How will Trump’s Toxic Patriarchy Affect Mothers and Daughters?

On November 5, 2024, when America elected Donald Trump to be president again, I was in Florida presenting at the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) conference about how to understand and heal generational trauma between mothers and daughters. As I talked about the emotional and relational harm patriarchy inflicts on mothers and daughters, how it inflicts generational trauma and causes mother-daughter conflict, the synchronistic timing of this message wasn’t lost on me. Nor was it lost on the packed room of mostly women who attended my talk. One woman bravely put up her hand and voiced the elephant in the room by asking how the election would impact the mother-daughter relationship. I responded by saying, “The election will have a direct impact on mothers and daughters because patriarchy is on trial today”. And patriarchy won!

There are a lot of theories being discussed about how a misogynistic, racist, convicted felon won the presidency again. And all these conversations are important. But there is a more important conversation that is begging to be discussed. We must talk about how deeply and intensely patriarchal American society is! Patriarchal thinking is often seen as a choice, as something you can opt out of. But that isn’t true. Patriarchy is the rule of law in America! It is the belief system every American is taught to believe in, regardless of how liberal their upbringing is. Patriarchy defines the gender norms that Americans are taught to define themselves by. And its sexist and misogynistic beliefs are so ubiquitous, so normalized, so ingrained into every fiber of American society, they can be heard to detect.

Patriarchy’s normalized omnipresence can be seen through America’s shocking domestic violence statistics, its gun violence epidemic, how equal pay has still not been achieved, and through the men who run the country, whether they’re in the White House, a banker, or a tech billionaire. Patriarchy’s glaring presence as the rule of law is seen in the way women’s abortion rights have always been under threat, and how they were finally overturned during Trump’s first presidency. And in our relationships, we see how easy it is to normalize patriarchy in how we unconsciously prioritize men’s needs, expect men to lead and speak, and see women as caretakers and listeners. Even if we don’t consciously believe in these sexist beliefs, the idea that a mother is the natural primary caregiver is so deeply ingrained, it isn’t recognized as a sexist belief, and no different to the sexism that men are natural leaders. And in my clients’ families, patriarchy is present every day in the way that the conversation that inquires after what women feel, think, need, and desire is silenced.

Donald Trump’s first and second presidential win are a stark warning that the toxic patriarchal behavior and leadership he exhibits is both tolerated and rewarded in American society. And since patriarchy is, by its definition, harmful to women, and as I write in “The Mother-Daughter Puzzle”, the root cause of mother-daughter conflict, I am deeply concerned about the increased harm mothers and daughters are going to experience during Trump’s second presidency.

When I map a client’s or student’s mother-daughter history, the harm patriarchy inflicts becomes quickly apparent. The mother-daughter history mapping exercise is the diagnostic exercise of the Mother-Daughter Attachment® Model and it uncovers women’s generational experience with patriarchy by mapping out the emotional silencing and neglect, violence, lack of necessary resources, reduced agency and autonomy, and unfulfilled dreams and potential that women experience. And after highlighting these experiences, the exercise exposes the emotional and relational harm they inflict. Causal connections are made between the emotional silencing, neglect, and reduced agency women experience and their struggle with anxiety, depression, disordered eating, and mother-daughter conflict. And the way the mental health profession colludes with patriarchy is revealed through its tendency to dismiss these obvious and researched causal connections and blame women’s mental and emotional struggles and mother-daughter conflict on women’s individual pathology or mothers. And the exercise reveals the harm patriarchy’s belief in the selfless mothering role inflicts on women’s emotional and mental health, equality, and mother-daughter connection, which I will return to later in this blog.

In Trump’s toxic patriarchy where bullying, controlling, and gaslighting behaviors are normalized and treated as a sign of leadership, of “deal making”, women’s rights, truth, reality, and needs will be treated as a threat to male dominance. This warns us that mothers and daughters will experience increased conflict, estrangement, mother blaming, and guilt-tripping. Women’s individual and relational suffering will increase, as voice by voice and right by right, women’s voices and rights are silenced, marginalized, and denied. (Not unlike the way that American health insurance companies deny people’s claims!)

How to help mothers and daughters survive and resist Trump’s toxic patriarchy

As I said during my talk at the AAMFT conference, patriarchy is traumatizing! And before I outline two recommendations on how mothers and daughters can survive Trump’s toxic patriarchy and limit the harm it will inflict, I want to remind women that they are more than 50% of the population! Mothers and daughters are more than 50% of the population! And America’s patriarchal society is asking half its citizens to adapt to, to normalize a belief system, a rule of law, that by its definition, hates women!

