Childhood Wounds

All children have the following emotional needs:

1. To be held (to be enveloped by safe, loving arms).

2. To be mirrored (to see a positive reflection of themselves in their parents’ eyes).

3. To be soothed (to be comforted, reassured, and protected).

4. To be given some control (to elicit predictable responses to expressed needs).

(“Understanding the Borderline Mother,” by Christine Lawson)

In infancy and childhood, a daughter catches the first glimpse of herself in the mirror that is her mother’s face. If her mother is loving and attuned, the baby is securely attached; she learns both that she is loved and lovable. That sense of being lovable—worthy of affection and attention, of being seen and heard—becomes the bedrock on which she builds her earliest sense of self, and provides the energy for its growth.

The daughter of an unloving mother—one who is emotionally distant, withholding, inconsistent, or even hypercritical or cruel—learns different lessons about the world and herself. The underlying problem, of course, is how dependent a human infant is on her mother for nurturance and survival, and the circumscribed nature of her world. What results is insecure attachment, characterized as either “ambivalent” (the child doesn’t know whether the good mommy or the bad one will show up) or “avoidant” (the daughter wants her mother’s love but is afraid of the consequences of seeking it). Ambivalent attachment teaches a child that the world of relationship is unreliable; avoidant attachment sets up a terrible conflict between the child’s needs both for her mother’s love and for protection against her mother’s emotional or physical abuse.

Early attachments form our internal templates or mental representations of how relationships work in the world. Without therapy or intervention, these mental representations tend to be relatively stable. 

The key point is that a daughter’s need for her mother’s love is a primal driving force, and that need doesn't diminish with unavailability—it coexists with the terrible and damaging understanding that the one person who is supposed to love you without condition doesn’t. The struggle to heal and cope is a mighty one. It affects many, if not all, parts of the self—especially in the area of relationships. 

The work of Cindy Hazan and Philip Shaver (and later, others) showed that early childhood attachments were highly predictive of adult romantic relationships, as well as friendships. It won’t surprise you that the most common wounds are those to the self and the area of emotional connection.

The point of looking at these wounds isn’t to bemoan them or throw up our hands in despair at the mother-love cards we were dealt but to become conscious and aware of them. Consciousness is the first step in an unloved daughter’s healing. All too often, we simply accept these behaviors in ourselves without knowing their point of origin.

1. Lack of confidence

The unloved daughter doesn’t know that she is lovable or worthy of attention; she may have grown up feeling ignored or unheard or criticized at every turn. The voice in her head is that of her mother’s, telling her what she isn’t—smart, beautiful, kind, loving, worthy. That internalized maternal voice will continue to undermine her accomplishments and talents, unless there is some kind of intervention. Daughters sometimes talk about feeling that they are “fooling people” and express fear that they’ll be “found out” when they enjoy success in the world.

2. Lack of trust

“I always wonder,” one woman confides, “why someone wants to be my friend. I can’t help myself from thinking whether there’s some kind of hidden agenda, you know, and I’ve learned in therapy that that has everything to do with my mother.” These trust issues emanate from that sense that relationships are fundamentally unreliable, and flow over into both friendships and romantic relationships. As Hazan and Shaver report in their work, the ambivalently attached daughter needs constant validation that trust is warranted. In their words, these people “experienced love as involving obsession, a desire for reciprocation and union, emotional highs and lows, and extreme sexual attraction and jealousy.” Trust and the inability to set boundaries are, as it happens, closely connected.

3. Difficulty setting boundaries

Many daughters, caught between their need for their mother’s attention and its absence, report that they become “pleasers” in adult relationships. Or they are unable to set other boundaries which make for healthy and emotionally sustaining relationships. A number of unloved daughters report problems with maintaining close female friendships, which are complicated due to issues of trust (“How do I know she’s really my friend?”), not being able to say ‘no’ (“Somehow, I always end up being a doormat, doing too much, and I get used or disappointed in the end”), or wanting a relationship so intense that the other person backs off. Insecurely attached daughters often end up creating scenarios that are more like the “Goldilocks and Three Bears” story than not—never quite right but, somehow, either too “hot” or too “cold.” 

