of girls and women—is liberating. Daughter Detox offers a route to the way out.
That’s why I wrote this book. It’s filled with stories told to me over the years by daughters whose experiences, while they differ in the details, hurt and changed them just as ours did. But even more important, Daughter Detox lays out strategies drawn from science to get out from under the influence of the past so that you can finally become you , not just your mother’s daughter.
I’ve written it so that you can come to recognize and understand your childhood experiences, see how they have shaped the person you are in the moment, and take action to help yourself heal and grow into the very best version of you. It’s the book I wish I’d had when my mother’s voice still played on an endless tape loop in my head.
I’m sure you, too, have struggled with that tape—the one that says you’re inadequate, unlovable, stupid, difficult, worthless, fat, or any other variation on the theme. The pages of this book will help you understand the process that internalized that voice and help you locate an off button once and for all and, more important, find another tape, one composed by you, to play .
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Each chapter of Daughter Detox focuses on a step-by-step process to guide you through the seven stages of reclaiming your life and recovering from childhood. The process includes expanding your understanding of the circumstances of your life, reading stories shared by other daughters, and then using strategies and techniques that are meant to help you move forward. You are working on undoing damage done over the course of many years so you may find yourself needing to go back to a previous chapter even if you’ve already read it. That’s to be expected: Recovery isn’t a linear process .
Because I’m neither a therapist nor a psychologist, I’ve drawn on strategies suggested by psychological and other research and, in some cases, steps that have worked for me as an unloved daugh
ter who had to reclaim herself. This book isn’t a substitute for therapy, of course, since nothing works quite as well or effectively as one-on-one work with a gifted counselor.
Here are the seven steps and what each of them entails. Journaling exercises for helping you heal organized by chapter and stage can be found beginning on page 235 in Chapter Ten .
Discovery: For many daughters, though not all, the first problem is recognizing the mother wound. There are many reasons—some complicated, some simple—that understanding the connection between the pain and unhappiness you feel and your mother’s treatment of you is very hard for many daughters. Even for those who recognize at a young age that their mothers don’t love them as a mother should (I was one of them), the full understanding of what this means and how it shapes you in every meaningful way is a slow revelation. The first two chapters of the book are devoted to discovery.
Discernment: Understanding the relational patterns in your family of origin is the goal of this next step. Recognizing how the other people in your early and later life contributed or detracted from your mother’s treatment of you is part of your growth; this includes how your father behaved and the attitudes of siblings and other people who formed a part of your childhood world. This step moves past discovery into the path of fully understanding the emotional connections you were exposed to and how they shaped your personality, your view of yourself, and your thoughts and emotions. Teasing out how your own behaviors were formed in response to your treatment by your mother and others is the second stage of discernment. Figuring out your own patterns of attachment—whether you are anxious or avoidant—is part of this step, as are beginning to recognize triggers and starting to work on coping mechanisms to thwart them. Chapters Three and Four focus on discernment.
Distinguish: You’re not in your childhood room anymore but the chances are good that you are bringing the relational patterns of the past into the present, and not just with your mother. Getting to the root of your own unhappiness in the present—whether that’s an inability to maintain friendships or intimate connections, a sense of isolation, being unable to connect to anyone, constantly fighting with someone you know you love, or a series of relationships that make you feel marginalized or “less than”—is part of being able to distinguish older patterns, which are covered in Chapter Five .
Disarm: This is the heart of Daughter Detox : figuring out how not to be the little girl in your childhood home. All of the previous steps lead to this path but it isn’t a slam-dunk. Why? It is about both her and you, and you have to bring the unconscious patterns in your behavior, formed in response to your mother’s behaviors, into conscious awareness. Specific strategies to deal with ruminative patterns of thought, recognizing emotional triggers, learning to identify and process emotions more productively, and more are the focus of Chapter Six .
Reclaim: This step tackles how to go about changing your thinking and reactions so that you can move on to a new phase of your life. Learning how to harness your motivation so that you can achieve new goals, practical steps for achieving earned secure attachment, and using techniques that help you to reframe your thoughts to stay on track are all part of Chapter Seven .
Redirect: One of the key decisions you’ll make as you move forward is redefining your relationship to your mother and most probably other members of your original family. Chapter Eight specifically focuses on helping you decide whether or not you should or can continue to be in contact or not. It details the pros and cons of continuing the relationship and what obstacles and barriers you’re likely to face as you put boundaries in place. The decision to go no-contact—its perils and rewards—is also explored in depth. One of the main goals of the redirect step is to enhance your ability to feel self-compassion and, indeed, to mother yourself.
Recover: The final stage involves seeing the healing process as one that is ongoing, and that really incorporating self-acceptance and self-compassion into your life remains a daily task. Using the Japanese art of kintsugi as its primary metaphor, this step requires you to understand healing in a different way and to make peace with the pace of the process.
Chapter Ten is devoted to exercises keyed to each of the stages of recovery. You can do them after reading each chapter or at any other time.
ABOUT THE EXERCISES IN DAUGHTER DETOX
Most of the work involved in reclaiming your life from the effects of a toxic childhood is about bringing unconscious patterns of thinking and feeling to the surface so that they can be changed through consciousness. It’s all about connecting the dots. A great deal of research attests to the fact that much of what we think is, in fact, not governed by rational and conscious deliberation but by automatic, unconscious thought processes that the brain uses as shortcuts. (To use psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s terms, slow thinking versus fast thinking.) Thought processes are also affected by what are called “primes” in the environment, as research by John A. Bargh and Tanya L. Chartrand showed. So the environment in which you do these exercises, including journaling, matters.
Choose a place to sit that makes you feel calm and focused. If a pile of unpaid bills or a sink full of dirty dishes is part of your visual landscape, you’re not going to be fully focused. Being in a well-lit space is important. Carve out enough time to do the exercises without interruption. If you are in therapy, do not do these exercises without discussing them with your counselor first.
JOURNALING
Research by James Pennebaker and others has shown that writing helps us not just to make sense of our experiences but also permits us to create a coherent narrative of them. Creating a coherent narrative—connecting the dots between cause and effect—is an important part of healing from a toxic, abusive, or chaotic childhood. Writing has been shown to be a therapeutic tool, provided you follow some simple rules.
Pick a notebook or a blank book for journaling, rather than using single sheets of paper. You should write by hand, rather than using a tablet or computer, because writing longhand uses a different brain circuitry. There’s scientific research, too, that shows we remember and think more clearly when we write by hand, rather than type. Remember that this isn’t a test, and if writing makes you anxious, start by writing down phrases or words instead of full sentences.
What to Do When You Are Journaling (and What to Avoid)
When you are writing about the past, make sure you are recalling why you felt as you did, not what you felt. Focusing on why you felt as you did is done best by recalling an event or experience as if from a great distance or as if it happened to someone else. This is called “cool processing.” The problem with remembering what you felt—which is called “hot processing”—is that if the feelings are vivid enough, they can actually put you emotionally back in the moment, act as a trigger for rumination, and effectively set you back a step or two. If you find yourself hot processing—remembering the pain you felt as a child when your mother taunted you or ignored you, or recalling a moment when you felt hopelessly alone and adrift—stop writing immediately. You need to be able to recall in the cool way.
The first stop is discovery . It’s the first baby step in the direction of understanding and, ultimately, healing.
CHAPTER ONE
THE TRUTH ABOUT MATERNAL POWER
I’ve spent the last 25 years trying to get my mother’s voice out of my head—the voice that tells me it’s just a matter of time until everyone realizes I’m not who I seem. The tape still plays when I get anxious, but, most days, I can muddle through and ignore it .
~Alexis, 40
T he baby girl, just one month past her first birthday, is perched on the long Plexiglas table, her hands and chubby knees touching its cool, smooth surface. She’s round-faced and smiling at her mother, who’s on the other side, out of reach. Even though she’s not walking yet, this baby in her pink coveralls is a confident crawler; she’s calm and more curious than anything else about her unfamiliar surroundings.
The Plexiglas she’s on is part of a ve
ry famous experiment called the “Visual Cliff,” originally designed and conceived of by scientist Eleanor Gibson to test whether depth perception was innate or learned. The idea came to this mother of two as her young children played near the edge of the Grand Canyon on a family vacation while she fretted about their safety. In the experiment, a checkerboard pattern lies flush under the Plexiglas for half of its length, but then the fabric slants some four feet, creating the illusion of a sheer drop beneath the solid surface. Gibson and her colleague Richard Walker tested rats, kittens, puppies, and baby goats, as well as human infants, and discovered that once an animal or infant was old enough to locomote, depth perception had kicked in, causing them to screech to a halt at the sight of the drop. Babies crawled readily across the “shallow” end, but only a very few dared to take on the “deep” end. Even when there was a toy placed at the end to lure them, babies typically stopped their crawling at the point of the illusion of a drop-off.
James Sorce and his colleagues took the cliff experiment one step further, exploring what a one-year-old does when her eyes are telling her one thing—Yikes! There’s a drop ahead!—while her palms and knees, solid against the plastic, are telling her another. When her sensory perceptions contradict each other, how does she resolve the ambiguity? She looks to her mother for guidance.
The researchers had the babies’ mothers stand on the deep end and assume various facial expressions. It’s in this experiment, among others, that the extent of maternal power becomes crystalline. When the researchers had the mothers look happy and smiling, they discovered that an astonishing 74 percent of the babies began crawling and kept going, even over the deep end. The signals conveyed by their cheery mothers’ faces—All is well! You’re safe!—caused the babies to ignore the danger of a drop ahead that their own senses registered. In contrast, an angry face from their mothers on the other side was enough to stop every baby in his or her tracks. Some babies actually retreated, crawling backward, at the sight of their mothers’ disapproving expressions.
