by Peg Streep
~Clarissa, 40
P erhaps one of the most frustrating things about the journey of recovery is that, often, it feels as though you’re trying to move a five-ton pachyderm by yourself—yes, the proverbial elephant in the living room—but sometimes he’s there and sometimes he’s not. Unloved daughters actively complain about how long it takes to recognize the lack of maternal love, how it takes even longer to see the effects, how slow the recovery process is, and how these patterns can be resistant to even years of therapy and efforts at self-help. There are reasons it’s hard, and that’s what we need to look at first. This chapter is about disarming the unconscious patterns of behaviors, along with the triggers for them, and the reality is that we can’t run the obstacle course until we can see the obstacles.
RUNNING THE OBSTACLE COURSE
Some of these obstacles, as we’ll see, have to do with the brain and apply to everyone whether they are loved by their mothers or not but take up a special place in the life of a woman who’s actively trying to recover. We’ll look at how the brain itself and our unconscious thought processes can be an obstacle and what we can do to outwit them—and yes, those unconscious processes can be successfully gamed, which is very good news indeed! In fact, just reading these sentences is changing the neural connections in your brain; we have the continuing pliability of that extraordinary organ to thank for that. First, though, we have to look at ourselves and our behaviors. Often, we are the biggest obstacles to our ability to thrive, the boulders that stand in the way. Why? Because of the core conflict: our continuing need for our mother’s love and approval. I call it the “dance of denial,” and I was once an expert at it, many years ago. It was the only time in my life, in fact, that I actually achieved the status of a prima ballerina. The dance of denial, in my case, went on for just short of 20 years.
UNDERSTANDING AND ENDING THE DANCE OF DENIAL
She was on her deathbed and someone said, ‘Do you want to tell Linda you love her?’ My mother answered, ‘No.’ Of course, I rationalized her behavior because it felt better than thinking I wasn’t loved. I rationalized her behavior for years, but it never helped my pain. I would tell people that she behaved the way she did because she was sick, because her own mother had been detached, because she was abused. I barely cried when she died. I cried much more when my beloved dog died, in truth. Why did I rationalize? Who wants anyone to know that they were unloved by their mother? I think that on some level I felt that if my mother couldn’t love me, how could anyone?
~Linda, 57
It’s a testament to both the centrality and complexity of the mother-daughter relationship that, for many unloved daughters, the recognition of their wounding and its source comes late in life. Some women are in their thirties, forties, fifties, and even sixties—and often, are mothers or even grandmothers themselves—before they finally begin to understand how their mothers’ treatment of them in childhood has affected and continues to shape their lives. Others know at a very young age—as I did—that their mothers didn’t love them. They “know” it long before they can even put it into words. I was no older than three or four; others say they knew at six, seven, or eight.
But this early knowledge doesn’t necessarily bestow an advantage because these children are clueless about why their mothers don’t connect to them; in fact, they are very likely to blame themselves for whatever might be wrong, which adds another layer of emotional confusion. Additionally, their perceptions don’t stop them from trying to become the kind of daughter their mother would or might love. But they know deep inside nonetheless, and as they get older, they begin to wrestle with the problem. Note the word “begin” because this is a long process, even with therapy.
What gets in the way of a daughter’s seeing her mother’s behavior as hurtful, destructive, or even willful? Part of it is certainly the hardwired need for a mother’s love and approval that is part and parcel of every infant’s being. This need doesn’t appear to have an expiration date; it lasts long into adulthood and, perhaps, the entire life span. Along with the need, there is often a feeling of deep shame at being unloved and the deep-seated fear that a mother’s judgment is correct. That fear—that her mother is right, that she is ultimately unlovable—and the shame that accompanies it underlie much of a daughter’s denial. Denial puts her in the position of somehow having to make sense of the relationship, of trying to find a reason other than her own unworthiness for her mother’s lack of love. Looking for a reason can keep you dancing, as Kate wrote: “I rationalized how my mother behaved toward me until last year when I turned 37. I wanted there to be a reason for how she treated me, one I could actually get my head around. I don’t think you ever want to admit what’s going on when you want so desperately to be loved by your mother.”
