Part 4: Mother-Daughter Estrangement Trend Explained

This is the last blog of a four-part series on “Why are so many mothers and daughters estranged today?”. In this blog I outline the conclusions I have come to about what may be causing this worrying trend. This trend is about adult daughters deciding to become estranged from their mother because they are not feeling heard, understood, or valued, and the pain of this invisibility is too much for them. Mothers and daughters do not relate in a cultural vacuum, and estranged daughters are the canary-in-the-coalmine, warning us about the harm that patriarchy and selfless caregiving inflicts on mothers and daughters, and that women’s voices and needs are not listened to or honored.

Notwithstanding today’s estrangement trend, I see no evidence that mothers are more abusive today. Nor do I see that mother-daughter relationships are more toxic or unsalvageable than they were ten years ago. What I am seeing is a parallel trend alongside today’s estrangement trend in which young adult daughters are asking their mothers to join them in mother-daughter couple’s therapy/coaching because they have woken up to the emotional and relational harm patriarchy inflicts on women, and they are demanding change. Yet regardless of whether an adult daughter is choosing estrangement or wanting mother-daughter couple’s therapy/coaching, both sets of adult daughters are angry about the way women are silenced, uncared for, and mistreated by their family. And both groups of daughters are demanding change. The main difference between many estranged daughters and daughters who seek couple’s therapy/coaching with their mother, is that estranged daughters have often internalized the mother blaming language that is pervasive in society, and they seek therapists who speak the same mother-blaming language.  

The fact that there is an observable and measurable trend of young adult daughters who are using therapy to blame their mother for their emotional problems and relationship issues and are becoming estranged because of their therapeutic experience is extremely worrying. And without meaning to, these estranged daughters are indeed whistle blowers. They are outing the truth about patriarchy’s harmful definition of mothering and how this harmful definition is being treated as truth in therapy offices.  

One of these so-called patriarchal facts hides in plain sight in Attachment Theory. Even though Attachment Theory has provided us with essential information about our attachment needs, it has also been coopted by patriarchy to justify its sexist gender role expectation that mothers should be a child’s main caregiver, and “good” mothers must be selfless, all-available, all-giving, and self-neglecting.

In the case study in Parts two and three, the daughter’s therapist blames the mother for her daughter’s attachment issues and anxiety, even though the daughter is twenty-five years old. The therapist diagnoses the mother, without meeting her, as a mother who has failed to provide the emotional care her daughter needs. In her diagnosis, she only considers the mother’s role and responsibilities as a mother. She does not recognize the mother’s agency, life, voice, or needs. The mother’s life experiences, the emotional silence she has experienced, the neglect she has experienced from family members and her ex-husband are not considered. The emotional unavailability of the daughter’s father, the sexist gender roles in the family, how the daughter was bullied at school, and her abusive ex-boyfriend were also not considered. The therapist also blames the mother for her daughter’s choice to become estranged, without any analysis of how their mother-daughter history and shared generational experiences with sexism, patriarchy, and violence have created their hurtful dynamics.   

In conclusion, I believe that today’s estrangement trend is happening because of the following three reasons.

The first reason is social media. Patriarchy’s mother blaming language is being repeated in social media forums, creating echo chambers where angry daughters accuse their mothers of being “toxic”, “wounding”, and “narcissistic”. These social media forums do not make daughters accountable for their role in their relationship, nor do they encourage daughters to do the hard work of understanding their mother-daughter history and connecting the dots between their shared experiences with patriarchal silencing and neglect and their mother-daughter struggles. In these social media forums, as in mother blaming therapy offices, mothers have no agency, rights, or voice, and neglectful fathers and patriarchy are not held responsible for the harm they inflict.

The second reason is patriarchy’s harmful definition of mothering. Patriarchy defines motherhood as a selfless, all-consuming role without any consideration of the mother’s agency, personhood, or needs, and this harmful definition is justified in many human development theories, most of which were created by white men. And this harmful definition is also being used in therapy offices, as the trend shows, to understand attachment dynamics. Attachment Theory for example, was created by Sir John Bowlby, a white upper-class English man during the 1940’s. It makes sense that this theory reflects Bowlby’s 1940’s sexist views of women and mothers.

Today’s estrangement trend is warning us that as a society, and as counseling, marriage and family, and coaching professions, we collectively need to do urgent work on rethinking our definition of motherhood. We need to find a new definition that provides mothers with rights to her personhood and needs, and that treats caregiving as a human quality, not just a female and mothering quality.

The third reason is the lack of mother-daughter attachment training in mental health, marriage and family, and coaching training programs. I believe today’s estrangement trend has come about because of the lack of specialized training in mother-daughter attachment® dynamics. I know that it is unreasonable to expect student therapists to prepare themselves for every issue and every relationship they face after they graduate. Yet, the persistent lack of even the most superficial coverage of mother-daughter attachment®, even though as therapists we know that the mother-daughter relationship is always in the room when we are working with a female client, baffles me. It feels like a deliberate professional blindness to the way that our profession is colluding with, and reinforcing, society’s patriarchal norms.  

What can all to easily be forgotten underneath the social media echo chambers, the books and YouTube videos by therapists on understanding the mother wound, mother hunger, and narcissistic mothers, and the lack of even the most rudimentary training for mental health professionals, is that this trend is about mothers and daughters who are yearning for connection, and they are not receiving the help they need and deserve. This trend is causing incalculable harm because as women’s development research and the Mother-Daughter Attachment® Model explain, mothers and daughters need each other. Estrangement creates toxic shame, guilt, and blame that makes both the mother and daughter feel bad, to-blame, wrong, unlikable, and unlovable. Estrangement isolates mothers and daughters. And it harms their power to fight for a better emotional reality for themselves and for future generations.