by Peg Streep
Sometimes, a daughter will ally herself against another sibling, hoping that somehow doing so will gain her the attention she craves. That was Leah’s older sister’s strategy. Leah was the middle child, her sister two years older, and she had a brother four years younger. All the attention was lavished on the baby boy, but her older sister’s allegiance to her mother and her vigorous efforts to shut Leah out kept her from being criticized and verbally abused as Leah was. “My sister and my mother were a team in the sense that they both adored my brother. I always felt like an outsider looking in, walking on eggshells to make sure I didn’t do anything to invoke my mother’s withering dismissal of me. I have spent years in therapy, trying to shake the feeling of being ‘less than,’ with mixed results despite a happy marriage and two wonderful children. My childhood sense of self still dogs me.”
In some families, though, the treatment of the unloved daughter becomes a cruel team sport, rendering her a scapegoat. Mary, now 51, was one of four, with one older sister and two younger brothers. While all the children feared their mother, Mary was the one labeled the “bad” one or the “troublemaker,” and picking on her or placing blame on her worked well for her siblings as a tactic to deflect attention from themselves. She remarks that, in hindsight, it’s clear that “we never had any control or choice about our relationship. We had a master puppeteer.” She is estranged from all of her siblings and comments, “If I were to meet them today as strangers, I would not be interested in being friends.”
Many daughters believe what they’re told about themselves, especially when they are young and they hear these “facts” repeated again and again, like some twisted familial mantra. How could they not? Scapegoating is much more public than the other kinds of maternal abuse, which are usually kept secret; the marginalization of the scapegoated child is institutionalized in a sense and made into family lore. The treatment is rationalized and the reasons for it are often broadcast to extended family and, sometimes, to anyone who will listen. (“Lizzy has always been difficult, moody, and has a bad temper; she’s nothing like her brothers and sisters, and it’s no wonder she’s not popular the way they all are.”) Needless to say, these daughters usually internalize the criticism until there is a moment of recognition—if there is one—when they finally see the pattern for what it is, most usually in adulthood.
The Odd Girl Out: In this dynamic, the unloved daughter isn’t actively set upon as in the scapegoat pattern, but siblings co-conspire with their mother to isolate the unloved daughter in order to gain her love and approval. They reinforce and sustain the mother’s vision of things. Corinne, 40, recounts the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which she was marginalized by both her mother and her siblings: “My older sister followed my mother’s lead to stay in her good graces. If I succeeded at something—getting good grades, winning the lead in a play—my mother would first deflect the conversation by praising my brother or sister, and then my sister would start in on how my achievement was no big deal. I felt close to my brother, the baby of the family, when he was little, but as he got older, he just didn’t have the courage to stand up to Mom and take my side. I always felt, and still do feel, like an outsider mostly.”
Here’s another story with resonance for many. Rose, 36, was one of three children, and the only girl: “My mother acted as though she didn’t have a daughter most of the time, unless she needed me to do something like laundry or walk the dog. I did well in school, unlike my brothers, and so my mother downplayed my achievements, saying that ‘being good at school didn’t make me smart.’ And, for the most part, I believed her, even after I won awards and ultimately a college scholarship. I still have trouble shutting the voice in my head off—the one that says that everything I do right doesn’t really matter. I’m an attorney and both of my brothers are construction workers, but that hasn’t changed how my mother treats me . . . I’m still the odd girl out.”
Daughters who were the Odd Girl Out in their families of origin often report that they have difficulty forging close friendships with women and have trouble trusting their own judgments in relationships generally. They also report that they’re highly sensitive to rejection and criticism .
PARALLEL LIVES
Almost all daughters report that, in one way or another, their mothers orchestrated their sibling relationships with deliberation. In some cases, a mother will actively work at making sure that her children don’t bond by setting one against the other, or triangulating. As a result, some daughters grow up in households where, despite the fact that the children are under the same roof, sharing day-to-day experiences, and may even be close in age, they end up living parallel lives without any connection to one another. There’s no open warfare or enmity as there can be in the other patterns, but there’s also little or no emotional connection. One daughter described it as “living among strangers who were related to me, who had the same parents, but we knew nothing about each other at all.”
In a similar vein, Cynthia describes her relationship to her sister and brother, who are three and two years older than she. In this family, it was the older sister who was shunned and actively disliked by their mother, the brother who was adored, and Cynthia who was deemed an embarrassment and failure. Their mother was vocal about her opinions, remarking that she neither knew nor liked her oldest daughter or that she had one child too many. And while both daughters struggled with self-esteem, they did not bond. The older sister rebelled, drinking and acting out; the brother internalized everything as a reluctant Trophy Child; and Cynthia, in her own words, “floundered.” Her mother used tactics to divide the siblings such as badmouthing one daughter to another or complaining loudly about both to her son. When the children reached adulthood, their mother would never permit them to visit her at the same time, not even on holidays (that is so telling, isn’t it?). Cynthia surmises that this “rule” was partly a function of her mother’s need to be the center of attention and partly an effort to make sure her children did not communicate directly with one another. Not surprisingly, Cynthia reports that “all three of us are emotionally detached when it comes to our relationship. We would never hug each other, not even after long absence.” They mainly communicate by email nowadays, if at all .