This is often true in romantic relationships as well. Kim Bartholomew’s work helpfully further divides those who are avoidantly attached into two categories—“fearful” and “dismissive.” Both share the same avoidance of intimacy but for different reasons. The “fearful” actively seek close relationships but are afraid of intimacy on all levels; they are intensely vulnerable, and tend to be clingy and dependent. The “dismissives” are armored and detached, perhaps defensively; their avoidance is more straightforward. Alas, both types aren’t able to get the kind of emotional connection that could move them closer to healing.

4. Difficulty seeing the self accurately

One woman shares what she has finally learned in therapy: “When I was a child, my mother held me back by focusing on my flaws, never my accomplishments. After college, I had a number of jobs but, at every one, my bosses complained that I wasn’t pushing hard enough to try to grow. It was only then that I realized that I was limiting myself, adopting my mother’s view of me in the world.” Much of this has to do with internalizing all you heard growing up. These distortions in how we see ourselves may extend into every domain, including our looks. Other daughters report feeling surprised when they succeed at something, as well as being hesitant to try something new so as to reduce the possibility of failure. This isn’t just a question of low self-esteem but something more profound.        

5. Making avoidance the default position

Lacking confidence or feeling fearful sometimes puts the unloved daughter in a defensive crouch so that she’s avoiding being hurt by a bad connection rather than being motivated to possibly find a stable and loving one. These women, on the surface, may act as though they want to be in a relationship but on a deeper,  less conscious level, avoidance is their motivator. The work of Hazan, Shaver, and Bartholomew bears this out. Unfortunately, avoidance—whether fear, mistrust or something else triggers it—actively prevents the unloved daughter from finding the kind of loving and supportive relationships she’s always sought.

6. Being overly sensitive

An unloved daughter may be sensitive to slights, real and imagined; a random comment may carry the weight of her childhood experience without her even being aware of it. “I’ve had to really focus on my reactions or, better put, over-reactions,” says one woman, now in her forties. “Sometimes, I mistake what’s meant as banter as something else and I end up worrying it to death until I shake myself and realize the person really meant nothing by it.” Having a mother who’s unattuned also means that unloved daughters often have trouble managing emotions; they tend to overthink and ruminate as well.

7. Replicating the mother bond in relationships

Alas, we tend to be drawn to what we know—those situations which, while they make us unhappy in the end, are nonetheless “comfortable” because they are familiar to us. While securely attached individuals tend to go out into the world seeking people who have similar histories of attachment, unluckily, so do the ambivalently and avoidantly attached. This sometimes has the effect of unwittingly replicating the maternal relationship. “I married my mother, for sure,” one woman says, “He was on the surface completely different from my mother but, in the end, he treated me much the same way, the same seesaw of not knowing how he would be with me. Like my mother, he was indifferent and attentive by turns, horribly critical or vaguely supportive.” She ended up divorcing both her husband and her mother.

(“Daughters of Unloving Mothers: 7 Common Wounds.” https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/tech-support/201304/daughters-unloving-mothers-7-common-wounds?page=1)

The role of shame:

Studies show that both abusive behaviors and harsh parenting of children make individuals more prone to feeling shame throughout the course of their lifetimes; some of this doubtless has to do with the fact that sometimes maternal behavior includes actions that are either deliberately meant to shame the child into behaving differently or better or are the result of the parent’s own inability to manage her own emotions. But being “shame-prone,” as the researchers put it, explains another aspect of how shame plays a role both in a daughter’s wounding and her attempts at recovery.

In their brilliant book, Parenting from the Inside Out, Daniel Siegel M.D. and Mary Hartzell M.Ed. discuss what they call a toxic rupture in the parent-child relationship and how it relates to parental shame as well as inducing shame in the child.  (Yes, we are pivoting here to show a possible pattern.) They define a toxic rupture as one which actively harms a child’s sense of self, often a result of a parent losing control of her emotions and threatening, screaming, or calling a child names. (Yes, that’s emotional and verbal abuse.) The child’s feeling of shame produces physical effects such as a stomach ache, a tightness or feeling of a lump in the chest or throat, or an impulse to avoid eye contact. The child internalizes the shame and begins thinking of herself as “bad” or “worthless.” Siegel and Hartzell note that it’s often the parent’s own shame—a result of her own treatment in childhood—that produces the unconscious hijacking of her emotions and facilitates her losing sight of her child in these moments. Instead, she may only be focused on her own powerlessness and incompetence. It’s a horrible cycle which can only be stopped in its tracks by the parent’s conscious awareness and concerted efforts at repairing the rupture. That doesn’t always happen, alas, as the experiences of unloved daughters attest.

