Open Letter to Mental Health Professionals, Life Coaches, and their Training Organizations

Part 1: Essential Mother-Daughter Attachment Training is Missing

When I asked my friend whether her therapist had received mother-daughter attachment training, she said that she hadn’t thought to ask. She said that she had assumed that every mental health professional and life coach would learn about mother-daughter attachment dynamics during their professional training, because of how essential this relationship is to understanding women. And when I told her that it is unlikely her therapist had received any mother-daughter attachment dynamics training, because it is missing in most training programs, she was shocked.

She didn’t want to believe me at first, as she struggled to wrap her head around the knowledge that a profession whose job it is to understand, empower, and heal women is missing such a key curriculum topic. And when this new reality sunk in, my friend became angry. She shared that she sometimes didn’t feel fully understood by her therapist. And she wondered if this was because her therapist had not been taught how to understand the subtle underlying dynamics in her mother-daughter relationship, and the generational themes in her family. As we continued to talk about this missing information, we commiserated…