Will I Ever Be Good Enough?: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers (3 page)

9. Shows arrogance, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

(Example: The mother who believes that her children are too good to play with other children who have fewer material luxuries.) Jackie’s mother allowed her to associate only with children from moneyed families because most people were not “good enough” for her well-heeled children.
²

Each of these nine traits is exhibited through behaviors that say “It’s all about me” and “You’re not good enough.” Narcissists lack empathy and are unable to show love. They appear to have a superficial emotional life, and their world is image-oriented, concerned with how things look to others. If your mother exhibits many of the above narcissistic traits, you may usually feel that she doesn’t really know you because she never takes the time to focus on who you really are. We daughters of narcissistic mothers believe we have to be there for them—and that it is our role to attend to their needs, feelings, and desires—even as young girls. We don’t feel that we matter to our mothers otherwise.

Without empathy and love from her mother, a daughter lacks a true emotional connection and therefore feels that something is missing. Her essential emotional needs are unmet. In severe cases of maternal narcissism, where neglect or abuse is involved, the most basic level of parental care is missing. In more subtle cases, daughters grow up feeling empty and bereft and don’t understand why. My goal is to help you understand why you feel as you do and free you to feel better.

When Mothers Don’t Bond with Their Daughters

As we grow through each stage of development, when our parents nurture and love us, we grow up feeling secure—our emotional needs are being met. But when a daughter does not receive this nurturing, she grows up lacking emotional confidence and security, and must figure out a way to gain these by herself—not an easy task when she doesn’t know why she always feels empty to begin with.

Normally, a mother interacts with her baby and responds to her every movement, utterance, and need. She thus fosters a solid bond of trust and love. The child learns to trust her mother to provide her with physical necessities, emotional warmth, compassion, and approval, which allows her to develop self-reliance. But a mother without compassion, who fails to forge a bond with her daughter, provides for that daughter only when it is in the mother’s best interest. Her daughter thus learns that she can’t depend on her mother. She grows up apprehensive, worried about abandonment, expecting deceit at every turn.

A striking example of the effect of maternal narcissism is exemplified in a dream told to me by my client Gayle. The dream has recurred throughout her lifetime, beginning when she was a child and continuing into her adult life.

After reporting this dream, Gayle said to me sadly, “If my own mother can’t love me, who can?” Gayle came to understand that the horse in the dream represented her longing for a fantasy mother, the one she wished she had, as well as her real mother, who typically turned away and did not respond to her needs for love and approval.

It’s a natural human feeling to long for a mother who loves everything about you absolutely and completely. It’s normal to want to lay your head on your mother’s breast and feel the security and warmth of her love and compassion. To imagine her saying, “I’m here for you, baby,” when you reach out for her. We all need more than the roof over our head, food to eat, and clothes to wear: We need the unconditional love of a trusted, loving parent.

My sixty-year-old client, Betty, reported that she still wishes she had a good mother but pragmatically gave up on that a long time ago. “I used to cry myself to sleep wishing I just had that mother to love me and make me a pot of soup.”

Cerena, a beautiful thirty-year-old friend of my daughter, was chatting with me one day about her mother and also telling me about her therapy. She encapsulated the longing for maternal love in her statement “When I am talking to my therapist, sometimes I want to jump into her lap, curl up on the couch with her, and pretend she is the mommy I never had.”

The feelings expressed by Gayle, Betty, and Cerena typify the longing for maternal love that daughters of narcissistic mothers experience. As you learn more about maternal narcissism and how to recover from its effects, you’ll gain a healthy appreciation and love for yourself and know how to fill that old emotional void.

Hello, Hope…Good-bye, Denial

Motherhood is still idealized in our culture, which makes it especially hard for daughters of narcissistic mothers to face their past. It’s difficult for most people to conceive of a mother incapable of loving and nurturing her daughter, and certainly no daughter wants to believe that of her own mother. Mother’s Day is this country’s most widely observed holiday, celebrating an unassailable institution. A mother is commonly envisioned as giving herself fully to her children, and our culture still expects mothers to tend to their families unconditionally and lovingly, and to maintain an enduring emotional presence in their lives—available and reliable no matter what.

