Peg Streep – Knotted: The Mother-Daughter Relationship

“Almost everyone I know well says I invade their space. And you know what? I’m not entirely sure what that means. How close is too close? Is there an invisible line between being involved and being intrusive? It happens with friends and it happens with lovers. What am I missing?”

This is the message I got from “Nina,” who is 35 and still struggling to define intimacy in relationships. While not as discussed as the difficulty unloved daughters have with managing their emotions, the inability to hew to healthy boundaries remains an issue for many.

Understanding the “Goldilocks Problem”

Infants and small children with a loving, attuned, and supportive mother grow up knowing that they are separate from other people but that others are there for them and open to them; their model of the world of relationships is based in security, knowing that the world and the people in it are to be relied upon and trusted. They are held close but not so close as to disappear from view or feel suffocated. None of that is true for the unloved daughter who will be more like Goldilocks in the house of the three bears than not—always looking for “just right” but never quite finding it. That is especially true when it comes to healthy boundaries.

Are you Goldilocks, still looking for “just right?”

Remember how Goldilocks tries to find a chair, a bed, and a bowl of porridge that isn’t too small or too big, too hot or too cold? That’s basically the relationship the unloved daughter has to boundaries; she’s always searching for “just right.” That said, there are variations on the theme and figuring out how your attachment style connects to the difficulties you have with boundaries is key. Do remember that attachment styles aren’t written in stone and are more fluid than the labels make them seem; focus on the style which describes you most of the time.

Each of three styles of insecure attachment—anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant— displays issues with not understanding what constitutes a healthy boundary as well as navigating healthy interdependence in relationships.

If your style of attachment is primarily anxious-preoccupied, you tend to misread healthy boundaries—someone needing time by him- or herself, not necessarily sharing every single thought and feeling, taking time to process emotional experiences—as potentially threatening. You see walls where there are permeable fences meant to give an individual room to be him- or herself. Because you overshare or blurt when you get anxious, you feel left out when someone doesn’t feel like talking; you automatically register being quiet as a sign of pulling away but the truth is that it has nothing to do with you, especially if the person demonstrates a secure style of attachment. Ironically, when you’re in the company of someone who’s actively trying to manipulate you by stonewalling, you tend to misread that as well, and decide to stay when you should be reaching for your running shoes.

If you tend to display an avoidant style of attachment—whether that’s dismissive or fearful—you see boundaries largely as walls that allow you to either stay in control of the relationship or work as a means of protection. These two avoidant styles are actually quite different and are driven by specific emotional needs. The dismissive daughter relishes control, and thinks well of herself; she thinks little of other people, hence the word “dismissive.” Her walls are based on not needing much from other people and preferring shallow connections. She pursues relationships that work for her and exits those that don’t. She may be the narcissist in your life or just someone who remains out of reach.

The daughter with a fearful-avoidant style shares some of the same characteristics as the anxious-preoccupied; she too is hungry for love and companionship but she’s learned that if she extends herself, she’s at risk of being hurt. She’s Goldilocks peering through the window, afraid to cross the threshold. Of the three, this daughter may be the most unhappy since she has a low opinion of herself, a high opinion of others, and feels shut out even as she erects walls to protect herself. Her misunderstanding of what a healthy boundary looks like is just as hobbling as that of the anxious-preoccupied and while her manipulation tends to be more covert than the overt pushback of the anxious style, neither can sustain a healthy connection as a result.

If these learned behaviors are getting in your way, here are some things you can do to troubleshoot your behavior and understand boundaries better.

Understanding the continuing influence of the past

Think about how boundaries were disrespected by your mother and others growing up and then answer the following questions:

Were you not permitted to “keep secrets” in your family of origin? Did your mother or anyone else rifle through your diaries or papers and demand you tell him or her “everything?”
Or, alternatively, did your mother or anyone else tell you not to trust anyone outside of the family or warn you that people who knew your secrets would take advantage?
How did your mother manage boundaries? With you? Your sibling or siblings if you had them, or with your father?
Now, examine your own thoughts about boundaries. Do they make you nervous or feel secure?
Do you feel threatened by someone else’s need for privacy? What scares you about it? Or someone’s need to be alone? What makes you anxious?
Did you feel threatened or unsafe in your family of origin? Did you learn to protect yourself?
Is your default position one of trust or mistrust when you meet someone new?

Understanding the roots of your present behavior is central to healing and change. Healthy boundaries permit us to maintain our own space while making room for others in our lives.

Photograph by Fezbot2000. Copyright free. Unsplash.com

“I honestly thought that taking care of her when she was ill and dying would right things, somehow. She was awful to me, always, but I thought that by doing it right, taking care of her and not walking away, I would feel better. Well, not. The abuse is non-stop and I have finally decided that I can’t see this through. Even my therapist agrees that I can’t do this anymore.”

I hear often from daughters whose abusive mothers now need care, and the crisis is real. This can be a cusp moment in a daughter’s life but it mostly remains in shadows and undiscussed; there is often deep shame associated with the moment. The assumption is that we will take care of our parent or parents because they “took care” of us. It’s arguable that a volitional act like having a baby doesn’t quite have its equivalent when it comes to being an adult child who feels obligated to repay a parent for a choice that parent made.

The culture is loaded with reminders of our filial duty, especially to the one who, as the phrase goes, “gave us life.” That cultural pressure never really lets up and all of us have internalized the idea that we owe a great deal to our parent or parents, and that this debt is sufficiently large that abuse or mistreatment should be forgiven or at least ignored in a time of emergency. This message is stored in our heads and has a very loud speaker system; there’s no question that an ailing toxic parent provokes a very real internal crisis in almost everyone.

What I call the core conflict in my book Daughter Detox: Recovering from an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life plays a role in the crisis.The core conflict is the tug-of-war between the daughter’s recognition of how she’s been wounded (and who wounded her) and her hopefulness that issues can be resolved and that she can somehow get her mother to love her. Healing remains elusive as long as the conflict remains active.

Resolving the core conflict has a topography of its own, full of peaks and valleys, as the daughter struggles to make sense of it, works to set boundaries, manages her feelings, and tries to find ways of making it less difficult and painful. There’s no easy solution and the results are often more cobbled together than not. Some opt for distance, moving a state away or hundreds or thousands of miles away from where they grew up; some put an ocean between themselves and their families of origin. They go low-contact by default, which is more like being in exile than not. Others stay in contact for reasons both simple and complicated: They range from not being willing to give up on the possibility of reconciliation, fear of disrupting important family ties, or the decision to make sure their child or children have grandparents. Some daughters, after years of struggle, decide that they can no longer brook the toxicity of the connection, and go no contact. In doing so, they often lose most, if not all, of their other family connections as well.

But nothing is more poignant than the crisis posed by the toxic mother who is in need. According to a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, one-quarter of Americans with a living parent over 65 provide assistance to a parent; that number jumps to one-third for adults with a parent over 75—and one-third say they provide financial assistance. While 88 percent of those helping elderly parents report the experience as “rewarding,” not surprisingly, 53 percent also say that it’s stressful. It should surprise no one that daughters do the lion’s share of hands-on caretaking. Mind you, these are overall statistics and don’t take the quality of the mother-daughter relationship into account.

But what about the mother who has belittled you all of your life or dismissed and ignored you, or still tries to control you but who, nonetheless, gave you life? It’s hard to overstate the cultural pressures pertaining to filial duty—backed up by one of the Ten Commandments, no less—and additionally, the daughter’s own sense of herself as a caring and empathic person. And then there’s the cultural opprobrium: While I was never asked to take care of my late mother—we had been estranged for 13 years when she became ill—I have seen people reassess me when they learn that I did not visit her before she died. I go from being seen as one kind of woman to another in an instant because, in our culture, it’s always the daughter who’s on trial. After all, what kind of a daughter doesn’t honor the mother who gave her life, the culture asks? I have an answer to that: The kind of daughter who is finally able to acknowledge mistreatment and honor herself. But, for the moment at least, my answer is that of an outlier.

Dealing with emotional confusion in crisis

For many daughters who have settled on how to deal with their unloving mothers, their parents’ sudden neediness or illness throws them into a state of emotional confusion. They worry about what precisely their duty to their mother is, and what other people will think of them. They may feel enormous guilt and angst, or pressure from siblings and other family members to “do the right thing.” They may also be afraid of how they will feel in the future if they do not

It’s a situation which has no easy answers or pat solutions.

It’s difficult to overstate the complexity of emotions and motivation. “I take care of my mother because it’s the right thing to do,” one woman in her late forties told me. “It’s crazy-making, painful, but I am a mother myself. It’s the right thing to do. I believe in doing the right thing in life and I’m not going to make an exception for my mother although, God knows, it would be warranted.” Not surprisingly, self-definition contributes to both the decision to hang in and the decision to stay away.

Women talk of their faith and religious beliefs, their sense of themselves as honest and true, and, tellingly, of wanting to show the world that they are better than their mothers were, and capable of better behavior—even if “the world” doesn’t know their mothers failed them. That was the reasoning Beth adduced: “I took great care of my mother because she took terrible care of me. I’m not saying she didn’t feed or clothe me, because she did. But she put me down, never heard or saw me as who I was, and was bitterly disappointed that I wasn’t who she wanted me to me. I treated her well when she was sick, and that was what I needed to do to prove to myself, for once for all, that how she treated me had nothing to do with who I was.” But, realistically, some daughters begin with those intentions and then discover that they just can’t. That was the case for Rose, 44, whose siblings had long since cut bait on their 75-year-old mother and who found herself unable to go forward:

“I divorced my mother (no contact) about a year ago. I did everything for her, until the day I said ‘Enough,’ and ended it cold turkey. I know she is ill, she is lonely, and I wish she was a mother I could be there for, but she quite simply is not. I tried my whole life to make her happy, and it was never enough, I was never enough. I feel like the weight of the world has been lifted off my shoulders! I am happier than I have been in my entire life. Of course, I have occasional pangs of Catholic guilt—that was a staple of my childhood—but my sister and husband help me work through it. It’s still a dirty little secret, and only those very close to me know that I have gone no contact. I’ve been shamed by other women who are now caring for their own loving parents and don’t understand the pain I endured my entire life from an alcoholic, narcissistic, just plain hateful mother.”

For many unloved daughters, the feeling of shame and isolation absolutely co-exists with the recognition that she has done what she needed to for herself and, quite literally, her own preservation. I have heard from daughters who took care of their mothers and bitterly regretted the decision, and the toll it took on them, their spouses, and others. I have heard from others who felt that by being loving to someone unloving, they’d done the right thing. Processing the cost (and benefit) of caretaking is extremely hard and a personal decision.

If you are at this watershed moment—no matter the status of your relationship to your mother or what you decide—please seek help and support, especially if you’re experiencing great emotional confusion. As you know, I’m neither a therapist nor a psychologist but this is a defining moment: Don’t do it alone if you are suffering. This is a personal decision in every sense and it is yours to make.

Photograph by Ben White. Copyright free. Unsplash.com

The holidays appear to be stressful for everyone—too much to do and too little time to do it in—but the specific stress of dealing with family when relationships are at best frayed and at worst toxic is something else entirely. Every year, I get messages from people asking for help in dealing with events and gatherings, so I thought I’d round up what I’ve learned actually works.

How to navigate potentially stormy waters

You deal with them proactively by coming up with a plan and sticking to it. If you are still participating in events with your family of origin, you have to remember that you’re an adult now and no matter what anyone says, you are allowed to set boundaries and rules, chief among them being that no one has the right to be abusive. Most important, you must set your own goals and expectations so that you are prepared, remembering that no one can push your buttons unless you allow them to. You need to be clear about your own behavior, remembering that you can’t control how other people act but that you are the captain of your own ship. Don’t think of yourself as helpless in the situation because you’re not.