The core conflict can keep a daughter stuck for years. Sometimes the wake-up call—the moment when the rationalization and denial finally stall out—comes when the pain of rejection becomes too much to bear. Sometimes the level of havoc in the daughter’s life—wrought by the behaviors she learned in response to her mother’s treatment—gets to be too much and in the moment, she suddenly has the clarity of mind to track the chaos back to its source. That was certainly true for Deidre, whose epiphany happened in her late thirties, after she’d been in two emotionally abusive relationships in a row. It was her marrying someone who treated her just as her mother did that forced her to take a long, hard look at her choices. She ended up going into therapy and, ultimately, divorced both her husband and her mother within a two-year period. As she put it: “My mother wasn’t able to take responsibility for her actions and I was no longer in a place where I was willing to tolerate either her denial or the emotional abuse. It still makes me sad, but I had to learn to live differently.”
Sometimes it’s a third-party intimate—a friend, a lover, a spouse—who opens the door to seeing the pattern, as Jenn’s story makes clear: “I was living with the man I ended up marrying, and we invited my mother to dinner to celebrate my getting my master’s degree. He’d met her before but never one-on-one in this way, in an intimate setting. It was the same old thing with her, but when she left, he turned to me and said, ‘Was this Beat Up Jenn Day? I thought we were celebrating.’ He then went on to rattle off every criticism and lousy thing she’d said about me—my flat looked slovenly, I’d gotten fat, did I think I was really going to succeed outside of school?—and I burst into tears because I realized I was so used to her being that way that I just sponged it up. He encouraged me to go into therapy, and I did. Unfortunately, my mother didn’t want to take responsibility for anything so we are long estranged. It’s a pity, really.”
Is it any wonder that unloved daughters deny in order to unconsciously protect themselves from recognizing such a painful truth? Yes, that’s a rhetorical question.
The dance of denial is also energized by the myth that all mothers are loving, and the rationalization that drives the dance is fed by other people’s responses—the people who tell you, as they tell me, that “It couldn’t have been so bad because you turned out just fine” or “Stop complaining. You had a roof over your head.” My own, thoroughly unscientific take is that people want so badly to believe that one kind of love is immutable, unconditional, and never wavering—given that we all know love in the world is hard to get and harder to hold on to—that they’re resistant to giving up that belief. An unloved daughter’s story challenges that pastel-tinted vision of the all-loving mother—and there’s the biblical commandment to boot.
And it’s not just the outside world’s reactions that keep a daughter stuck; speaking up and recognizing the truth of a mother’s behavior may be made harder by other family members who either don’t see the mother in the same way or don’t want to come out and call her behavior what it is. The dilemma that Julia, 41, faces has much to do with her family’s rallying in their own dance of denial: “My mother’s behavior is still excused by my siblings, and they hate me for telling the truth. They explain and excus
e her as a victim because of her own upbringing and are quick to tear me down if I challenge the family in any way. This throws me into self-doubt, once again, and makes me feel guilty about my perceptions. I’m still afraid of being punished in some way for thinking these thoughts about the person who gave me life. But I know what happened and what she did; I end up spinning emotionally.”
The moment at which the daughter stops denying and starts looking is the first step of what is a long journey—unraveling the ways in which her own behavior was shaped in childhood. Coming to terms with the self and experience requires self-compassion, insight, and emotional fortitude—which, of course, denial does not—and a decision about how to use and process both the information gleaned and the experience. This is what Laura came to understand. “I rationalized my mother’s behavior all of my life. I always had an excuse or rationale for why she said or did things. This was all about minimizing me, because if there were a ‘reason’ for her behavior, somehow it was okay. Eventually, after getting out of the blame cycle and ignoring all the New Age garbage about ‘forgiveness,’ I decided on honesty and accountability. As long as I was excusing/rationalizing her behavior, I was discounting what it did to me, condoning it as okay because I didn’t deserve any better. A-ha! It took a while to figure this one out—I’m 59. I’m a mother myself so I’m tired of being on a pedestal or in the gutter.”
