Will I Ever Be Good Enough?: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers (9 page)

According to the Dove study, only 2 percent of women describe themselves as beautiful and only 13 percent are satisfied with their body weight and shape. I have been quite impressed with the Dove gals who allowed themselves to be photographed in their underwear and even in some nude shots, and who seem to be breaking free from the cultural yoke of perfectionism. Yet thousands of other women will spend $5,000 to $6,000 to have the flab on their arms removed.
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Less invasive methods of retouching can be used with a camera made by Hewlett-Packard called Photosmart R-927, which has a slimming feature that digitally removes those ten pounds a camera supposedly tacks on.
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In some middle- and upper-middle-class families, it was customary for a girl to receive a car for her sixteenth birthday. Now, in many circles, the coming-of-age gift is a breast implant.

I started trying to offset the media assault for my own daughter when she was only five years old by telling her, “It’s what’s on the inside that counts.” One day, she and her five-year-old playmate were standing in front of a mirror primping and looking at their hair. Her little friend said, “Aren’t we pretty, Meggan?” My well-informed but too-young-to-understand daughter told her playmate, “My mommy says that it is nice that we are pretty, but it’s our guts and our veins that are really important!” Okay, perhaps I started a little early, but I was trying to give her an important message for the future.

Authentic Reflections

A young girl absorbs how to be a woman, wife, lover, friend, and mother from both her mother and her culture. When a healthy, secure mother assists her daughter in managing the cultural onslaught of image messages about celebrity, wealth, and perfect beauty, the daughter gets the correct message that healthy womanhood is about who she is—her value system, standards, courage, integrity, inner fortitude, capacity for love and empathy and her personal mode of conduct. But women who were taught that how they appear is more important than personal feelings, identity, values, and authenticity feel empty. Whenever I heard Tina Turner sing “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” I really wished that the message were “What’s
Beauty
Got to Do with It?” Love actually has everything to do with our healthy development.

In order to recover from this emptiness and image-oriented life view, the daughter of a narcissistic mother first has to learn how to tune in to who she is as a person. She begins sorting out the things that make her beautiful and unique and separating herself from the inauthentic, automatic reactions to people and her environment to which she has become accustomed. Before we begin these important steps of recovery, however, I want you to see how your childhood with a narcissistic mother has affected your decisions about career, relationships, parenting, and your place in the world. Join me, and together we will see some distinct patterns.

In the previous section we laid out the characteristics and dynamics of maternal narcissism. Now we will look at how these dynamics directly affect your life.

Daughters of narcissistic mothers absorb the message “I am valued for what I do, rather than for who I am.” As we mature, this potent credo can make us act in two wildly different ways: as high achievers and as self-saboteurs.

Being raised by a narcissistic mother has far-reaching effects that brand your soul. To excise this brand and become your own person, you will need to work through the recovery program in part 3. But first you need to identify which behavior pattern is yours.

THE HIGH-ACHIEVING DAUGHTER

T
he high-achieving daughter, whom I call Mary Marvel,
¹
embarks on a whirlwind of achievement, out to prove to her mother and to the world just how good she can be. “I am worthy,” she is trying to tell herself and her mother, “because of the extraordinarily impressive things I can accomplish.” She finds it difficult to love herself just for who she is. She bases her worth on her accomplishment and her busyness. When not accomplishing something she (or others) thinks is great, she feels worthless. The high achiever becomes a “human doing” rather than a “human being” who is accepted for and comfortable just being herself.

Such women appear to be superheroes, but their productivity and achievement don’t make them feel accomplished or comfortable on the inside. They never give themselves the credit they deserve and continually struggle with feelings of inadequacy. Constantly looking for more things they can do to prove themselves, they are often chronically exhausted, unaware of how this drive to achieve inhibits their ability to take care of themselves. Mary Marvels can be highly educated and professional or stay-at-home, perfectionist homemakers, but they feel nothing they do is ever good enough.

Are you a Mary Marvel? One way to identify whether you are is to look at how you define yourself. Do you typically describe yourself as who you are: “I am a loving, kind person who strives to be honest and to live a life that contributes to society in some significant way”? Or is your identity more closely tied to what you do: “I am a CEO for a large manufacturing firm, I am a business owner, I am an attorney, or I am a mother of four and a Girl Scout leader who also teaches Sunday school”?

