Daughter Detox by Peg Streep

Author:Peg Streep [Streep, Peg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780692973974
Publisher: Île D'Éspoir Press
Published: 2017-10-29T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

MAKING THE UNCONSCIOUS CONSCIOUS

My wake-up call came when I realized I didn’t even like the people I thought I loved. I was trying to so hard to win my mother’s approval, mostly unconsciously, through people I loved or were friends with. Invariably, my mother would say how much better these people were and how much smarter they were than me, which set up competition on so many levels. In the end, I didn’t even like these people because it seemed I wasn’t even in the equation. I kept choosing people to get my mother’s approval, and they were just like her. I can see that now .

~Clarissa, 40

P erhaps one of the most frustrating things about the journey of recovery is that, often, it feels as though you’re trying to move a five-ton pachyderm by yourself—yes, the proverbial elephant in the living room—but sometimes he’s there and sometimes he’s not. Unloved daughters actively complain about how long it takes to recognize the lack of maternal love, how it takes even longer to see the effects, how slow the recovery process is, and how these patterns can be resistant to even years of therapy and efforts at self-help. There are reasons it’s hard, and that’s what we need to look at first. This chapter is about disarming the unconscious patterns of behaviors, along with the triggers for them, and the reality is that we can’t run the obstacle course until we can see the obstacles.

RUNNING THE OBSTACLE COURSE

Some of these obstacles, as we’ll see, have to do with the brain and apply to everyone whether they are loved by their mothers or not but take up a special place in the life of a woman who’s actively trying to recover. We’ll look at how the brain itself and our unconscious thought processes can be an obstacle and what we can do to outwit them—and yes, those unconscious processes can be successfully gamed, which is very good news indeed! In fact, just reading these sentences is changing the neural connections in your brain; we have the continuing pliability of that extraordinary organ to thank for that. First, though, we have to look at ourselves and our behaviors. Often, we are the biggest obstacles to our ability to thrive, the boulders that stand in the way. Why? Because of the core conflict: our continuing need for our mother’s love and approval. I call it the “dance of denial,” and I was once an expert at it, many years ago. It was the only time in my life, in fact, that I actually achieved the status of a prima ballerina. The dance of denial, in my case, went on for just short of 20 years.

UNDERSTANDING AND ENDING THE DANCE OF DENIAL

She was on her deathbed and someone said, ‘Do you want to tell Linda you love her?’ My mother answered, ‘No.’ Of course, I rationalized her behavior because it felt better than thinking I wasn’t loved. I rationalized her behavior for years, but it never helped my pain.

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