Even though this idealized expectation is impossible for most mothers to meet, it places mothers on a heroic pedestal that discourages criticism. It is therefore psychologically wrenching for any child—or adult child—to examine and discuss her mother frankly. It is especially difficult for daughters whose mothers don’t conform at all to the saintly maternal archetype. Attributing any negative characteristic to Mom can unsettle our internalized cultural standards. Good girls are taught to deny or ignore negative feelings, to conform to society’s and their family’s expectations. They’re certainly discouraged from admitting to negative feelings about their own mothers. No daughter wants to believe her mother to be callous, dishonest, or selfish.

I believe almost all mothers harbor good intentions toward their daughters. Unfortunately, some are incapable of translating those intentions into the kind of sensitive support that daughters need to help them through life. In an imperfect world, even a well-meaning mother can be flawed and an innocent child unintentionally harmed.

Once we daughters begin to face the painful truth that maternal narcissism does indeed exist, we can start to address the disturbing emotional patterns that we have developed throughout our lives. You can courageously look at your past and heal from it by honestly facing up to these tough questions:

• Why do I feel unlovable?
  
• Why do I never feel good enough?
  
• Why do I feel so empty?
  
• Why do I always doubt myself?
  

You can feel better and find a better way to live. You can understand what maternal narcissism did to you and decide to nurture yourself and feel good about who you are, in spite of it. You can also prevent your own children from undergoing what you went through. Every woman deserves to feel worthy of love. It is my hope that as you come to understand how narcissistic mothers treat their daughters, and as you gain support from the stories and advice you read, you will acquire the strength to break free from the longing for a mother you never had. Instead, you will be able to nurture and love the woman you have become.

So, before you proceed further, please answer the questions in the survey that follows so that you have a clearer idea of the extent of your own mother’s narcissism. Even if your mother does not have all nine traits of a fully blown narcissistic personality disorder, her narcissism has no doubt hurt you.

Questionnaire: Does Your Mother Have Narcissistic Traits?

Mothers with only a few traits can negatively affect their daughters in insidious ways. (Check all those that apply to your relationship with your mother—now or in the past.)

1. When you discuss your life issues with your mother, does she divert the discussion to talk about herself?
   
2. When you discuss your feelings with your mother, does she try to top the feelings with her own?
   
3. Does your mother act jealous of you?
   
4. Does your mother lack empathy for your feelings?
   
5. Does your mother support only those things you do that reflect on her as a good mother?
   
6. Have you consistently felt a lack of emotional closeness with your mother?
   
7. Have you consistently questioned whether or not your mother likes you or loves you?
   
8. Does your mother do things for you only when others can see?
   
9. When something happens in your life (accident, illness, divorce), does your mother react with how it will affect her rather than how you feel?
   
10. Is your mother overly conscious of what others think (neighbors, friends, family, coworkers)?
    
11. Does your mother deny her own feelings?
    
12. Does your mother blame things on you or others rather than own responsibility for her own feelings or actions?
    
13. Is your mother hurt easily and does she carry a grudge for a long time without resolving the problem?
    
14. Do you feel you were a slave to your mother?
    
15. Do you feel you were responsible for your mother’s ailments or sickness (headaches, stress, illness)?
    
16. Did you have to take care of your mother’s physical needs as a child?
    
17. Do you feel unaccepted by your mother?
    
18. Do you feel your mother is critical of you?
    
19. Do you feel helpless in the presence of your mother?
    
20. Are you shamed often by your mother?
    
21. Do you feel your mother knows the real you?
    
22. Does your mother act like the world should revolve around her?
    
23. Do you find it difficult to be a separate person from your mother?
    
24. Does your mother want to control your choices?
    
25. Does your mother swing from egotistical to depressed mood?
    
26. Does your mother appear phony to you?
    
27. Did you feel you had to take care of your mother’s emotional needs as a child?
    
28. Do you feel manipulated in the presence of your mother?
    
29. Do you feel valued by your mother for what you do, rather than for who you are?
    
30. Is your mother controlling, acting like a victim or martyr?
    
31. Does your mother make you act different from how you really feel?
    
32. Does your mother compete with you?
    
33. Does your mother always have to have things her way?
    

Note: All of these questions relate to narcissistic traits. The more questions you checked, the more likely your mother has narcissistic traits and this has caused some difficulty for you as a daughter and an adult.