Recommendation 1: The mental health profession has a key role to play in helping mothers and daughters limit and heal the generational harm patriarchy inflicts. But the mental health profession cannot adequately fulfill that role without first understanding how patriarchal beliefs have been co-opted by and normalized within the profession.

The mental health profession needs to understand that it does not function outside of the society it serves, and with patriarchy being the norm in America, the mental health profession cannot avoid internalizing America’s patriarchal norms.

Trump’s presidency is a call for the mental health profession to examine the patriarchal sexism it has internalized through the way it pathologizes women’s normal reaction to patriarchal harm and actively marginalizes women and the mother-daughter relationship by how it sidelines female theorists, women’s development, and mother-daughter attachment. The mental health profession needs to recognize that it sends its newly graduated therapists out into a patriarchal society without any understanding of how patriarchy sets mothers and daughters up for conflict, women’s developmental needs within a patriarchal society, and women’s generational experience with patriarchy. And it needs to recognize how it teaches therapists to understand their female clients through men’s eyes through its love of certain male theorists, without any examination of the male theorist’s internalized sexism and how women’s perspectives and needs are being actively silenced.

One key area where patriarchy has been internalized by the mental health profession is through its reverence to Bowlby’s Attachment Theory. Patriarchy has co-opted this theory, using it to provide a “scientific” justification for the way patriarchy pathologizes and blames mothers, treats mothering as a selfless role, and caregiving as a female quality, rather than a human quality. Evidence of this normalized patriarchal sexism is seen through the increasing use of mother blaming terms like “mother wound”, “mother hunger”, “toxic mother”, and “narcissistic mother” and today’s mother-daughter estrangement trend. I am seeing a willful blindness in too many corners of the mental health profession in how it views women as the caregiving gender, and mothering as a selfless role, without any recognition to how a mother’s ability to mother is limited by the emotional, practical, and financial support she receives, as the Mother-Daughter Attachment® Model highlights.

Recommendation 2: Challenging patriarchy’s selfless mothering role will go a long way in helping mothers and daughters survive Trump’s toxic patriarchy and heal generational trauma. The selfless mothering role comes from patriarchy’s belief in the Culture of Female Service, which I define in “The Mother-Daughter Puzzle”, as an “umbrella term that collects together all the ways that society (patriarchy) believes that it is a woman’s God-given duty to be of service”.

Trump’s re-election is a wake-up call to the harm patriarchy’s selfless mothering role inflicts on women. How it renders mothers without a self, without an identity as her own person, without a life and needs of her own. And how this sexist belief is the cornerstone of patriarchal sexism and gender inequality, and how it feeds mother blaming. (Mothers are people first is the Mother-Daughter Attachment® Model’s first solution.)

The selfless mothering role was on full display when I sought help from a local family therapist because I was emotionally exhausted. This family therapist had a master’s degree in women’s studies, so I expected her to understand the selfless mothering role and know how to help me decontaminate myself from my internalized sexist beliefs and behaviors. But when I told her that I needed some time-out from prioritizing my family’s needs, my children being adults at the time, and learn how to prioritize myself and my career, she responded aghast, saying “So you want to abandon your family”.

Women need to start asking that their mental health professional receives women’s development and mother-daughter attachment training. And women need to map their mother-daughter history map (instructions in “The Mother-Daughter Puzzle”) so that they can uncover the bold truth about their own, and their mother’s and grandmother’s emotional reality. Women need to understand how the conversation that inquires after what women feel, think, need, and desire is actively silenced in their generational family, culture, and society. And how patriarchy teaches women to silence and neglect themselves, feel guilty, and normalize their emotional exhaustion due to too much emotional labor. When the understanding of women’s lives and mothering are restored to the socio-cultural and political environment they live in, patriarchal harm can no longer hide in plain sight! The lies in mother blaming are exposed! And the mental health profession cannot pathologize women’s normal reaction to patriarchal harm!

In conclusion, mothers and daughters should not have to fight the onslaught of patriarchal harm that will be unleashed in the coming years on their own. They need and deserve the support from each other and the support from the mental health profession! The counseling and marriage and family and coaching professions have an ethical duty to provide a united challenge to the increasing patriarchal and misogynistic beliefs and policies that will be unleashed on women, men, and the world.

My hope is that women, and men, will become a united front in examining their internalized patriarchy and challenge the toxic patriarchal norms that resulted in Donald Trump being re-elected.

And I am asking the mental health profession to –

1. Examine their much-loved male-based theories for the sexist views they hold.

2. Honor women more actively by mandating training on women’s development and mother-daughter attachment, not as an add-on, but as an essential part of therapy training.

3. Challenge any pathologizing diagnoses and mother blaming ideology and terminology.