by Peg Streep
Hypercriticality: In many households, both the loud and the quiet kinds of verbal abuse are rationalized by the need to correct perceived flaws in the child’s character or behavior. Hypercriticality—nitpicking and then magnifying every misstep or mistake—may be “justified” or “explained” by having to make sure the child “isn’t too full of herself,” “doesn’t let her successes go to her head,” “learns humility,” “knows who’s boss,” and other self-serving statements that are just excuses for cruel adult behavior. Delivered in a quiet tone, the barrage of criticism makes a child believe she’s unworthy of attention and support because she’s worthless.
The absence of praise, support, and love: The power of what isn’t said cannot be overstated because the void it leaves in the child’s psyche and heart is enormous and, yes, it’s emotionally abusive. Children are hardwired to need all the things that the unloving mother neither voices nor demonstrates in order to thrive and develop normally. In truth, words that articulate why a child is worthy of love and attention are as essential as food, water, clothing, and shelter.
Normalizing or excusing the abuse: As I’ve already mentioned, it’s a sad truth that a child’s world is so small that she thinks that what goes on in it goes on everywhere. Most children attribute verbal abuse to their flaws and “badness”; as Rachel Goldsmith and Jennifer Freyd note, this attribution may actually be less scary than “the scarier prospect that the caregiver can’t be trusted and may help create an illusion of control.” Even as adults, those verbally abused in the quiet manner during childhood may rationalize or normalize their parents’ behaviors for many different reasons.
Maternal power—that ability to dictate how things that happen in the household are interpreted—and the daughter’s acceptance of what happens at home as “normal” stand in the way of her seeing how she’s being emotionally abused. Then, too, her continuing need for her mother’s love also keeps her more focused on somehow turning things around than analyzing the real dynamics. She’s more apt to look for reasons why her mother treats her as she does and make excuses for the behavior rather than confront the terrible and painful truth. This is what I call “the dance of denial.” It’s little wonder that so many daughters struggle for decades long after their childhoods are officially over.
MOVING FROM DISCOVERY TO DISCERNMENT
You may be feeling a sense of relief at this moment, seeing the ways in which your mother behaved expressed in words on the page in black-and-white, along with the recognition that other girls had experiences similar to yours. As one woman wrote after being on my Facebook page, “It’s strange how knowing that I have company in this awful situation, that others have gone through what I did, and felt some of the same feelings of isolation and hurt, has made me feel better and less daunted.” The list of the toxic patterns of maternal behavior is meant to be used as a tool for you to begin seeing how her actions and inactions, what she said and what she didn’t say, affected your own reactions and behavior in the past and continue to do so in the present. Recognizing your own mental models of relationship—your predominant attachment style—is a necessary step in the process. These first two chapters have sketched the terrain the unloved daughter finds herself in; the following two will begin the process of untangling the threads that form the tapestry of your personal experiences. It’s what I call “discernment,” and the first stop is taking a close look at the family of origin and its dynamics.
CHAPTER THREE
ALL IN THE FAMILY: UNDERSTANDING RIPPLE EFFECTS
There were four of us, growing up—two boys and two girls. My brothers got all the attention, which I resented when I was young but I now see that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Our mother was enmeshed and controlling in the boys’ lives, and dismissive of my sister and me. My sister is the youngest, and she simply went her own way. I was the needy one, desperate to please my mother and get my father’s attention. Nothing worked. I married the first guy I dated at 18 and that set me on a path for a life of underachieving. I divorced him and married another. Now I’m 45 and trying to reroute my life. I don’t speak to anyone in my family other than my sister .
~Clarice, 45
A mother’s treatment of her daughter doesn’t take place in a vacuum, of course; the drama plays out in a household, each of which has its own unique aspects. This chapter marks the first step toward discernment: being able to see and then fully understand both the ways in which your childhood experiences were similar to those of others and the ways in which they were different and unique. Each pathway to healing is, in the details, singular because we are all individuals with our signature quirks and ways of seeing the world. Once again, we will begin with the broadest of brushstrokes so that you can locate your experiences in the common threads and then begin to see the differences.
As small children, the world of the family is the only one we know. We may feel its undercurrents—the arguments between our parents, shifts in routine that may signal larger changes of which we’re unaware—but we have no way of knowing whether this family is like the other families we see out in the greater world. Everything that happens in this little world affects us in small ways and large even though we don’t know that as children. One of the largest obstacles to our healing as adults is the young self still inside each of us who, in the hope of feeling at one with that family and belonging to it, still believes that what happened was “normal.” Or that if it wasn’t quite normal, the dynamic can somehow be fixed or altered, even now.
Family dynamics—the interactions among the individuals within the group—are defined by both presences and absences: the presence of siblings or the absence of them, the presence of a father or the absence of one, the presence of extended family or its absence, the presence of addiction or its absence, the presence of stability in all of its forms and its absence.