As you gather your thoughts about what you want to happen, bring to mind the predictable scripts that are bound to surface and how you are going to deal with them. You know Uncle Joe has political views that are antithetical to yours; how will you deal? You’re pretty sure your mother will play the usual favorites game—criticizing you and fawning over your sister—so decide ahead of time how you’re going to respond. Your brother-in-law is hugely competitive but are you going to play tit-for-tat? No one can push your buttons without your permission.

If you have gone low contact without ever articulating why you’ve put distance between you and your mother and family, family gatherings may be incredibly stressful because by avoiding overt conflict, you’ve escalated potential conflict. You may want to rethink why you’ve avoided making a statement and whether that’s right for you and your children and spouse, if you have them, going forward. Yes, it’s easier to duck for cover than it is actually speaking your mind—and there’s way less pushback—but it will probably create more problems in the long run. Remember that being clear about your position and expectations doesn’t mean you have to start World War III.

Is clarity the best route going forward? Think about it.

Getting clear about intentions

If the response you get to setting boundaries is unreasonable or angry pushback or stony silence and a refusal to listen, spend time thinking about why you’re still attending the gathering; weigh the pros and cons ahead of time. Again, conscious awareness is key and if this is just another cycle of the core conflict—and you’re going to try to get love and validation once again—you may want to rethink why you are attending. If you’re unsure whether or not you should attend, do ask yourself the following questions. Again, it’s better to write your answers down so that you can review them later. You will be more consciously aware confronting your words on the page, rather than just thinking about your answers.

Do I feel pressured to attend? What are those pressures and where are they coming from?
What is my motive for attending the event? Do I have a specific goal or goals?
Am I in command of my emotions so I won’t react out of habit or respond to old triggers?
Am I clear about behaviors I won’t accept and how I will deal with them if they happen? You need to answer this in detail.
Are my expectations realistic or am I being overly optimistic? Are my goals realistic?

Preparing yourself emotionally and mentally

Unrealistic expectations appear to be the leading cause for unpleasantness, such as assuming that old patterns of behavior will magically disappear, that everyone is determined to get along, and that, somehow, you’ll find your family has been transformed into the one you’ve always wanted—some version of a Norman Rockwell painting or of the commercials you see everywhere. Keep in mind that while there are families like that, some 40-50% of us haven’t experienced them. You’re neither an outlier nor are you alone.

Remember that while you should always be polite, good manners don’t include overlooking disparagement or cruelty; keep your reaction tempered but pretending something hasn’t been said or done actually won’t help. Don’t tolerate abusive behavior leveled at you or your loved ones. You have every right to hold people accountable, even during the holidays.

If you find yourself filled with dread as the date approaches, consider cutting the visit short, if need be. Don’t feel as though you must say “yes” to every demand and revert to the old habit of pleasing so as not to roil the waters.

If you’ve decided to participate in a family gathering, make sure that you’re ready not to participate in someone else’s drama. Your best self can show up.

Photograph by Caroline Hernandez. Copyright free. Unsplash.com

Rather than make resolutions which, research shows, tend to be doomed to failure, why not set down some hard-and-fast house rules for 2020? You’re much more likely to succeed at changing things up if you tack up some rules, either mentally or literally, and make a commitment to stick by them. Rather than resolve to be a better housekeeper, put some simple rules in place such as leave your shoes by the door, open the mail every day and recycle the junk, and toss what needs tossing in the fridge at a set time on a specified day.

Of course, when we think about getting our house in order, it’s not just vacuuming or dealing with clutter that matters; it’s about setting meaningful boundaries for ourselves and others and putting some rules in place so that next year will be better than last. This is especially true if you’ve been working on recovering from a difficult or even toxic childhood, and what you learned during those years isn’t standing you in good stead.

The 4 nevers

As I explain in my book, Daughter Detox; Recovering from an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life, figuring out how to unlearn old behaviors and substitute new ones is a long and sometimes difficult journey. Some of the difficulty is that we often see our behaviors as set-in-stone or simply a function of our essential nature; that’s especially true if our parent (or parents or even siblings) have consistently told us that we were just born flawed, as in “too difficult,” “too sensitive or emotional,” “didn’t belong,” “not good enough,” or any other variation on the theme, whether about our looks or character.

Setting rules for your own behavior and those of others is one way of making sure things get off to a dandy start. The illustration here is of my mental welcome sign, inspired by the behavior of my ex.

Tolerate abusive behavior

No more excuses such as “she/he didn’t mean it,” “it’s just the way she/he is,” “everyone does this now again when he/she is frustrated” or whatever excuse and form of denial comes to mind. And, yes, it includes your own behavior as well as those of other people, even those you may be related to. Normalizing abuse isn’t healthy and happens also to enable the behavior.

Among the abusive behaviors you should no longer allow in your life are name-calling, scapegoating, gaslighting, stonewalling, and any other behavior that is intended to make you feel lousy about yourself or motivated by a need to control you.

Abuse is never okay.

Let someone control you (or be the controller)

If you already have issues trusting your own perceptions and judgment because you grew up with a controlling parent, you may initially be comfortable handing the reins of life over to someone else. It can be oddly reassuring that someone else is in charge of decisions, especially if voicing your opinion or taking risks makes you anxious Alas, this basically consigns you to your childhood room forever and further reduces your sense of yourself. Having a sense of personal agency is key to thriving, as is learning to take reasonable risks as well as figuring out how to recover from mistakes. Besides, it’s important to learn to distinguish between helpful behavior and a need for control; with practice, you’ll be able to tell the difference.

And if you’re the controller, wouldn’t you rather have relationships with people who are being their real selves? Think about it.

Tell anyone that things could always be worse

The start of a new year is the perfect time to chuck those platitudes and actually listen to people with empathy and understanding. I honestly believe that people revert to those sayings— “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger,” “I know exactly what you’re feeling,” “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade,” “Find the positive in every experience”—because they think they must say something. But listening to someone doesn’t require you to say anything.

Just listen and stay silent, instead of serving up words that have no meaning. Be present, and look into the speaker’s eyes.

Keep the peace at all costs

Do you feel as though you bite your tongue, walk on eggshells, or revert to pleasing when there’s an argument or disagreement? Disagreeing with people is a part of life, as long as the disagreement is framed in mutual respect, and verbal abuse (name-calling, trying to make the person feel shame, stonewalling, and the like) is absent. Daughters who grew up in households in which a controlling parent was at the helm often shun any hint of conflict and end up stifling themselves to keep the peace. Similarly, those raised by a parent high in narcissistic traits often learn to duck under the radar and do their best to disappear; these are, according to Dr. Craig Malkin’s book Rethinking Narcissism, “echoists,” people who actually lack healthy amounts of self-regard.

Don’t stifle your voice going forward; it’s the only one you have and it’s unique.

Happy New Healing Year to all!

Photograph by Jude Beck. Copyright free. Unsplash.com

Malkin, Craig. Rethinking Narcissism: The Secret to Recognizing and Coping with Narcissists. New York: Harper Perennial, 2016.4 T

This question was submitted by a number of readers and the following text is adapted from my book, The Daughter Detox Question & Answer Book: A GPS for Navigating Your Way Out of a Toxic Childhood.

The short answer? It absolutely does matter.

You should not start playing amateur psychologist here, applying labels and faux diagnoses, but, that said, becoming aware of not just your patterns of behavior (and why you act as you do) and being aware of how others act (and why) can help you live your life with more conscious intention. Understanding how well or badly your partner manages his emotions under stress, what his working assumptions about relationships are, and how comfortable or uncomfortable he is with intimacy will give you a bead on how your relationship might thrive or founder, and what you can do preemptively both for yourself, for him, and the two of you. Do remember that attachment styles aren’t carved in stone for anyone; you should be thinking about how he and you respond, react, and act most of the time. (Note that I am using the masculine pronoun but it could just as easily be feminine.)

The appeal of the securely attached

It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that the best possible partner would be securely attached; yes, file this one under “Duh.” If you’re insecurely attached, being with someone who is secure is a possible game-changer. It’s not just the partner whose emotional stability is likely to ground you from the get-go but his family and closest friends. This isn’t to suggest that securely attached people don’t have friends with insecure attachment—of course, they do—but you might be welcomed into a world that permits you to build on your own experiences with caring others (called “islands of security” by experts) and rebuild your style of attachment from the ground up. Yes, earned secure attachment is real. But so is enhanced security and I’ll return to that at the very end of this question.

Back-up plans

But let’s assume that you end up with someone who is insecurely attached instead; it’s here that you need to pay attention because these relationships can include a terrific amount of turbulence and, yes, heartbreak, if you don’t understand how to make the relationship work.

Let’s start first with the worst possible pairing: the anxiously-preoccupied and the dismissive-avoidant. Yes, each is a person whose emotional needs weren’t met in childhood but their adaptation and coping mechanisms render them totally incompatible, with different emotional motivations and needs. The anxiously attached daughter wants relationship but her anxiety is pervasive; she has a low opinion of herself and doesn’t have the base of confidence in herself to quell her worries. She’s emotionally volatile—quick to defend and anger—and can’t calm herself down. The dismissive-avoidant is Mr. Cool; he thinks well of himself and little of others and thinks of himself as a self-sufficient island. Hidden from view are those needs that were never met in childhood and the hole in his heart; yes, he may also be high in narcissistic traits. You can see where this is going: her volatility and neediness push him away at the very moments that she needs him close so there’s lots of drama and maybe hot makeup sex which masks the fact that there’s no way he is ever going to meet her needs. Unfortunately, her own ideas of what passion looks like—more like a rollercoaster with lots of ups and downs—may keep her from seeing that this is never going work. And Mr. Cool will deal with it until the moment at which he’s oh-so-tired-of-it and moves on to different and presumably greener pastures.

But relationship failure isn’t necessarily guaranteed even with these diametrically opposed styles of attachment or even when two anxiously-preoccupied people couple up, or two with an avoidant style. Research shows that while the pairing of two people with insecure styles of attachment can be problematic, there are ways to ameliorate and even strengthen the relationship. One suggested approach is what researchers have called partner buffering.

Do you buffer your partner?

Partner buffering is part of every relationship but it has specific pertinence for the ones we’re discussing; researchers Jeffrey A. Simpson and Nicola C. Overall have come up with a schema they call “Dyadic Regulation Model of Insecurity Buffering.” Yes, it sounds like a pile-up of psychological jargon but it’s really quite intuitive and smart. Basically, when partner A is in distress, partner B tempers his or her reaction to partner A in ways that “buffer” the partner’s emotional reaction rather than inflame or exacerbate it. To work from one of their examples, let’s assume that Hillary and Joseph are fighting and Joseph knows that any kind of argument trips her warning bells because she’s anxiously attached. Even though he continues to argue, he also reassures her of his commitment to making things work; that permits her to regulate her anxiety.

In another experiment, Overall and Simpson videotaped couples as one partner asked the other for specific changes in behavior and to the relationship. This is, of course, a tender subject even for the most secure among us and a potential tinderbox for the insecure. But, as the researchers noted, those with an avoidant style displayed less anger and withdrawal—they always have their running shoes at the ready, don’t forget—if the partner softened the approach, acknowledged his good qualities, and recognized his need for autonomy.

Using what you know about your partner’s response to stress can also help the relationship run more smoothly. If you already know that your partner gets anxious, beef up the attention and support you give at a time of stress or crisis. Conversely, if you know your partner is avoidant and needs to lick his wounds in private, respect that and don’t force him into sharing when he’s not ready; instead, make it clear you will be there if he needs you. That said, your partner isn’t a DIY project and you’d better be committed to both your responses and the relationship. The same goes for your partner.

