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Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt QUOTES

Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt QUOTES

1 " The mother‘s relationship to her daughter not only formed the earliest, if not primary, foundation for all the daughter formulates her sense of self, but is the basic template for her understanding of how relationships work in the world. "

― , Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

2 " The mother‘s relationship to her daughter not only forms the earliest, if not primary, foundation for how the daughter formulates her sense of self, but is the basic template for her understanding of how relationships work in the world. "

― , Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

3 " We want desperately to believe that every mother falls in love with her baby at first sight and that the complexity of relationships, so evident elsewhere as part of the human condition, is totally absent from the connection between mother and child. "

― , Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

4 " As Louis Cozolino Ph. D., observes, a consistent theme of adult psychotherapy clients is that they had parents who were not curious about who they were but, instead, told them who they should be. What Cozolino explains, is that the child creates a "persona" for her parents but doesn't learn to know herself. What happens is that "the authentic self"--the part of us open to feelings, experinces, and intimicy--remains underdeveloped. "

― , Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

5 " I was younger, smarter, better educated than she, and I began to realize that she was afraid of me and the truths I told. By the "

― , Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

6 " But sibling relationships can also be shaped by the dynamic between the unloving mother and her daughter, most particularly when a mother differentiates between her children, being loving and attentive to one but not to another. In many families, the dynamic will weaken sibling bonds. "

― , Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

7 " I am not turning into my mother’s apologist by writing those words; I would certainly trade in my childhood experiences with her in a heartbeat. But I—and you, for that matter—are more than the sum of the parts our mothers, loving or not, bequeathed us. The process of confrontation—of feeling the pain of not being loved or known—and of becoming conscious of how we were mothered offers an unloved daughter possibilities of growth another experience might not have yielded. "

― , Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

8 " Relational disconnection is created when there is an absence of “mutual authenticity,…when either the daughter’s voice or the mother’s voice is dominant or silenced.” As Louis Cozolino, Ph.D., observes, “A consistent theme of adult psychotherapy clients is that they had parents who were not curious about who they were but, instead, told them who they should be.” What happens, Cozolino explains, is that the child creates a “persona” for her parents but doesn’t learn to know herself. What happens is that “the authentic self”—the part of us that is open to feelings, experiences, and intimacy—“remains undeveloped. "

― , Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

9 " With insecure attachments, “a child unwittingly memorizes the precise lesson of that troubled relationship: that love is suffocation, that anger is terrifying, that dependence is humiliating, or one of a million crippling variations. "

― , Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

10 " I know the answer now, and that knowledge absolutely coexists with a terrible longing for the mother love I never had and never will have. "

― , Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

11 " mother of a young daughter and son herself, she says, “I understood from a young age that there was nothing I could do to satisfy my mother. She was totally self-absorbed, a narcissist, and she was never able to see me as anything but a projection of herself. And the anger, meanness, and disappointment which began inside of her simply radiated out toward me. "

― , Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

12 " The parent of a child, as Deborah Tannen has written, has the power not only to create the world the child lives in but the ability to dictate how that world is to be interpreted. Seen from that point of view, one of the lasting and important legacies of a mean mother is a wellspring of self-doubt. The other, explained by adaptive behavior, is a need to replicate the relationship she has to her mother with other people, regardless of how unhappy it makes her. "

― , Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

13 " Children of mothers who are only sometimes available and who aren’t reliably attuned adapt by being ambivalently attached. Because they don’t know what to expect—is she going to be the nice mommy or the yelling one?—these children develop anxiety and insecurity about the maternal relationship and, as adults, a sense of all relationships as being essentially unreliable. "

― , Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

14 " As Adrienne Rich so acutely observed, “It is hard to write about my own mother. Whatever I do write, it is my story I am telling, my version of the past. If she were to tell her own story, other landscapes would be revealed. But in my landscape or hers, there would be old, smoldering patches of deep-burning anger. "

― , Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

15 " A “healthy” woman had children; a “happy” and “fulfilled” woman was a mother. "

― , Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt