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Embarrassment
Why Unloved Daughters Struggle to Recognize Cruelty
Recognition often needs to be sparked by a third party.
Posted March 1, 2022 Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
Key points
- Because children normalize maternal abuse, it may be difficult for an adult daughter to recognize her mistreatment.
- A daughter's continuing need for her mother's love and support often leads to years of trying to cope and "fix" the problem.
- Recognition is often sparked by the intervention of a third party, either a therapist or loved one, but the daughter has to be ready to see it.
More than a decade ago, when my first book on the subject, Mean Mothers, was about to be published, 10 professionals and I sat in a conference room, debating whether to change the title and, if we didn’t, whether the book needed a brown paper wrapper so that a reader could hide the title if she wanted to. No, this wasn’t a joke, and the directors of marketing and sales were worried that women might be too ashamed to hold the book in their hands. We never did come up with a better or more palatable title and they published without the brown paper wrap associated with smut.
But, in truth, they were onto something: The incredible discomfort and disloyalty daughters feel when it comes to actually recognizing and putting a name to their mothers’ behaviors. Even after years of trying to fix the relationship. Even after therapy. Even after setting boundaries. Even after estrangement.
Giving those behaviors a name causes daughters to feel deep shame even though they know rationally that the shame of being unloved isn’t theirs to own.
Beginnings: Normalizing and Denying as Typical Responses
All young children believe that what goes on at their house goes on at everyone’s house, and that holds whether a family is healthy and functioning or abusive and dysfunctional. That’s not just a reflection of how small a young child’s world is but, as Deborah Tannen has written, the power of the mother to dictate how what goes on in that little world is be interpreted; this becomes especially salient in a family where a parent (or parents) are verbally abusive, emotionally unavailable, controlling, or high in narcissistic traits.
If a child’s world is filled with swift reprimand and little or no affection, the little girl learns to protect herself by pulling away physically and shutting down her neediness; all of this happens on an unconscious level. This self-protection, while damaging to the girl’s development, is a function of evolution, which focuses on adaptation and survival, not mental or emotional health.
While the hold the family has on her doesn’t necessarily change as she gets older, goes to school, makes friends, and begins to see that every family isn’t alike, normalizing and denial often become more difficult. Still, what she wants is love and support from her mother and for the problem to go away. She spends time thinking about how to solve it and, most usually, she focuses on what she could possibly change about herself to make her mother love her. Researchers have suggested that this focus is much less frightening than the genuinely terrifying realization that the person who is supposed to love, care, and protect you won’t, or, even worse, will deliberately hurt you.
That’s way scarier than the imagined monster in the closet.
The Question of Cruelty (and Motivation)
The tug of war between what the daughter recognizes as her mother’s maltreatment and her continuing hope that she’ll garner her mother’s love—somehow, someday—is what I called “the core conflict” in my book Daughter Detox. This conflict usually goes on for years, even decades, into a daughter’s adult life. The impulse to somehow paper over such an ugly truth that flies in the face of all the mother myths—that women are by nature nurturing, that mother love is always unconditional, that maternal love is hardwired—is understandable. It’s mirrored in what the Grimm Brothers did when they collected folk and fairy tales; they changed every single cruel mother portrayed in the originals into a stepmother instead.
The myths cast a spell not unlike those in fairy tales, leaving the daughter in limbo until, sometimes, the spell is broken.
Breaking the "Spell"
Sometimes, it is a therapist who sees what the daughter can’t bear seeing; even so, as Deb recounts, there may be resistance:
“I was 37 when my therapist pointed out how my mother demeaned me in front of my family. How she derided my choices, my parenting. I not only defended my mother but I fired the therapist. The turning point came when my mother began to treat my daughter the way she had always treated me and tried to turn my son against his sister which was just a replay of the relationship she’d encouraged between my so-called perfect brother and me, the eternal screw-up. I went back into therapy and, this time, I allowed myself to listen. My mother refuses to listen, and, as a result, we see her only occasionally. I stop short of calling her ‘cruel’ but, trust me, she’s neither kind nor nice to me or mine.”
Sometimes, it is a spouse or partner who points out what a daughter has always looked away from. That was true for Allie.
“Tom always found my mother sharp-tongued but things began to escalate after he and I bought our first house. She was undone by the fact that it was bigger than hers and her attacks on me escalated. I did my best to ignore them, as I always had, but Tom got increasingly bothered. It blew up big time at Christmas when the whole family posed for a photo and my mother said, ‘This would be a great picture if Allie wasn’t such a fat pig.’ Mind you, I was six months pregnant with our daughter and I burst into tears. Tom went from zero to sixty in seconds and called her out, right then and there. My mother started screaming at him and he took my arm and steered me out the door. He felt strongly that our child couldn’t be exposed to how mean my mother could be and we ended up talking it through with a therapist who suggested we sit down with my mother. We did sit down with her, but it only resulted in her telling me how ungrateful and overly sensitive I was and always had been and how she didn’t need to change herself to suit me. She promptly cut me out of her life. It was mind-boggling. And, to be honest, once I became a mother, how she acted seemed even weirder. What kind of a person goes out of her way to hurt her kid?”
The Question You Must Stop Trying to Answer
It’s tantalizingly simple: “What makes her cruel?” While it seems as though if you understood that, you’d know everything, all it does is muddy the waters. It puts your focus on her, not on you and your recovery. Empathy is not your friend as you work on recognition.
And while, someday, it may be of historical interest to you why she was cruel, it really only matters that she is.
The best route to recovery is working with a gifted therapist.
The ideas in this post are drawn from my book, Daughter Detox: Recovering from an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life, as well as interviews for it and my forthcoming book on verbal abuse.
Copyright© 2022 by Peg Streep
Facebook image: Marija Nedovic/Shutterstock