Understanding “enhanced security

There’s also evidence that apart from helping you navigate insecurity in a relationship, certain strategies can actually enhance the attachment security of one or both partners; yes, we’re back to enhanced security as I promised at the beginning of the answer. Ximena B. Arriaga, Mdok Kumashiro, Jeffry A. Simpson, and Nickola C. Overall have proposed a model (Attachment Security Enhancement Model or ASEM) which goes beyond simply buffering reactivity and actually changes a partner’s security for the better. Our working models of relationship—those unconscious lessons gleaned from early experiences—can be confirmed by our adult relationships (alas) but, more hopefully, can be edited or re-written by them. The researchers posit that security gets enhanced by processes that shift the person’s mental models of the self and others. For example, an anxiously attached person gains confidence when a partner personally validates her goals and pursuits or praises her for handling something difficult well; she (or he) feels capable and more secure. An avoidantly attached person may have his or her vision of others shift by positive experiences with closeness—thereby making him or her more open to interdependence and enhancing his or her security.

While the researchers’ model is theoretical, it reminds us that the lessons of childhood experiences aren’t set in stone; with conscious awareness and knowledge, we have the power to write our own scripts.

So, yes, both your attachment style and that of your partner matter but there are strategies at hand.

Photograph by Milan Popovic. Copyright free. Unsplash.com

Mikulincer, Mario, Philip R. Shaver, et al. What’s Inside the Minds of Securely and Insecurely Attached People? The Secure-based Script and Its Associations with Attachment Style Dimensions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,2009, vol. 97(4), pp. 615-633.

Arriaga, Ximena B, Madoka Kumashiro, Jeffry A. Simpson, and Nickola C. Overall. Revising Working Models Across Time: Relationship Situations That Enhance Attachment Security. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2018, vol.22(1), pp. 71-96.

Arriaga, Ximena B. and Madoka Kumashiro. Walking a Security Tightrope: Relationship-Induced Changes in Security Attachment. Current Opinion in Psychology, 2018, vol. 25, pp. 121-126.

Simpson, Jeffry A. Psychological Foundations of Trust. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2007, vol. 16 (5), pp. 264-268.

Simpson, Jeffry A. and Nickola Overall. Partner Buffering of Attachment Insecurity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2014, vol.23(1), pp. 51-59.

Waters, Harriet S, and Everett Waters. The attachment working models concept: among other things, we build script-like representations of secure base experiences. Attachment and Human Development, 2006, vol. 8(3), pp. 185-197.

Over the last month or two, this question has come up with increased frequency, doubtless because of the holiday season. Some readers wrote to say that, as they aged, they particularly missed being able to share memories of the past with their siblings, while others highlighted the irony of their regrets, as “Donna” did:

“I keep thinking that it’d be good to talk to my brothers and sisters about the past and then I have to force myself to stop fantasizing since my siblings appear to have grown up with very different parents than the ones I remember. Still, it’s a pity that my recall makes me a pariah in their eyes, the ungrateful sister who dishonors our mother’s memory.”

Yet another bemoaned the loss, writing that “I wonder if I’ll ever get over being pushed out of the family I was born into by my sister who is the keeper of Mom’s flame. My two brothers are nothing more than foot soldiers in my sister’s army.”

Lest you think this is just a seasonal thing, it was one of the questions submitted by readers for my book, The Daughter Detox Question & Answer Book. This piece is adapted from the answer in the book.

Now, about those words…

The words “get over” and “loss” are highly freighted. If “get over” means magically rendered good as new, my personal answer would be no. The word “healing” means to make whole but I believe that thinking about healing that way is misleading and is a pathway to kinds of positive thinking that ultimately paper over the hurts we need to address and deal with. Humans are hardwired to belong to communities; evolution selected those who build communities because—duh! —the forebears who lived in isolation tended not to survive. The first community we are hardwired to belong to is our family of origin, and some of our most lasting definitions of self, some consciously perceived and others not, come out of our experiences and interactions with that first tribe. Even with a toxic or difficult childhood, not every memory is going to be negative and that too affects our sense of loss. While we may have hated being the oldest and the focus of our mother’s harsh criticism, we may have relished being our younger sibling’s caretaker. We may feel some points of connection even when we are most defined by our outsider status. Even though cutting these ties is the only way forward to health, we may feel the loss keenly. It’s only when we begin to address why we felt that we didn’t belong that we begin to see how we were shaped by the treatment of each and every member of the house; it’s then that we begin to see ourselves with clarity. We are then empowered to change the behaviors learned in that very first group.

“While I’d long recognized how my mother’s targeting me had affected me, I didn’t see how the men in the family—my father and my three brothers—added on. My dad didn’t protect me and my brothers echoed what Mom said about me at school and elsewhere. Horrible. I have nothing to do with them. I envy people who have nice brothers, in fact.”

Alternative paths

What we do next is up to us. We can build a family by having children we raise differently or we can build a family without having children by growing and cultivating close relationships with people not related to us by blood. We can build a family through shared interests and caring. And we can arrive at a new definition of healing. In my view, too many daughters are looking for a solution that would render them good as new in some way, as if the past didn’t happen and as if a wave of a magic wand could disappear their scars. Truthfully, that’s not going to happen. But if healing is understood as unlearning the behaviors which get in your way and altering your unconscious models of how people and relationships work, then you can absolutely recover. And the hole in your heart gets smaller and smaller as it is crowded out by new experiences and joy; eventually, the hole is small enough that it’s just a reminder that you’ve earned all that you have and you have reason to be proud. This isn’t to say that there aren’t moments that evoke old memories with surprising poignancy—there are—but eventually these memories become smaller details in a narrative of your own making and experiences.

As you heal over time, these older experiences become vignettes, not turning points, and your attention turns more to the gains you have made, rather than your losses.

Photograph by Limor Zellermayer. Copyright free. Unsplash.com

Of course, everyone is sensitive to rejection—who likes being cast aside or spurned, after all? —so what does it actually mean to be “rejection sensitive?” That seems to be a legitimate question especially since many daughters who have less-than-optimal or downright toxic relationships with their mothers are often told that their emotional responses are just a function of their being “too sensitive.” I can absolutely remember my mother telling me exactly that whenever I’d object to something nasty or demeaning she’d said about me; I didn’t realize it until later but calling someone “too sensitive” is just a way of blame-shifting and justifying your abuse.

So what’s the deal here exactly? Let’s look at the science.

Some people are actually more rejection sensitive

Perhaps a better term might be “alert to rejection” because that’s what people with an anxious-preoccupied style of attachment are: They are on constant watch or alert for signs of rejection. Their anxiety about rejection causes them not only to be easily triggered but to misread and to read into social situations they encounter. Let’s say you walk into the kitchen area of your office to grab a cup of coffee and see a few of your colleagues talking; do you immediately assume that they’re gossiping about you when they appear to go silent when they see you? Or perhaps you see a colleague or acquaintance on the street on the weekend and you wave and he or she doesn’t wave back; is your immediate thought that you’re being snubbed or do you just assume he or she didn’t see you? Do you feel rejected when two people you know make plans without including you even though you have no interest in actually doing what they’re doing? Do you fret about the order in which people are invited to a gathering and feel rejected when you learn someone else was invited first?

Rejection sensitive people tend, by and large, to assume that they are being slighted or outright rejected for many reasons or none at all.

And, no, “high alert” isn’t a metaphor either

That’s precisely what a 2007 study conducted by Lisa J. Burklund and others discovered with a small sample. Being able to “read” facial expressions and react to them is part of our safety system, including being able to tell friend from foe which enables the flight or fight responses. But what about facial expressions that aren’t flat-out threatening but aren’t welcoming either; what about facial expressions that convey a sense of disapproval? Using MRI imaging, the researchers found that, indeed, people high in rejection sensitivity showed more intense neural responses to disapproval meaning that their anticipation of rejection is happening at a physical level.

Rejection sensitivity and the creation of interpersonal drama

Her hypervigilance makes many social interactions hard—asking for a favor or help becomes fraught with meaning, hearing a demurral or an outright “no” releases strong emotions—and has the unfortunate consequence of creating emotional turbulence, especially in intimate relationships. That’s what research by Geraldine Downey and others confirmed; ironically, the emotional response to perceived rejection may actually, over time, cause a partner to exit the relationship. One man, “Tim,” I interviewed vividly described how exhausting being in a relationship with someone like this was:

The real problem was that no amount of reassurance was ever enough. She would become anxious if I got home an hour late or if I didn’t answer a text. She’d take it personally if I were in a meeting and I couldn’t pick up my phone. It didn’t matter if she knew about the meeting ahead of time; she’d start spinning like a top and then she’d get hugely angry and accusatory. We tried a few sessions with a therapist but, at the end of the day, she wore me out. I just couldn’t do the drama anymore.

I have heard this story many times. It’s often very difficult for the rejection sensitive daughter to see herself clearly; alas, she’s more likely to believe her faulty perceptions than her partner’s reassurances.

Do you tend to become anxious when your partner is late in calling or forgets to text as promised? Do you worry about his fidelity or his commitment constantly? Does your anxiety escalate into anger?

Acknowledging your rejection sensitivity

Working with a gifted therapist is the best route but there are some things you can do for yourself if you believe you are rejection sensitive. These ideas are drawn from my book, Daughter Detox: Recovering from an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life.

Think about the source of your sensitivity

If you display an anxious-preoccupied style of attachment, understanding how you were treated in your family of origin and how it affected you can go a long way to identifying what triggers you in the present.

Work on identifying those triggers

Figuring out what kinds of situations are likely to trigger your rejection sensitivity is key. Is it more likely to happen when you’re in groups or does it happen just as often when you’re one-on-one with someone? What kinds of things set you off? Knowing your typical reactions ahead of time can help you deal with over-reactions.

Use Stop. Look. Listen.

This is a technique a therapist taught me many years ago to deal with over-reactivity and I’ve made it a part of the recovery steps I outline in my book Daughter Detox. When you start to feel your emotions ratchet up, give yourself a mental time-out and, if possible, actually withdraw physically from the situation or confrontation that is triggering you; this is the Stop part. Then you need to Look at the situation and ask yourself whether you are reacting reasonably or over-reacting and reading in. Finally, you need to Listen to your thoughts as well as to the words the person has spoken and make sure you are responding to the true context.

Rejection sensitivity insinuates itself into all your interactions and relationships but it can be dealt with. Be proactive.

Photograph by Priscilla du Preez. Copyright free. Unsplash.com

Burkland, Lisa J, Naomi I. Eisenberger, and Matthew D. Leiberman. The Face of Rejection: Rejection Sensitivity Moderates Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Activity to Disapproving Facial Expressions. Social Neuroscience, 2007, vol.2 (3-4), pp. 238-253.

Downey, Geraldine, and Scott I. Feldman. Implications of Rejection Sensitivity for Intimate Relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1996, vol. 70(6), pp.1327-1343.

Downey, Geraldine, Antonio L. Freitas, Benjamin Michaelis, and Hala Khouri. The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Close Relationships: Rejection Sensitivity and Rejection by Romantic Partners. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1998, vol. 75(2), pp. 545

The hardest part of recovering from a toxic childhood isn’t just coping with the fact that your emotional needs weren’t met or that you were actively neglected or even marginalized, dismissed, or made to feel less than; it’s coming to terms with the lessons about life and relationship you internalized and the maladaptive coping mechanisms you developed

Why seeing the effect of the wounds is so hard

While recognizing the damage done to you by the very person the culture holds to be the one who will always love and support you is hard enough, seeing how you’ve been affected by the treatment you received in childhood can be maddeningly elusive. There are a number of reasons this process is so hard, chief among them being:

You’ve been told that your character is fixed

Children subject to constant criticism or who are belittled or ignored are often told that they were born with their flaws in place; parents have a unique and powerful authority in the little world a child inhabits and what they say about the child is simply absorbed as truth. Told that she is lazy, too sensitive, stupid, or unlovable, the child simply incorporates those words into her vision of self. It’s little wonder that many daughters come of age feeling that change or growth is hopeless or impossible and continue to feel that way long into adulthood.

