Part 1: Essential Mother-Daughter Attachment Training is Missing

When I asked my friend whether her therapist had received mother-daughter attachment training, she said that she hadn’t thought to ask. She said that she had assumed that every mental health professional and life coach would learn about mother-daughter attachment dynamics during their professional training, because of how essential this relationship is to understanding women. And when I told her that it is unlikely her therapist had received any mother-daughter attachment dynamics training, because it is missing in most training programs, she was shocked.

She didn’t want to believe me at first, as she struggled to wrap her head around the knowledge that a profession whose job it is to understand, empower, and heal women is missing such a key curriculum topic. And when this new reality sunk in, my friend became angry. She shared that she sometimes didn’t feel fully understood by her therapist. And she wondered if this was because her therapist had not been taught how to understand the subtle underlying dynamics in her mother-daughter relationship, and the generational themes in her family. As we continued to talk about this missing information, we commiserated how at every turn, women are missing from the conversation, and how for mental health professionals and life coaches this omission is worse, because its exclusion is being silenced and ignored.

My friend’s anger was cathartic to me, because I too am angry that mother-daughter attachment dynamics are still missing across the board in training organizations, and mental health professionals and life coaches are continuing to help women without this essential knowledge. I have knocked on many training organization doors in North America and England, and most did not respond. For example, the Ackerman Institute for the Family in New York has not responded to my inquiry emails. Relate and the Institute for Family Therapy, two major family training organizations in England, and Black Therapists Rock in America, fobbed my inquiries off with vague statements about not needing new training or professional development topics. Years ago, the head of Relate Nottingham responded to my inquiry about adding mother-daughter attachment to their training program with how she didn’t know how this topic would fit into their training program. Really?? And the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy told me to wait patiently for them to call me when they’ve decided that the mother-daughter relationship fits into their program. I have been patiently waiting for their call for twenty years.

I have pioneered the mother-daughter specialism over the last thirty years and created the Mother-Daughter Attachment® Model. Today, mothers and daughters actively seek out specialized help for their relationship difficulties. Women and colleagues commonly respond when they hear that mother-daughter therapy and coaching is a specialism with comments like “of course it is”, “why shouldn’t it be”, and “why isn’t this more widely known”. To them the mother-daughter relationship is a specialism, and it belongs front and center in the mental health and life coaching professions.

Like my friend and I, women and colleagues get angry when they realize that this essential female knowledge is deliberately being ignored. And many see that this omission reveals the unrecognized sexism in the mental health and life coaching professions that is marginalizing women. It reveals that women are still not a priority, because this essential information should not be added in at some undisclosed time in the future because every therapist and coach needs it every time they are working with a female. And it reveals how these professions have been coopted by patriarchy, because understanding mother-daughter attachment dynamics does more than heal mother-daughter conflict. It reveals the generational trauma women experience and patriarchy inflicts. And when the mother-daughter relationship is treated like an optional extra, or shoved to the sidelines, or ignored, women’s generational trauma is left unacknowledged and misunderstood, and the harm patriarchy inflicts is left unaccounted for, ignored, and allowed to continue.

Published research does not support the deliberate omission of mother-daughter attachment dynamics. The research on women’s development which was conducted by Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller, and other researchers, including the researchers at the Stone Center, Wellesley College, reveals that mother-daughter attachment dynamics are key to understanding how women and girls learn about themselves.

Let’s look at how essential mother-daughter attachment dynamics are in understanding women’s lives, behaviors, relationships, work lives, and their emotional growth and development, and how these facts do not support its continued omission.

1. Mothers and daughters are at least half the population.

2. Mental health professionals know that when they’re working with a female client of any age, her relationship with her mother is metaphorically in the room with her.

3. The research shows that the mother-daughter relationship is essential to;

• Understanding women’s and girls’ lives, behaviors, and emotional reality.
• Female emotional development and wellbeing.
• Understanding systemic sexism.
• Understanding and healing generational trauma.
• Facilitating emotional empowerment and generational change.
• Challenging patriarchy.

With women being at least fifty percent of the population, why is this omission being tolerated? Why, if mother-daughter attachment dynamics are essential to the work mental health professionals and life coaches do every day, do I receive so much silence and defensive, dismissive reactions when I ask for it to be included? And why, in a profession that prides itself on understanding systemic sexism, is the mother-daughter relationship not front and center in our conferences and training programs?

This is part one of a three-part open letter to mental health professionals, life coaches, and their training organizations, where I outline how serious the situation is. In this three-part open letter, I outline how this omission is deliberate, unsupported by research, harmful to therapeutic and coaching work, and reveals the extent of the profession’s internalized sexism.

In part two, I reveal the serious consequences of this deliberate omission. How this omission is causing, and contributing to, an increase in mother-daughter conflict, blame, estrangement, and how it leaves women, girls, mothers, and daughters confused, misunderstood, and not helped in the way they deserve.

In part three, I discuss why, after thirty years, I am still struggling to get mental health professionals, life coaches, and their training organizations to recognize this huge hole in their training programs, and that this hole tells the story of how successful patriarchy is at coopting our profession to marginalize women.

I am grateful to our faculty at Mother-Daughter Coaching International and all my students, you are all my fellow pioneers who have recognized the need for mother-daughter attachment training. You see that ethical therapeutic and coaching work MUST include the understanding of mother-daughter attachment dynamics, and that ignorance is no longer an acceptable excuse!