SAFE HAVENS AND ISLANDS OF CONNECTION
Some daughters report that members of their extended family—aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, even older cousins—gave them a taste of what it might be like to be in a close relationship, feeling both loved and safe. That was true for Adele, 48: “I loved going to my grandmother’s house when I was a girl because she was everything my mother wasn’t—kind, open, and uncritical. My mom didn’t like her much—called her a slob and always harped on how messy her house was. But, oh, I loved that house and her. She would listen to me—I’d tell her all about what was going on at school and what I was learning—in a way that my mother never did. She was my dad’s mother and, sometimes, I could see that he was like her in ways, but he was always working and never had time for me. She died when I was 12, and it was a huge blow.”
These relationships—and they may not necessarily be with people a daughter is related to, but might be with a neighbor or a teacher—can provide a daughter with a vision of both herself and how the world works that is very different from what she has learned at home. They can act as a corrective to the things she’s been told about herself as well as help her see that what goes on at her house isn’t what goes on everywhere. That can be both comforting and dislocating at once, as Annie’s story makes clear: “I was sent to my aunt’s house in Philadelphia when I was 12. My 10-year-old sister, Mom’s favorite, didn’t go and it was made clear to me that my mother just wanted a break from dealing with me. I was the ‘bad’ girl. I’m not sure how this all came about because my mother and her older sister—that was the aunt—were always on the outs, but off I went. And it was an eye-opener. No yelling, no screaming, just a calm house and an aunt who loved joking and laughing, and who let my cousin and me
have pillow fights and sit with our feet on the sofa. It was both bewildering—how could they be sisters?—and totally wonderful. I am still close to her. She’s the mother I wanted, in truth.”
Alas, even with these close connections—especially if they are forged with members of the family—it’s rare for a daughter to actually confide and directly seek comfort and solace. Both shame and fear that there will be some sort of retaliation keep her silent .
Still, these memories make a difference, and the daughters who have none of them have a tougher journey than those who do. I hoarded my memories of the times I spent with my Tante Jo, my grandfather’s sister, when I was a girl; they provided the same comfort as the stories I read and a place where I could retreat in times of stress and regroup.
WHY DISCERNING THE PATTERNS IN YOUR FAMILY MATTERS
Family dynamics can, as we’ve seen, either mute or amplify the experience of being unloved and unsupported by your mother. Keeping in mind that the idea of experiences “balancing out” is incorrect, nonetheless the existence of one or more supportive connections in your family—whether that’s with your father or a sibling, grandparent, aunt, cousin, or anyone else—can make an enormous difference not just in how you see yourself but also in how much or how little you take responsibility for your mother’s treatment of you. A daughter who’s even caught a glimpse of her own worthiness in someone else’s eyes is in a different place from that of the girl who hasn’t; she’ll still deal with self-criticism and hurt, but if she squints, she can see a different view of herself. Research suggest that these positive experiences—safe havens or “islands” of connection—can be the basis for what’s called “earned secure attachment.”
The unloved daughter who’s had her mother’s treatment amplified—by the chorus effect of a sibling or siblings, by scapegoating, by dismissive paternal behavior—will have a longer road out toward healing. She may not have an island on which to build future connections and so must start from scratch. It can be done; it’s just harder.
The next step in discernment is looking at you and your behaviors—not the great behaviors that you love about yourself but the ones that trip you up and get in your way—and tracing them back to their point of origin. Yes, sometimes all roads lead back to Mom.
CHAPTER FOUR
ADAPTATION: HOW HER BEHAVIORS SHAPED YOURS
It’s actually amazing when it dawns on me that every single relationship is truly seen through the lens of how my mother loved or didn’t love me, those things she did love about me, and most especially those she didn’t love about me, and how this alone carries into all relationships. How this seems now so very conditional and how I’ve used this template throughout my life . . . and to stop and begin to realize how I’ve continued to carry this view of me and even how I treat others. Remembering this all belonged to my mother and what I’ve “inherited” belongs to me alone to change now .
~Carrie, 55
D uring childhood and later, the unloved daughter focuses on her mother; she sees herself peripherally and then only in relation to the questions that animate her emotional landscape. First among them is “Why doesn’t Mommy love me?” but there are many others that are variations on the theme: “What can I do to make Mommy love me?” or “Who can I be so she’ll be happy with me?” She’s not aware, of course, of how her mother’s treatment is shaping her—how she sees the world, how she reacts to others, how she deals with feeling bad. She doesn’t know why she feels so lonely and adrift some of the time. She doesn’t understand why she has to bite her lip to stop herself from crying when the girls at school are running ahead of her and she can’t catch up, or why she turns to steel instead, willing herself not to feel. She doesn’t know why she has trouble making friends. She soothes herself by thinking that everyone must feel this way or that she’s fine on her own.
This second stage of discernment shifts the attention from how your mother treated you to how you adapted to her treatment. It’s a key step in the journey of healing.