You’ve normalized or rationalized how you are treated

Most children live the first decade of childhood (and often longer) believing that what goes on in their house goes on in houses everywhere; this might vary depending on how much or little the child is exposed to other households, of course, but it’s only as the child becomes more independent that she’s likely to see that her assumption isn’t quite right. She’ll watch other mothers interact with their children and begin to notice telling differences. But since her need to belong and, more important, be loved by her mother trumps all, it’s likely she’ll continue to excuse her mother’s behavior nonetheless. After all, her main motivation is to get her mother’s love. Her rationalizations may unwittingly echo what her mother (or father) has said as well: “She doesn’t mean what she says,” “She yells at me because I don’t listen,” “If I did better, she wouldn’t have to hound me,” “She’s right that I’m not good enough,” “Maybe I am a crybaby.”

You don’t want to believe your mother has hurt you

In my book, Daughter Detox: Recovering from an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life, I call this the “Dance of Denial;” it’s fed by hopefulness that the problem will go away and that she will love you if you just come up with the right way of acting as well as rationalizing and normalizing her behavior. It usually goes on for decades, even if the daughter has already begun to recognize the pattern of toxicity. It’s a way of avoiding a most painful truth. Nothing makes you feel more like a leper and outlier than ‘fessing up to the fact that your mother didn’t love you; the shame is intense, if totally unwarranted.

The !0 lessons you need to unlearn

As you read these, keep in mind that attachment theory proposes that there are three styles which result from inadequate caretaking of an infant and child. They are different, and opposed to secure attachment which results from a child being heard and seen and given space to be herself and to explore. The secure child (and, later, adult) knows that she is loved and valued for who she is, not what she does. The three styles of insecure attachment are anxious-preoccupied (wants relationships but is anxious and anticipates rejection); fearful-avoidant (wants relationship but is too afraid to connect and has low self-esteem); and dismissive-avoidant (has no need for intimacy, thinks well of self and poorly of others, and feels avoiding connection is a sign of strength).

That love is earned (and always conditional)

The lesson learned is that love is never freely given and always comes with strings attached. Daughters whose mothers are high in control, combative, or display narcissistic traits are likely to internalize this lesson, as are those whose mothers are emotionally unavailable or dismissive.

That all social standing is all that matters

Many unloving mothers—not just those high in narcissistic traits—curate their public selves carefully and see their children as extensions of themselves and ambassadors testifying to their success. The inner self doesn’t count; it’s only accolades that get attention.

That you must hide your true self

The main source is a mother’s constant criticism, dismissal, or belittling; a child who’s been told that she’s too lazy, stupid, or anything else begins to quash her own thoughts and feelings and starts acting in ways that she believes will make her mother love her, thus creating a false self. Of course, the conundrum is that whatever praise she does mete out isn’t really yours, is it? No, it’s the fake you who earned it.

That allegiances are temporary and not to be relied on

This isn’t just tied to her mother’s treatment (needing to earn love and support, and seeing that there are always strings attached) but what she learns from her siblings, especially if everyone is working hard either to garner Mom’s favor or stay off her radar if she’s hypercritical or combative. If she always has to pay attention to the quicksand in her family of origin, she will do the same thing in adulthood when it comes to friends, acquaintances, as well as others. Trust is often an ongoing issue.

That feelings should be hidden

Many unloving mothers mock daughters for their supposed sensitivity, calling them “crybabies” or telling them they are just too dramatic, and daughters often react protectively by learning how to distance themselves from their emotions. Alas, this has the effect of weakening their emotional intelligence skillset even more since management of emotions (and the ability to know what you are feeling) are hallmarks. This is especially true of those with the two types of avoidant attachment styles; the anxious-preoccupied style is characterized by emotional flooding which is no better.

That control is a part of every relationship

With an unloving mother, connection is never truly dyadic; the quid pro quos imposed on the daughter—which include all the lessons already mentioned—make her believe that every emotional connection has one powerful person and one weak one. This particular lesson is a recipe for future disasters.

That who you are isn’t good enough

Lack of validation and support, along with dismissal and hypercriticality, will do that every time.

That you deserved your treatment

While this thought is bolstered by normalization of your mother’s behavior and the Dance of Denial, researchers point out that, for a child, it is far less scary to blame yourself than it is to admit that the person or people who are supposed to keep you safe in the world won’t. Additionally, if you’re at fault, that leaves open the possibility that you can somehow change yourself and the treatment of you will change. Self-blame serves many purposes.

That you must please and appease in life

For those who are anxious and need more than anything to belong, pleasing and going along to get along become a fixed habit in adulthood, much to their own detriment

That emotional connection is too costly

This is a fixed position of those who have an avoidant style of attachment; it’s a logical enough conclusion drawn from interactions in her family of origin.

What was learned, though, can be unlearned, most easily with a good therapist and dedicated self-help. For specific strategies and techniques , see my book Daughter Detox: Recovering from an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life.

Photograph by Enrique Meseguer. Copyright free. Pixabay.com

Recovering from childhood experiences is hard work, as readers of my book Daughter Detox well know. One daughter put it bluntly in an email she sent me:

“Will I ever feel confident enough not to overthink every decision and choice? I am fifty but, in here, there’s a kid, worried about falling on her face in the schoolyard or having people laugh at her. What can I do about that? Am I doomed to be an anxious little girl forever?”

The good news is the answer to the question is “no.” but getting there may take a bit of work. It may feel like you’re “overthinking,” but the repetitive thought patterns and worry are really about your inability to manage your emotions, the default position of self-doubt, and, perhaps, your need for reassurance if you display an anxious-preoccupied style of attachment. It may seem counterintuitive but to answer the question, you have to ask yourself some more so you can determine where the problems lie and how you define “overthinking.” These questions are best answered in writing.

Do I often or always regret decisions I’ve made? Is it a pattern?
Do I discuss my decisions and choices with others, or do I go it alone? How well is either strategy working for me?
Am I driven by positives or negatives when I make decisions or set goals?
Do I see myself as having agency and power—being able to act and deal—or do I see myself as mainly reactive to the actions of others?

Wait a few days and then reread your answers and come up with some small ways to alter your behaviors. Begin by addressing the anxiety that is driving your thinking, and do what you can to defang it. Self-calm by either deep breathing or by visualizing a person you feel safe with or a place that calms you. Reassure yourself. If you are self-isolating, try seeking counsel; another point of view may open up your own. If you are mainly prompted to make decisions by negatives—trying to avoid something, rather than achieving something—think about how you can shift to more proactive ways of behaving. Most important, examine the roots of your fear of failure or making a mistake; is this an old default position you learned in your family of origin? If it is, start arguing with the voice in your head.

How to stop catastrophizing

There are two strategies you can use when you’re beginning to spin and feel utterly demoralized. The first is to imagine the worst-case scenario and to look at it objectively and figure out what you will actually do if it happens. Mentally, this puts the ball back in your court and permits you to become proactive instead of emotionally reactive. Coming up with a plan if this should happen will also make you feel less anxious and besieged.

Spend time thinking about what you will do if what you’re afraid of actually happens, and even better, write it down; think about both the practical aspects and the emotional fallout. Again, you can use this technique to deal with situations that will merely be disappointments on the road of life—such as being passed over for a promotion, not getting a job, or having a relationship hit a rocky patch—or those that are really important and affect your emotional equilibrium, such as the end of a relationship, losing your job, or going through a contentious divorce. I found it a life-saving technique during my protracted divorce, in fact.

The second technique is cognitive reframing—changing how you’re thinking about the problem or situation. While this is potentially a very valuable strategy, it’s also relatively hard to master, especially if you still are learning how to manage your emotions. Reframing does not mean that you’re reaching for those old rose-colored glasses and murmuring that “Everything happens for a reason” and “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Absolutely not.

Instead, cognitive reframing has you abandon that doom-and-gloom view of the situation and permits you to see it more objectively and, with luck, without all the self-blame and character assassination you often resort to. You know how when you take a photo, you frame the subject and change the perspective by zooming in or out? Or you decide to focus on a specific detail rather than the whole to reflect a different vision? That’s basically what you’re doing when you deliberately reframe; you’re actively shifting your perspective and focus.

Using journaling can be very helpful as you begin to learn to reframe. Let’s say that you’ve had a huge blowup with your husband or lover, and you’re absolutely convinced that there’s no way back from this argument, that he’s going to leave you, and that’s probably your fault. Begin by describing the situation as accurately and objectively as you can, using both distance and a third-party perspective (“cool processing”). Reread what you’ve written and see whether or not your vision of the situation has shifted. What cues or signs did he demonstrate that were positive in nature? What might you have done to shift the tenor of the argument that you didn’t? What would you say if this fight had taken place between two strangers? How would you evaluate the behavior of each of the parties?

The more often you use these techniques, the more comfortable they’ll feel to you and the less likely you’ll be to catastrophize at the drop of a hat.

Photograph by Niklas Hamann. Copyright free. Unsplash.com

You’re probably wondering why I’ve put the word “narcissist” in quotation marks, so let me explain. Google the word “narcissist” and an astounding 60 million links will fill up your screen, despite the fact that only a tiny percentage of people, something like six percent, actually suffer from NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder). The truth is that the word “narcissist” has become a catch-all synonym for a bad person or someone who betrays and hurts you. It’s common on social media for someone to call you a “narc” if you disagree with them or if they feel disparaged.

But the truth is that there’s a spectrum of narcissism, as Dr. Craig Malkin explains in his book, Rethinking Narcissism, ranging from those lacking in healthy self-esteem on one end (the so-called “echoist”) to the middle where healthy self-regard resides to the far end occupied by the grandiose braggart who fits the stereotype perfectly.

What is healthy self-regard?

I will quote Dr. Malkin here because he puts it succinctly: “Healthy narcissism is all about moving seamlessly between self-absorption and caring attentiveness—visiting Narcissus’ shimmering pool, but never diving to the bottom in pursuit of our own reflection.” These people are self-assured but don’t feel the need to tear other people down to raise themselves up; in fact, they often inspire other people to become their best selves. They tend to act in inclusive, not exclusive, ways. Mind you, as Malkin points out, they’re not an especially modest bunch and, yes, they do acknowledge their own talents. Our cultural heritage of Puritanism often has us mistake that kind of acknowledgement as bragging but it’s really not; when you’re good at something, it’s perfectly okay to recognize it. The real question is whether you use your gifts, your talents, or your specialness to achieve your goals, or to beat other people into submission. The latter is what people high in narcissistic traits do.

Healthy self-regard is balanced by caring for others and their needs; on the other end of the spectrum, there’s a blatant disregard for others which is evinced in a complete lack of empathy and an agenda that is only about the self.

How people high in narcissistic traits get the best of you

The people who are more likely to fall under the narcissist’s spell, initially at least, are those who lack in healthy self-regard themselves and who often don’t have a good sense of what healthy boundaries look like or a good mental model of relationships; put in other terms, they tend to have an insecure style of attachment. Some of us are better at spotting the narcissist early in the game in part because we understand boundaries and because we have a strong sense of our own needs being important and legitimate. (For more on how your attachment style affects your relationships, see my book Daughter Detox: Recovering from an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life.)

Almost everyone can be taken in some of the time but the following behaviors can consistently trap the unwary. I will be using the masculine pronoun to avoid the she/he grammatical pile-up; be aware that while there are more males at the grandiose end of the narcissism spectrum, there are women too.

