Why can mothers and daughters be so critical of each other?

This is the third blog in my Mother-Daughter Attachment series. In this blog I tell the story of how I worked with Clara and Adele (names and identifying details changed), helping them understand the underlying causes for why they were so critical towards each other, and how they healed their mother-daughter bond.

I worked with Clara and Adele through Zoom because Clara, the mother, lived in America and Adele, her daughter, lived in France. Clara was in her sixties and Adele was in her late twenties. Adele was the one who initiated couples’ therapy, asking me if I could help them heal their hurtful relationship. She described how her mother criticizes her every time she doesn’t do exactly what her mother wants. If Adele didn’t call when she said she would or didn’t organize something she knew her mother needed help with, Clara would say something critical. And Adele said that she too had a tendency to be super critical of her mother and other people in her life, especially when people didn’t do exactly what she expected from them.

I have noticed that an increasing number of daughters in their twenties and thirties are eager to bring their mother into mother-daughter couples’ therapy because they do not want to repeat the emotional distance and lack of emotional honesty they saw happening between their mother and grandmother. Adult daughters are waking up to the patterns of selflessness and self-neglect in their generational family. They are noticing how their mother and grandmother have learned to normalize being self-neglecting, self-sacrificing, and self-effacing, and how these behaviors cause emotionally manipulative behaviors. Adult daughters are seeing how daughters inherit their mother’s selflessness and self-neglecting behaviors, and they are desperate to change this. They are wanting their mothers to join them in therapy so that together they can change this damaging generational pattern.

When I mapped Clara and Adele’s mother-daughter history, (the main exercise of the Mother-Daughter Attachment Model) and uncovered generational patterns of selflessness and sacrifice, Clara and Adele sighed with relief. “Finally”, Adele said, “we are finding answers as to why your mom (Adele’s grandmother) was so mean and why you spent your life taking care of her.” Clara too could see how she and her mother did not know how to honestly and openly ask for what they needed, and how this missing conversation made her angry, frustrated, and controlling. Clara talked about a recent situation that she needed Adele’s help with, and how afraid she felt that Adele wouldn’t help her. Adele was able to tell Clara that the emotionally manipulative way that Clara tried to guilt-trip Adele into helping her made her not want to help, when deep down, she was happy to help her mother out.

Over time Clara and Adele learned to believe that it is human to need and to speak the language that asks for what they need. As Clara and Adele learned to relate in a more emotionally honest way, their other relationships changed as well. Clara and Adele had learned to tolerate relationships that required that they focus on what the other person needs and fit in with what the other person wants. The more they learned to claim what they needed, the less they wanted to spend time with people who did not ask after what they need or engaged in the normal to-and-fro of asking after and honoring what you each need and want.

The silencing of what women need is a universal generational theme, because of the way patriarchy silences women’s voices and needs. Clara’s and Adele’s mother-daughter attachment story is the story of women’s generational experience with sexism. For generations, women have been expected to put others’ needs before their own and be selfless caregivers. Adele’s generation is waking up to the sexism in this role expectation, how it harms women’s emotional and mental wellbeing, equality, visibility, and mother-daughter attachment.

I am very excited to see women fighting to not repeat their mother’s life of selfless caregiving. And I believe that this awakening is the next stage of the women’s movement. As I write in “The Silent Female Scream”, laws alone will not make women equal. True equality will not happen until mothers are treated as people first with needs and lives of their own. True equality will not happen until women know what they need and feel entitled to ask for what they need, regardless of whether someone listens and responds. For generations, patriarchy has silenced women’s needs, and the rise of the #MeToo and #Believe Her movements shows that women are sick of having their experiences, voices, rights, and emotional needs dismissed and disregarded.

(Read “The Silent Female Scream” for more information about patriarchy’s silencing of women’s voice and how to claim what you need and “The Mother-Daughter Puzzle” for instructions on how to map your own or your client’s mother-daughter history.)

Reprinted with permission from Rosjke Hasseldine’s American Counseling Association Blog.