CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Mother Daughter Relationships

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

In the final episode of The Calling Home podcast's first season, Whitney discusses the complexities of mother-daughter relationships. She emphasizes that love and protection are not the same thing, and a mother can love her child but still put them in dangerous situations.  We'll talk about why mothers might criticize their daughters, such as projecting their own standards or seeing their daughters as competition.  And a reminder to identify patterns they want to break in their own relationships and consider the systemic factors that might impact these relationships. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to the Calling Home podcast. I am your host, Whitney Goodman, and I cannot believe this, but this is the finale of season one. This is the last episode before we dive into a totally new season next year. This was a short season. It was our launch of the podcast. And I have been so blown away and happily surprised with how much you guys have been loving the episodes. I so appreciate your support. And if you'd like to support calling home, home and make sure that we have a wonderful season two. Please don't forget to subscribe, like, follow the podcast, leave a review, anything that you can do on the platform where you listen to this podcast. All right, let's get into it. So the last few days or over the last week, we've over the last week, we've over, opened up the calling home community again. And we have been talking about mother-daughter relationships. We've been having amazing groups. I have been like blown away every time we have a group by how supportive people are, how much they are gaining from the groups, what we're

talking about. Like there have been groups where after I log off, I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm about to be in tears because this has always been my dream to create this space where people could come and speak and share and get feedback and get advice. And this one thing that I keep hearing from every single person who comes into our calling home community, especially into the Family Cycle Breakers Club, is they say, wow, I had no idea that other people were feeling the way that I'm feeling. And I am so glad to know that I'm not alone in this. I have heard at least one person say that in every single group that we've been in. And so it's just, really, really incredible to finally be having that experience and to hear from all of you.

And I am recording this podcast on a Wednesday, and so we just had group today before I got on here to record with you. And I want to talk about something that someone brought up in the group that I think is such an important thing to talk about. And we were talking about mother-daughter relationships. And we have groups on mother-daughter relationships every Wednesday for the rest of December if you want to join and think that might be helpful for you. But someone brought up this idea about how we need to have empathy and that they saw a post online that was about you don't have an empathy problem. You have an emotional regulation problem. And I'm paraphrasing this post. I haven't seen it. But from what I understood from our conversation was like there was kind of this

argument that if you have good emotional regulation skills, you should be able to engage in empathy without getting super dysregulated and overwhelmed and kind of like losing your mind, for lack of a better phrase. And when the person brought this up, I was kind of taken aback. I was like, huh, I don't really know what I think about that. Because I think this is true to an extent, right, that we can access deeper empathy when we are in touch with our emotions, when we know how to feel when we can work ourselves through certain feelings. And it's easier to stay in a place of empathy and to offer someone compassion and understanding when we have emotional regulation skills. That's totally true. But there's this other piece that I run into in our groups in

calling home and with my own private therapy clients that people actually have like too much empathy. Sometimes when they grow up in dysfunctional families. And let me rephrase that. I don't think it's that they have too much empathy, but they feel that empathy should always be the priority. And so the way that I see that playing out is that if you grew up in a dysfunctional family where maybe there was one person who was highly dysfunctional that you were catering to their needs, you may have been taught that you needed to learn how to not get triggered, not get upset, not allow them to get to you, and just continue to learn how to take more and more because they're not going to change, and it's our job to be compassionate to them, and they're struggling.

They have, you know, substance use issues or a mental health concern, and so we get ourselves into this position where we feel like our only option is to learn how to empathize more and more and more and learn how to tolerate this person's behavior to such an extent that we can, like, survive and keep ourselves in a good place. And this often happens in family systems where there is one person who wants the family to remain the same and is enabling the behavior of the most dysfunctional person. So an example that I'll give you might be where we have a mother and a father and two children. And let's say the mother is highly dysfunctional, possibly has a mental health issue, a substance use issue, a personality disorder, something that is causing them to behave

in an erratic, unreliable, and abusive or disruptive way. Okay. And the husband does not want to leave their partner. They don't want to set boundaries. They don't want to confront the problem. They do not want to rock the boat. They want to keep the family intact. So in the name of quote unquote peace in the family, that father might encourage his two children to learn how to be like him, to learn how to tolerate the dysfunction, to swallow it, to keep the peace, to meet every erratic behavior that the mother does with compassion and understanding and empathy. And we're ultimately learning in this family that we are not allowed to have needs that would disrupt the status quo of things in the family. We're not allowed to set boundaries and we're certainly not allowed to call out

behavior that upsets us. And when you learn that, I think some of these people develop like a really tough exterior, it becomes part of their identity, right? Like, I can tolerate a lot. No one can make me upset. No one can make me angry. I am the person that you cannot break, right? And it becomes this like thing that they cling to is like, I can tolerate mass amounts of dysfunction and like you are not going to get a rise out of me. And the problem is, is that sometimes it's not about learning how to tolerate more and more dysfunction. Sometimes it's about making a change. in what you're actually living with. You know, sometimes people are being bad to you.