Exerting stealth control

This observation is taken from Dr. Malkin’s book, and it’s really key to understanding how so many people can be taken in with ease. The narcissist wants control but he doesn’t like having his needs out in the open. Rather than telling you what to do, the narcissist makes subtle suggestions or, under the guise of being solicitous or caring, takes command. The example I always use is that of a first date or meeting between a person with healthy self-regard and a narcissist and the same scenario but with an insecure person and a narcissist. You meet at a place the narcissist has chosen which presents no problem. You decide you’d like a glass of Rosé, but he tells you that you really must have the cocktail the place is famous for. Okay, then; why not? But when you order your meal, once again he tells you that the salmon is the only thing to have and he’s rather insistent. The secure woman hears warning bells; she knows what she wants to eat and, no, it’s not salmon. Ms. Insecure, though, is flattered by how solicitous he’s being; wowie, could he be her knight in shining armor?

There’s more, of course—the way he directs and steers the conversation, for example—and only one of these women will see this man again. Guess who It is?

The problem, of course, is that if you’re waiting for a knight, you’re going to read into gestures that are about control and label them as something else such as chivalry and caring. That includes switching up plans you’ve made so as to “surprise” you, pressuring you to spend time with him alone instead of your friends, and more.

Alas, at the end of the day, control is still control, no matter how stealthy.

Perfecting the grand gesture

The thing is that while narcissists only really care about one person—yup, that would be him-or-herself—they do like thinking of themselves as good people and they love, love, love admiration and positive attention so that, counterintuitively, they may appear to be incredibly thoughtful and caring. That could be rushing to help a neighbor rebuild a fence savaged by a storm, buying you extravagant gifts because you said you were feeling down, and anything else that makes him or her look good. The problem here is motivation, of course; the gesture isn’t about the person who is the object of his largesse but himself.

In the early stages of courtship by a narcissist, this is also called lovebombing and while it may feel good in the moment—who doesn’t like being doted on, told you’re gorgeous and sexy, or having gifts lavished on you? —but it’s all a means to an end.

Once again, the common denominator is control. As you fall under his spell and your own sense of yourself and your needs recedes, the narcissist has you exactly where he wants you to be.

Exploiting your insecurities

Expert at turning the tables, the narcissist uses your own self-doubt to get the upper hand by blame-shifting when there’s an argument (“If you weren’t always so angry, I wouldn’t have to shout” or “If you weren’t so sensitive, I wouldn’t have to spend my life tiptoeing around you”), turning your words back on you (“I’m not the one who wants things to change; you are” or “Just the same old tattoo. You’re like a broken record and it’s tedious”), or simply denying what happened (“I never said that to you; you’re being delusional” or “Stop making things up to make me look bad.”) The latter technique is, of course, called gaslighting.

Reeling you in (and casting you out)

The narcissist is in it to win it on his terms and he’s perfectly fine with heading toward the exit because his ties to you are remarkably shallow. This permits him play the take- it- or- leave- it card, which he (rightly) believes will dissolve you into a puddle of pleasing and appeasing so that he doesn’t actually head out. Again, this is usually done with a bit of finesse and after he has you believing that it was really all your fault. It’s very easy to spin like a top under these circumstances if your default position is self-doubt.

And, since control is the name of the game, after the ruckus has died down, he will likely reel you in again with charm and caring. This can be incredibly emotionally confusing for many people; after all, you’re unlikely to register that he hasn’t taken one ounce of responsibility, much less offered an apology, if he’s telling you how much he loves you and bringing you thoughtful gifts.

It’s a masterful performance and, yes, it’s all about control.

If finding yourself in relationships with people who behave this way has become a pattern, it’s time to take a hard look at what you bring to the party. The only person you can change, after all, is you.

Photograph by Jonathan Borba. Copyright Free. Unsplash.com

Malkin, Craig. Rethinking Narcissism: The Secret to Recognizing and Coping with Narcissists. New York: Harper Perennial, 2016.

Those high in narcissistic traits often exhibit a self-absorption and grandiosity that’s pretty easy to see, unless, of course, you’ve temporarily been blinded by his or her charms. Narcissists –and I use the term loosely to refer to those who are high in narcissistic traits, though not necessarily diagnosable as having NPD—are well-known to curate their outward appearances and that, too, is pretty easy to spot. But there are more subtle ways a narcissist curates his or her image, and that is how she or he tells the story of the past. (For simplicity and because there are more men high in narcissistic traits, I will be using the male pronoun but feel free to switch up genders. Women do it too.)

But with any narcissist, stories of friendships and romances can be very telling.

Why the past gets reshaped and seeing the patterns

Wooing and wowing will get you to admire the narcissist but they won’t garner your empathy and that’s what the narcissist knows is necessary to get you on his team. Armored to the max under that slick exterior, the narcissist sees the world in black-and-white terms with people who are for or against him, helpful or harmful; there are no shades of gray. While he’ll own his accomplishments—no team player, he! —he is quick to redistribute failures and setbacks onto the shoulders of others.

And here’s where the pity party comes in—the ultimate test for those who have empathy.

It’s my party (and I’ll cry if I want to)

Perhaps the most tell-tale sign that you’re dealing with a narcissist is how he talks about past relationships. Is his ex-wife a bitch who’s just money-hungry and took him to court when he offered her a really fair settlement? Is she whining to everyone who will listen that he treated her badly when he tended to her for years and years? Or has he just been so unbelievably unlucky in love, with one ungrateful or dismissive woman after another? Or maybe he’s just a magnet for the needy, neurotic ones?

It’s not hard to be taken in, alas, when it seems as though someone is pouring out his heart, as one woman confided:

“He was quite circumspect about his past for the first few months. I’d been more open, telling him about the failure of my last long-term relationship and how it’d happened. Then he opened up about the last two hair-raising relationships he’d been in, and I was totally sucked in. The poor guy had been used and abused, or so I thought, by women who wanted nothing but an upgrade in life. His stories made me protective of him and when my friends starting complaining about how he monopolized my time and was controlling, I felt I had to protect him. Mistake, big mistake. But I didn’t see it for the longest while. Now, I highly doubt that a single story he told me was true”.

Gaming empathy and other games

The pity party puts you solidly in the bleachers, cheering him on. It is also, as one woman noted, incredibly flattering, because you get to be the girl version of the Knight-in-Shining-Armor he’s already shown himself to be:

“Part of the love bombing involved his great luck in finding me—the woman of his dreams, the one who really ‘got’ him and appreciated him. I was so flattered, and it was all so like the movie ‘Pretty Woman’ at the end and the way we each got to rescue each other from all of those thoughtless creeps. Of course, it was a game on his part because all the flattery masked the not-so-subtle ways he tried to change me. I would look better as a blonde. I should go on a diet so I could wear clingy dresses. Did I see it? Nope. I loved the story of us too much, with me as the star. Of course, I didn’t keep the starring role, you know, once I stopped saying ‘yes.’ Then I became just another woman who didn’t get him.”

People high in narcissist traits use relationships for self-regulation, as a paper by W. Keith Campbell and others points out; they seek status and self-esteem, rather than intimacy or caring. Even more to the point, while they may be attracted to a partner, they always feel superior and game-playing is one way of maintaining superiority, on the one hand, and maintaining control, on the other. Curating their romantic history basically kills two birds with one stone.

Unmasking the narcissist

If a story sounds too black-and-white to be true, the chances are good that it isn’t; life tends to get messy and it’s really rare that one person alone behaves badly and torpedoes a relationship. Most people telling the story of a failed connection will mention mistakes made by both parties, and own the ones that are theirs. 95% of all divorces get settled out of court which makes the point another way.

Of course, rare doesn’t mean never, especially when you’re dealing with a narcissist, something I learned the hard way. I bought my own husband’s story of his divorce hook, line, and sinker; he’d been married more than twenty-five years and I believed him when he said he’d made his wife a fair offer and that suddenly, out of nowhere, she took him to court. Their marriage ended before he and I began our relationship and, frankly, there wasn’t any reason to doubt him. His divorce proceedings dragged on and on—which he attributed to her greed and recalcitrance and which, I am sorry to say, I believed too.

Of course, in hindsight, none of that was probably true. I learned that during our divorce, one that should have been settled in a nanosecond and reasonably. His narcissism was in full view—with lies and game-playing and, yes, the need to win at all costs.

So, listen up when someone fills you in on their past. How the story’s told may tell you more than the story itself.

Photograph by Gregory Hays. Copyright free. Unsplash.com

Malkin, Craig. Rethinking Narcissism: The Secret to Recognizing and Coping with Narcissists. New York: Harper Perennial, 2016.

Campbell, W. Keith, Craig A. Fogler, and Eli J. Finkel. “Does Self-Love Lead to Love for Others? A Story of Narcissistic Game Playing, “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2002), vol. 83, no. 2, 340-354.

Not long ago, I asked “Elaine” who just celebrated her thirty-fifth wedding anniversary and is still happy in her marriage what the secret was. This was her answer:

“Listening. Paying attention to no matter how urgent my need may be—to get something off my chest, to vent or complain or even bitch—that he has needs in that very same moment. We went through one very rough patch where we descended into name-calling and trying to win points and a marriage therapist pulled us back from the brink. Even when you’re pissed, you have to be respectful of your partner and that goes both ways. We each call each other out when things start to get nasty and we dial it down. It works.”

What has worked for Elaine and her husband actually is a formula for maintaining a relationship successfully, as the work of John Gottman makes clear. Many people wrongly assume that it’s fighting that sinks a marriage but, as Gottman explains, it’s not whether you fight or disagree but how you do.

And while, in the moment, great make-up sex after a fight might seem as if it’s brought you closer together, if toxicity has entered the dynamic, you’re probably kidding yourself.

Say hello to the Four Horsemen

Many years ago, a marital counselor named Susan and I talked about how rarely marital counseling actually works, and I asked her why. Her reply, born out of forty years of experience, was revelatory:

“Timing. Most people wait until their marriage has reached the very bottom of hill, and they feel obligated to give it one last shot by talking to a professional. Sometimes, seeing a therapist is a way of proving to the world that they’ve done ‘everything they could’ to save the marriage but sometimes it’s more sincere and less self-referential than that. But the problem is that by the time they get to my office, their ability to communicate is at zero and, even worse, they’ve both gotten used to playing roles when they argue. These roles are entrenched so it’s not surprising that unlearning them, especially when there’s pent-up discord, is often impossible. And they move their cars out of my parking lot into the ones adjacent to a lawyer’s office.”

In descending order, Gottman has identified four toxic ways of communicating that are bound, if left unchecked, to end a marriage or relationship. Understanding them and being able to identify them are key to not just keeping your relationship healthy but to assuring its future.

They are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Gottman writes that “As each horseman arrives, he paves the way for the next,” thus explaining how a relationship which once seemed full of connection and promise can become a never-ending cycle of recrimination and anger.

Criticism

When you fight, do either of you begin sentences with the words, “You always” or “You never?” The difference between complaining and criticism may, at a glance, seem superficial or just parsing words but it actually isn’t; according to Gottman, criticism involves “attacking someone’s character or personality—rather than a specific behavior—usually with blame.” It’s not usual for members of a couple to have differing views about spending money but when you complain about how your partner has, in your opinion, over-spent, do you make it personal? Do you bring up as many examples of his or her failure as you can dredge out of the past? Or do you simply point out that the money was actually needed for something else? There is an important difference.

Complaining, done right, is actually a good thing in a marriage or relationship; it’s generally a bad idea to muzzle yourself until you reach a boiling point because it’s at that moment that you’re going to be more likely to lapse into criticism than not. Speak up but pay attention to how you speak.

Contempt

In Gottman’s view, criticism opens the door to the next horseman which is contempt; he defines contempt as “the intention to insult and psychologically abuse your partner.” Yes, things have escalated to the point that the knives are out and it’s all about power and control. Contempt can be expressed through physical gestures (eye rolling, sneering, or mocking laughter) or verbally such as calling someone names or insulting them. Make no mistake: These are abusive behaviors and shouldn’t be excused or placated. And, yes, apologies are in order.

