Daughters Grow up Feeding on Mother’s Emotions: Self-Recovery Guide to Heal the Love-Hate Relationship between Mothers and Daughters, and How to Protect our Daughters from Emotional Legacy

By Woo-ran Park

“Mother is Mother, Daughter is Daughter”
- A self-recovery guide for all mothers and daughters by a psychoanalytic expert
- How mothers can reclaim their lives as an independent women and human beings
Why do mothers turn more to their daughters than sons when feeling upset or distressed? Why do mothers look upon their happily married daughters with not just pride but a hint of jealousy? Why do daughters, when thinking about their mothers, feel gratitude as well as guilt and resentment?
We need to lose our mothers to find ourselves. And we need to find ourselves for our daughters to live their own lives. Woo-ran Park, a psychoanalytic expert who for more than ten years has conducted over 10,000 psychotherapy and dream interpretation sessions, reaches deep into psychology research and case studies to unlock the secret behind the love-hate relationship between mothers and daughters and explain how we can protect our girls from this emotional wounding across generations.
Many reasons lie behind the mother’s obsession with her daughter and the daughter’s inability to break free from this hold. But the author pays particular attention to the female tendency to attain self-realization by meeting the unmet needs of others. Mothers typically see the son or husband as the other and try to satisfy their needs, but when it comes to the daughter, who they see as their equivalent, they’re more likely to make demands. Likewise, daughters identify with the mother and see the mother’s emotions as her own. This is what makes the mother-daughter relationship so complicated: the daughter is angry at the mother who is full of demands but gives little love, and wants to hate her but can’t.
This deep psychological bond between the mother and daughter starts to show cracks as they become older, introducing problems, both big and small, into their lives. Feelings of obsession, bitterness, resentment, longing, and gratitude get rolled into one and make the two oscillate between love and hate. In short, the mother and daughter have failed to create a healthy distance between themselves.
Then what can we do? Park says we should question the social concept of unconditional motherly love and try to bring to surface the mom’s deeply-buried wants and desires as a woman. Only then can we forge a path different from our mother’s and our daughters live a different life from our young selves. The author walks us through the main conduits through which the mother’s unconscious is passed onto the daughter—emotions, gaze, unmet needs, maternal love, husband—and how we can reclaim ourselves as not just a woman but as a human being.
This book will help you to learn the Psychology for Mothers, Daughters and all of women, and recover yourself:
Feelings of Guilt, Resentment, and Gratitude - About Female Emotions
Daughters Grow up Feeding on Mother’s Emotions - About Mother’s Emotions
Am I Really My Child’s Mother? - About the Maternal Gaze
I Wanted to Be Mom’s Loving Daughter - About the Mother’s Unmet Needs
All Mothers are Strong? - About Maternal Love
Moms Be Moms, Dads Be Dads - About Our Husbands
Moms are Human Too - About the Mother’s Recovery
NOW GET THE BOOK! And start growing your skills to strengthen your relationships between MOMs and DAUGHTERs!

• Language: English
• Publisher: METASEQUO
• Release date: Jun 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9791197845130

Book preview

ch1

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Turn to Sons for Love

but to Daughters for Needs?

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Girls get about 30 percent less breastfeeding time than boys.

Women are different from men from a structural or patriarchal standpoint, as they often attain self-realization by satisfying the needs of other members in the family. Women tend to prove themselves by meeting the unmet needs of the men (either the husband or the son), caring for them and filling any gaps. Yet they have trouble directing this kind of attention to their own personal needs. There’s a clear reason why these acts of female dedication cannot be seen as pure sacrifice.

Women often make up for their own insufficiencies and achieve a sense of self-worth by satisfying the demands of others. This holds true especially for sons. What’s ironic is that mothers apply a different standard when it comes to their daughters.

I noticed an interesting thing during a gathering of some mothers of my daughter’s friends. We mothers were laying out snacks on a table. Once we had finished, the girls immediately stopped what they were doing, approached the table and started eating, occasionally looking up at their moms. Meanwhile the boys were completely lost in whatever game they were playing and had no interest in coming over. Some mothers, to my surprise, went over to the boys and personally fed them, popping the snacks into their open mouths.

That this is not a behavior of some few eccentric moms but quite a common affair is testament to how mothers treat daughters and sons differently. In a group setting, girls tend to be more intent on the relationships they have with their mothers while boys are more fixated on their own games, or themselves.

If women attain self-achievement not by fulfilling their own desires but by meeting the needs of men, such as their husbands or sons, why won’t they do the same for their daughters? This is because mothers tend to look at their daughters as an extension of themselves. If sons and husbands exist as the other, daughters are more like the mother’s alter ego. While we should be wary of sweeping generalizations, this phenomenon is one with many profound implications, as these kinds of relationships can have a decisive impact in the psychological makeup of girls and boys as they mature into adults.