And it's not about can you get yourself to a place where you can tolerate all their bad behavior without reacting, without getting upset, without doing anything. And so that's where I think with these people, if you fall into that group that I'm describing, this idea that I can always be empathetic if I have my emotions in check is kind of kind of dangerous because I think that people will take that as a challenge of like my empathy will never run out. You will never see me shake. You will never see me get mad. I am always going to be caring and compassionate towards you because you are struggling and I am strong. And I don't know that having endless empathy in the name of like remaining in bad relationships is always the best thing.

Now, in the group today, we also talked about this idea of loving detachment, which is a term that gets brought up or that is used in like Al-Anon or ACOA adult children of alcoholics groups. And it's an idea that I'm going to paraphrase, but that you can show someone empathy and love them from a detached distance. You can wish them well. You can say, I hope that you have good things happen for you in your life. I want you to get help. I want the best for you. And I cannot be close to you. And so there is a way to have empathy and to set boundaries and to strike a balance between those two things. But if you take away anything from this, I would want it to be that it is not your job to learn how to tolerate endless amounts of

dysfunction in the name of empathy. All right. So when we've been talking about mother-daughter relationships. This question keeps coming up in groups, in messages I'm getting in comments about why doesn't my mother love me? Why can she not show me love? And I think we associate this word love with motherhood. We expect unconditional love to come from mothers more than anyone. There are so many poems, movies, statements, quotes, whatever, all about like the concept of a mother's love, right? That it can really, like, outlast anything. It's the most important lasting feeling that you can get in this life. It is an example of unconditional love. It's,

one of the only instances of like true unconditional love that we talk about when it comes to relationships. Now, the tricky thing about this is that your mother can love you and still treat you poorly. And that is what is so tricky about this. And so I want to talk about a couple of different ways that a mother might be showing love in her mind. She thinks what she's giving you is love. She feels love for you, but it doesn't come out feeling that way. And I want to talk a little bit about why it is not your fault if your mother cannot love or if she cannot seemingly choose you. So there is a book called Mother Hunger by Kelly McDaniel. I'm using this book as a resource throughout this podcast episode and while talking about this topic. So keep that in mind.

and this book is also one of the ones that I recommend inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club. I have a whole list on book recommendations. We send one out every month for every topic. So that's something else that you'll get in there. But she includes a quote in her book from, I think it's an article or a book that's called, Sometimes You Make Your Rapist Breakfast, Inside the Controversial and Often Confusing, Tending Instinct of Women. And in this work, she writes, You can only push a man off of you so many times. You can only say, not now, no thanks, I don't want to, so many ways. I too have had sex I didn't want because sex was the least bad option. Sex was a known variable. Think of it as a harm reduction tactic. Fighting and screaming and kicking and yelling at a man? Unknown outcomes. Would he hit me back? Would he let me go? Would I fight and lose? If I lost. Would you?

he have sex with me anyway, only more violently? And in this, this author really captures how some of us get into appeasing people that are violent or abusive towards us because it is less risky than fighting or running. And so I bring this up to talk about the mindset of a frightened or a fragile mother and the way that she may show love towards her child that does not come out as love and also leads to more dangerous situations. So daughters really struggle when they cannot count on their mothers and their mothers may put them in dangerous situations like being around men or partners that are abusive or harmful to the child, not believing the child when they bring up something that happened to them at the hands of one of those people. You know, we hear lots of

stories, especially among like child celebrities, children who grew up with very young parents of their parents bringing them out to bars with them or clubs or whatever it is. And in a lot of these mothers' mindsets, this is not an act of not loving someone. It's actually showing love for the child. I chose that action because I thought it was the least dangerous thing. And when a mother is trapped in fight or flight, they are frightened, they are scared. They are going to make decisions that often may feel like love to them, but do not feel like love to the child. And that's because these decisions are rooted in trauma, in fear. and whatever it is, and they're not actually well thought out balanced decisions, right?

