Daughter Detox

by Peg Streep

  This mother’s brand of aggression is largely verbal, although she may resort to physical aggression from time to time. She rationalizes her hypercriticality and verbal abuse, insisting that her words are a necessary corrective given her child’s flaws, or she justifies words and actions by saying she was “provoked.” The denial is another layer of abuse. The constant pattern of shifting the blame for her own behavior onto her child’s shoulders is, in and of itself, abusive.

  The combative mother guards her territory fiercely, and while she wants her children to validate her, she’s also competitive. That can yield even more confusion, as Karen, now 42, related: “My mother had been a beauty queen, and she was very proud of her looks. I was the only girl and super-cute as a small child. The photos of me look as if I’m a china doll, dressed to the nines. She looks proud and beaming. But as I got older, how pretty I was bothered her. She criticized everything I did. She screamed my inadequacies and mocked my failures. It was horrible. I didn’t get it, and I just kept trying to please her. Strangely, it was my grandmother—her mother—who explained it to me, right before I left for college, in two words: ‘She’s jealous.’ That was the first inkling I had that I had done nothing to deserve her wrath.”

  The combative mother shapes a daughter in specific ways. Imagine a seedling planted too close to the gutters of a house, pelted to the ground every time it rains, and you have an accurate picture of what it’s like to be a child in these circumstances. Many daughters, not surprisingly, go down for the count as children. They become fearful and guarded, terrified of making a mistake. They hide in plain sight.

  Others report that they just muzzled themselves out of fear during their adolescent years. One daughter wrote to ask, “Is it true that teenage girls actually challenge their mothers?” I answered by saying it was normal, and weird if they didn’t, and then she and ten others chimed in with pretty much the same response: “I would have been cut to ribbons if I’d done that.”

  The Roles the Daughters of Combative Mothers Take On

  The home as battleground spawns different ways of coping, each damaging to daughters in different ways. Based on interviews with many women, I’ve given them wholly unscientific names because my evidence is anecdotal, but they capture what happens in broad strokes.

  The appeaser: This daughter becomes a peacemaker or a pleaser, doing what she can to turn down the volume and velocity of fights. She’s often timid and so focused on stopping potential conflict that she forgets her own needs and wants, if she can even recognize them. Unfortunately, these girls often end up in relationships with people who take advantage of their need to please, a pattern that usually persists into and through adulthood.

  The scrapper: This daughter takes on her mother in many ways but can get tripped up by both fighting her mother and wanting her love at the same time. (It’s a specific variation on the core conflict.) Management of emotion is often a problem for these daughters, most specifically anger because it’s aroused by old triggers very quickly. These daughters also have difficulty distinguishing among emotions, confusing hurt with anger.

  The avoidant: This daughter will do anything to dodge conflict of any kind; she’s learned to armor herself living with a combative mother and she’s distrustful of people. The problem is that in her effort to live conflict free, she’s also missing out on the possibility of close connection, which is something she actually wants. Because she doesn’t really trust anyone deep-down, she’s more likely to fold her tents and flee than try to work out difficulties with anyone. In many senses, she is the most wounded of the daughters who came of age in the combat zone.

  The combative mother is the easiest to spot on the surface but she leaves behind a complicated legacy of fear.

  Common Effects of the Combative Mother

  ♦ Daughter’s impaired ability to identify and manage her feelings

  ♦ High reactivity to even the hint of conflict

  ♦ Difficulty with intimacy and closeness

  ♦ Maladaptive behaviors when there’s any kind of interpersonal tension

  ♦ Problems regulating emotions

  THE ENMESHED MOTHER

  Maxie, 69, was 14 and her brother was 10 when her mother came home to discover that her husband and their father had left them: “The apartment looked as if it’d been robbed: he’d taken the furniture, the linens, the art on the walls, the dishes and cookware. Only our clothes remained. My mother was a salesgirl at a store, and there was no way we could live on her salary. My father didn’t want to pay her much in alimony or child support so he dragged things out so she’d cave in and accept whatever crumbs he offered. Instead, she borrowed money and merchandise and started a business, and my brother and I worked in it. It became very successful. I lived at home until I was 29—my mother needed me—and moved into an apartment she picked out for me that was five minutes away. She hired the interior designer and had keys to my place. I was in therapy for years, and my therapists urged me to live my own life, but my mother couldn’t let me go. I think the first decision I made totally alone was when I was 54 and planning her funeral. She loved me but not enough to let me go and stand on her own. That’s not really mother love, is it?”

  The enmeshed daughter disappears in the hot glare of her mother’s attention. This daughter lacks a sense of self because her mother only sees her daughter as an extension of herself and observes no boundaries. The way out of this especially tangled relationship is very difficult and singular because even though the daughter may feel as though she’s choked by the connection, she may also feel loved. It’s a thorny paradox. These mothers actually do love their daughters, but the degree to which they engulf them is wounding nonetheless. It’s the mother’s own neediness that trumps all.