From time to time, I make a point of seeing whether I can still glimpse my mother’s daughter in the woman I am today. It’s not hard to do when I look in the mirror: Even older, there are parts of me—my cheekbones, the shape of my chin—that recall the contours of my mother’s face. Today, at 68, I am older than my mother was when I saw her last, and that was over 28 years ago. My identity as a daughter has long since been replaced by my identity as a mother because the second was of my choosing and a most welcome experience, as the first wasn’t.
Many years ago, outside of my real-world achievements, all I was inside was my mother’s daughter; that reactive, desperate-for-love girl in her teens and twenties was nothing but a product of her childhood. I was volatile and quick to anger; I self-protected by being funny—bitingly so—and made it clear to everyone I had to call the shots. And then I began to build a life—spurred on and helped by therapy—that shut some doors that needed closing and opened others so that who I was could be someone other than that frightened child, reading books alone in her bedroom. I slowly learned to listen to other people and to be less prickly. The largest sea change came at the end of my thirties when I became pregnant and also divorced my mother. My impending motherhood forced me to look inward once more, isolating those behaviors learned in childhood that were detrimental to my being the best version of myself I could be. `
This isn’t to say that the child who was my mother’s daughter has been totally erased; I’d be lying if I told you that. But I recognize the legacy, and I can choose how I wish to behave, most of the time. And when automaticity kicks in, I can see it. That’s empowering. Perhaps I’m not the best version of myself that I might have been if I’d had a different mother, but I am close to being the best version of myself given the mother I had.
MERCI BEAUCOUP , EVOLUTION! BUT FORGIVE ME IF I DON’T TOAST YOU . . .
We’ve already seen that evolution explains why aspects of healing are so elusive—how the infant’s responses and her brain adapt to wherever she finds herself to insure survival, the child’s hardwired need for maternal love, the lasting effects of bad experiences and the way they are stored in the brain, and more. But what about insecure attachment itself? Wouldn’t there be an evolutionary advantage to having everyone be securely attached and in charge of their emotions, able to regulate, and connect to others? How to explain the 40 to 50 percent of us who are insecurely attached?
It sounds facetious, but that’s exactly what a group led by psychologists Tsachi Ein-Dor, Mario Mikulincer, and others wanted to find out: Was there perhaps an evolutionary advantage to being either anxiously or avoidantly attached since there’s no personal advantage? People with anxious attachment, research shows, are more likely to have a higher rate of failed relationships, experience more stress, are less able to cope with their emotions, have lower self-esteem, and suffer both physically and psychologically. They are more prone to depression and disordered eating. Avoidant individuals have trouble with intimacy, don’t work well with others, have difficulty maintaining relationships, manage stress badly, and are generally more pessimistic than securely attached people.
So why hadn’t insecure attachment been “selected out” by evolution? The researchers hypothesized and confirmed in a series of laboratory tests that, in times of extreme danger, the insecurely attached might contribute something valuable to the communal, tribal living early humans enjoyed. Say a violent storm threatened or a fire broke out. How would the securely attached person react? She or he would stay calm and self-soothe, take comfort that the members of the tribe were near, look to them for guidance, and might, as a result, be slower to act. The fight or flight response—another bit of hardwiring to keep us alive in times of trouble—might actually be tamped down by all of those stable feelings of belonging. Of course, that’s not likely to happen to the anxiously attached individual who’s always hyper-alert to danger and who, according to the researchers, may act as the sentinel for the tribe—a kind of Paul Re
vere—when it comes to threat. So while all the securely attached folks would be hugging and singing some forebear version of “Kumbaya,” the anxious person would be screaming, “Storm! Flooding! Fire! The worst is going to happen and we’re all going to die so run for it!” and presumably the singing would stop and the secure types would all follow suit. Similarly, the scientists hypothesized that the avoidant individual who steered away from close connection and cared only about him- or herself would be focused on the danger and the best way of escaping it so he or she would promote the common good by thinking fast on his or her feet: What to do? Best way out? Which way? That way?—and thereby save everyone else. Whew! We’ve “proved” why insecure attachment exists!
Unlike attachment theory, which has been proved reliable in an enormous body of literature, this hypothesis is completely theoretical, but I bring it up because there’s a dark kind of humor in a peer-reviewed journal article that could easily be called “Finding the Bright Side of A Not Good Thing.” In truth, the actual title of the article comes close because it highlights what insecure attachment actually is: a coping mechanism for inadequate parenting when a child’s needs aren’t met. It’s called “The Attachment Paradox: How Can So Many of Us (the Insecure Ones) Have No Adaptive Advantages?” Note that the researchers are included in “us.”
That’s where the second stage of personal discovery, or what I call “discernment,” has to start: the not-so-simple admission that your needs weren’t met in infancy, childhood, and beyond by the person who was supposed to take care of you. Yes, the very person you might still long for or mourn. You cannot begin to understand your behaviors today—how you react to people, think about connections as well as perceived threats, see yourself, set goals for yourself, deal with failure and success, manage emotions—without seeing how you developed the coping mechanisms you did and, more important, what they are. Not only are the circumstances different in every house, but also each daughter comes to the party with her own personality. Once again, we’ll start with the most general observations.
