Part 3: Is therapy colluding with or causing mother-daughter estrangement?

This is part three of a four-part blog series on “Why are so many mothers and daughters estranged today?”. In this blog series, I shine a spotlight on a worrying spike in mother-daughter estrangement that my graduates and I have observed. In this third blog I unpack my second observation about this trend – that daughters in their twenties and thirties are seeking therapeutic help for their mother-daughter troubles, and too often, this help is leading them to choose estrangement.

Over the last ten years I have repeatedly heard the same story – that a therapist is advising a daughter to cut off contact from her mother, and mothers are feeling confused, deeply hurt, and angry at their daughter’s individual therapist. Mothers are saying that they do not trust their daughter’s individual therapist’s judgement about their mothering and their connection with their daughter, and many have not had a session with their daughter’s individual therapist, which is leaving them feeling blamed and powerless.

When I first started hearing multiple stories of twenty and thirty-year-old daughters being told by a therapist that her mother is ