by Peg Streep
The controlling mother—no matter what you call her—actually believes that she’s doing the right thing by her child, and she usually has a host of rationalizations (aka “explanations,” from her point of view) to justify her behavior; in that way, she’s like the hypercritical or combative mother who also believes she’s disciplining or inspiring her wayward child.
The controlling mother teaches a child that love comes with strings attached and that if you fail or disappoint, no one will love you.
Common Effects of Maternal Control
Whether the daughter goes with the program—doing what she can to fulfill her mother’s expectations and working overtime at pleasing—or rebels, there is real damage to the self. The daughter of a controlling mother:
♦ Defines herself by how others see her and is detached from her inner self
♦ Attributes her successes to luck and her failures to character flaws
♦ Is drawn to other controlling people because she’s afraid of failing or choosing
♦ Is intolerant of hesitation in others because she believes life has “rules”
♦ Lacks emotional resilience
♦ Has no sense of herself as independent. Whether she plays by the rules or rebels, she is always defined by her reactivity.
THE EMOTIONALLY UNAVAILABLE MOTHER
Of all the patterns of maternal behavior, among the most wounding is that of the emotionally unavailable mother. These women are emotionally distant and withdraw from their children on both a literal and symbolic level and, as a result, don’t fulfill many of the basic needs we know children need to thrive. These mothers aren’t necessarily outwardly neglectful—they may walk through the paces of what society expects of them as mothers and often do very well on the surface—but they are unresponsive and uncaring on a fundamental level. They also ignore and dismiss their children’s emotional selves, don’t work at maintaining close bonds, and are more comfortable when there’s physical and emotional distance between themselves and their daughters. Natalie, 46, recounts what it felt like: “I think I literally craved love and attention as a child. The more my mother withdrew, the more frantic I became. I became a troublemaker because I knew she would pay attention to me, even if it meant punishment. It sounds weird, but that’s what I did. Since I couldn’t get her love, I settled for her anger. At least in those moments, she was there.”
Although these mothers aren’t necessarily verbally abusive and don’t put their daughters down the way a dismissive mother can, the withholding of affection and attention is another form of emotional abuse. While some mothers are, by nature, cold and unresponsive—they are themselves avoidantly attached—others use unavailability with intention and malice, as a way of feeling powerful in their own right. Either way, their behavior tells the daughter that she’s unworthy, that she’s insignificant in the scheme of things, and that she doesn’t matter. None of that necessarily tamps down the daughter’s efforts to somehow get her needs answered. Lily, 48, wrote that, “I loved being sick because that was the only time I felt mothered. Granted, she didn’t tolerate whining or crying and she didn’t cuddle me, but she did bring me tea and toast or soup and crackers. It doesn’t sound like much, but they are my happiest childhood memories. It’s sad, really.”
Many emotionally unavailable mothers are much more comfortable with children who require specific kinds of caretaking and permit her to mother by doing instead of connecting emotionally. That was what Jane, now 60, experienced: “What was really confusing was that my mother was stone-cold to me but responsive to my older sister and younger brother. My sister had learning issues, and I think my mother felt needed by her in a way that was comfortable. My brother had severe allergies, and Mom fit nicely into the role of his caretaker. But I didn’t need her to do things for me. I needed her to connect to me. And she couldn’t.” Even more confounding is the fact that emotionally unavailable mothers may be deemed highly successful at nurturing by others; they usually have organized households, seem attentive to their daughters’ external needs, and may even be involved in the community .
The confusion is real for the daughter who feels emotionally starved and neglected, invalidated and lonely, despite all the pretty things in her room and closet or even the family photos hung up on the wall. She’s apt to doubt her own perceptions and worry that, somehow, her own neediness or some other flaw is to blame for the lack of love and emotional connection she feels in her mother’s presence. It may take her a long time not just to recognize the problem but also to act on it.
