MOTHER ISSUES

Most of my visiting friends are women ...

   And I don't think there is a mother-daughter relationship that isn't complicated and difficult in certain respects.

 Whenever there is someone who acts in an abusive way,

the only way of dealing with that person is to have a clear plan so that you can remain protected.

 When a child is being abused, the law of Honoring Your Mother and Father is suspended.  

Or perhaps think of it as honoring the parent

by realizing that the person is dangerous to themselves and others and acting accordingly.

 We don’t get to choose our mothers. 

 

We only have to find the wisdom to emerge from the experience of mothering with some small degree of inner peace and strength.

 Mothers are the first and most constant expression of what a woman is.

If your mother is emotionally damaged, you will have a hard time finding your own path in living as a whole woman.

Your mother's relationships with men --

husband, boyfriend, brother, father and friends--

are the first and most compelling examples of how you believe a woman interacts, or should interact with a man.

If your mother was/is emotionally damaged,

you will have to exercise great care that you choose wisely in your own relationships.

 Perhaps the greatest common ground is the discovery that each of you is not alone,

that you are not the only girls or women on the planet to have had mothers who can’t or won’t love them.

It was their fault not yours.

 In infancy and childhood, a daughter catches the first glimpse of herself in the mirror that is her mother’s face.

The daughter of an unloving mother —

one who is emotionally distant, withholding, or inconsistent, or even hypercritical or cruel—

learns different lessons about the world and herself. 

The experience  teaches a child that the world of relationships is unreliable.

It is called  avoidant attachment

and sets up a terrible conflict between the child’s needs both for her mother’s love and for protection against her mother’s emotional or physical abuse.

 The key thing here is

that the daughter’s need for her mother’s love is primal and a driving force, and that need isn’t diminished by its unavailability.

 Early childhood attachments are highly predictive of adult romantic relationships, as well as friendships.

 It won’t surprise you that the most common wounds are those to the self and the area of emotional connection.

 Consciousness is the first step in an unloved daughter’s healing.  
 

1. Lack of confidence
 

 The voice in the daughter's head is that of her mother’s, telling her what she isn’t (smart, beautiful, kind, loving, worthy).  

Her accomplishments and talents will continue to be undermined by that internalized maternal voice, unless there is some kind of intervention.
 

2. Lack of trust
 

 The ambivalently attached daughter needs constant validation that trust is warranted. 

This triggers a pulling away of the Other in her life, teaching the daughter that all relationships are not to be trusted.
 

 3. Difficulty setting boundaries
 

 Many daughters, caught between their need for their mother’s attention and its absence, report that they become “pleasers” in adult relationships

 or are unable to set other boundaries which make for healthy and emotionally sustaining relationships. 
 

 4.  Difficulty seeing the self accurately
 

 As a child it was only natural to internalize all you were told growing up, and these distortions in how we see ourselves may extend into every domain, including our looks.
 

5.  Making avoidance the default position
 

 Lacking confidence or feeling fearful sometimes puts the unloved daughter in a defensive crouch

 so that she’s avoiding being hurt by a bad connection rather than being motivated by the possibility of finding a stable and loving one.  
 

   6.  Being overly sensitive
 

 An unloved daughter may be sensitive to slights, real and imagined; a random comment may carry the weight of her childhood experience without her even being aware of it. 
 

  7.  Replicating the Mother bond in relationships
 

 Alas, we tend to be drawn to what we know —those situations which, while they make us unhappy in the end, are nonetheless “comfortable” because they are familiar to us

With this list in mind, the day a daughter takes stock of her wounds is the first day of her healing,

 and her journey towards new self-awareness and possibility.

 What often works is non-defensive behaviors, setting limits and boundaries. 

As far as the emotional work is concerned, try to get to the point where you don't get sucked into a lot of the sparks or overreact to the stabs and the jabs. 

A good book to read:

 Mothers Who Can’t Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

 http://www.amazon.com/Mothers-Who-Cant-Love-Daughters-ebook/dp/B00BATILFG/