The Difficult Mother-Daughter Relationship Journal: A Guide For Revealing & Healing Toxic Generational Patterns (Companion Journal to Difficult Mothers Adult Daughters)

By Karen C.L. Anderson

#1 New Release in Parent & Adult Child Relationships ─ Healing for Mothers and Daughters

A compassionate guide: Karen C.L. Anderson is a storyteller, feminist, and speaker who views the world through the lens of curiosity and fascination. As a mother-daughter relationship expert, she gently guides readers through revealing painful patterns in their relationships to finding ultimate healing. Her book isn’t a quick fix. Rather, she writes to help mothers and daughters heal and either reconcile or peacefully separate.

Tips and tools for healing: Anderson comes prepared in this book to offer readers practical advice for creating a healthier relationship. Her previous book, The Peaceful Daughter’s Guide to Separating from a Difficult Mother, was an international bestseller, and she offers new practical wisdom in this journal. From setting healthy boundaries to creating a new outlook, Anderson helps readers create peace in their troubled relationships.

You’re not alone in the struggle: Studies suggest that nearly 30% of women have been estranged from their mothers at some point. It can be difficult to talk about the strain of mother and daughter relationships because they are so often glorified in our society as one of the most precious bonds. If anything, however, that makes them more important to talk about.

Anderson’s book is ideal for mothers and daughters alike, whether they read it separately or together. Open it up and find:

• Various prompts and practices for building a relationship around healthy interdependence rather than dysfunctional codependence
• A way to transform things that create pain into a source of wisdom and creativity
• An informative and intriguing self-care gift for women in the form of a healing journal

Readers of self-help books such as Mothers Who Can’t Love, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, and Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters will find a wonderful source of help and healing in Anderson’s The Difficult Mother-Daughter Relationship Journal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mango
• Release date: Jan 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642501315

Karen C.L. Anderson

Karen C.L. Anderson is a storyteller who believes that the truth never creates suffering and that all stories can be told through the lens of truth. She is also a feminist, a writer, speaker, workshop presenter, and blogger who consciously chooses to live her life as an experiment and to view the world through the lens of curiosity and fascination. Her previous book, The Peaceful Daughter’s Guide to Separating From A Difficult Mother, is an international best seller, having sold well over 100,000 copies. In another life, Anderson spent 20 years trying to fit her right-brained self into a left-brained career as a trade magazine journalist in the field of plastics (and if she had a dime for every time someone mentioned that line from The Graduate…). She is married to a left-brained engineer and they live in Southeastern Connecticut.

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 Karen C.L. Anderson

Published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author. Reviewers may quote brief passages in reviews.

Cover Design: Elina Diaz

Layout & Design: Elina Diaz

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Disclaimer: The author is not a licensed professional. This book details the author’s personal experience and opinions. Among other things, it includes the author’s reactions and memories. The author acknowledges others may remember or have experienced certain situations she recounts in this book differently than she does.

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The Difficult Mother-Daughter Relationship Journal: A Guide For Revealing & Healing Toxic Generational Patterns

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2019948632

ISBN: (print) 9781642501308, (ebook) 978-1-64250-131-5

BISAC category code: FAM033000—FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Parenting / Parent & Adult Child

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to women in all their glorious forms and to painful generational patterns that want to be healed.

It is dedicated to all the women who have come before us, who sacrificed their spirits and their dreams because the world didn’t value them as they were and as they wished to be.

It is dedicated to the fierce, wild, liberated women who will come after us.

All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb, and she in turn formed in the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythm of our mother’s blood before she herself is born, and this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother.

—Layne Redmond, When the Drummers Were Women

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Answers

Guidelines

Intend

Reveal

Awareness

Notice

Feel

Tend

Retell

Betray

Delve

Separate

Limit

The Anatomy of a Healthy Boundary

Break

Need

Heal

Reconnect (or Not)

Revisit

Practice

Recommended Reading & Other Resources

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Thank You

Preface

Christmas Day, 2018

On a day that would normally be filled with busyness and family, my husband was in bed with what we thought was the flu (it wasn’t…and he’s fine) and I was zoning out on Facebook.

A message request came through from a woman who wrote, "Have you ever thought of writing a book called Great Mothers, Difficult Adult Daughters? I feel there is just far too much mother blaming and mother shaming in this world today."

(She was reacting to the title of my previous book, Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters: A Guide For Separation, Liberation & Inspiration.)

She had a few other choice words and an accusation: You are preying on vulnerable adult daughters who aren’t taking responsibility for their appalling behavior to their mothers who love them unconditionally, who gave their all for their beloved daughters.

I noticed feelings arise in me. Defensiveness, anger…fear, even. A weight on my solar plexus. I also rolled my eyes.

I took a deep breath and responded. Kindly but honestly. I expressed that my work isn’t about blame or fault for mothers or daughters. It’s about taking responsibility for oneself.

She had more accusations.

I responded with a recommendation: Dr. Joshua Coleman is an expert on family estrangement and is the author of When Parents Hurt.

He’s okay. Not that good, she replied.

(Which I suspect is because, like me, he asks his readers to consider looking inward and to take responsibility for themselves,