Emotional deficiency for girls starts

as soon as they’re born

Research by psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud has found that girls receive 30 percent less breastfeeding time than their male counterparts. This is a telling example that shows how a daughter starts her life with emotional deficiencies. Seeing their mothers cry, girls often feel as though their mother’s emotions are their emotions. Mothers are moved by this, believing their daughters deeply sympathize with their feelings. But the reality is actually a lot more complicated than that.

Before recognizing or acknowledging her own feelings, a daughter would identify with her mother and consider her mom’s feelings as her own. In other words, the daughter puts herself in her mother’s state of mind. Unlike the son, who brings his mother into his own mind state, the daughter erases herself and identifies entirely with the mother. In this way, many women feel other people’s emotions like their own and try to achieve self-realization by serving the needs of others. This is why women are extremely attuned to other people’s emotions and behavior but surprisingly dense when it comes to understanding their own feelings.

Sons tend to perceive the mother as a part of themselves and maintain this stance even with their girlfriends or wives, often seeing the female sacrifice and dedication as a given. So in a family with both boys and girls, it’s usually the daughter that quickly recognizes the demands of the mother. Mothers, too, would see this as perfectly natural and make more demands on the daughters, subtly pushing them to give way to their brothers.

Mothers look at their daughters with mixed emotions. Women who grew up in a difficult household with little love and affection are likely to project their younger self onto their daughter and give her the same cold treatment. If the daughter happens to share one of their own personal flaws, they become insecure and try desperately to erase that imperfection in the child. If they grew up with too many unmet needs, they would sometimes try to make up for it by showering the daughter with too much love and attention. This is all because mothers do not see their daughters as a separate being but as a younger version of themselves.

When mothers see their daughter as an extension of themselves this way, they could rob her of the chance to fully come into her own. And because the child will have trouble recognizing her own emotions, she would live her life constantly monitoring the emotions and feelings of others. This is why it’s important for us, as mothers, to be in touch with our own state of mind, emotions, desires, and needs. Only then can we talk to our child with our emotions kept separate from hers and avoid placing unnecessary guilt or burden on either side.

A life of sacrifices

One of my clients, Young-ji, recalled this scene from her childhood:

While sleeping, my mother often held our baby brother in her arms while I, just a year older and still a baby myself, was left to sleep on the side, touching my brother’s earlobes. Looking back, I can see how pathetic and lonesome this little girl was. In the morning, my brother’s ears would often be swollen from my incessant rubbing.

Often neglected by parents due to their more high-maintenance brothers, girls often grow up feeling lonely and isolated, but it doesn’t end there. Mothers can leave a more profound impact when they make the daughter a vessel of their residual emotions. Many women grow up being an obedient daughter to their parents; even when they form a family of their own, they continue to lead a life in service of their husbands and sons. But in their daughters, they find an emotional release. Knowing that daughters would often turn to the mothers and identify with their feelings, they do not hesitate to pour out their innermost thoughts and emotions.

It’s true we now live in different times and it’s hard today to find mothers that demand daughters to make personal sacrifices for the sons. But there are still many daughters that serve as an emotional help desk for their mothers.

Mothers would often tell their daughters:

You’re the only one I have.

You’re the reason that I live.

There’s no one else I can turn to.

These words entrap the daughters. They think, My mom needs me, I am an important person to my mom. This is the unrealized hope of all daughters: to be recognized as an essential figure in their mother’s lives. And this is why daughters have such a hard time saying no to their mothers. As a result, mothers would latch onto these emotions of their daughter and treat her as a conduit through which they can release all their complaints and emotional grievances.

We sometimes hear of married daughters talking on the phone with their mother every day. As a child and even as a grown-up, we all want to be an important and necessary person to our parents. The daughter’s unfulfilled wish is for her to take priority in her parents’ lives, to become that ultimate, absolute figure.

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Haunted By

Unresolved Emotions

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A daughter often recognizes her mother’s emotions, desires, and needs faster than the mother herself.

Tears continued streaming down during those months I received therapy. I kept telling my therapist it was unfair. Even while expressing these feelings of resentment, I knew I wasn’t making any sense. I couldn’t recall a single moment when I was treated unfairly. My therapist did not offer any explanation. It was a long time after these sessions that I came to understand the source of my resentment.