You might have learned that you had to be a doer for your mother in order to be accepted or approved. If your mother was an “accomplishment-oriented” narcissist, as discussed in chapter 3, you grew up emulating this role model and following the rule that you had to “achieve to be worthy.” Even though this was expected of you, however, your accomplishments don’t really make you feel good about yourself. For no matter how much you try to accomplish and perform, you still hear the internal message: It’s not enough.

This attitude is frustrating, sad, and difficult. There is always a push to do more, but doing more makes you feel better about yourself only temporarily. So you up the ante, hoping somehow that it
will
work in the end. Most daughters of narcissistic mothers don’t understand the origins of this impulse, but feel they need to keep it up. As Pressman and Pressman say in their book,
The Narcissistic Family
, “The roots of workaholism are truly sown in narcissistic homes; ‘I do, therefore I am’ could be the motto of many adult children from these homes.”
²

• Rosa is a pretty but harried-looking woman who is constantly doing more than her fair share of work within any group. She explains, “I have to work so hard to justify just being here—have to do and do and do.”
  
• Mother of three and a college professor, Jerilyn started on her path during the early years. She relates, “I’ve been doing this race for the good since I was a kid. Straight A’s, AP classes in high school, every sport offered, in all the music programs, honors programs, straight to college and then on to grad school. It all looks great, but somehow it feels like I am trying to prove something to justify my existence.”
  

I have to admit this category fits me. Sometimes I have been able to give myself credit for what I have accomplished, but even when I’ve done so, I still feel something might be missing. Throughout my life, it would actually make me angry when others asked why I was doing something more—another degree, another business idea, another major project. You yourself probably won’t really be able to explain it to yourself until you complete recovery and uncover all the dynamics behind it. We daughters may try to explain ourselves as being type A personalities, or just overly ambitious. But inside, we know that our personal rat race has another cause. A recurring dream I had in my early years before graduate school illustrates this unconscious compulsion always to work harder and get it right:

I am standing in front of a mirror in the bedroom trying to get dressed. As I am trying on several different outfits in arduous, frustrating slow motion, nothing looks right or is working correctly. I keep changing clothes, regardless. A voice in the hall outside the bedroom is calling me: “Come on, you’re okay just the way you are.”

I misinterpreted this dream for years, thinking it had something to do with my husband’s impatience with me when we were getting ready to go somewhere. I ultimately realized, however, that the voice in the hall was my intuition calling to me, voicing the validation that I am okay as I am.

So, What Does This Mean?

If you fit the description of a Mary Marvel, you may be asking the question “But what if my choices are mine and I am doing what I want, although it just happens to be a higher level of achievement than many people care to pursue? Is this wrong?” Of course, a significant number of high achievers
are
doing things they really want to do. Many daughters of narcissistic mothers who took the Mary Marvel route are truly accomplished, amazing women, and I honor their multitude of talents. In fact, sometimes the narcissistic mother’s legacy ends up being a gift that provides you with an inner drive that others may not have. One woman, an exceptionally talented artist, explained it this way:

If you are a high achiever pursuing your chosen life dreams,
and
you are giving yourself credit and taking good care of yourself in the process, you are doing it
so
right. High achievement becomes a problem only when you:

• Have medical or mental health problems associated with not taking care of yourself.
  
• Seek only external validation to define your self-worth.
  
• Find that you cannot give yourself credit for what you accomplish in all aspects of your life.
  

Let’s look at each of these Mary Marvel pitfalls so that you can make sure they have not entrapped you or, if they have, so that you can take steps to climb out of them.

Lack of Self-Care

Busyness or workaholism can be a form of self-destructive behavior similar to alcoholism and drug or food addiction. It works the same to numb the pain. If you become chronically exhausted, and find that you can’t slow down, and are beginning to have health problems, it is time to take an inventory of whether or not your activities fit your own value system (rather than your mother’s or your internalized critic) and whether they are healthy for you. Looking strong and invulnerable on the outside may be an attempt to escape the emptiness and pain of feelings of unworthiness on the inside. Here are some women who have begun to come to terms with this behavior:

• Summer feels valued for what she does rather than who she is. “I’m a workhorse. I’m like this because my mother trained me to be. I don’t know how to stop. It’s affecting my health. I have MS, nine breast biopsies in the past few months, irritable bowel syndrome, can’t keep weight on, and arthritis. I work full time, have a side business of four accounting clients, am a Girl Scout troop leader for my daughters, youth athletic coach, make jewelry, and can vegetables. Everybody looks at me for what I do, not realizing there is a
  me
  inside of there too. I can’t sit down. It feels like I am leaping small buildings in a single bound and if I sit down, I will crash.”
  