And when I say this, I want to circle back to where we started, that this doesn't mean that you say, okay, I know why my mom did what she did. It makes sense to me. And so now I have to forgive her and I can't be hurt by this. You are allowed to say, I understand why my mom made the decisions that she made because she was coming from her own place of fear, of trauma, of abuse, whatever it is. And my mom hurt me. She was supposed to, in that moment, be that protector. And whether she willingly didn't have those skills or not, doesn't matter because it impacted me. So I can understand why she made those decisions as part of the story. but it doesn't necessarily change that I was put in these situations that ultimately

harmed me and changed the trajectory of my life. And each person, depending on their unique situation, is going to have to decide what that means for their relationship with their mothers in adulthood. But I bring this up to say that this is why a lot of emotionally immature mothers, when being confronted with this stuff, of like, well, why did you stay in that situation. Why did you keep me in that house? Why did you move us in with that person? You know, you didn't show me love. We'll say, of course I loved you. I loved you so much. I was trying to give you a home. They'll become very defensive potentially about these actions because love and protection are not the same thing. Your mother can love you and put you in very dangerous situations.

your mother can love you and not know how to protect you. And that's why you have to kind of work on getting to this place where my mom doesn't know how to show me love in a way that feels like love to me. She may think that she loves me. She may think that she's showing me love, but I don't feel that love. That's not what love looks like to me. Love and pain and harm don't look the same. And maybe my mom doesn't know how to show me love in that way. But I want any children of mothers who feel like my mother can't love me because there's something wrong with me to realize that that is often not the root of the issue or what is going on here. And just really coming back to this place of love and protection are not the same

things. Parents who love their children, put their children in dangerous situations every day for a variety of other reasons that sometimes don't have to do with not loving them. And that's why love is not the number one thing that a mother or a parent needs to provide, right? It's one of those things. But protection, guidance, a stable home, a foundation, education, medical treatment, and emotional involvement. These are all things outside of love that have to be provided for a child to have a successful start to their life and to have a meaningful childhood that they can look back on and say, wow, I felt really loved, respected, understood, and taken care of as a child. And so when you think about why can't my mom love

me, I want you to think about what else you might actually be trying to say underneath that umbrella of love. So the other thing that I wanted to mention here that we've been talking about a lot in calling home this month is this idea that if my mother doesn't love me, it must be that something is wrong with me, that I'm not doing something right, because that's what children will immediately perceive. Children will say that they are bad before saying that their parent is bad or that their parent is abusive. This is a biologically innate kind of compass for the child because they know that they need that adult to protect them and to take care of them. Parents can abuse their children and their children get sent away and their children will often

still say, like, I want to go back to my parents. I want to be with my parents. We see this because children know to some extent that they are fragile. They are not able to live on their own and they need their parents to take care of them. The second you are put in a position where you have to perform and bend yourself and change yourself and hide parts of yourself to appease your mother and to make her quote unquote love you and respect you and want to be around you, you are enter and a losing game. And I know that this is a very hard realization, but it goes back to this idea that a mother is supposed to love you no matter what. Your mother's love is not supposed to be conditional, and it is not supposed to be dependent on you being a certain version of yourself

that she likes and approves of. And so when she is not capable of that, you cannot force her to give it to you. If she doesn't give it, it's not a reflection of your worth. Because what often happens, and this happens in many types of relationships where people try to earn love from someone else by performing as another person, is that when you secure that love or that attention from the other person, and it's when you are not acting like yourself, it doesn't feel good. It's not the reward that you think it will be because they're not acting that way towards you. They're acting that way towards a faux, made up, you know, improvised version of you that you have created as a way to secure their love. And that does not feel good. That does not feel genuine. It does not feel

authentic. And eventually you will grow very tired of performing that role. And I now want to talk about a few reasons why mothers criticize their daughters. This is one of the worksheets that's in the Calling Home Family Cycle Breakers Club. And I think it's important to kind of touch on some of these as a potential reason for why you're getting this type of criticism from your mother that has absolutely nothing to do with you. Because that's often where we go, right, when our mothers are acting this way towards us is like, what am I doing wrong that's triggering this response? in her. So here's some examples of reasons why your mother might criticize you. She's a perfectionist and she's projecting her standards onto you. She wants you to be a certain way. She may even think that

her criticism will save her daughter from becoming a version of a woman she does not like or even from becoming her. There are a lot of preconceived beliefs, notions about what a woman should be, especially in certain cultures and religions and communities. And so there are women that may feel like they need to protect you from becoming a woman that is quote unquote bad, or who is not going to achieve something that is highly valued within that community. And so if you decide to be a different type of woman than your mother or the other women in your family, criticism may be guaranteed if those people are not open to other variations of womanhood or living how you're living. Some mothers also see their daughters as competition or as like

their own personal project as someone that they are there to mold into the person that they want them to be. Something else I see a lot of is that, the mother is trying to live life through her daughter, or she sacrificed herself completely for her daughter and never was able to be her own person, and she wants her daughter to do the same for her. And I want to reiterate that this is not a personal failing majority of the time for mothers. Okay. We can look at older generation of women in our family and understand why they made a lot of the decisions that they made and the conditions that they were living in that caused them to make those decisions, right? So if you have a mother that grew up in an

