Unloved
Daughters and the Culture of Shame -Taking a close look at the elephant hidden
in plain sight, an article by Peg Streep in Psychology
Today Posted Jun 23, 2017.
In the court of public opinion, when the mother-daughter
relationship is damaged beyond repair, it’s always the daughter who’s on trial.
The cultural myths about motherhood—that all women are nurturing, that
mothering is instinctual not learned, and that all mothers love their children
unconditionally—both shape and inform people’s responses to the daughter who
either cuts her mother out of her life entirely or maintains so little contact
that her position is clear to both intimates and strangers alike. The culture
sides with the parent—a view bolstered by the authority of a Biblical
commandment—regardless of the circumstances.
Most tellingly, when a parent cuts a child off, there’s a
sympathetic murmur, an acknowledgement that parenting is hard and that adult
children can be difficult. When a parent initiates estrangement, she’s assumed
to have pursued every possible solution and, more important, to have tried her
hardest and done her best. The culture raises a glass to the parent who tried
but failed and lends a supportive shoulder.
In contrast, the unloved daughter never gets the benefit of
the doubt. Instead, the culture goes on the attack and labels her as
ungrateful, impetuous, narcissistic, and more. She is reminded again and again
that she was fed, clothed, and had a roof over head as if having her emotional
needs met in childhood were a throw-away extra and that if love and support
weren’t extended to her, she has no one but herself to blame. Or that she’s
exaggerating or being dramatic since, on the surface, it seems that she turned
out just fine. The culture finishes up the job of marginalizing and criticizing
her that her mother and perhaps other family members began, and tries to shame
her in the process.
As a daughter who cut her mother out of her life (and writes
about unloving mothers), I have personally experienced all of these responses.
They are the rule, not the exception.
Cultural shaming: The elephant in the room
Cultural disapproval often impedes a daughter’s road to both
recovery and reclaiming her life by creating another kind of inner conflict, as
one daughter wrote:
“How do I explain
exactly how toxic my mother’s behavior is without sounding whiny and
ungrateful? Every time I broach the subject, even with close friends, I see
nothing but disapproval. But is filial duty supposed to be painful? Am I
supposed to see her when she’s actively out to get me?”
Stories of unloved daughters are the ones no one wants to
hear.
Unloved daughters already feel as though they don’t belong
because of how they were treated in their family of origin; adding another,
more public layer of not belonging by severing or limiting their relationship
to their mother is, for many, terrifically daunting. But sometimes it is only
way to heal.
Shame and the code of silence
Unloved daughters rarely tell anyone about what goes on in
the household during childhood, in part because they assume that what goes on
there goes on everywhere. Normalizing how she is treated—even if she actively
hurts from being ignore, marginalized, put down, or harshly criticized, or is
frightened—is one reason. As she gets older, comes into contact with other
households, and begins to see that perhaps what goes on at her house is
different, silence may be compelled by the shame and worry that, in fact, she’s
to blame for how she’s treated. Since unloving mothers often justify their
hypercriticality and verbal abuse by shifting the blame onto their
children—saying things like “I wouldn’t have to punish you if you weren’t so
clumsy or careless,” “You ask nothing but stupid questions and I have better
things to do than to deal with stupid people,” “If you were a better child, I
wouldn’t need to yell”—feeling ashamed often becomes the daughter’s default
response. That becomes another potent reason to maintain her silence since the
last thing she wants to do is broadcast her supposed deficiencies to the world
at large.
In adolescence and young adulthood, the need to fit in and
be like everyone else, along with continued shame and worry, usually prevent
the daughter from getting help and support from her peer group by confiding the
truth. While keeping the secret safe, it has the unwanted effect of isolating
her even further. After my book Mean Mothers was published, I heard from my
roommate from my sophomore year in college; it had been 40 years since we’d
spoken. Even though we’d shared a room the size of a shoebox for an entire
year, neither of us even hinted at the way our respective mothers had
mistreated us. She wistfully commented on how we might have been able to help
each other by breaking the silence; I could not have agreed with her more. But
how we handled it all those years ago is typical, as I have learned from
hundreds and hundreds of interviews.
Shame as a weapon in an unloving mother’s arsenal
Studies show that both abusive behaviors and harsh parenting
of children make individuals more prone to feeling shame throughout their
lifetimes; some of this doubtless has to do with the fact that sometimes
maternal behavior includes actions that are either deliberately meant to shame
the child into behaving differently or better, or are the result of the
parent’s own inability to manage her own emotions. But being “shame-prone,” as
the researchers put it, explains another aspect of how shame plays a role both
in a daughter’s wounding and her attempts at recovery.
In their brilliant book, Parenting from the Inside Out,
Daniel Siegel M.D. and Mary Hartzell M.Ed. discuss what they call a toxic
rupture in the parent-child relationship and how it relates to parental shame
as well as inducing shame in the child. (Yes, we are pivoting here to show a
possible pattern.) They define a toxic rupture as one which actively harms a
child’s sense of self, often a result of a parent losing control of her
emotions and threatening, screaming, or calling a child names. (Yes, that’s
emotional and verbal abuse.) The child’s feeling of shame produces physical
effects such as a stomach ache, a tightness or feeling of a lump in the chest or
throat, or an impulse to avoid eye contact. The child internalizes the shame
and begins thinking of herself as “bad” or “worthless.” Siegel and Hartzell
note that it’s often the parent’s own shame—a result of her own treatment in
childhood—that produces the unconscious hijacking of her emotions and
facilitates her losing sight of her child in these moments. Instead, she may
only be focused on her own powerlessness and incompetence. It’s a horrible
cycle which can only be stopped by the parent’s conscious awareness and
concerted efforts at repairing the rupture. That doesn’t always happen, alas,
as the experiences of unloved daughters attest.
.
Understanding shame
Psychologists distinguish between shame and guilt, although
both are considered “self-conscious emotions.” Infants are born feeling
neither; it’s thought that children begin to experience both in the toddler
years. Of the two, shame is more toxic and has a different kind of staying
power; while guilt emanates from a specific behavior, shame involves the core
self. Interestingly, according to research studies, while guilt can facilitate
empathy, shame disrupts the ability to empathize. Why might that be? June Price
Tangney and her colleagues opine:
“Shame’s
inherently egocentric focus on the ‘bad self’ (as opposed to the bad behavior)
derails the empathic process. Individuals in the throes of shame turn tightly
inward, and are thus less able to focus cognitive and emotional resources on
the harmed other.”
While the impulse to deny or hide it is extremely strong,
shame nonetheless bubbles to the surface unconsciously in other forms. Research
shows that shame-prone individuals experience intense anger, express that anger
in volatile and destructive ways, and do what they can to externalize the
blame. Needless to say, their ability to hold on to relationships is profoundly
affected. The lengths to which people will go to avoid feeling shame testifies
to the intensity of the pain.
Shame and shaming play significant roles in the lives of
many unloved daughters, though they are rarely addressed. Bringing shame and
shaming into the light and seeing their provenance with conscious awareness are
important steps on the road to recovery.
Copyright © Peg Streep 2017
References
Siegel, Daniel and Mary Hartzell. Parenting from The Inside
Out. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2003.
Tangney, June Price, Jeff Stuewig, and Debra J. Mashek,
“Moral Emotions and Moral Behavior,”Annual Review of Psychology
(2007), 58, 345-372.
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