“Being constantly rebuffed in childhood made me armored,” one daughter writes me in an email, “and I don’t like being dependent on anyone.” Her voice is that of the avoidant variety of insecure attachment: These daughters keep their distance even when they’re in a relationship and pride themselves on their independence. But having an unavailable mother—physically present in the household but maddeningly out of reach— may also create an anxious working model of relationship, filled with longing, fraught with difficulty and frustration, and animated by rejection and pain.
Common Effects of Having an Emotionally Unavailable Mother
♦ Turning to unhealthy substitutes or addictions in lieu of maternal love
♦ Lack of trust in others
♦ Extreme emotional neediness and problems with boundaries or being walled off and self-isolating
♦ Trouble making friends and other intimate connections
♦ Difficulty identifying and acting on her feelings
♦ Heightening of the core conflict because the need for mother love is so amped up
THE UNRELIABLE MOTHER
Perhaps the most difficult pattern of maternal behavior to deal with and to recover from is that of the unreliable mother. These mothers don’t regulate their own emotions and vacillate wildly between being unbearably present—intrusive, invasive, utterly without respect for the child’s boundaries—and being absent and withdrawn. Remember the story about playing peek-a-boo I described in the first chapter , in which the infant momentarily withdraws in order to collect and regulate herself and the mother impinges on the baby, literally crowding her? That’s one aspect of the unreliable mother. These mothers aren’t capable of consistent attunement and pay no attention to the cues their infants and, later, their children communicate; they swing between overinvolvement and withdrawal. It’s like being in a Goldilocks world where everything is either too hot or too cold all the time.
And it puts the child in a fearful and emotionally paralyzing mode because she never knows whether the good mommy or the bad one will show up; in children, this type of attachment is called “disorganized” for a reason. The dynamic within the child is one of conflict: The need for her mother causes her to approach and seek her out, but the fear of that “other” mommy causes her to push off and disconnect. This kind of emotional confusion—an interiorized tug-of-war—affects an unloved daughter in myriad ways. This is how Caroline, 41, described her experience: “I trace my own lack of self-confidence back to my mother. She was horribly critical of me one day, ignored me the next, and then was smiley and smothering the day after that. It took me years to realize that the lovey-dovey in-my-face stuff only happened when there was an audience. I’m still armored, and really sensitive to rejection, have trouble with friendships, you name it. These wounds run deep.”
These daughters can demonstrate anxious behavior and avoidant behavior by turns in adulthood. They both desperately need love and affection and are also fearful of the consequences of that need. One daughter wrote me that, in retrospect, she realized that, “My mother could be loving (seeming) in one moment, but it could turn on a dime. There came a time when I no longer trusted her good behavior. I’d seen such intense cruelty that those tender moments seemed like a lie.”
These daughters are Goldilocks in exile—never finding anything quite right—and have terrific trouble managing emotions as well as knowing what they’re feeling. They feel that same tug to
try to make their mothers love them, but as they do, it fills them with fear and hopelessness. For them, the core conflict—between still wanting their mothers’ love and recognizing the need to save themselves—is even more intense and complicated than in other unloved daughters.
Common Effects of the Unreliable Maternal Style
♦ Heightened and even extreme lack of trust
♦ Emotional volatility and inability to self-regulate
♦ Replication of the mother bond by being attracted to abusive people
♦ Being drawn to controlling friends and lovers because she mistakes control for consistency and reliability
♦ Impaired emotional intelligence and ability to identify and process emotions
♦ An intensified version of the core conflict with heightened emotional confusion
THE SELF-INVOLVED MOTHER
In recent years, this type of unloving mother, the one high in narcissistic traits, has garnered the most press and even spawned acronyms in the world of self-help: the NM (Narcissistic Mother) and DONM (Daughter of NM). This mother is the sun of her own universe and her children, revolving planets; her treatment of them is completely self-referential and superficial and, not surprisingly, she’s incapable of real attunement because she’s low on empathy. This mother exerts control over her children but in much more subtle, less overt ways than her controlling counterpart: She favors the children who reflect well on her and ostracizes those who don’t by belittling them. Like a combative mother, she is a mistress of the put-down when necessary and enjoys pitting one family member against another. People high in narcissistic traits are also game-players; they glow in the light of adulation—they need it to thrive—but they also need to feel the rush of power. They play games setting one child against another, giving extra points and gold stars to those who make her feel completely in control. They are verbally abusive, specialize in scapegoating, and cover their tracks with charm and a perfectly maintained façade.