My feelings of being treated unfairly, I realized, were another expression of loneliness. I remembered a very young girl, squatting alone in the yard of her grandmother’s house in the remote countryside, taking residence there for some time. In the evenings, when the sun would hide behind the mountains, the girl would run after a bus that left whirls of dust on the road. I remembered her crying for her mom. To this girl, a day felt like a thousand years. She didn’t want to feel this lonely; she was, after all, just a little girl and had the right to miss her mom and to want to be near her. But because she was deprived of these things, the loneliness she felt then gradually morphed into resentment.

My grandmother, who led a difficult life of her own, would drag her sobbing granddaughter by the hands and tell her to leave. If you’re going to keep on crying like that, then get out of here, she yelled, pushing the little girl in the direction of the fading bus. The painful grip on the wrist, the shrill tone of her voice, are still vivid in my memory. Resentment grew as this little girl’s cries for her mother were met with reproach and scolding. A sense of helplessness engulfed her as the bus that was sure to take her to her mother remained out of her reach. Isolation overtook her when no one was there to console her, no matter how much she cried and yearned for her mom. Loneliness gripped her at the thought that nobody understood her… All these memories rushed forward and came out in a burst of sobs.

It’s so unfair!

This was the password that had kept all my past pains locked away. These unresolved chunks of emotions would flow around me and occasionally resurface, at an unexpected time or place.

Back when I was a nun and lived a collective life in a convent, I would sometimes retreat into isolation. This was my way of grieving. By repeatedly seeking out similar environments and events, I would mourn these emotions and experiences that lay deep in my subconscious. Unless these emotions were sufficiently grieved in this way, they would come back to haunt me in slightly changed forms.

Locked in the past

Ji-yoon was a mother of two daughters who was dedicated to her job at a major company. Her spouse was cooperative, both as a husband and a father. Since early in their marriage, the couple had donated their time and money to helping children from less privileged backgrounds. When Ji-yoon first came to me, she seemed extremely unstable. She said she didn’t know when and how her anxiety had started but that she was suffering from severe fatigue and agitation. Together, we spent a long time working through her emotions.

It turned out her two daughters had gotten very ill, one after the other, and had had to undergo major surgeries. She and her husband didn’t realize their older girl had gotten so sick until it was already very serious. A few years later, their younger daughter also had to be hospitalized. In her case, the illness was accompanied by hearing loss, which turned out to be permanent. She was taken to major hospitals but none of them could find the exact cause of the illness. The doctors simply told them the only thing they could do was wait, and pray for a natural recovery.

As a parent, Ji-yoon was worried they had done something wrong. But deep inside, she said the thought that really rattled her was not whether her daughter would get better but whether this was somehow her fault.

When a child becomes sick, many mothers wrestle with guilt and blame themselves for the situation, rather than focusing on the child. This guilt sets off its own vicious cycle. Guilt can seem like punishing ourselves for something we’ve done wrong, but it’s actually a defense mechanism. We’re putting ourselves first, our child second. Feelings of anxiety—this is my fault, I’m a bad mom—end up making us once again lose sight of what’s truly important. Instead of seeing the situation for what it is, we retreat inwards. We’re more preoccupied with our reputation and image as a good mom than we are with our sick child.

By all standards, Ji-yoon was a good mom and her daughters were bright, well-raised kids. As there were no genetic predisposition in the family, her daughter’s illness was an anomaly. Through a series of therapy sessions, Ji-yoon came to realize that her anxiety was rooted more in her own unmet needs and desires, a revelation that came as a shock to her. This finding was a result of not just exploring her relationship with her kids but understanding the environment and context of her family, as well as uncovering the pain and deprivations from her own childhood.

Emotionally neglected

Ji-yoon grew up isolated in the constant shadow of her older brother but was a well-behaved and obedient daughter to her parents. As an adult, she was well respected in her workplace and in her free time supported kids from low-income families, keeping up the volunteer work she had started since college.

When she was young, she thought she could win more love and attention from her parents if she got good grades, but she always fell short of her brother. Her parents’ expectations were fairly low when it came to their daughter so she grew up feeling deeply neglected. Her older brother, who was a good student but physically weak, was always at the center of attention. No matter how hard she worked, Ji-yoon always felt outside of her parents’ care and often wondered why she didn’t even get sick that often.

For children, getting sick is often a way to bring attention to themselves. Why, then, did Ji-yoon show such good health growing up? This may have had something to do with her conviction that she was a child who was easy to take care of. She knew her parents approved of this, and she thought she had to keep this up to remain in their good graces. As a little girl, her mind was so tense with worry that she couldn’t even allow herself to get sick.

In such an environment, it would have been hard for Ji-yoon to get a true grasp of the intensity of this child’s desire for love and attention. As a hardworking, dependable person,