The real problem here is that what reigns is retaliation and what has shifted is your or your partner’s motivation.

Defensiveness

This may seem initially confusing because, after all, if someone has criticized you or displayed contempt, shouldn’t you make an effort to defend yourself? The problem is that defensiveness becomes a go-to stance which effectively cuts off even a remote possibility of communicating and, of course, the person defending him or herself feels utterly justified so there’s no hope of that person simply stopping on a dime.

Gottman has identified certain kinds of defensive postures and they’re worth familiarizing yourself with especially if they have infiltrated your familiar ways of interacting. Denying responsibility, no matter what, is one, while making excuses is another. Sometimes, they are intertwined as one wife discovered when she found out her husband had intentionally hidden something important from her; when challenged he replied, “If you’d asked me the right question, I would have told you.” (Gottman doesn’t mention this defensive tactic but blame-shifting fits right in.) A phrase he signals out is “Yes but” which seems to begin as taking responsibility but then immediately segues into the “but” part.

If one or both partners inevitably become defensive in this way, you are on a train to nowhere.

Stonewalling

Manipulative to the max and meant to marginalize and demoralize, stonewalling really sounds the death knell of a relationship. Stonewalling is often justified by the person doing it as trying to calm things down but stony silence actually ratchets up tension. This is abusive behavior, meant to disempower the person speaking and make them feel worthless and small.

Again, if stonewalling is habitual, that’s one thing, but if your partner walks out of a room in an effort to tamp down his or your temper, that’s no reason to hit the panic button. Men tend to stonewall more than women, research shows; it’s been studied so often that the formal name for the behavior is Demand/Withdraw and it even has an acronym, DM/W.

In a relationship with one controlling partner, stonewalling can be effective because it plays on the insecurities of the disempowered partner who is more likely to start apologizing and appeasing when faced with stony silence. While this cycle of stonewall-and-make-up may seem to grant the relationship a reprieve (and may include some hot make-up sex too), it’s a game-ender in the long run.

Toxic behaviors such as these should never be normalized. Keep that in mind and do seek counsel sooner rather than later.

Photograph by Sabina Tone. Copyright free. Unsplash.com

Gottman, John. Why Marriages Succeed or Fail. New York: Fireside Books, 1994.

One of the questions offered up by readers of Daughter Detox and included in my book, The Daughter Detox Question & Answer Book, was this one: “My father was toxic but by only blaming him, am I denying my mother’s role?”

I’d prefer to use the words “hold responsible” rather than “blame,” since we’re looking for answers and not revenge. But no matter how it’s phrased, it’s an interesting question for a number of reasons, the first of which is all we don’t understand about our parents during childhood and much later.

In a way, we never really grow up enough or get old enough to see our parents’ marriage in fullness. After all, we weren’t there when they met, we have no idea why they chose to be together, and we didn’t know them before they had us. Our view of them is completely shaped by what we need from them and how well they meet those needs. Both our deepest feelings for them and our judgment of them can’t be separated from the nature of our relationship.

As a child, there’s much you don’t understand about your family’s dynamics. You don’t have the perspective to see whether your parents define their marriage in traditional ways or as a partnership, but their definition determines how you are parented and who parents you. You are used to how things are at your house but you don’t know that there are different ways of doing things so you don’t ask whether this is a family in which there’s open discussion or one where every conversation devolves into a screaming match. Without information about the world, you don’t ponder if this is a couple used to tackling problems together or given to playing the blame game at a moment’s notice. Instead, you figure that this is what everyone’s house sounds like which might be animated by dialogue, unnervingly and scarily quiet, or a screaming hell. Yet each and every detail will shape you and your development. Your parents’ marriage is the invisible partner in all that transpires.

If there’s an imbalance of power or source of disagreement, that will trickle down into how the children are responded to and taken care of, as one reader wrote:

“When I was a kid, I was scared of my Dad’s temper, and I basically tiptoed around him. My brother took him on and paid the price. But even though Mom never yelled, she also never took our side either. You know that old show, ‘Father Knows Best?’ It may have been the 1980s but my mother was a doormat and bowed to him. And I hold her responsible for allowing the abuse.”

Another daughter took a very different point of view, defending her mother to the max:

“I honestly think my mother was as afraid of him as we were. She is a timid person with not very much self-esteem and while it’s true that she didn’t mother very well and was distant, dealing with her was and is a lot easier than dealing with the self-appointed King. I deliberately moved 1000 miles away from both of my parents as an adult and see them infrequently. That said, I still put the lion’s share of the blame on him, not her.”

Unloving fathers are easier to talk about (and to blame)

Even though there’s a Commandment that tells us to honor both our mothers and fathers, there’s a different cultural standard for each. Admitting that your father was unloving, absent, or a tyrant will absolutely not get the same kind of pushback that saying the very same thing about your mother will. The mother myths—that all women are nurturing, that mothering is instinctual, that all mothers love unconditionally—don’t have a counterpart when we get to Dads. There’s a long string of stories about bad or even horrible fathers—from the raging King Lear, the tormented James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Great Santini’s Bull Meacham—that gives us permission. Second, the sense of filial duty—of guilt and shame—that is associated with being unloved by your mother just doesn’t happen in the same way with a father.

In her book, Our Fathers, Ourselves, an anecdotal study of fathers and daughters, Dr. Peggy Drexler makes the point that “Despite everything women have achieved and the freedom they have won, they still have not liberated themselves from the need to forgive their fathers and, in so doing, reassure themselves that they are still loved by them.” Even more poignantly, based on her sample of some seventy-five women, she asserts, “…No matter how selfish, stingy, narcissistic, or downright cruel some of these men sounded to me, their daughters were willing to forgive them, if not forget.” I’m not sure I necessarily agree with the forgiveness part but the truth is that many daughters hold their fathers to a different standard than their mothers.

But, and it’s a big but, while focusing on your father’s influence may be easier, it may also feed your denial about your mother’s involvement and specifically how her treatment of you affected your development and behavior. Again, the hardwired need for a mother’s love and support is so strong that it’s easy to look away and rationalize, deny, and pin it all on Dad, In the best of all possible worlds, as you begin to understand the dynamics in your family of origin with greater clarity, you will see how each of your parents acted, both in tandem and as individuals.

Seeing your mother in context

Understanding and assigning responsibility are the goals so you can figure out how to deal with both of your parents. If your father was a tyrant or a bully, much will depend on not just how your mother acted but what motivated her. Did she see him as a comrade-in-arms or was she a facilitator who didn’t have the courage or the stamina to stand up to him? As adults, we can look at the relationship between our parents with a kind of understanding that it’s simply impossible for a young child or even a young adult to muster. As one daughter wrote me with not a little bit of wistfulness:

“I see now that my mother thought that my father’s relentless criticism and authoritarian my-way-or-the-highway kind of thinking was a sign of strength, instead of the hallmarks of a bully. Her own father was a bully and I think she slid seamlessly into her role as my father’s wife. But I don’t think that excuses how she echoed him and treated me and my brother. They were partners in cruelty. That’s the bottom line.”

Even what appears to be passivity or inactivity on the mother’s part when the father is controlling, tyrannical, or high in narcissistic traits can influence a daughter’s development in significant ways and complicate how she copes with the family dynamics. If your mother signaled that you should fold your tents or disappear under the radar or hide in plain sight, she was teaching you to lose sight of yourself, echoing the lesson your father’s behaviors taught.

While daughters often grow up believing that there’s a single villain of the piece, the road to recovery requires a more clear-eyed and balanced vision.

Photograph by Annie Spratt. Copyright free. Unsplash.com

Drexler, Peggy. Our Fathers, Our Selves: Daughters, Fathers, and the Changing American Family. New York: Rodale Press, 2011.

I’m a great believer in taking advantage of the energy that comes with a change of season, especially if you’ve been feeling stuck or listless, as so many people do in the dark of winter. If you’ve embarked on the long journey of healing from childhood, it may sometimes feel as though you’re making zero progress so psyching yourself up to put in a new effort can make a huge difference but you have to do it right. Just as our physical closets tend to end up the repository of clothes we no longer wear, so too our emotional closets are often stuffed with behaviors and thoughts we should have worked harder to discard ages ago but we didn’t just know how.

These tips are drawn from my books Daughter Detox: Recovering from an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life and The Daughter Detox Companion Workbook.

Declutter your literal space first

Yes, choose a specific area to work on, and start figuring how what you still want and/or need, and what’s just sitting there courtesy of inertia. Don’t try to do everything at once because you’ll probably just give up; if you weren’t someone who accumulates clutter, you wouldn’t need this exercise. Doing some real-world cluttering won’t just make your physical space more appealing but it’ll make you feel in control. Feeling empowered is a good thing when we turn to tackle old-ingrained emotional responses and behaviors.

Don’t try to do too much; focus instead

As in decluttering, over-reaching and being overly optimistic aren’t helpful when you’re tackling something that’s previously been out of reach. People who attain their goals tend to be realistic; in fact, the more pie-in-the-sky optimistic you are about what you can and can’t do, the likelier it is that you will fail. Don’t set lots of goals; set one or two specific ones, such as trying to be less sensitive to the possibility of rejection or working on tamping down self-criticism and blame as an automatic response. You’re not going to be able to change all the behaviors you learned in childhood that have become obstacles in adulthood at once; pick and choose just a few and use strategies to defeat them.

Use journaling as a tool to increase awareness

We all tend to think that our behaviors are “just who we are,” instead of reflections of what we learned growing up. The best way to see the self that’s buried under layers of experience is working with a gifted therapist but studies show that we can also drag unconscious behaviors into the light by asking ourselves questions and writing down our answers. This takes a bit of discipline to do on your own but let me give you an example you can adapt.

Let’s say that you’re tackling sensitivity to rejection. Ask and answer the following questions, using cool processing. (“Cool processing” is described at length in my books, including Daughter Detox.). Research shows that recalling what you felt actually sets you back; you must recall why you felt it. The “hot” process of recall—combined with journaling—will just flood you with emotional pain so, please, don’t do it.

Let’s say you are working on rejection sensitivity. Ask and answer the following questions using cool processing and pretending as you’re taking the point of view of a third party:

What was the trigger for my reaction?
In hindsight, was I reacting appropriately?
Why did I react as I did? Was I reacting to old scenarios or in the present?
How could I have handled this better? What can I learn from it?

Learn from the steps back and failures

Rather than beat yourself up for reverting to old patterns—blaming yourself, figuring that you’re a lost cause, or that everything your mother and others said about you was true—try taking a cold and calculated look at the last time you felt lousy about how you behaved or performed. If you melt down into self-criticism— “it’s who I am and it’s hopeless—you will always be stuck. The following exercise is adapted from one in The Daughter Detox Companion Workbook.

Describe a setback as objectively as you can. Just the facts, please, to echo an ancient television show.
How well did you do? Give yourself a grade from 1-5 using a third-party perspective.
Do not recall the specific emotions you felt. Instead, focus on why you felt as you did. (For example, “I felt lousy because I wasn’t sure I had put my all into it.” Or “I am disappointed because I just didn’t anticipate the setbacks and I know I should have.” Or “I reverted to my old position of blaming myself when things went wrong and that is what made it so painful. I basically did it to myself.”
How do you plan to regroup?
What did you learn that will be valuable going forward?

Spend some time looking in the mirror

No matter what we look like objectively, many unloved daughters express their lack of true self-esteem through dissatisfaction with their looks and their bodies. Some of this may be a legacy from childhood experiences—being told you’re ugly, fat, or ungainly— but it’s certainly exacerbated by a culture that is fixated on stereotypes and standards of beauty that are pretty much unattainable except for a handful of people…. So put on Your Big Girl Pants and Your Conscious Awareness Cape and take a hard look. Look at yourself smiling, and see yourself as a stranger might. No, this is not a test of photogenic teeth or a wrinkle or blemish count but a look-see at how inviting and open you look. Next time, take it a step further and dare to name the things you like about how you look. Remember, this isn’t an inventory of likes versus dislikes but just a moment of positive appreciation.