Perhaps one reason labeling unloving mothers as narcissists has had so much popular appeal is that they take total advantage of the imbalance of power implicit in motherhood discussed in the first chapter . Given the taboos about criticizing mothers, the self-involved one is easy to target once you’ve figured out who she is .
The story shared by Laura, now 41, brilliantly captures what life is like with this kind of mother. It appears to have all begun when this seemingly ordinary child was deemed extraordinary by others: “There was definitely a clear delineation between the years before I got slapped with the ‘gifted’ label by my teachers and after. Before, she couldn’t have cared less about me. I was just this nuisance she had to tend to all day when she’d rather be watching her soap operas. After I was labeled, I think she saw me as having potential value she could exploit.”
The irony here is that Laura also confides that this turning point—seized upon by her mother—was actually unwelcome for her. She didn’t like the attention, hated being singled out, and wanted nothing more than to blend in at school. That was not going to happen with her mother around: “Suddenly, she became very interested in being a parental helper in my classes at school when she never wanted to be involved before. (She did not show this same interest in my brother or his classes.) My mother took it upon herself to swoop in and make sure everyone was focused on me. She was also hypercritical of my teachers and my school, often acting like she knew more than they did. She was in the habit of criticizing assigned reading material and lesson plans, for instance, saying things like, ‘This isn’t challenging enough for my daughter. She is exceptional and needs to be challenged .’”
And, needless to say, it became totally about her, as Laura recounts: “She also became hypercritical of me, my interests, my friends, how I spent my free time . . . everything. My feelings and actual interests were not considered important, when their existence was acknowledged at all. Often I’d try to communicate what I liked or didn’t like the way any kid would. (‘Mom, I like mashed potatoes, but I don’t like yogurt.’) She’d come back at me with ‘information’ about my own feelings. (‘Don’t be silly. You love yogurt. You don’t want mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes are fattening, and you don’t want to grow up to be fat.’) If something about me or my personality wasn’t perfectly in line with what she wanted it to be, she’d do everything she could to convince me to change it, often berating interests and emerging values I had that didn’t fit the mold, while encouraging substitutes of her choosing.” This is a form of psychological control .
In many ways, Laura’s story functions as a summary of what it’s like to be the daughter of a mother high in narcissistic traits. First, there’s the mother seizing an opportunity to aggrandize herself through her child, both literally and symbolically. Once again, what matters most is the outside world’s perception, not what the daughter is feeling or what she actually wants. Second, her marginalization of her daughter’s thoughts and feelings—especially if they don’t coincide with her own—often leaves this daughter feeling fraudulent and ignored, despite her achievements.
No child really wins or gets what she or he needs in this household, but one child’s success with the Queen Bee and another’s failure may not make that obvious. Laura’s brother, for example, grew up on a steady diet of “Why can’t you be more like your sister?” With a self-involved mother, you’re either on Team Mom or rejected from it, and if you find yourself in the off position, the chances are good that you’ll be scapegoated and picked on. These mothers care deeply about how they look to the outside world so there’s lots of pressure on the children in the household to succeed and to shine since they are essentially ambassadors for how terrific Mom is.
Perhaps the most dangerous—and psychologically important—lesson the self-involved mother imparts is that attention is earned, never given freely or without condition. And whatever attention’s available is sparingly doled out and substitutes for love. It’s as though saplings under the canopy in the rainforest are duking it out for a glimmer of sunlight; is it any wonder that the sorties, skirmishes, and battles orchestrated by the Queen among and between siblings endure through childhood and all of adulthood?