It’s not just that the unloved daughter truly gets to see her mother once she stops the dance of denial, but that she is finally afforded the opportunity to see herself in full, unobscured by the second-guessing, self-doubt, and shame that looking away from the real problem induces. For many, it’s a hard path, but it is a hopeful one, as Alicia wrote: “We are filled with so much self-doubt that loving ourselves and having belief in our worth is so hard. For so long we believed the trouble lay within ourselves. As a mother myself now, there isn’t a thing I wouldn’t do for my kids, and I won’t put a price tag on it. Loving my kids unconditionally has let me see that I am actually a much more capable and stronger person than I ever knew.”
If you are still on the Ferris wheel—making excuses for your mother, cutting her slack, trying to minimize your own pain—you aren’t being compassionate to her. You are simply lacking in self-compassion. In order to begin the process of healing yourself, you have to let go of the denial and trade it for recognition. Yes, it hurts. Why it hurts was put eloquently in an email by Deborah, 55: “When I stopped making excuses for her, I also gave up the hope that things would ever change. That she would come around someday. That was a killer. More like experiencing a death, really.”
It is the step, though, that every unloved daughter must take to save herself, whether she decides to remain in contact with her mother or not.
THE FEELING OF BEING “LESS THAN”
The degree to which unconscious processes govern much of human behavior will be made clear in the pages that follow. Keep in mind, though, as you read, that while some of these unconscious patterns are universal default settings, the unloved daughter has some that are specific to her experiences. Feeling less than or inadequate—which can impair the ability to assess herself realistically despite outward success—is one. The habit of self-criticism—ascribing setbacks or failures to fixed character traits instead of circumstances—is another. There are others we’ll turn to in detail after examining unconscious process generally.
THE BRAIN: YOURS, MINE, AND EVERYONE’S
All of us pride ourselves—yes, I count myself in that number—on making well-considered decisions most of the time and avoiding snap judgments based on little or no information. We think of ourselves as thoughtful and reasonable, but nothing could be further from the truth. Humans are actually hardwired to make snap judgments or engage in what Daniel Kahneman has called “fast” thinking, most of which takes place outside of consciousness.
Fast thinking that is automatic—you’re connecting the dots even as your brain registers that there are dots—was obviously an evolutionary advantage at a time in human history when staying alive required being alert and proactive in the face of physical dangers and challenges. Remember the example in the first chapter about reacting to a baby’s cry—even if you don’t have a baby—before you’ve consciously registered there’s a baby wailing? Our brains still work that way, which factors into the mix when we consider the road to recovery and disarming the responses we learned in childhood. While I won’t provide a comprehensive review of all of the automatic processes associated with the brain, I’m going to focus on the ones that most directly affect how we can begin to unlearn what we learned as children.
THE EFFECTS OF PRIMES AND PRIMING
Did you know that if you have people think about a library, they’re more likely to lower their voices to a whisper? Or that the smell of cleanser in the air actually encourages people to clean up after themselves? A body of research attests to the fact that cues in the physical environment evoke specific thoughts and reactions without our being aware of their provenance or even that we’re being cued to do and think what we’re doing and thinking. It’s not hard to see the evolutionary advantage to the brain metaphorically sniffing out danger before it’s actually seen, but this trait continues to influence our behavior in important ways. For the insecurely attached daughters, those unnoticed primes are a key to disarming reactivity. Let’s take a look at how primes and priming work.