  The classic example of the enmeshed mother is the stage mother—Gypsy Rose Lee, Frances Farmer, and some contemporary stars had them—or those who hope to live off of, be enriched by, or aggrandized by their daughters’ achievements or status. Still others—such as the mother of Vivian Gornick as portrayed in her memoir Fierce Attachments —look to live through their daughters vicariously. These mothers are usually single—widowed or divorced—and deprived of other social connections; they experience the world through their daughters and use guilt and other forms of emotional manipulation to keep their daughters tied to them.

  It’s the mother’s own unfulfilled needs that drive and define how she connects with her daughter. The enmeshed daughter is often an only child, but she may also be the last-born of a number of children who are separated by many years. Not knowing where she begins and Mom ends, this daughter looks to her mother for everything from advice to company, unconsciously subjugating her own needs and wants—if she can even recognize them—to her mother’s. During childhood and adolescence, the daughter may chafe at her mother’s intrusiveness but, often, she simply gives in and settles into the routines dictated by the person who says she always knows best. Young adulthood often presents a crisis for the daughter as she tries to find her own voice—and her mother pushes back. Some enmeshed daughters make it to college and may manage to live on their own, but others fail, moving back to the safety and oxygen-deprived atmosphere of their childhood rooms. Enmeshed daughters have great difficulty resolving the problem until they seek professional help, and even then, it can be an uphill battle.

  Patterns of enmeshment may also emerge from relationships with self-absorbed or narcissistic mothers, who also see their daughters as extensions of themselves. These patterns are a bit different since the enmeshment is one sided and driven by the daughter’s need to please her mother and stay within her orbit. The mother, in fact, is not enmeshed but a solitary star dictating her daughter’s path.

  Enmeshed daughters are sometimes able to salvage their relationships to their mothers by enforcing strict boundaries. These mothers aren’t actually unloving; they just lack the ability to allow their daughters to breathe and be.

  Common Effects of the Enmeshed Style

/>   ♦ Alternating feelings of anger, guilt, and emotional confusion

  ♦ Impaired sense of self

  ♦ Difficulties being independent and articulating and acting on her own needs

  ♦ Unhealthy coping mechanisms

  ♦ Inability to see the core conflict clearly

  THE ROLE-REVERSED MOTHER

  Anecdotally at least, this is the least reported pattern and usually happens when a mother is young or overburdened (she has too many responsibilities or children and not enough resources), is physically or mentally ill, or has experienced some other kind of life-altering crisis. The child, usually the oldest but sometimes the most capable, is thrust into the role of caretaker, no matter her age, and effectively becomes the “mother” in the family. These mothers aren’t necessarily unloving—in fact, many of them love their children deeply—but are rendered incapable for one reason or another. That said, there’s no denying the damage they wreak: They rob their daughters of their childhoods and girlhoods, put burdens on them that they’re not ready to take on, and force them to take on inappropriate adult roles.

  Amy, a 32-year-old, shared her story: “My father died suddenly and unexpectedly when I was 13 and my little brother was 10. My mother fell apart and became very depressed, spending most of her time in bed. My dad’s parents lived too far away to help. My mom’s parents didn’t really have time and had issues of their own. Everyone chalked it up to mourning and thought it would stop. It didn’t. I was the mom for five years, cooking, cleaning, taking care of my brother. I didn’t have time to see friends or date. I did poorly in school. I got married at 18 just to escape. That marriage fell apart, and when my brother turned 18 and I refused to come home to care for her, she finally got help. We still talk, but I am scarred and guarded.”

  Sometimes the daughter is pushed into the role of best friend or confidante to a lonely mother, which prevents her from being a child, burdens her with too much adult information, and blurs all the important boundaries. This relationship inflicts its own kind of damage as Grace, 39, told me: “My father divorced my mother, moved away, and remarried when I was six. Did you see that movie Anywhere but Here? That was my life. My mother wanted me to mother her, listen to her, support her. She wouldn’t let me be a kid and, you know, she’s the same now that I’m an adult. Being with her is like being in a room without air. I don’t exist.”

  This pattern of relationship is different from the others and there is often reconciliation between these mothers and daughters as whatever obstacles that stood in the way of the mother’s functioning are addressed or improved. This isn’t to say that the relationship doesn’t affect the daughter’s development—it does—but it is also always clear that what’s happening has nothing to do with the daughter herself. She never feels at fault or blamed or somehow responsible. She may also have compassion for her mother’s predicament even as she chafes at the role she’s been forced to take on. All of that makes a huge difference .