Not surprisingly, since all the attention is focused on external success—no use talking to this particular mother about someone’s soulfulness or character—many daughters become high achievers because that’s what it takes to have a favored position in Mom’s orbit. Their achievements, though, don’t fill the void in their hearts left by their mothers’ lack of attunement or by the recognition of how tenuous the emotional connection is. Perhaps the most poisonous part of a self-involved mother’s legacy is the idea that love has to be earned: This puts the daughter in a position where she’s always trying to figure out what she can do to wrest her mother’s love from her. It is a thankless task and impossible to fulfill.
And then, of course, there’s the Odd Girl Out: the girl who either can’t ever win her mother’s approval or who is necessary to the mother’s gamesmanship in the family. We’ll look at gaslighting and scapegoating and other manipulative tactics later in the chapter in depth, but for the daughter of the self-involved mother, whether she’s the Trophy Child who can do no wrong or the Odd Girl Out, she has been indelibly shaped by her mother’s behaviors.
How a Daughter is Affected by the Self-involved Mother
♦ Detached from her own feelings and thoughts and has trouble identifying them
♦ Lacking in real self-esteem and dependent on others for superficial validation
♦ Unhappy but doesn’t see the source because she accepts her situation as normal
♦ Trouble with intimacy and closeness
♦ Feels lonely and adrift without knowing why
♦ Attracted to others high in narcissistic traits
♦ Deeply immersed in the core conflict if she’s the Odd Girl Out. The Trophy Child is unlikely to recognize the conflict at all.
THE COMBATIVE MOTHER
This mother takes w
inning and absolute control of the household and the children in it very seriously, and she can get angry at the drop of a hat. She considers herself feisty and outspoken, not tyrannical and repressive, and she’s often proud of how tough she is because she thinks it gives her authority and agency. The truth is that sometimes she’s a bully who’s bullied by a hot-tempered and tightly-wound husband, but not always. In other households, the father may simply be an appeaser, absenting himself from parenting and permitting his wife to run the ship as she sees fit. In addition to being highly combative, these mothers are often hypercritical, determined that life look “perfect,” at least from the outside; they don’t tolerate any deviation from the rules they’ve set, and they’re not shy about voicing their displeasure. Woe to the child who ignores her .
Like a narcissistic or self-involved mother, the combative mother largely sees her child or children as an extension of herself, and she has high standards that have to be met. Once again, there’s a great disconnect between what is seen by the outside world and what goes on in private, as Geri’s story makes clear: “My mother’s public self was carefully cultivated. She was always beautifully groomed and careful to appear ‘thoughtful’ to others. She was the first to volunteer for a bake sale or charity drives. But at home, she was a tyrant and a screamer. It was horribly confusing to try to figure out who my mother was. The one who berated me for being too fat and lazy or the woman the neighbors all admired for her gardening skills and her baked goods? No wonder I didn’t tell anyone. Who would have believed me?” My own mother was highly combative, and I, too, was confused by the switches between her public self and the private one. The world thought my mother was charming and beautiful. The other thing that was confusing was I could see that she liked being angry and yelling at me. I knew that, even as a little girl, and it scared me.
Of course, the idea that a mother would actually enjoy berating her child runs counter to every cultural trope we hold dear about motherhood. That’s why these daughters keep their silence long past childhood and mothers rationalize and justify their combative behaviors. As one daughter recounted, “I thought my mother was doing it for our own good—those constant fights to make us tougher, the lectures about how only the strong survive. I believed that until I was in my early thirties when I finally noticed the way I’d been damaged and my siblings had been hurt. I wasn’t tough; I was a fearful person with armor against the world. My mother liked the power her anger gave her, I think. She still does. She thrives on drama, trying to set me against my siblings or my siblings against me. But when I finally realized that about her and said so, my three siblings turned on me like a united front.”