The bottom line is that you have to unlearn what you were told about yourself and learn to trust your eyes.

Do some real gardening

I no longer have a backyard but I have a terrace and indoor plants and while land is better, everyone can garden. And while being a gardener is my fav way of writing about emotional and psychological growth and while gardening metaphors work best when you are talking about uprooting old behaviors, growing something can change your mindset too. If you already have plants, you know what I am talking about but if you don’t, start with something pretty indestructible such as a philodendron or pothos. You can also grow your own vine with an organic sweet potato; put it in a glass of water, pointy end down, with four toothpicks one- third of the way down. The top ends up suspended above the water. Put in a sunny window, change the water every three or four days, and soon you’ll have sprouts and, later, a vine.

I honestly think that becoming attentive to growth in other forms helps us see our emotional growth more clearly.

Happy Spring!

Photograph by Michal Jarmulak. Copyright free. Pixabay.com

These ideas are drawn from two copyrighted books: Daughter Detox: Recovering from an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life (Copyright© 2017 by Peg Streep) and The Daughter Detox Companion Workbook (Copyright © 2018 by Peg Streep) Copyright © 2020 by Peg Streep

Many of us have difficulty managing our emotions in the best of times but the times we find ourselves in at the moment are difficult for everyone, no matter how emotionally intelligent we are. Calming yourself down may feel like an insurmountable task at the moment; yes, we all know that we’re supposed to take deep calming breaths but how can you do that when you feel panicked? While I’m neither a psychologist nor a therapist, I’ve found that visualization can be an enormous help when I am stressed out; that’s actually not just a personal opinion, but one backed up by scientific research, as I explain in Daughter Detox: Recovering from an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life.

In a study conducted by Sander L. Koole and David Fockenberg, after testing for how skilled the participants were at managing emotion, the researchers had them write detailed descriptions of either a difficult and demanding person in their lives, along with specific encounters with that person or, alternatively, writing in great deal about an accepting and friendly person and those experiences. Since our emotional states are affected by all manner of unconscious cues, the researchers wanted to see how negative or positive focus affected participants’ functioning. After doing that exercise, the participants were asked to visualize that demanding or accepting person before being tested on how quickly they could identify a discordant schematized face on a screen—a scowling face in a sea of smiling ones, for example, or a happy face amid angry ones. Then, they were asked whether they identified with a series of negative and positive traits by checking “me” or “not me.” The results revealed that those who were adept at regulating emotion could think of a demanding person without getting derailed by negativity. But those less skilled at self-regulation were effectively derailed by the intense recall of someone negative. Most importantly, those who recalled a supportive and loving person felt better after doing so and managed their emotions better.

Setting up to visualize

In the best of all worlds, you’ll work on this by yourself, away from family members, your phone, and the news; you are trying to give yourself an emotional and mental time-out. A place you feel comfortable is ideal; if you are calmed by music, do play some.

Try visualizing a person who cares about you to tamp down stress

Other studies show that visualization can affect your state of mind in the short term and possibly even over the course of days, as a study by Katherine B. Carnelley and Angela C. Rowe showed. Writing down specifics about the person’s actions and words can help make the visualization that much more effective so spend some time preparing for your visualization; that’s what worked best in the experiments. Keep in mind that basically using visualization consciously mimics what securely attached people who are skilled at managing emotion do automatically to self-regulate; they automatically reassure themselves and back off from the clif.

Visualize the whole person using all your senses. Pull up his or her voice, how he or she laughs and smiles, for example. Recall exchanges and conversations that made you feel loved and secure, and try to take deep breaths as you fill in the details.

Visualize a place that makes you feel happy or at peace

It might not even be a place you’ve actually visited but always dreamed of going, or it could be a place you’ve been. Do use some imagery to help you imagine as fully as you can because the more detail the better; your imagination can transport you out of your home into the middle of a verdant forest, alongside a flowing brook, or on a mountain top. Or imagine a place and an activity you love, whether it’s hiking, taking photographs, or gardening.

Don’t’ forget to draw on all of your senses. For example, if you visualized being on a beach near the ocean, you’d recall the sounds of the waves and the seagulls, the taste of the salt on your lips, the scent of the ocean breezes, the feeling of walking on sand, in addition to all you would see.

A visualization for you to try

This one is from The Daughter Detox Companion Workbook and it’s intended to help you focus on inner growth, as if you were the gardener of your self. Imagining yourself in a garden filled with beautifully scented flowers and rich smell of loamy earth, surrounded by bird song and faint rustle of leaves blown by the wind, will set the stage for you to relax and focus.

Locate the areas of your body where you feel the most tension and stress;

They might be your back and shoulders, or your arms and hands.

Take a deep breath and work on letting go of that tension

by visualizing yourself as a seedling, pushing its way out of the earth,

slowly unfurling.

Imagine the bright light of the sun on your face

and then feel it move slowly over your body, warming your neck and chest,

relaxing your arms and hands,

unlocking stores of vitality you’d long forgotten.

Take another deep breath and now imagine yourself as the gardener

tending to the flower’s growth.

Keep that image in mind,

seeing yourself both as the flower and the gardener,

as you take another deep breath and stretch your limbs.

Photograph by Leo Rivas. Copyright free. Unsplash.com

Koole, Sander L. and Daniel A. Fockenberg. Implicit Emotion Regulation Under Demanding Conditions: The Moderating Role of Action Versus State Orientation. Cognition and Emotion, 2011, vol. 25(3), pp. 440-452.

Carnelley, Katherine B., and Angela C. Rowe. Repeated Priming of Attachment Security Influences Later Views of Self and Relationships. Personal Relationships, 2007, vol. 14(2), pp. 307-320.

While not every daughter will feel ashamed, many do, and suffer silently. Shame emanates from being unloved (“I am deficient, damaged, or less than, which is why I am unloved”), believing what is said to you and about you in your family of origin (“My mother says I’m stupid and lazy, and she knows me”), being isolated by cultural mythology (“All children are loved by their mothers so it’s my fault that I’m not”), and from feeling singled out while everyone else is normal (“I’m the only unloved daughter on the planet, and if my mother doesn’t love me, who will?”). These feelings of shame may be both conscious and unconscious, and can affect your life in significant ways, exerting a toxic influence on your thoughts and behaviors.

When we feel ashamed of ourselves in the context of the mother-daughter relationship, most of us will do what we can to hide it; after all, if we were to confess the real workings of our family of origin, we are positive we’ll be judged badly and that others will come to the same conclusions about us as our mothers and perhaps other family members did. Many of us will deny and bury our thoughts and feelings—about the family dynamics, about our true selves—for as long as we possibly can; the denial is fed by shame as well as hopefulness that, by some miracle, we’ll find a way to have our mothers connect and love us.

But even though denying the shame makes us feel better in the moment, it is a blind alley.

In a counterintuitive book called Shame: Free Yourself, Find Joy, and Build True Self-Esteem, Dr. Joseph Burgo argues that by denying or hiding the shame we feel, we miss the opportunity to grow our true selves. I asked Dr. Burgo to answer this question so as to go right to the source of expert opinion:

“We’re born into this world with an expectation for a loving mother and when our love for her is not returned, it invariably fills us with profound shame akin to a feeling of inner defect, damage, or ugliness. I don’t think one can ever transcend this shame entirely, but the way to make it less defining and more bearable is to become a person we feel proud of: by setting and achieving goals, even small ones, and by living up to the expectation for the person we want to be. When we forge connections with people we like and respect and who honor us for who we are, our sense of self-esteem runs deeper and can help offset that deep sense of shame.”

I asked Dr. Burgo about the permanence of shame, and his response was positive, if tempered:

“The legacy of shame doesn’t mean we can’t grow to feel good about ourselves and develop healthy relationships. As we do grow in those ways, shame becomes less pervasive, less defining. It’s an increasingly smaller part of who we are. To make a physical analogy, say you had a sports injury to your leg when you were young; it healed and for the most part, you’re unaware of it. But now and then, especially at times of intense exertion, you feel a twinge in your knee where you hurt yourself. You can still go running or skiing, but you know you have to keep that injury in mind because if you push yourself too hard, it will act up. You may injure yourself further if you pretend nothing ever happened to you. I think of the residual shame that comes from having been unloved as a child in the same way. You know it’s there and most of the time it doesn’t matter, but you can’t completely ignore it either, especially at times of stress and intense emotional challenges.”

I completely agree with Dr. Burgo but as someone who isn’t a therapist or a psychologist, I talk about the importance of recognition and the end of denial which leads us to a place where we can accept what happened to us and begin to change. While Dr. Burgo used the metaphor of the injured bone, I use the image of a hole in the heart; it does get smaller and smaller as you heal and your perspective changes and, eventually, it’s a detail in a larger landscape of your own making.

But if shame is hiding in plain sight in your head, now is the moment to deal.

It is always problematic but in the midst of a pandemic, you need to love and support yourself the best you can. Kicking shame down the stairs is an important step.

This article has been adapted from my book, The Daughter Detox Question & Answer Book: A GPs for Navigating Your Way Out of a Toxic Childhood. Copyright © 2019, 2020. Only share links back to this site.

Photograph by Parker Johnson. Copyright free. Unsplash.com

Given the stress of the moment, it’s not surprising that childhood issues are being triggered. At the same time, with so many of us sequestered at home, it is a good time to think about those feelings and begin to deal with them. This post has been adapted from The Daughter Detox Question & Answer Book: A GPS for Navigating Out of a Toxic Childhood.

Not trusting others: the why of it

Trust issues are central to many unloved daughters in almost every intimate relationship, including friendship; it may spread out from there to embrace just about everyone. It’s not altogether surprising, especially in light of attachment theory, that if the one person whom the culture deems always trustworthy—your mother—isn’t, your mental models of relationship will come up short in the area of trust. Research shows that those with an anxious-preoccupied style of attachment have the most issues with trusting and are, moreover, likely to respond to feelings of mistrust in the most maladaptive ways. For example, in a study of college participants, 85 percent of whom were female, conducted by Lindsey M. Rodriguez, Angela M. DiBello, and others, the researchers found a rather distressing pattern: that anxiously attached individuals are more likely to be distrustful and jealous, act on their feelings of mistrust, engage in acts of snooping on or monitoring partners they suspect of betrayal, and actually engage in psychological abuse. If your response to this research is Yikes!, that’s appropriate. Like rejection sensitivity, mistrust often ends up being a self-fulfilling prophesy; monitoring and “testing” a partner’s loyalty (checking text messages, emails, going through receipts, and other spying tactics worthy of a Lifetime movie) usually doesn’t yield the desired reassurance but something else entirely. While securely attached people trust and prioritize their relationships, the anxiously attached woman responds in a knee-jerk way supposedly to protect herself.

Recognizing that your trust issues may be energized by your past experiences is an important moment in recovery, as is understanding the degree of your own overreactivity. The fearfulness caused by these uncertain times may also trigger old behaviors so it’s especially important to use this downtime to promote your overall healing. A number of readers have written me to say that their trust issues are triggered by the current reliance we have on others to tell us what’s safe and what isn’t.

Self-calming through conscious awareness

Learning to self-calm in these moments of automatic panic is the way to disarm these old behaviors; when you are settled, sit down and ask yourself some important questions, among them these:

Has my partner or friend given me reason to distrust him or her?
What would happen if I asked him or her outright about my fears or doubts?
Am I able to stop the escalation of my thoughts and feelings by pinpointing the trigger?
Can I specifically name the fear that fuels my distrust?
How much of my reaction is moored in the present? How much in the past?
How many people in my adult life have actually been untrustworthy?
How many have proved to be trustworthy? Is there an underlying thread I can discern?
Does not trusting others make me feel empowered or helpless?
How does the current crisis feed into my specific lack of trust in others?

