The Mother-Daughter Relationship is NOT a Self-Contained Island!
While I spoke at the United Nations 61st Session of the Commission on the Status of Women in March 2017 about the mother-daughter relationship, the audience gave an audible murmur of recognition when I explained how the mother-daughter relationship is a mirror reflection of how women are treated. And at the book launch party in June 2017, where we celebrated the publication of my new book “The Mother-Daughter Puzzle”, the women and men in the audience murmured in agreement when I talked about how the mother-daughter relationship is not an island because it is intimately affected by the socio-cultural environment mothers and daughters live in.
It is fascinating how women have a visceral reaction to this information, especially as I write in “The Mother-Daughter Puzzle”;
“Even though women’s issues are increasingly being addressed, the mother-daughter relationship remains one of the most disregarded topics within women’s studies, psychotherapy, and feminism.”
Patriarchy has pushed the mother-daughter relationship off to the sidelines. It has defined the mother-daughter relationship as a self-contained unit that is unaffected by the environment women live in, leaving mothers and daughters to blame themselves and each other for the conflict they experience.
This limited patriarchal thinking is designed to stop women from connecting the dots between their mother-daughter relationship conflict, and the emotional silencing, emotional neglect, and restrictive gender roles patriarchy treats as normal. It stops women from digging below the dynamics in their mother-daughter relationships, and recognizing the emotional and relationship harm that sexism and gender inequality inflict on women. When we start to connect these dots, it becomes abundantly clear how central the mother-daughter relationship is to the understanding of the female experience, and changing generational patterns of sexism and gender inequality.
Ruth and Hannah’s relationship story (who I write about in “The Mother-Daughter Puzzle”) is a classic example of how emotional silencing and emotional neglect harms a mother’s and daughter’s ability to listen to and understand each other. In brief, Ruth, the mother, and Hannah, the adult daughter suffered from relationship conflict for years where neither felt heard or understood. Hannah would get angry over things Ruth said, leading them to retreat from each other into weeks of silence.
As we mapped Ruth’s Mother-Daughter History we uncovered the theme of severe emotional silence that had affected every generation in their family. Mothers did not know how to voice what they need and feel and it was news to Ruth that this conversation even existed. We also uncovered how emotionally neglected the women were. In this generational family, women were expected to focus their attention on what husbands, fathers, and sons need and help facilitate the men’s careers and goals without expecting the same support in return. As Ruth and Hannah explored these themes, which are extremely common around the world, they realized that when Ruth didn’t know how to voice what she needs, Ruth and Hannah were set up to fight over how they meet Ruth’s unspoken needs. In their relationship, the honest back-and-forth of setting boundaries and speaking your emotional truth was missing. Hannah didn’t really know who her mother was, until Ruth started to learn to identify, and feel entitled to speak, what she felt and needed.
The good news is that mothers and daughters like Ruth and Hannah, and the women and men who murmur in agreement at my talks, are helping to dispel the lie patriarchy tells about the mother-daughter relationship. These pioneering women and men are restoring the mother-daughter relationship to its rightful place — at the center of women’s lives, self-knowing, emotional empowerment, and the fight for women’s equality.
Reprinted with permission from my Huffington Post Blog