And then, too, there is the presence or absence of love and attunement. The presence or absence of aggression, anger, manipulation, and chaos. The presence or absence of mutual support, respect, and caring.
Each family is different, although there are discernible patterns that aid our understanding. While this book focuses on a specific lack—maternal support and love—the losses suffered by a daughter usually involve other relationships as well. Depending on the dynamic, wresting love from her father may be as hopeless a task as trying to get it from her mother. Then there is the sibling connection, the relationship that can potentially span more decades of life than any other. For many daughters, sibling relationships become the locus of more pain and loss.
All of these experiences—fallout out from the maternal relationship—also mark the daughter in specific ways.
FORGETTING THE IMAGE OF THE SCALES
Colloquially, when we talk about relationships and their pluses and minuses, we often use images that summon up scales, employing words like “balance out” when we’re focused on the pros of staying in or, when we’re not, referencing the thing or things that “tipped the scales” and made us bail. There’s only one problem with the imagery and the vocabulary, especially as we move toward understanding how the dynamics of our family worked and affected us: They’re not accurate. You may remember that, in the first chapter , I wrote about how “bad is stronger than good,” and how bad events and negative emotions affect us much more quickly and deeply than positive ones. And how they’re stored in the brain for easy retrieval. And how the verbal expression of caring by one parent doesn’t do anything to mitigate or buffer the effect of verbal aggression by the other. A study of some 2,000 adults in their sixties showed that, when it came to telling their life stories, painful events were recalled quite differently even when there’d been a long interval of time since they occurred, with the exception of childhood trauma. The researchers concluded that older adults perceived positive events as central to their lives largely because of cultural norms, but that negative events were perceived as central or a turning point because of coping skills and emotional dist
ress.
Well, all of that is part of a larger psychological truth: The systems that process good events and experiences and bad ones are separate and run parallel to each other. So there’s no weighing, no balance, no tipping, no offset.
As you approach the task of discerning the patterns of interaction in your family of origin, you need to make an effort to see them objectively and separately, and not in concert. Being treated well by your father may have helped build your sense of self, but it did little to assuage the wounding your mother’s disparagement inflicted.
THE UNSEEN PLAYER: THE MARRIAGE BETWEEN YOUR PARENTS
The roles mothers and fathers play in their children’s lives—whether they are essentially loving and caring parents or not—are usually closely tied to the relationship the two adults have to each other. Small children aren’t really in a position to understand the relationship except in the most obvious of ways; you may have parents who are usually laughing and hugging or grow up in a place where slammed doors and yelling are the norm. But the dynamic of that central relationship—is it one in which each partner listens to the other and compromises are made to benefit the couple, or is it one that is all about power?—inevitably spills over onto how both mother and father parent. How happy your mother and father are in the relationship matters, too, of course, and shapes all of the family’s interactions, as does whether his or her individual expectations are being met by the other partner. It’s very easy for marital dissatisfaction to become anger directed at a child. And, of course, the breakdown of that relationship (if it occurs)—whether it ends in an amicable divorce, a prolonged battle lasting years, or a literal disappearing act—spills out and over onto each child in the family in a very personal way.
As adults, we can finally begin to see the subterranean currents in our parents’ marriages we felt washing up against us as children but couldn’t identify.
THE OTHER GROWN-UP: YOUR FATHER
Research shows that in healthy families, fathers contribute to a child’s development in significant ways, through actions, words, modeling of behavior, and displays of affection. Paternal influence may be key in teaching a child to regulate emotions—through the roughhouse style of play that fathers tend to favor—as well as helping a child form a cognitive perspective on empathy in childhood and adolescence. In a healthy family, the dyad of husband and wife is actually strengthened by the expansion to include the child in a new triad, even though it may take conscientious effort. A few studies make it clear that the father’s influence isn’t insubstantial. For example, one by Jennifer Byrd-Craven, Brandon J. Auer, and others showed that a daughter’s relationship to her father plays a significant role in her management of stress. Measuring for cortisol, a hormone released by stress, researchers noted that cortisol levels went down with warm and caring connections between father and daughter. Daughters in relationships that were more negative and not close showed both higher levels of cortisol and increased sensitivity to emotional changes and an inability to inhibit reactivity.
Something else happens when a mother is unloving or rejecting.
When we become parents, each of us—whether it’s the role of mother or father we’re about to take on—brings to the table not just our own childhood experiences but also our ideas, all of them untested and many of them not totally articulated, about how best to rise to the challenges of parenting and the desirable or “proper” role each parent should play. The childhoods of daughters (and sons) raised from the 1940s to the 1970s were shaped by traditional views of the father as the breadwinner, rule setter, and disciplinarian and the mother as in charge of raising children and running the home. For most of these daughters of unloving mothers, the role of the father was culturally and socially marginalized, which had real-life consequences.
