How Marital Conflict Causes Mother-Daughter Conflict
We all know that conflict between a husband and wife affects the entire family, and that children of all ages are deeply impacted when their parents fight. What isn’t widely known is how parental conflict can cause conflict between a mother and daughter. In this blog I examine how the bond between a mother and daughter of any age can be adversely affected by parental conflict.
Understanding this mother-daughter dynamic starts with an appreciation of how the mother-daughter bond mirrors how women are treated by their family, culture, and society. How a mother and daughter of any age relate, tells the wider story of the emotional impact of when women are silenced, emotionally neglected, and expected to comply with limiting gender role stereotypes that restrict their choice and power. In brief, conflict between a mother and daughter tells the story of women’s generational experience with sexism and patriarchy, and how patriarchal beliefs harm a mother’s and daughter’s ability to listen to and support each other. I write about this in “The Mother-Daughter Puzzle”.
“Women’s generational experience with sexism and gender inequality is the root cause of why mothers and daughters fight, misunderstand each other, and emotionally disconnect. In every mother-daughter relationship I work with, I see how mothers and daughters are set up for conflict. The background from which their struggle emerges are the ways mothers are expected to be selfless caretakers, the silencing of women’s voices and emotional needs, and restrictive gender roles that limit women’s choices and freedom. When women’s voices are silenced by their family, culture, and wider society, mothers and daughters end up fighting over who gets to be heard.”
It makes sense that when a mother is silenced by, and unsupported by her husband or partner that she will unconsciously turn to her daughter to meet these necessary human needs. Mothers unconsciously turn to their daughter rather than their son, because the daughter is female. This is particularly prevalent in families that believe that females are the listening, caregiving, supporting gender. And this dynamic can happen in any family where the mother isn’t heard or supported or equally valued, and the parental conflict that this causes isn’t openly expressed. And chances are, if the mother isn’t feeling heard or supported, the daughter isn’t either and neither are the other women in their generational family.
Another issue that causes conflict between a mother and daughter is when the mother has learned to prioritize her husband’s rules, thoughts, and needs over her own, even if she sometimes fights against this. The prioritizing of men’s voices and needs is one of the most common reasons a mother and daughter seek therapy. It causes a great deal of anger and conflict, as a mother and daughter fight over their shared silencing and the expectation that they must silence themselves and each other and prioritize the men in the family.
The daughter being a “Daddy’s Girl” is another issue that can cause conflict between a mother and daughter. A daughter needs her father’s attention for her emotional development, but when a father is more attentive of his daughter than his wife, a mother and daughter are set up to compete for the much-coveted attention from the man. And the mother is set up to feel jealous of the attention her daughter is receiving from her father, harming the mother-daughter bond even more. This is compounded even further when, as I mention above, the mother is wanting her daughter to provide the emotional support she isn’t receiving from her husband. No one is a winner in this dynamic. When a daughter witnesses her mother being neglected and treated as the inferior gender by a man who professes to love her, she learns to mistrust men. The daughter ends up feeling insecure about her own rights, and questions whether she can expect men to listen, support, and treat her as their equal.
Mapping a client’s mother-daughter history (detailed instructions are found in “The Mother-Daughter Puzzle”) helps a mother and daughter connect the dots between parental conflict and their relationship issues. It helps a mother and daughter recognize how the emotional silencing of the women in their family causes them to fight over who gets to be heard, and how the age-old sexism that believes that mothers are responsible for keeping the family together sets the daughter up to blame her mother for the conflict in her marriage, her husband’s emotional unavailability, or for her parents’ divorce.
Daughters of all ages are primed to want to care for their mother. And daughters hate to see their mother being silenced and dismissed, because as I said earlier, it makes them worry about their right to be heard and respected. But without a wider lens that connects the dots between the emotional reality in which a mother and daughter live, and the mother’s and daughter’s generational experience with patriarchy and sexism, a daughter can unfairly blame her mother for the conflict in her marriage and a mother can feel let down by her daughter. Mothers and daughters relate within their family and socio-cultural environment, and when they see how they are being set up for conflict by sexist beliefs and emotional neglect, the mother-daughter bond can become a force for change.
Reprinted with permission from my American Counseling Association blog.