(“Unloved Daughters and the Culture of Shame.” https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/tech-support/201706/unloved-daughters-and-the-culture-shame)

What about the role of fathers?

For some daughters of unloving mothers, the father’s mere presence at home helps to de-escalate the criticism and hostility; for other daughters, though, their closeness to their fathers will heighten the conflict with a jealous or competitive mother, or a narcissistic one. These categories aren't always mutually exclusive; fathers may demonstrate a blend of roles or take on different roles over time.

1. The Yes Man

Whether he does it consciously or unconsciously, this father becomes a co-conspirator with the mother.  In some cases, the mother makes sure that she doesn’t say or do anything hurtful to her daughter in her husband’s presence; in others, where the behavior is witnessed, the mother quickly shifts the blame onto the daughter.  No matter what rationale is offered—the child needed discipline, was disobedient or disrespectful, is too “sensitive”—the father buys into it.  The Dad’s joining team Mom makes it easy for the daughter to consider herself responsible for her mother’s lack of love; many daughters spend years thinking that they are undeserving and unlovable, leaving a well-spring of self-doubt that takes years to unravel. With Mom and Dad teamed up, the daughter may be wary of all relationships with both women and men. 

Some Yes Men don’t team up with their wives but end up playing The Appeaser role, which is a variation on the theme.  Their commitment to the marriage and their own acceptance of how their spouses act (“That’s just who she is” or “She means well. She’s doing it for your own good”) trumps all and leads them to actively encourage their daughters to do the same.  These men may have love and affection for their daughters but consistently take their wives’ sides, since their first allegiance is to Team Spouse and Marriage.  Their consistent lack of support results in emotional confusion and more complicated issues of trust since Dad is there for his daughter in one sense and not in another.   

2. The King of the Castle

Sometimes, a father’s closeness to and love for his daughter is the catalyst for conflict since the mother perceives the attention being given to the daughter as rightfully hers.  Jealous, competitive, or narcissistic mothers, as well as detached and insecure ones, will see the daughter as a potential rival for what she sees as her throne by the King’s side. Mothers who competed for their fathers’ attention as daughters are especially susceptible to feeling threatened.  These mothers will escalate the warfare by amping up the criticism of their daughters and doing what they can to turn their husbands into Yes Men.

The more unstable the marriage is, the more the father’s affection for his daughter looks like a threat to the safety of her mother’s world.  Sometimes, the daughter becomes a stand-in for “The Other Woman,” real or imagined.

As daughters tell it, the King of the Castle scenario is very toxic and impossible to resolve.  Jealousy spurs on a mother’s meanness.

3. The Absentee

Sometimes, daughters discover that both parents are equally emotionally unavailable, even if their parenting styles are very different; some daughters report that their controlling mothers controlled their husbands as well, and these fathers tended to disappear into the woodwork.  While the Yes Man joins team Mom, the Absentee simply stays out of the fray as much as he can. 

In troubled marriages, fathers often emotionally vacate the premises long before they leave (and some of them don’t ever leave), and spend more time at work, out of the house, and shift their attention to hobbies and sports outside of the familial circle.   Extramarital affairs remove them even farther from the emotional center of the family and. of course, their daughters.  The emotional pain inflicted on daughters by the lack of maternal love is compounded by the sense that their fathers have abandoned them and failed to protect them, leaving them alone and at their mothers’ mercy.  Daughters report a great deal of emotional confusion when fathers are absent, and if their mothers end up abandoned by their fathers, they may actually align themselves with their mothers, creating another kind of inner conflict. The need for mother love rises to the surface, and loyalty to the mother in these circumstances sometimes outweighs the need for self-protection.

