Mothers & Daughters

When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends

"The more we idealise the past... and refuse to acknowledge our childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation" - Alice Miller" PhD

Victoria Secunda investigates the coping mechanisms that daughters took on to counteract the ways that their mothers controlled them. It important to note, she explains, that daughters should not feel ashamed that they relied on these coping mechanisms, rather to admire them - because they worked - they enabled them to make it to adulthood.

Ways in which unpleasable mothers "control"
(p79)

• through neediness (Doormat)
• through rigidity and corrections (Critic)
• through enmeshing (Smotherer) "to destroy life by depriving it of air"
• through fear (Avenger)
• through silence/abandonment (Deserter)

Daughters react to those mothers in patterns of their own, adopted to make sense of the friction, to give it some balance by "pleasing"

p180

• by serving (Angel)
• by being ambitious (Superachiever)
• by caving in (Cipher)
• by being the scapegoat (Trouble maker)
• by getting out (Defector)

The book discusses how these coping mechanisms spillover into our adulthood, by "duplicating the past in our adult relationships", a phenomenon known as "the repetition compulsion". This coping mechanism affects our co-workers on the job, friends, partners and spouses.

The book ends with an investigation into ways to break the cycle, redefine the mother-daughter relationship, and end with a possibility of three outcomes: friendship, truce or divorce.

Time for Introspection:

Are your coping mechanisms affecting your job, friends, partners? Are you still the Angel, Superachiever, Cipher, Troublemaker or Defector?

Highly recommended for all daughters!