MY MOTHER AND ME

W
hen you grow up in a family where maternal narcissism dominated, as an adult you go through each day trying your hardest to be a “good girl” and do the right thing. You believe that if you do your best to please people, you’ll earn the love and respect you crave. Still, you hear familiar inner voices delivering negative messages that weaken your self-respect and confidence.

If you are a daughter of a narcissistic mother, you likely have heard the following internalized messages repeatedly throughout your life:

• I’m not good enough.
  
• I’m valued for what I do rather than for who I am.
  
• I’m unlovable.
  

Because you have heard such self-negating messages year after year—messages that are the result of inadequate emotional nurturing when you were little:

• You feel emptiness inside, and a general lack of contentment.
  
• You long to be around sincere, authentic people.
  
• You struggle with love relationships.
  
• You fear you will become like your mother.
  
• You worry about being a good parent.
  
• You have great difficulty trusting people.
  
• You feel you had no role model for being a healthy, well-adjusted woman.
  
• You sense that your emotional development is stunted.
  
• You have trouble being a person separate from your mother.
  
• You find it difficult to experience and trust your own feelings.
  
• You feel uncomfortable around your mother.
  
• You find it difficult to create an authentic life of your own.
  

Even if you experience only a few of these feelings, that’s a lot of anxiety and discomfort to carry around. As you learn more about the mother-daughter dynamic associated with maternal narcissism, it will become clear to you how you came to feel as you do.

My research into maternal narcissism identified ten common relationship issues that occur between mothers and daughters when the mother is narcissistic. You may relate to all or only some of these issues, depending on where your mother falls on the maternal narcissism spectrum, from a few traits to the full-blown narcissistic personality disorder.

Let’s take a look at these ten mother-daughter dynamics associated with maternal narcissism, which I refer to as “the ten stingers.” To help us better understand how these dynamics get played out in real life, I’ve illustrated them with clinical examples from my practice as well as instances from popular culture.

T
HE
T
EN
S
TINGERS

1. You find yourself constantly attempting to win your mother’s love, attention, and approval, but never feel able to please her.

Both big and little girls want to please their mothers and feel their approval. Beginning early in life, it is important for children to receive attention, love, and approval—but the approval needs to be for
who they are as individuals,
not for what their parents want them to be. But narcissistic mothers are highly critical of their daughters, never accepting them for who they are.

• If Madison Avenue ever needed to come up with a commercial aimed at daughters of narcissistic mothers, my client Jennifer could have provided them with the perfect image. During our first session, she told me that she felt like standing on a street corner holding a sign that read “Will Work for Love.” Jennifer recalled always trying hard to please her mother, but one story from her childhood was particularly telling. One day in a department store, she watched her mother hold a beautiful little coin purse and understood how much her mother wanted it. She vowed somehow to get it for her, even though she was only eight years old and it was expensive. She skipped lunches at school for weeks on end until she had saved enough money to buy the elegant purse for her mom. She wrapped it in shiny red paper and saved the surprise for Christmas. On Christmas morning, she eagerly awaited her mother’s reaction to the gift, but was crushed when her mom accused her of stealing it and threw it across the room, screaming, “I don’t want a gift from a thief!”
  
• Mindy describes herself as a “messy type” and her mother as “Ms. Anal Retentive—a clean freak.” She told me, “I tried for years to be clean and organized to get her approval, but I am not like her. I am right-brained. I try to keep things organized and neat, but clutter happens to me against my will. I guess I’m the creative type, and she didn’t like that. I’m now fifty years old, and still when Mom comes to visit, she can’t withhold her disapproval if the newspapers are scattered across the living room floor.”
  
