How I Made Myself Invisible

I grew up being invisible to my mother. My mother had no idea how to listen to me or how to recognize that I was my own person, because she didn’t know how to listen to herself and acknowledge her own personhood. In my generational family women were invisible. My mother and grandmother learned early on in their lives that their only value as women was to embody the caregiving roles of being a wife, mother, and daughter. I know that my mother felt invisible and unimportant throughout her life, and she didn’t know how to voice these experiences. The only thing my mother knew to do, was to turn to me, her first-born daughter, and expect me to make her feel valued and happy, because that is what my grandmother asked my mother to do. In my generational family, mothers unconsciously ask their daughters to fill the emotional voids and ease the emotional pain they experience and don’t know how to voice or change.

This dynamic of daughters, usually the first-born daughter, being unconsciously asked by her mother to ease her mother’s pain is extremely common. And this dynamic is a direct result of how society emotionally neglects women. It is between mothers and daughters that we see how the emotional neglect of women gets played out. Daughters are often asked to carry the responsibility of their mother’s unsupported, uncared for, and unfulfilled life. The problem with this is that whilst the daughter is focused on easing her mother’s pain, she is not learning how to listen to and emotionally support herself, which means that history is repeating itself. The daughter is being set up to live an invisible, emotionally starved life, which will be her future daughter’s responsibility to “fix”.

It makes sense that I would marry into a family that only saw me as a caregiving wife and mother, having grown up believing that it was my duty to be my mother’s emotional helpmate. I can still remember the look of complete incomprehension when I responded to my mother-in-law’s insistence that I follow her rules with; “and what about what I want, what about my rules?” Her look of utter bewilderment woke me up a little. I saw her inability to understand that I could possibly have rules and needs of my own. But it still took me many more years to become fully awake to my rights. Because I had seen this look of utter incomprehension on my mother’s face countless times whenever I asserted myself, I internalized it. It became normal for me to not feel entitled to assert my own needs and rules in my relationships. It felt normal for people to not only not understand me when I talked about what I need and want, but to ignore me and to get angry whenever I didn’t follow their rules or whenever I was distracted from focusing on what they needed from me.

This wholescale silencing left me little choice but to silence myself. I didn’t know any other way to be. I had learned to see myself through my role as listener and emotional helpmate. I didn’t know how to be in a relationship in which my voice and needs were equally important. And if, on the rare occasion someone asked me what I needed or wanted, I would shrink away in horror. Not knowing the answer felt terrifying. The visibility felt terrifying. It felt foreign, suspicious even, so I would reject the inquirer and shrink back to my known world of being the invisible caregiver.

I continued this dynamic in my relationships until I became more fully awake to what I was doing in my late thirties and early forties. (I write about my journey in “The Silent Female Scream”) And recently I realized that I have been repeating this dynamic in my work as well. Even though I have created a highly successful private practice specializing in mothers and daughters and am a recognized world expert on the mother-daughter relationship, I have internalized how my counseling, psychotherapy, and coaching professions marginalize and undervalue the mother-daughter relationship. And I have internalized how my profession views men as thought leaders. Even though I see the many ways the mother-daughter relationship and female thought leaders like myself are dismissed and ignored, inside I have repeated the self-silencing and self-dismissal I learned from my mother. I have stepped away far too often and gone away to my own corner and focused on what I’m doing and stopped bothering the professional organizations and training courses that dismissed me. I learned from my mother to go away and do my own thing quietly so not to upset her, and I have been doing the same in my work. To be fair, it is soul destroying to keep putting your hand up and reaching out and receiving little to no response. It is hard to not internalize this as my fault when it isn’t. Just like with my mother and mother-in-law who saw my independence as a threat to their wellbeing, I am a thorn in my profession’s side that doesn’t appear to want to admit that they are knowingly marginalizing and devaluing women.

My mother died three years ago, and at 56 I thought that I had done enough work to shed the vestiges of my female family’s generational experience of being invisible. I should’ve known that this dynamic takes a lifetime to erase. I now see that I have been playing by my profession’s rules and colluded with their discomfort by going away and not bothering them. I need to make a nuisance of myself! The more I “lean in” as Sheryl Sandberg suggests, whether I get a response or not, I am realizing how I silence myself and that there is more support for my work than I realize. As in my relationships when I was in my twenties and thirties, I am seeing that I didn’t always recognize support when it was offered. Even though it is hard to look back and see the opportunities I might have missed, it feels good to be fully awake. My mind is clearer, my instincts are more acute, I can juggle different needs and opinions without suppressing my own, and I feel empowered to fight for the mother-daughter relationship’s right to be at the forefront of women’s lives. I feel less silence-able, both by people and organizations, and by myself.

Reprinted with permission from my American Counseling Association blog.