Using this enforced downtime to work on healing is a good idea. Life has been put on hold for most of us but we can continue to make progress.

Photograph by Johannes Plenio. Copyright free. Unsplash.com

Rodriguez, Linda, Angelo M. DiBello, et al. “The Price of Distrust: Trust, Anxious Attachment, Jealousy, and Partner Abuse,” Partner Abuse, 2015, vol. 6(3), pp. 298-319.

Even though I’ve been writing about mother-daughter relationships and other psychological topics for twenty years, my very first books were about spirituality and spiritual practices, and the trying times we find ourselves in seem to call for a return to my old roots. None of these rituals are associated with any religion or creed. One is a ritual I created for the workshops I used to give years ago, while the others were created specifically for my recent books, Daughter Detox: Recovering from an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life and The Daughter Detox Companion Workbook.

Why turn to rituals?

Our daily routines have been utterly altered by fast-moving events and, if you think about it, those little rituals—buying a coffee on the way to work, walking your child to the bus stop, kissing your significant other goodbye as you each head off to your individual days, seeing familiar faces in the lobby of the building where you work, congregating with colleagues—have disappeared in what feels like the blink of an eye. For those of us who live alone, being deprived of social contact can be especially difficult. Rituals can help us manage our anxiety at a time of great stress and help us to maintain some positivity amid a tsunami of distressing news; that is, of course, why there are specific rituals associated with death and loss, and have been in every society from humanity’s beginning.

There is actually psychological science to back up this assertion, as witness the findings of Nicholas M. Hobson and his colleagues; the scripted and repetitive nature of rituals helps to regulate emotions, improve goal performance, and social connection.

So here are some ideas for new rituals to incorporate into daily life right now.

Create a blessing bowl

I did this with my daughter when she was little and it continues to be a way of looking forward positively without turning into a Pollyanna. Cut up little strips or squares of paper—if you’ve using a glass bowl, it’s prettier if you use colored paper—and have each member of your family write down something he or she is grateful for or looking forward to and fold the paper over. You can do this every day or once a week and, then, at a time you choose, you read the slips out loud. This little exercise gets you thinking about what is in your life, and not what is missing from it. (By the way, the blessing can be the absence of something as well as the presence so you can be grateful for feeling less anxious.) If you are sheltering in place with your kids, this can be a nice way of making them recognize that while things have changed, being grateful makes you feel better as does looking forward to the future.

Create a candle lighting ritual

Humanity’s earliest rituals involved bringing light into the darkness— using hollowed-out lamps of stone with bits of moss floating in fat set afire—and continues to this day. Scented candles can lift our spirits. Lighting a candle as you sit down to eat a meal can make the experience feel more special and signal that now is a time for sharing and enjoying. You can say words as you light the candle or simply enjoy a moment of quiet. Never leave a burning candle unattended, make sure it is on a fireproof surface, and be vigilant if you have small children.

Create “looking forward” rituals

It’s especially important that we all continue to look ahead even when we feel confined or stuck. Have each member of the family do something that symbolizes the future in a positive way; young children can draw pictures of places they’d like to go or things they’d like to do (such as seeing a whale spouting in the Atlantic or playing basketball).

Older kids can create collages or write aspirations on a board; again, the point here is to set a time for when you deliberately think about the future and beyond today.

Planting seeds might be something else you might do for yourself or with your kids or perhaps sprouting a sweet potato which is actually lots of fun. (Use an organic sweet potato and stick four toothpicks about one-third of the way from the top. Put the pointy end in water. Put on a sunny windowsill and change the water every few day. You will see it root and then see a vine emerge from the top. It can be transplanted to a pot with soil once it’s growing.)

There’s no “right” way to create a ritual; use your creativity to look forward!

Photograph by Kristina Tamašauskaitė. Copyright free. Unsplash.com

Hobson, N.M., J Schroeder, J.L Risen, et. al., “The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-based Framework,” Personality and Social Psychology Review (2017), 22 (3), pp. 260-284

It’s a sad truth that you might not even be aware that you’re reacting to abusive behavior in unhealthy ways, especially if you grew up around abusive people. As children, we assume that what goes on at our house happens at everyone’s house and even when we discover that it doesn’t, it may take us a long while to recognize that what is happening is not okay. This piece is excerpted and adapted from my book, Daughter Detox: Recovering from an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life.

Yes, you may be holding yourself back

So many daughters are afraid to take a stand because, more than anything, they want to belong and fit into their family of origin; most importantly, they remain hopeful that, somehow, they can get their mothers to love them. Sometimes, that means just denying what’s being said or done, and then locking in the denial by telling yourself “that it’s really not so bad.” Daughters also rationalize their treatment by telling themselves “It’s just how Mom is.” Even worse, because they simply can’t face the fact of how unloving, punitive, or even cruel their mothers are, they resort to blaming themselves: “She wouldn’t yell at me if I didn’t disappoint her,” “She’s hard on me because she wants me to make her proud,” “I wish I were just better than I am.”

Take a look at these behaviors that unintentionally fuel the continuation of abuse and see which ones are part of your personal repertoire. The time has come to cull them from your unconscious scripts.

Accepting that you’re “too sensitive”

You’ve heard these words all of your life and whenever someone says something hurtful, you end up taking responsibility for being hurt and your pain becomes your problem, not the person’s who wounded you. Similarly, an intimate tells you that you’re “too serious” or that you “can’t take a joke” after he or she has said something that absolutely withers you, and you accept that statement as accurate. Stop right now.

On the other hand, if you tend to be overreactive, practice the STOP, LOOK, LISTEN technique so that you can get a handle on what you’re bringing to the party. That means that when you feel yourself reacting, you STOP, and take a moment to assess the situation. If necessary, absent yourself. Then you LOOK to see whether or not you have taken the remark out of context or whether your reaction is on point. Finally, you LISTEN to whether you are really hearing the intention behind the words or whether you are reacting to old triggers.

This doesn’t mean that you should believe it’s “your fault,” but you should work on finding balance. Context matters, and as you become more confident about identifying those moments when you actually are being “too sensitive,” it will be much easier to identify the people who are using those words to manipulate and control you.

You still don’t defend yourself when you’re falsely blamed or put down

If you were scapegoated or the daughter of a hypercritical mother, duck and cover may have been your first line of defense during childhood and you may be very sensitive to any kind of criticism at all. But that needs to stop if you’re going to move forward because you need to be able to tell the difference between criticism that’s used as a weapon and critical commentary that is meant to be helpful. Paying attention to a person’s language and tone can help you distinguish one kind of criticism from the other.

Criticism that intends to marginalize you is highly personal, often expressed in sentences that begin with “You always” or “You never,” which are then followed by a laundry list of your flaws. The criticism is never limited to something specific but spins out into generalized statements about your character such as “You always forget to do what you’ve been asked to do because you’re selfish and unmotivated by nature.”

On the other hand, criticism that is meant to be constructive is specific, offered as a suggestion, and is usually part of a dialogue: “I think there were ways you might have handled that blowup with him differently such as explaining why it’s so frustrating” or “It would be better if you didn’t get defensive because that leads to escalating the tension.”

You still rationalize when you’re stonewalled

Children who are ignored or made to feel invisible in childhood often have trouble recognizing what psychologists know to be the most toxic pattern in relationships and a sure sign of trouble: demand/withdraw. The unloved daughter tends to tolerate stonewalling precisely because it’s so familiar to her and to rationalize her partner’s behavior by thinking that he’s simply too stressed to talk things through, to blame herself for choosing the wrong time or tone to initiate a discussion, or to castigate herself for making a demand in the first place. This kind of tolerance just adds to an already unhealthy dynamic; stonewalling is never an appropriate response.

If someone’s response to an issue you’ve raised is silence, pretending you are invisible, mockery, or contempt—expressed in physical gestures—you are being abused. Period and end of story.

You still question your perceptions

Children who are mocked, marginalized, or gaslighted in their families of origin don’t just suffer from low self-esteem; they’re also quick to retreat when challenged because they’re deeply insecure about whether their perceptions are valid and to be trusted. Second- guessing themselves is the default behavior. Gaslighting can make a child deeply fearful, as I was, especially of being “crazy” or damaged in some profound way. This again cedes all power to the narcissist or manipulator who needs to control you.

It is key to your healing that you stop normalizing or excusing abusive behavior. From anyone. At any time. You hear?

Photograph by Christiana Rivers. Copyright free. Unsplash.com

This question surfaces for most unloved daughters, at one point or another, but most usually when efforts at setting boundaries or maintaining low contact with their mothers, fathers, or both have failed, and they are staring the possibility of estrangement in the face. Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. which every daughter with children confronts. Our heads are filled with images of generations seated around a table, the wisdom of the elders informing the younger ones, with love and pie served in equal portions painted as Norman Rockwell might, and that’s what makes us hesitate. Never mind that our family of origin never gathered around in that way; we may remain hopeful of a miracle in our heart of hearts. Our fear of depriving our own children of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins may dominate our wishful thinking, despite all that we know. This is one of the issues women write me about most often, despite their real and substantial worries that their mothers (and other family members) will treat their children as they were treated.

This post has been adapted from The Daughter Detox Question & Answer Book: A GPS for Navigating Your Way Out of a Toxic Childhood.

Can a toxic mother become a good-enough grandmother?

Of course, this is the looming question, and the jury is still out on it. Perhaps you’re not setting the bar high and looking for doting but what can you expect? Can a leopard change its spots? Can someone who mistreated, marginalized, or ignored you treat your children better?

Alas, it’s impossible to generalize because the particulars matter and, of course, the role of a mother and that of a grandmother are very different. It’s unlikely that a mother high in narcissistic traits or control will act any differently as a grandmother; your children are likely to be seen as smaller planets in her orbit and not as individuals in their own right. And yes, she will likely favor those who reflect her most brightly and hew to her standards, just as she did with her own children. A mother who was emotionally unavailable to her daughter might be able to deal with grandchildren relatively well because they are visitors to her life and not constant fixtures; the emotional demands on a grandparent are considerably less than those on a parent. Seen in that light, enmeshed and role-reversed mothers might also do better as grandmothers. But—there’s always a “but”—it very much depends.

What about “but?”

As discussed in Daughter Detox: Recovering from an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life, each of us has to decide on the path. I was absolutely categorical that my mother would not be permitted to see my daughter, and I felt no qualms about depriving her of this particular grandmother. I knew exactly how my mother would miss no opportunity to criticize and undercut me and perhaps my daughter, too. Ironically, when my daughter was about seven or eight, she was curious about my mother and asked to see her; I set it up with a friend doing the ferrying, but in the end, it was my mother who turned my daughter down. Some daughters who live long distances from their mothers are able to manage a twice-yearly kind of relationship. Still others begin that way but then reverse themselves as their mothers (and fathers) display the same kind of favoritism with grandchildren that they did with their own children. One woman told me that it was the year that her two sons received a tee shirt each while her favored brother’s boys got expensive dirt bikes for Christmas that clinched it for her, writing that, “This wasn’t about the money she spent on the cousins; it was about the looks on my boys’ faces. If she didn’t do it on purpose, she is even more insensitive than I thought. It doesn’t matter; it’s done.”

If you have gone no-contact, do remember that we are free to define family any way we wish; my daughter was surrounded by caring and loving adults growing up, even if they weren’t related by blood. And besides, you don’t actually need a village or a table that seats 12 to give a child a sense of family. It’s not about the numbers; it’s about the love. But then, you knew that, right?

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