• Lynette never could get her mother’s approval. Her mom was an accomplished pianist, and Lynette strove to be just like her. Although she spent years studying piano and giving recitals, she could never live up to her mom’s expectations. “Mom still clucks when I make mistakes,” she told me. Lynette decided that maybe her choice of boyfriend would finally do the trick. “When I met my husband, I thought to myself, Wait till she meets this guy. She’ll love him and be happy that I chose him. I was hoping that she would adore him and that would finally give me the approval I needed. But after meeting him, she actually asked me if I thought he was cute, because she thought he looked a little rough around the edges and not as refined as she had hoped.”
  
• Bridget remembers giving her mother gifts to prove her love. She felt particularly sad about a Mother’s Day plaque she gave her mom, with the phrase “World’s Best Mom” printed on it. “Mom really didn’t like it. She hung it up for a while and then took it down and gave it back to me. Mom said it didn’t fit her decor when she redecorated her kitchen. I still have it. I just gave up after a while.”
  

2. Your mother emphasizes the importance of how it looks to her rather than how it feels to you.

“It’s much better to look good than to feel good” could easily be a narcissistic mother’s mantra. Looking good to friends, family, and neighbors, rather than feeling good inside, is what’s most important to her. A narcissistic mother sees you as an extension of herself, and if you look good, so does she. It may appear on the surface that she is concerned about you, but at the end of the day it is really all about her and the impression she makes upon others. How you look and act is important to her only because it reflects her own tenuous self-worth. Whenever you are not on display and can’t be seen by others, you become less visible to her. Sadly, how you feel inside is not really important to her.

• Twenty-eight-year-old Constance tells me, “My mother is involved in every aspect of my life: how skinny I am, the clothes I wear, the right hair color, even my career. I’ve never been fat, but she put me on diet pills when I was 12 and started doing my makeup for me when I was 15, explaining, ‘Men leave women who let themselves go.’ When I disagree with her taste, she demeans and criticizes me. Even now as an adult, when I go home I make sure to have my ‘mother look’ in place. I starve myself for two weeks before the visit to be thin enough.”
  
• Gladys reported moments in her childhood when her mother tried to be a good mom. “But she could never just put her arms around me to comfort me. One time I had lost out on an audition for a high school play, and I felt sorely dejected. I just needed a hug. I think she felt bad for me, but she couldn’t tune in to my feelings. Instead, she did the strangest thing. She went out and bought me some go-go boots and proudly announced that if I felt bad inside, at least I could look good the next day at school. Now I wonder if she was the one who was embarrassed that I lost the audition.”
  

3. Your mother is jealous of you.

Mothers are usually proud of their children and want them to shine. But a narcissistic mother may perceive her daughter as a threat. You may have noticed that whenever you draw attention away from your mother, you’ll suffer retaliation, put-downs, and punishments. A narcissistic mother can be jealous of her daughter for many reasons: her looks, material possessions, accomplishments, education, and even the girl’s relationship with her father. This jealousy is particularly difficult for her daughter, as it carries a double message: “Do well so that Mother is proud, but don’t do too well or you will outshine her.”

• Samantha has always been the petite one in the family. She says that most of her relatives are overweight, including her mother, who is obese. When Samantha was 22, her mother ripped her clothes out of the closet and threw them to the bedroom floor, exclaiming, “Who can wear a size four these days? Who do you think you are? You must be anorexic, and we’d better get you some help!”
  
• Felice, 32, told me, “My mother always wanted me to be pretty, but not too pretty. I had a cute little waist, but if I wore a belt that defined my waistline, she told me I looked like a slut.”
  
• Mary sadly reported, “Mom tells me I’m ugly, but then I am supposed to go out there and be drop-dead gorgeous! I was a homecoming queen candidate and Mom acted proud with her friends but punished me. There’s this crazy-making message: The real me is ugly, but I am supposed to fake it in the real world? I still don’t get it.”
  