In one experiment conducted by John Bargh and Tanya Chartrand, participants who were primed to complete sentences with words associated with rudeness such as “aggressively” and “bold” were more likely to behave rudely than those primed with neutral or polite words like “respect” and “courteous.” Similarly, it’s been shown that the physical environment—objects—can cue behavior as well. For example, Bargh and his colleagues ran an experiment that used images associated with capitalistic enterprise (a conference table, briefcases, dress shirts, and ties) to see if they could cue competition among the participants. Primed with images of business, 70 percent of those given the word fragment “c_ _ p_ _ _ tive” completed it as “competitive,” compared to 42 percent of unprimed subjects. Alternatively, the fragment could have been completed as “cooperative.”
Other cues elicit other reactions. A study by Adam Pazda and his colleagues showed that women were more likely to judge a woman as promiscuous or sexually receptive if she was wearing a red dress, and more likely to display jealousy and mate-guarding behavior than if she were wearing white or green! So if you’re sitting at a bar or at a party with your honey and you suddenly find yourself bristling at the brunette in red, it’s your brain doing the talking.
If you think about primes and priming in a down-to-earth way, it makes a great deal of sense. We’re not reacting just to primes in the environment—the crowded subway car elicits one mood, the calming celadon walls of a sunlit living room another—but also to people’s facial expressions and body language. Sometimes, we’re conscious and aware of how we’re being affected, but sometimes we’re not. Imagine you are meeting someone for the first time; you’ve arranged to meet her in the lobby of a building so there aren’t any external primes to elicit your responses. Let’s say you call out her name as you approach and she doesn’t smile at you or extend her hand; do you assume you’ve done something to offend her or do you think she’s having a bad day and her behavior has nothing to do with you? What if she extends her hand in greeting but her face is stiff and unsmiling; are you likely to read into her mixed signals and feel as though you have to do something to win her over? What if she’s on the phone and she keeps on talking for the next ten minutes? Would you register that she’s being unspeakably rude or would her behavior make you feel small and inadequate?
For all of us, daily life is made up of dozens and dozens of such moments when we’re responding to cues from strangers, acquaintances, neighbors, friends, coworkers, and intimates; understanding how we react to these cues is part of the journey of understanding that comprises making the
unconscious conscious. Seeing whether and how you internalize external cues is an important first step in disarming unconscious process .
HOW REACTIVE TO CUES ARE YOU?
All this talk of primes may make you feel that we’re all human puppets on strings, but the reality is that some of us are more open to their influence while others are relatively impervious. You need to identify your own reactivity both to disarm primes and to learn how to use them consciously and to your advantage. There’s a body of research that explores another theory of personality called “personality systems interactions” (PSI). This theory focuses on how individuals cope in times of stress. Based on a continuum of behavior, it distinguishes between those who are action-oriented and those who are state-oriented.
People who are action-oriented are good at emotional regulation, can summon up positive images of self under fire, and don’t rely on external cues. (Yes, this sounds like the skill set of a securely-attached person who’s motivated by approach goals. The perspective and the vocabulary are different.) In contrast, people who demonstrate state-oriented behavior flood with emotion under stress, don’t self-regulate well, are preoccupied by worries about failing, and are sensitive to external cues. (This description is also similar to the traits of an insecurely attached person motivated by avoidance.) This theory also assumes that these dispositions are learned in childhood.
Now, back to primes. In one experiment, after filling out questionnaires that determined either their action or state orientation, half of the participants were asked to visualize a difficult and demanding person in their lives and to recall both specific incidents and how they felt at the time. (In other words, they were asked to hot-process the encounters.) Then, additionally, the experimenters had these participants write down those observations and identify the difficult person by his or her initials. The other half of the participants were asked to do the same things but focusing on, visualizing, naming, and writing about an accepting person in their lives and how they felt. Then everyone was tested on how quickly they could identify a schematized image of a discrepant face in a crowd—a happy face in a field of angry ones, for example. Then they were asked to identify or not identify (noting “me” or “not me”) with a series of positive (“reliable,” “creative,” etc.) and negative (“impulsive,” etc.) traits .