• Bernie looks at her overachieving with some regret. “I never called in sick at work even when I felt awful. Every job I had, I gave 100 percent. In fact, anything I do gets 100 percent. This is all that makes me good enough. Raising my daughters, sometimes I gave too much to my job when I should have been home with them. I have some regrets about this now, as well as a new diagnosis of fibromyalgia.”
  
• Marlo, 45, tells me, “I am an overachiever, a perfectionist type A with my job, with keeping a meticulous house, with constantly having new goals that I want to obtain. I never feel it is good enough and always that I have to do more. I have constant feelings of anxiety, worry, and excessive stress.”
  

Once you recognize that you are trying to patch up your vulnerability with various modes of achievement, you will see that you have been shortchanging yourself and those you love. Then you’ll be able to take steps to change.

Internal Versus External Validation

The need for validation can be a catch-22. If a child did not receive validation in her early developmental years, and as a young woman is not able to validate herself, she often succumbs to the lure of doing more and trying harder in ways that bring validation from others. This is an unconscious seduction because Mary Marvels are almost always highly skilled and competent. It is therefore not difficult to obtain external validation from friends, family, work, or society in general. The praise appears to fill the emptiness, but relying on external praise can create anxiety. Because it is
external
validation, the daughter does not own it or control it and it can be taken away from her at any time. If she does not continue to accomplish, it will also disappear.

When you learn to rely on yourself for validation, on the other hand, you rest peacefully at night. You will be learning more about how to do this in the recovery section of the book, but let’s look closely now at why you find it so difficult to give yourself credit.

Am I Arrogant?

Many daughters are afraid to give themselves credit. On the rare occasions when they do, they feel as if they are behaving like a narcissist or at the very least, acting arrogant, like their mothers. If you are worried about emulating your mother in this way, remind yourself that the true narcissist has “a grandiose sense of self-importance, e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements.”
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The narcissist is arrogant in disingenuous ways, and most times with nothing to back up the bragging spree. She needs to make herself look bigger than she really is because she feels inadequate. But most high-achieving, Mary Marvel daughters have a ton of very real achievements because they have worked so hard. It is not narcissistic to be proud of your achievements and accomplishments. You do not need to brag, but give
yourself
the credit you deserve. By giving yourself credit where credit is due, you can help slow down the rat race of do, do, do. Feel good about what you have already done.

Am I an Impostor?

Another reason high-achieving Mary Marvels have difficulty giving themselves internal praise is a fear called the “impostor syndrome.” Someone who suffers from the impostor syndrome is unable to accept and claim her accomplishments, no matter what level of success she has achieved or maintained. She may have abundant proof of her hard-won accomplishments, including wealth and material goods, but remains convinced that she either doesn’t deserve her success or that she is just a fraud. She dismisses outward signs of accomplishments as just luck or good timing. An “impostor” usually feels as if she has been deceptive, having made others think she is more intelligent or skilled than she believes herself to be. Most people who admit to feeling like impostors are women, although there is some evidence that many men feel this way too.

High-achieving daughters of narcissistic mothers are at great risk for the impostor syndrome because we were raised to feel we were never good enough. When a woman does not feel worthy internally, she believes that she is undeserving and cannot accept success or recognition.

• Lonnie, 46, a very bright, accomplished owner of her own clothing company, puts it this way: “I have a knack for appearing competent when I don’t think I really am. I’m always worried that someone will find out that I’m not really very good at my job. I just know how to put on a good show. This bothers me and I know someday someone will find this out and call me a fake.”
  
• Ellen, 57, a successful real estate agent, does not attribute her success to her own efforts: “Every time I make a big sale, even though I know I worked my butt off, I regard it as luck or just a fluke that the money came my way once again and predict that the next time will be a failure.”
  
• Karena, 38, recalls how she felt right after receiving her Ph.D.: “I actually wrote that damn dissertation, but believe me, I won’t ever let anyone read it. I don’t want anyone to see how dumb it sounds. It is amazing I got that degree. Maybe my field is a particularly easy one or the professors felt they had to pass me after all this time.”
  

In the above examples, you see how women discount their real successes. In addition to these tendencies, high-achieving daughters tend to disparage themselves and play down their positive attributes because they fear that someone will find them arrogant. This behavior is a holdover from growing up as the target of Mother’s envy.