• When Addie was in high school, she was interested in a modeling career and started to investigate modeling schools and programs. She landed some fun modeling jobs for local department stores and was very excited to be doing something she loved. Her mother’s jealousy, however, got in the way of Addie’s dreams. Mom got on the Internet, found some over-forty beauty contests, and asked Addie to enter her in them. Addie did so, and Mom won one of the contests. The next year’s family Christmas card was a picture of Mom in the beauty contest with a blurb she’d written about never being too old to do what you want in life. Addie never said anything to her mom but was deeply disappointed and embarrassed. She never followed through with her own ambition to pursue a modeling career, because the competition with her mother felt too overwhelming. When recalling this incident in therapy, Addie said sadly, “It never got to be about me.”
  
• Laura, 50, was the youngest daughter in the family and had a close relationship with her father. “But Mom didn’t want me to be around him; it was like she was jealous of our relationship because she always needed the focus to be on her! She used to say things like, ‘You love your father and not me, and you will do anything for your father.’” I think that what Laura’s mom really meant was that she felt threatened by the attention that her husband was showing their daughter. Laura told me that her mother once threw rocks at her and her father while they were planting flowers together in the yard.
  

4. Your mother does not support your healthy expressions of self, especially when they conflict with her own needs or threaten her.

When children are growing up, they need to be able to experience new things and learn to make decisions about what they like and don’t like. This is partly how we develop a sense of self. When mothers are narcissistic, they control their child’s interests and activities so that they revolve around what the mothers find interesting, convenient, or nonthreatening. They do not encourage what their daughters truly want or need. This can even extend to a daughter’s decision to have a child of her own.

• In the movie
  Terms of Endearment,
  the family is at the dinner table when the daughter announces that she is pregnant. Her mother screams and runs from the room, saying that she is not ready to be a grandmother. Clearly, the daughter’s pregnancy is not about her—it’s all about her mother!
  ²
  
• Like the daughter in the film, Jeri’s ability to express herself was inhibited by her mother’s inability to see beyond her own needs. Jeri was always artistic as a child and began winning awards for her art in the third grade. Later she won an award for a painting that included a full scholarship to an art school, but she never took advantage of it. “I never got to use the scholarship,” Jeri told me, “because my mother didn’t want to drive me to the school. She thought it was a hassle.”
  
• Ruby longed to be involved in various school activities, but when she got the lead in the school musical, her mother was furious. “You don’t have time to go to all of those rehearsals! You won’t be able to get everything else done around here,” she screamed. Her mother made Ruby do all the household chores each day before she could even begin her schoolwork, let alone memorize her lines in the play. Ruby’s mother gave her a hard time throughout the rehearsal period of the play, but when the night of the performance came around and Ruby did a good job in spite of her mother, Mom threw a huge party for her own friends to celebrate “my daughter the star.” Yet none of Ruby’s friends were invited to the party and Ruby’s mother somehow forgot to tell her she did a good job.
  
• A mother can feel so threatened by her daughter’s success that she won’t even bring herself to attend a graduation. Maria told me that her mom gave the excuse that she couldn’t attend Maria’s college graduation because it was too hot that day. Maria wasn’t surprised; her mother had never shared any of the trust fund money left by Maria’s late father but had used it on herself, rather than helping her daughter pay for college as her father had intended. “I had to work my ass off to put myself through college and never got a dime from her,” Maria told me.
  

5. In your family, it’s always about Mom.

Even though “It’s all about Mom” is one of the central themes throughout this book, I’ve added this stinger here to illustrate some specific examples of how this plays out in the mother-daughter connection. Narcissistic mothers are so self-absorbed that they don’t recognize how their behavior affects other people, particularly their own children. My own mother recently acted out this fifth dynamic, but this time I knew how to handle it. While I was in the midst of deadlines writing this book, my mom wanted me to come visit her and my dad in their new home. Not only had they just recently visited me in our home, but, as I had explained to her, this was a very busy time for me writing as well as running a full-time practice. I made it clear to her that a better time for me would be after I’d completed more work on the book. She responded with, “We all have goals and some of them don’t get done. You need to start doing some things that ordinary people do.” In other words, it didn’t matter what important things were going on in my life at the moment; it was all about what she wanted me to do: visit her. In years past, I would have done what my mom wanted me to do regardless of how it worked for me, my schedule or my finances. Thank God for recovery! This time around I held my ground and told her I’d visit when the time was right.