unequal, abusive, oppressive family or society or culture where she was forced to do things that she didn't want to do or she didn't have a lot of options, you know, it wasn't so long ago that women couldn't like go to the bank and open up their own bank account and get their own credit card. There are certain communities that believe that only a man can initiate divorce. There are many women who raised their children and always worked in the home and they have no financial freedom whatsoever. They have no say in their lives. And so I think as daughters, when we are looking at the decisions that our mothers made, we can think about the impact that it had on us and how that impact is even more pronounced because of the world that we're living in

today and what it did to us. But we can also consider the context of like, what kind of world was my mother living and what choices did she even have access to? Could she even teach me these things if she wanted to or was that something that was not available to her? And this is again where we get back into this delicate dance of, can I hold empathy for this person? Can I look at them within the context of their life and understand why they maybe did the things they did. And in that same moment, can I say, I am also a woman living in this time and this is how it impacted me and this is what I'm working through. And a really good example of this would be like body image and dieting. This is one that I see huge generational differences, you know,

between women who are maybe part of the boomer generation or even Gen X. And then if we look at Gen Z and millennials kind of growing up in this more body acceptance movement, wanting to be more weight neutral and really working on their relationship with food and the influence their mothers had on that. But then if we look at their mother's lives, they were constantly being force-fed images of needing to be thin. You know, we're talking about people in the age of slim fast, weight watchers, all this other stuff. And so it's not so simple to just say in this type of example, my mother wanted to hurt me. She wanted me to be thin. She wanted me to suffer. She's responsible for X, Y, and Z. We have to also look at the context of like, what kind

of information was my mother operating off of? And what maybe did she think was the healthiest and the best thing for me because of what doctors in the media and everyone around her was saying. And that's an example, I think, where a mother and a daughter can talk about this together, and the mother can be open to learning new things and saying, wow, yeah, I could see how that wasn't great and how I was just repeating what I knew. And I was also kind of sucked in to this belief that that's how a woman should be. And that's what is expected of me. All right. So inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club, we have a worksheet with three strategies to help you heal the mother wound. And I want to just walk you through one of those exercises as one of the last things

that we're going to talk about today. And then if you want to get access to the rest of those exercises, you can definitely go to callinghome.com and join the community. So I like this exercise about identifying the patterns that you want to break. And awareness really is the first step in ending the patterns of generational trauma in your family. And so now that you're aware of your mother wound, it's helpful to ask yourself some of these questions and really get clear about what patterns might need to be changed or broken within your family. So what patterns do I want to end with me? Really thinking about what would I like to be different between my mother and myself now? If I am a mother, what would I like to be different between the relationship between me and my

children or my daughter? What wounds am I at risk of passing on to my children? So thinking about, like, is there anything that if you don't do work on it? If you continue to stay on autopilot, you might pass on, you might continue. We all tend to do that. I fall back into old patterns that I've worked very hard to change or stop and they can still come up. So what might you need to be aware of? And for some people, that might be yelling, shutting down emotionally, whatever it is. are there any systemic factors like poverty, immigration, et cetera, that I'm up against and that I need support for? So families don't exist in a vacuum, mother-daughter relationships don't exist in a vacuum. We just talked about that when it came to like eating disorders and body image. So thinking about what are some things happening around me that I may have to combat against or fight when it has to do with my relationship with my mother or my relationship with my own children or my myself. In what ways was my mother impacted by her unique circumstances? So again, going back to kind of like how can I view her through that lens and how does that help me understand our

relationship? And can I heal the relationship with my mother that I have today? And is she willing to participate in that healing? So for some of you, it might mean that you are doing that healing on your own. Your mother isn't willing to participate and she's not willing to take accountability or talk to you about the reasons why she may have made the choices that she made. And for others, you might find that your mother is like, I want to talk to you about why I decided to do what I did. And I want to hear how that impacted you and how my choices have shaped who you are today. And of course, there are other parents that are going to fall all along that spectrum. And there's a lot of ups and downs as you move through this process. I hope this episode was helpful for anyone who is working through a mother-daughter relationship

or has a challenging relationship with their mother or even their daughter. We have a ton of content on the Calling Home website about mother-daughter relationships and our groups are meeting about mother-daughter relationships for the rest of December. In January, we will be starting another module and we're going to be talking about a lot of different things inside of calling home in 2024. In January, we'll be starting a module on adult sibling relationships. And then in February, we've got accepting your parents. And March is what happens when you grow up in chaos. So a lot of good stuff coming your way. You can always get access to that content at calling home.com. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season. Happy Hanukkah,

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. And I am so excited to show you what we have in store for season two starting in January. See you guys later.