Daughters Who Are Never Good Enough by Abbey Strauss

Author:Abbey Strauss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mother daughter relationships, narcissistic mothers
Publisher: Abbey Strauss

A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until

he begins to blame somebody else.

~John Burroughs

This is another common story:

Shelley entered psychotherapy when she was 18 years old. She was overweight and depressed. She told her therapist in the first session that she feared her mother's hostility and that she also admired her mother in some ways as well. It was terribly confusing for her, and it became evident that she felt she was a terrible person compared to her ‘beautiful, charming, and accomplished mother.’ The therapist, who believed in the value of family therapy, suggested that the mother come into therapy with Shelley. Shelley said she would consider this, but in fact she skipped her next appointment and never returned.

For the next five years Shelley avoided any psychotherapy; she medicated herself with gin for her depression. She combined the gin with large amounts of sweets and starches, and she got even heavier, but “at least it made me feel nicely drugged and lethargic, and so in less emotional pain.” All this was happening while she still lived at home; this made her hostile mother increasingly disgusted and ashamed of Shelley: “You are getting so fat…can’t you stop it?” Finally her mother drove her out of the house, telling Shelley that if she ever returned she would be "incarcerated into a mental hospital." Shelley moved 1000 miles away and sank into the pits of depression, being alone, out of work, and feeling irreversibly ugly and unlovable.

After a while she found began to face the possibility of committing suicide. This was the perfect way to shame her mother who had always advertised herself as the perfect mother. She thought it would also remove the pain from Shelley's life. But by change she had a short-lived relationship with a ‘philosophic drunk’ who ignited a small good flame in her at this desperate point in her life. That flame sparked some hope, she was able to assert her basic good sense and self- preservation. The ‘philosophic drunk’ spoke to of higher purposes in life, of self-love, and how to step away from undeserved guilt. They also had a sexual relationship that soothed her ego because he kept telling her that he was making love to her soul. “I smiled and cried in ways I never thought possible.”

Shelley decided her mother wasn't all that important to her anymore and that her own life was more important. She began talking to some sober friends about this, one of whom introduced her to a clergyman. Little by little she used him to fight herself out of this pit of depression. Eventually she got a job. Then she decided to take a second chance of formal psychotherapy. She told her new therapist that the reason she stopped therapy before was that she was unable to risk I bring her mother into the therapy den with her. “My mother would co-opt the therapist. She would be so charming, so persuasive, and so articulate that the therapist would ‘be sure to believe her mother's side’ of their conflicts.

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