But recent research reveals that, even now, the involvement of fathers continues to be limited since, even in these more enlightened times, mothering is seen as more important than fathering, and raising children continues to be a woman’s turf, as does the care of the home, even in households with two wage earners. It turns out that mothers end up deciding whether or not and to what degree fathers are involved in childrearing, a phenomenon called “maternal gatekeeping.” When a mother gate-keeps, she criticizes, disparages, or discourages her husband’s efforts at childrearing; as a result, fathers are likely to withdraw from active roles.
Almost 20 years ago, Mary DeLuccie’s work revealed that both the stability of the marriage and the wife’s support were strong predictors of paternal involvement with their children. Interestingly, the more negative the mother’s experience had been with her own father, the more eager she was for her husband to be an active parent. Daughters of rejecting fathers were also more likely to be supportive and happy with their husbands’ efforts. More recent research, including that of Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, sees maternal gatekeeping as a significant factor when coparenting fails. Unloving, rejecting, and controlling mothers tend to be described by their daughters as expert gatekeepers; they want control of what has traditionally been a woman’s turf.
For some daughters of unloving mothers, the father’s mere presence at home helps to de-escalate the criticism and hostility; for other daughters, though, their closeness to their fathers will heighten the conflict with a jealous or competitive mother, or a highly self-involved one who wants the attention of the man of the house all to herself. A father who is emotionally withdrawn from the household—present in fact but essentially absent by choice—can increase the confusion the unloved daughter feels and add to her feelings of abandonment and betrayal. The truly absentee father—either through divorce or because he’s simply skipped out—affects the unloved daughter in yet another way.
Again, I’ve given thoroughly unscientific descriptions of some of the roles fathers can play in the dynamic of the mother-daughter relationship and in the one-on-one relationship with their daughters. Sometimes, behaviors will overlap or change over time. Keep in mind that these patterns are meant only as tools to help you sort out and understand the role your own father played in your childhood and later.
The Yes Man: Whether he does it consciously or unconsciously, this father becomes a co-conspirator with the mother. In some cases, the mother makes sure that she doesn’t say or do anything hurtful to her daughter in her husband’s presence; in others, where the behavior is witnessed, the mother quickly shifts the blame onto the daughter. No matter what rationale is offered—the child needed correction, was disobedient or disrespectful, is too “sensitive”—the father buys into it. Dad’s joining Team Mom makes it easy for the daughter to consider herself responsible for her mother’s lack of love. With Mom and Dad teamed up, the daughter may be wary of all relationships with both women and men.
Some Yes Men don’t team up with their wives but end up playing the appeaser role, which is a variation on the theme. Their commitment to the marriage and their own acceptance of how their spouses act (“That’s just who she is” or “She means well—she’s doing it for your own good”) trump all and lead them to actively encourage their daughters to feel the same. Unfortunately, by acting as appeasers, they further marginalize and deny their daughters’ perceptions and feelings. These men may have some measure of love and affection for their daughters but ignore or look away from maternal treatment and its consequences since their first allegiance is to Team Spouse and Marriage. Their consistent lack of support results in emotional confusion and more complicated issues of trust.
The Chorus: It’s sad but true that some unloved daughters report growing up with two emotionally abusive parents—each for his or her own reasons—who take their grievances out on a single child or a number of them. Yes, fathers can be unloving, too, and sometimes—horribly enough—an unloved daughter finds herself in a situation where the messages, even if different, are all negative, all the time, separate from the dynamics of the marriage.
The King of the Castle: As counterintuitive as it sounds, the presence of a loving a
nd involved father can actually complicate the dynamic in the household in destructive ways. His closeness to his daughter can quickly become a catalyst for escalated conflict, especially as the daughter gets older, since the mother perceives the attention her daughter’s getting as rightfully hers. Jealous, competitive, or self-involved mothers will often see the daughter as a potential rival for what she thinks of as her throne by the King’s side. Mothers who competed for their fathers’ attention as daughters—my mother was one—are especially susceptible to feeling threatened. These mothers will escalate the warfare by amplifying their criticism of their daughters and doing what they can to turn their husbands into Yes Men.
The more unstable the marriage is, the more the father’s affection for his daughter looks like a threat to the safety of her mother’s world. Sometimes, the daughter becomes a stand-in for the “other woman,” real or imagined. As daughters tell it, the King of the Castle scenario is very toxic and impossible to resolve. Jealousy heats up a mother’s behaviors, no matter what form they take, and spurs on her vindictiveness and meanness. The daughter effectively doesn’t have a chance.
The Absentee: Sometimes, daughters discover that both parents are equally emotionally unavailable, even if their parenting styles are very different; some daughters report that their controlling mothers controlled their husbands as well, and these fathers tended to disappear into the woodwork. While the Yes Man joins Team Mom, the Absentee simply stays out of the fray as much as he can. This is what Sarah recounted: “I have practically no memory of my father that doesn’t involve television or his shop in the basement. He ate dinner in silence, never asked about my day, and disappeared once he put down his fork. Until I was an adult, he was a cipher to me.”