Parental divorce creates a special conundrum for daughters of unloving mothers who usually end up living with their mothers;  daughters of enmeshed mothers will find the going very rough as whatever slight boundaries once existed disappear under stress.  An older daughter may be able to recognize that her father has left because he’s been treated the way she has been, and that can lift the burden of feeling responsible for the failure of the maternal relationship and create an enduring alliance with the father, even if the time spent with him is scanty.  Even though these fathers are physically absent from their daughters’ lives, they are nonetheless emotionally present and caring.  When the daughters reach adulthood and begin to set boundaries with their mothers, their bonds to their fathers remain strong.

4. The Rescuer

While few daughters report feeling totally protected by their fathers from their mothers’ treatment—there doesn’t seem to be A White Knight—many do feel that their fathers’ presence “rescued” them in important ways.  For the daughters of hypercritical mothers, paternal encouragement of pursuits and acknowledgment of their talents and abilities acted to counterbalance their mothers’ focus on failures and shortcomings.  Daughters of rejecting or emotionally distant mothers often find a safe haven in their fathers’ company and affection, even when it’s relatively limited in scope because of maternal gatekeeping.  Many daughters—and I count myself in that number—received validation from their fathers which permitted them to begin to understand, even at a relatively young age, that they had done nothing to provoke or deserve their mothers’ treatment.  In some families, especially if the unloved loved daughter is the eldest or the only child, the father can become a gateway to the outside world as he encourages her to try new things or persist in pursuits he considers valuable. 

Unlike the Yes Man, the Appeaser, or the Absentee, the Rescuer tends to act more like a free agent, navigating between his love and loyalty to his wife and daughter.  Many daughters with Rescuer fathers often end up walking in paternal footsteps when it comes to work and career.

It’s important to realize that even having a Rescuer father isn’t a version of the Out of Jail card in a board game.  The daughter is still left with a boatload of emotional baggage and a journey of healing ahead of her.

While the relationship to the primary caretaker—usually our mothers—determines whether we are securely or insecurely attached and how complicated and difficult our emotional futures will be, there’s no question that our fathers influence and shape us and our sense of self both by their presence and absence.

(“The 4 Roles Fathers Play When Mothers Are Unloving.” https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/tech-support/201406/the-4-roles-fathers-play-when-mothers-are-unloving)

So, what to do?

 "Will I ever stop feeling I was cheated of something essential?? Even at age 59, it makes me angry and my mother died over 10 years ago." —Priscilla

The road that is recovery from a childhood without a mother’s love, support, and attunement is long and complicated. One aspect of healing that is rarely touched upon is mourning the mother you needed, sought, and — yes — deserved. The word deserved is key to understanding why this remains elusive for many women (and men): They simply don’t see themselves as deserving, because they’ve internalized what their mothers said and did as self-criticism and have wrongly concluded that they’re lacking, worthless, or simply unlovable.

Grieving the mother you needed is impeded by both feeling unworthy of love and, more important, what I call the core conflict. This conflict is between the daughter’s growing awareness of how her mother wounded her in childhood, and still does, and her continuing need for maternal love and support, even in adulthood. This pits the need to save and protect herself against the continuing hope that, somehow, she can figure out what she can do to get her mother to love her.

This tug-of-war can go on for literally decades, with the daughter retreating and perhaps going no-contact for a period of time and then being pulled back into the maelstrom by the combination of her neediness, hopefulness, and denial. She may paper over her pain and make excuses for her mother’s behavior, because her eyes are on the prize: Her mother’s love. She puts herself on an ever-turning Ferris wheel, unable to dismount.

Those who concede the battle — going no contact, or limiting communication with their mothers and usually other family members — experience great loss along with relief. For the daughter to heal, this loss — the death of the hope that this essential relationship can be salvaged — needs to be mourned along with the mother she deserved.

The depth of the core conflict can be glimpsed in the anguish of those daughters who stay in the relationship precisely because they fear they will feel worse when their mothers die. 

In their book On Grief and Grieving, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler point out that the five stages of loss for which Kübler-Ross is famous — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — aren’t meant “to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages.” They instead emphasize that everyone experiences grief in a unique and individual way. Not everyone will go through each stage, for example, and the stages may not necessarily follow in the expected sequence. That said, the stages are still illuminating, especially when seen in the context of an unloved daughter’s journey out of childhood, and they make it clear why mourning is an essential part of healing.