  Common Effects of Role-Reversed Mothering

  ♦ Experience of a “lost” childhood; being forced into maturity the daughter isn’t ready for

  ♦ Often, poor social skills and a feeling of isolation

  ♦ Feeling conflicted: Daughter loves her mother but also resents her

  ♦ Great difficulty with forming close and intimate relationships

  USING THE EIGHT BEHAVIORS FOR UNDERSTANDING

  Very few women report just a single behavior dominating their childhoods and young adulthoods; almost everyone says that their mothers displayed one or more at various times. You’ll note that I’ve used unscientific descriptions, and I’ve done that deliberately, even in the case of the self-involved mother whom I’ve declined to call a narcissist. One reason is that I’m not a therapist or psychologist, but even if I were, I couldn’t “diagnose” someone I hadn’t talked to. The second is that, while there’s a reassurance and aha! moment in realizing that your mother’s a narcissist or maybe borderline, it doesn’t focus you on what happened to you. Daughter Detox is about you, not her. Her behavior is only important as an aid in seeing how you were shaped and affected.

  The point of these categories is for you to start understanding how you were treated with some specificity. There’s a lot of unconscious process that prevents you from really seeing how you were affected; that’s why seeing your wounds is so hard. The more experience is brought into the light, out of the murk of unconsciousness, the better equipped you’ll be to stop the past from leaking into and directing the flow of the present.

  THE ARSENAL: VERBAL ABUSE IN ALL OF ITS FORMS

  Verbal aggression and abuse are usually part of the daughter’s emotional landscape, although she may not recognize either except in hindsight. Some of that has to do with the child accepting that what goes on at her house is normal because she has nothing to compare it to; remember that her world is tiny and the interpretation of that world is controlled by her parents. Harsh words are often justified by mothers as disciplinary in nature or a necessary corrective (“I wouldn’t have to get angry if you didn’t mess up all the time”). Additionally, abusive mothers marginalize or deny the pain of verbal abuse, which adds to the child’s confusion and shame (“They’re just words. Stop being a crybaby and grow a spine”). One daughter, now 47 and a mother herself, described what it was like: “My mother filled the house with her rage and yelling but told me I had no right to be sad or to be angry, that I should be glad I was being fed and clothed. She shamed me for reacting. She sabotaged and mocked me when something made me happy or feel proud and I felt myself get smaller and smaller. I tried very hard to disappear, you know?”

  But not all abuse is loud or even articulated. In fact, counterintuitively enough, some of the worst kinds of verbal abuse are quiet; silence in answer to a question asked or a comment made can pack a mightier wallop than a loud rant. Silence effectively ridicules and shames. The child subjected to quiet abuse often experiences more emotional confusion than one who’s being yelled at or insulted, precisely because the absence of rage sends mixed signals, and the motivation behind willful silence or a refusal to answer is impossible for a child to read. There’s a special kind of hurt in being treated as though you’re invisible or that you are so unimportant in the scheme of things that you’re not even worth answering. Is there anything more chilling and hurtful than seeing your mother act as though she can’t see you, her face calm?

  Everything science knows about the effects of verbal abuse applies to the quiet variety, too. Following are the different kinds of subtle verbal abuse you might have experienced.

  Being ignored: Because much of the information children have about the world and relationships comes to them secondhand, the child with a mother who ignores her learns that her place in the world is precarious, even though she doesn’t know why, and even worse, generalizes that most relationships make you feel bad about yourself. Remember the effect that Edward Tronick’s “Still Face” experiments had on babies and toddlers? How those children had to self-protect? Well, being ignored 24/7 effectively disappears a child’s sense of self instead of validating it, and she learns that avoidance doesn’t hurt but expectation of engagement does. That, too, is abusive.

  Stonewalling: From a child’s perspective, being stonewalled may seem very much like being ignored, but it has different emotional consequences, especially as she matures. She’s likely to recognize this abuse by the time she’s an adolescent, which will increase volatility in the household, depending on whether she fights back or folds her tents. It’s the younger child who’s especially vulnerable. The child’s lack of developed and effective defense mechanisms is precisely what researchers in Israel homed in on when they examined the long-term effects of childhood emotional abuse. They concluded that the damage done to individuals’ self-esteem had much to do with their inability to protect and defend themselves and to internalizing the thought that they weren’t good enough to warrant their parents’ attention when parents were uncaring
or harshly controlling.

  Contempt and derision: Shaming a child can be accomplished sotto voce or even with physical gestures like eye-rolling or laughing at her to convey contempt or making her the butt of jokes. This particular variety of bullying can become a team sport in some households, if siblings are asked to join the fray and make the child a scapegoat. Controlling parents or those who need to be the center of attention often use these techniques to maintain the dynamics of the household as they want them. Once again, damage can be done without a raised voice.

  Gaslighting: This tool of manipulation is aimed at having the child doubt her perceptions. (The term derives from a play, Gas Light , which was then made into a movie, about a man who tries to convince a woman she’s losing her mind.) Gaslighting doesn’t require shouting or yelling; all it takes is a simple statement that something that actually happened didn’t. Given the imbalance of power in the parent-child relationship—and the fact that a young child accepts the adult as the last word and authority on most things until she gets old enough to begin questioning her mother’s judgment—gaslighting is relatively easy. Gaslighting not only makes a child worry about being “crazy” but also erodes her confidence in her own thoughts and feelings in a profound and lasting way. Again, keep in mind that children don’t have conscious defense mechanisms.