Will I Ever Be Good Enough?: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers (15 page)

Because if everyone just turns out like their mother, then what’s the rat’s ass point?

—Elizabeth Strout,
Amy and Isabelle
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T
o become authentic and whole—this is the ultimate goal in recovering from a narcissistic mother. The next step for you to take toward this is to separate psychologically from Mother as an adult, so that you can grow your own internal emotional psyche. For when you grow your internal emotional being, you become resilient and strong. You can stand on your own. You can sustain yourself in the face of maternal deprivation, bear up under any negative litanies from your mother, and withstand criticism from anyone in the external environment. You will become a woman who can be around your mother and be away from her, and you will remain whole in both situations. This is the ability to be
a part of and apart from
at the same time, all the while keeping in steady access a solid sense of self.

Why Is Psychological Separation from Mother Important for Your Mental Health?

Individuation, a normal part of development, begins at about age two as a child begins to say “no” and “mine,” and continues throughout life as the child matures, develops her own wants, needs, and desires, and deliberately breaks away from her parents to form a healthy sense of self. Healthy parents allow this to happen gradually and naturally.

The individuation process is stunted for children of a narcissistic mother, because she has either engulfed or ignored them. An ignored child does not get her emotional needs met and cannot work on self and separation because she is still trying to fill up her own tank with Mother’s love. She keeps trying to merge with her mother like a small infant, trying to get Mother’s approval and attention. An engulfed child is discouraged from seeing herself as separate from her mother and from having individual needs, desires, thoughts, or feelings. Neither daughter’s emotional needs are met and each has difficulty in developing a sense of self. If you’ve grappled with issues of control over your own life and feelings, or you can’t enjoy your successes, you are struggling, like most daughters of narcissistic mothers, to separate and individuate. You are probably still searching for and developing the whole you.

For many years, at the times I felt overwhelmed, I had a favorite saying: “I’m too little for that.” I would find myself using it whenever I faced a big project or was up against a major life decision. One day it dawned on me that this was an unconscious expression of a much deeper reality. During a therapy session, while I was processing the breakup of a love relationship, my therapist innocently asked me why I had decided to stay in the house in which I’d lived with the man I was getting over. It seemed too big for just one person, so why did I not move and find my own smaller, more practical home that could be “just mine”? I remember feeling blank and numb, and responded, “I’m too little to move.” My therapist’s eyes glistened, and he smiled. I felt instantly defensive and annoyed, but he gently explained, “That’s the issue right there.”

I did feel “too little.” When you haven’t completed individuation with your mother, it leaves you unfinished and emotionally immature, a half person aspiring to become a whole person. If your emotional self has been stunted, it doesn’t grow in proportion to your physical, intellectual, and spiritual self. You have to heal in order to become whole.

Years ago, in times of stress, I would unconsciously recite the words “Oh, Mommy.” Thank goodness that impulse is gone, but I do remember how infantile and orphaned I felt. It makes me smile to write this today simply because I can acknowledge this and be grateful that I have grown beyond it.

Part of separating from your mother and childhood is ridding yourself of negative self-talk, such as, “I’m not good enough,” “I’m unlovable,” “I can’t trust myself.” Because you have internalized these messages, they speak to you now as your mother once did. Decide for yourself what those messages say, block them out, and override them. As you do this, you separate in a healthy way from your dysfunctional mother and her self-defeating belief system. You will recognize yourself as an individual woman.

• Gracie, 35, remembers her struggle to individuate with painful clarity. “It took me a long time to feel like a separate person from my mother. She merged into me and then it was all about her—no distance.”
  
• Marianne wants to be close to her family, but needs to maintain her hard-won sense of self. “I seem to do really well with my established sense of self until I get around my mother and the family and then it’s like I get sucked back into the old roles we all used to play. I want so badly to just be me even when I am around all of them.”
  

What Does Separation Mean, Exactly?

Psychological literature explains separation-individuation as defining a sense of self and as differentiation. Every person has to undertake individuation from her family of origin to grow up fully. Psychological separation is an internal process and has nothing to do with geographically separating from your mother or family of origin. According to renowned family therapist Dr. Murray Bowen, an adult can regard herself to be further along with her individuation process the more she (1) becomes less emotionally reactive to the family dynamics, (2) becomes more objective in observing the family dynamics, and (3) becomes aware of the “myths, images, distortions, and triangles” she had been blind to while growing up.
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As you undergo the acceptance and grief processes in the previous chapter, you can undertake these steps successfully. As Bowen states:

How Do I Release Myself from the Mother Orbit?

Releasing yourself from orbiting around your mother is the only way to gain true mastery over your life choices and to become who you are meant to be. I take my clients through the following three steps when they are moving through this stage of development: (1) understand how your mother projects feelings onto you; (2) understand and cope with envy from your mother and others; and (3) eradicate negative internalized messages. Let’s go through them together on the following pages.

PROJECTION

Projection is best understood as a process by which a person takes her own emotions and sees them as coming from someone else, believing that the other person actually originated those emotions. People do this when they are not dealing with their own pain or inner conflicts and blame other people for their own turmoil. Daughters of narcissistic mothers are generally the scapegoats for their mothers’ projections, including fragile ego and self-loathing. The daughter doesn’t understand this hatred and internalizes it so that she feels that she is bad or not good enough. Because this begins for the daughter at such a young age, it feels normal and real.

