Why Daughters of Difficult Mothers Aren’t Just Complaining About Mom

Are you just complaining about mom?

Most adult daughters of difficult mothers I see in psychotherapy are not just complaining about mom. If anything they want to feel love from their mothers. When Mom is limited or impaired and can’t provide the love and support her daughter needs, she bears a burden few can understand.

Here is what I have witnessed in my psychotherapy practice ( in the video above).

If you’d rather read- transcript- 

You know, after a day of seeing daughters of difficult mothers, I would like to scrap… if I could… once and for all the myth that daughter’s just like to complain about their moms. 

It’s not one thing it’s your mom, right? Accompanied by an eye roll.

My experience, time after time is that daughters who have difficult narcissistic, histrionic, borderline insecure, addicted moms…,  feel an incredible deep shame.

The shame is misplaced, but it’s real because of their mom’s odd behavior, unloving behavior, or criticism of them.

They bring up it up in psychotherapy and it stings. It’s not something they’re like, I can’t wait to put on Facebook or tell the world.

New Speaker:                      01:05                       No, they feel a deep shame about….. this is their mom, you know, how could mom who loves me or should love me treat me so badly and the conclusion that they come two more times than not is  I was unlovable, I didn’t deserve it.

Speaker 1:                              01:33                       And that becomes the problem because when they don’t value themselves,

New Speaker:                      01:52                       And when I look into the face of my adult clients, I see the child in them and you know, their eyes lower and they like in a flash, remember something just unbelievable that their mom said or did, and they usually notice it doesn’t happen with their friends.

New Speaker:                      02:17                       Um, but it’s deeply shameful to them. I have not seen in my practice of 30 years… women who say my mother is a narcissist. She she does this, this, this, and this.

New Speaker:                      02:35                       Maybe that’s happened, but not, none of that is coming to mind right now. So I’d like to bust this myth that, you know, adult daughters just enjoy complaining about their mothers, not when their mothers have serious difficulty and have related to them in ways that sting and hurt.

Are you suffering from the Good Daughter Syndrome? Take the quiz here, it’s free –