Denial: As the authors write, “It is nature’s way of letting in as much as we can handle.” With the experience of great loss, denial helps cushion the immediate blow, allowing the person to pace the absorption of the reality. That’s true for death, but it also applies to the daughter’s recognition of her woundedness. That’s why it can take years or decades for the daughter to actually see her mother’s behavior with clarity. Counterintuitively, some women actually only see it in hindsight, after their mothers’ deaths.

Anger: In the wake of death, anger is the most accessible of emotions, directed at targets as various as the deceased for abandoning the loved one, God or the forces of the universe, the unfairness of life, doctors and the healthcare system, and more. Kübler-Ross and Kessler stress that beneath the anger lie other, more complex emotions, especially the raw pain of loss, and that the power of the grieving person’s anger may actually feel overwhelming at times.

Unloved daughters, too, go through a stage or even stages of anger as they work through their emotions toward recovery. Their anger may be directed squarely at their mothers for their treatment, at other family members who stood by and failed to protect them, and also at themselves for not recognizing the toxic treatment sooner.

Anger at the self, alas, can get in the way of the daughter’s ability to feel self-compassion; once again, it is the act of mourning the mother you deserved that permits self-compassion to take root and flower.

Bargaining: This stage has to do with impending death most usually — bargaining with God or making promises to change, thinking that “if only” we’d done x or y, we’d be spared the pain of loss. With death, this is a stage to be passed through toward acceptance of the reality. The unloved daughter’s journey is marked by years of bargaining, spoken or unspoken entreaties in the belief that if some condition is met, her mother will love and support her. She may embark on a course of pleasing and appeasing her mother or make changes to her behavior, looking in vain for the solution that will bring the desired end: Her mother’s love. Just as in the process of grief, it’s only when the daughter ceases to bargain that she can begin to accept the reality that she’s powerless to wrest what she needs from her mother.

Depression: In the context of a major loss, Kübler-Ross and Kessler are quick to point out that we are often impatient with the deep sadness or depression that accompanies it. As a society, we want people to snap out of it, or are quick to insist that if sadness persists, it deserves treatment. They write instead that in grief, “Depression is a way for nature to keep us protected by shutting down the nervous system so that we can adapt to something we feel we cannot handle.” They see it as a necessary step in the process of healing.

The terrain for the unloved daughter is equally tricky; it’s normal to feel sad, even depressed, by your mother’s treatment of you. This sadness is often given more depth by feelings of isolation — believing she is the only unloved girl in the world — and shame. The shame emerges from the mother myths (that all mothers are loving) and her worry that she’s to blame for how her mother treats her. Just as well-meaning people try to push and prod mourners out of this stage of grief, so too friends and acquaintances in whom the daughter confides may unwittingly marginalize her sadness, saying things like “It couldn’t have been so bad, because you turned out so well!” and other comments of that ilk.

Acceptance: Most importantly, Kübler-Ross and Kessler are quick to say that acceptance of the reality isn’t a synonym for being all right or even okay with that reality. That’s a key point. It’s about acknowledging the loss, identifying the permanent and even endlessly painful aspects of it, the permanent changes it’s made to your life and you, and learning to live with all of that from this day forward. In their view, acceptance permits us “to withdraw our energy from the loss and begin to invest in life.” Acceptance permits the mourner to forge new relationships and connections as part of their recovery.

All of this applies to unloved daughters as well, though acceptance remains, for many, somehow out of reach. This is why, once again, the need to mourn the mother you deserved is crucial.

What does it mean to mourn the mother you deserved? Just what it sounds like — to grieve the absence of a mother who listened to you, took pride in you, who needed you to understand her as well as she understood you, a woman willing to own up to her mistakes and not excoriate you for yours, and — yes — someone to laugh and cry with.

(”Daughters of Unloving Mothers: Mourning What You Deserved.” https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/tech-support/201703/daughters-unloving-mothers-mourning-what-you-deserved?page=1)

Dear One, if any or all of the above resonates with you, please consider seeking out support as you pursue healing. Remember, your children need you to be ok. Take care of you, Mama, and the real you will thrive and flourish in all of your interests, desires, roles, and relationships. Don’t allow the past to hold you back from being the most wonderful version of yourself.