COPING WITH MOTHER’S ENVY

Daughters of narcissistic mothers commonly feel their mothers’ envy. It’s time to recognize and understand it. Many people believe that to be envied would be a desirable, powerful experience, but in reality being envied, particularly by one’s own mother, is unnerving and awful. The daughter’s sense of self is canceled by disdain and criticism. Her goodness is questioned or labeled bad or made light of, which causes her to feel like “her reality as a person is obliterated.”
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As the daughter analyzes what her mother appears jealous about—her looks, achievements, material wealth, weight, personality, friends, husband or boyfriend, or relationship with her father or siblings—she comes to feel unworthy. It makes no sense to the daughter that her own mother would have these bad feelings about her, and therefore she believes something is wrong with her.

Daughters typically have a difficult time coming to terms with being envied and being able to discuss it openly. I believe this is because they don’t want to appear arrogant in even thinking that someone could envy them. We can discuss our being jealous of someone or something, but to say we think someone is envious of us sounds haughty, eh? Daughters of narcissistic mothers usually do not see their own goodness enough to recognize envy for what it is, but believe they have done something wrong once again. Well, for you this envy was very real, particularly if you can recall specific comments, criticisms, and judgments your mother made about you or about things you did. You might have tried to make sense of them before, but it is important for you now to write down any comments that felt like envy. Seeing them in black and white in your journal will help you recognize the distortions that came your way and created an awful feeling inside your very soul.

If you blamed yourself for these comments and tried to right what seemed to you to be a misunderstanding, your efforts no doubt failed, for it is impossible to mend a narcissist’s distorted sense of envy. Envy just allows the insecure mother to feel temporarily better about herself. When she envies and then criticizes and devalues you, she cancels you out of her life and in this way diminishes the threat to her fragile self-esteem. Envy is a powerful tool in the narcissist’s repertoire, and you have likely seen it in your mother’s interactions with other people. When she directs it at you, however, it creates a feeling of helplessness and painful self-doubt.

To release yourself from your confusion and see the envy for what it is, recognize your own goodness and strength. Do not be spiteful or retaliate with ugliness. The envy that is thrown your way does not belong to you, and you do not have to identify with it. You can be real and feel the hurt and the sadness but not attack back or seek revenge. Hang on to the good that is within you. Most daughters I have worked with are not vengeful, so you most likely are not either. Is it any wonder that Cinderella is the favorite fairy tale mentioned by daughters of narcissistic mothers?

ERADICATING NEGATIVE MESSAGES

To rid yourself of negative messages, first think about how you make a wide range of decisions. Do you base your choices on information that you trust? Is that information usually from a reliable source? Do you typically have data that tell you that this source is someone on whom you can rely, someone with the credentials to be giving you advice or assistance? Have you generally had a good experience with this person and been able to trust his or her perceptions, information, and knowledge? Does this reliable source mostly treat you with respect and care about how you feel? Most likely your answer to each of these questions is yes.

I ask you, then, Is it wise to take those internalized messages from childhood and believe them, since they came from someone who was not authentic, loving, or empathetic, who could not establish an intimate emotional bond with you, who projected her own feelings onto you, as she was not in touch with her own emotions, and who was also envious of you? Why would you allow this person to define who you are? Consider the source. Remind yourself of this as you take a pen or go to a computer and identify and record those negative messages. Write them down in one column, and in another column, write about why they are simply not true. In doing so, you are redefining what you believe to be true about yourself. Is it really true, for example, that you are not good enough? Who says? You only have to be good enough for you!

Once you have identified the negative messages and have answered back, saying why they are not correct, your next task is to remember to do this same exercise whenever a message pops up in your mind. This way you will erase the old and put in the new—each time one appears in your mind. It will take some practice, but eventually your persistence will pay off.

Even though working this recovery program will bring you success, if you have difficulty getting rid of your internalized messages and need additional assistance, this is another time in your recovery that a therapist using Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) could help you. You would take your specific negative messages to your therapist, who will likely ask you to put a traumatic memory with each message for the EMDR therapy to be effective.

The Separation Criteria

How do you know when your real self has developed and has separated from orbiting with Mother? How do you know when you have successfully uncoupled from maternal dysfunction and are truly standing tall, strong, and able? James Masterson, in
The Search for the Real Self,
describes the key capacities of the real self.
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I have interpreted for daughters, below:

• The capacity to experience a wide range of feelings deeply with liveliness, joy, vigor, excitement, and spontaneity.
  You allow yourself to feel your authentic feelings and do not create barriers to numb the full gamut of human emotion. You allow yourself to express these feelings in appropriate ways.
  
• The capacity to expect appropriate entitlements.
  You believe in yourself, and are no longer filled with the angst of self-doubt, so you are freely giving yourself credit where credit is due.
  
• The capacity for self-activation and assertion.
  You can identify your dreams and desires and are able to set out to accomplish them while believing you can do it.
  
• The acknowledgment of self-esteem.
  You now believe you are worthy and can validate yourself regardless of external, worldly approval.
  
• The ability to soothe painful feelings.
  When life creates painful situations, you can comfort yourself, not wallow in misery, and can find solutions.
  
• The ability to make and stick to commitments.
  When decisions are right for you, you can stick to your guns and overcome obstacles, criticism, and setbacks.
  
• Creativity.
  You can find solutions to problems and be resourceful and also replace and defuse negatives with positives.
  
• Intimacy.
  You can express yourself fully and honestly in a close relationship with another person with minimal anxiety about abandonment or engulfment. You can create emotional intimacy without fear or anxiety about being abandoned or swallowed up.
  
• The ability to be alone.
  You can enjoy a relationship with yourself, be alone, and find meaning within.
  
• Continuity of self.
  Your inner core is real and remains the same through the trials and tribulations of life, and throughout the aging process.