How Mother Blaming Harms the Mother-Daughter Bond

In this, my sixth blog on Mother-Daughter Attachment, I will identify; what mother blaming is, how toxic mother blaming is for the mother-daughter bond; and how unconsciously pervasive it is within the counseling and marriage and family professions.

Paula Caplan, in her definitive text, The New Don’t Blame Mother describes mother-daughter blaming as moderate air pollution that we learn to tolerate and ignore, until we wake up to how harmful it is to our health. Paula Caplan is correct! Mother blaming is the air we breathe within this patriarchal society, which blames mothers for everything and anything. Mothers are blamed for not bonding well enough with their baby, and therefore causing their child to suffer from life-long attachment issues, as John Bowlby theorized in his Attachment Theory. Mothers are blamed when their daughter of any age is unhappy or acting out. Mothers are blamed for the father’s lack of parenting skills or even for divorcing him. Mothers are blamed for not knowing how to be a good mother and for not following the advice of child development experts. Mothers are blamed for not being emotionally available enough, for not providing enough love and encouragement, for being too needy, too controlling, too selfish, too caring, too silent, too demanding, too angry, too emotionally manipulative etc etc. I could fill this page with the many ways mothers are blamed and daughters are taught to focus their anger on their mother.

A daughter in her twenties came to see me because she wanted help with her mother’s behavior, which she labeled as ‘enmeshed’. She told me that her previous therapist had ‘diagnosed’ her mother as being enmeshed and controlling, and she wanted help with setting clearer boundaries with her mother. As she talked about how her mother is both loving and caring and needy and controlling, I asked her to describe who her mother is as a person and woman. She looked surprised by my question. She said that no one had ever asked her who her mother is as a person, and after a minute or two of silence, she said; “I don’t know. She has always been just mom. She is mom in the family, even my Dad treats her like a mom.”

This young woman’s admission that she had never considered her mother as a person and that she did not know who her mother is outside of her mothering role is extremely common. It is also common, in my experience, for therapists to omit to see mothers as people. In our patriarchal society, motherhood is all defining of a mother’s life and identify. Patriarchy actively resists the idea that a mother is a woman with a life and needs and identity of her own, whereas a father is still seen as a man. And this patriarchal thinking is normalized in many counseling and human development theories that we are taught to believe in and use with our clients.

In Attachment Theory, this mother’s enmeshed and controlling behavior is commonly explained as resulting from her relationship with her mother, my client’s grandmother, who may have also struggled to allow her daughter to have a voice, identity, and life of her own. Attachment Theory does not ask often enough or loudly enough the question; why is a mother over-identified with her daughter? It does not delve into how this mother and grandmother were taught to not have a voice, identity, and life of their own as mothers. And it does not unpack the emotional reality of the mother’s and grandmother’s lives, and their generational experience with sexism and patriarchy. Attachment Theory and some other theories do not go further than pathologizing the mother and grandmother for their relational behavior. They do not inquire after the gender role stereotypes that define who the mother and grandmother were expected to be, and how they were not allowed to be their own person, and how this lack of personhood harms the way they relate as mother and daughter.

As I mapped this young woman’s mother-daughter history, an exercise from the Mother-Daughter Attachment Model (The Mother-Daughter Puzzle, 2017, pp 56–87), this young woman saw the extreme emotional neglect that the women in her family suffered from. In her family, mothers are expected to be selfless, and if they voice any desires, dreams, or needs of their own, they are accused of being selfish, demanding, and a bad mother. The only way her grandmother and mother had any control over their life was through their children. The only identity and value they were given was as a mother, which left them feeling useless and worthless when their child became an adult.

This young woman’s mother-daughter story is tragically extremely common, and it reveals how mother blaming and the pathologizing of a mother’s behavior is misogyny at its best! Mother blaming is a patriarchal strategy designed to hide the lack of support mothers receive within society and how mothers are denied their rights and identity as people. Mother blaming keeps mothers and daughters focused on the mother’s behavior, rather than noticing the socio-cultural environment that a mother is trying to mother in. And mother blaming silences the conversation about what it is like to be a woman and a mother in an environment that guilt-trips mothers into being selfless, sacrificial, and self-neglecting.

The counseling and marriage and family professions have a responsibility to fight against mother blaming by exposing how mother blaming is designed to harm a mother’s ability to know herself and the emotional attunement between mothers and daughters. It has a duty to expose the implicit bias we all internalize about motherhood. And it has a duty to examine the theories that are being taught as fact, for hidden sexist beliefs and harmful gender role stereotyping.

Reprinted with permission from my American Counseling Association blog.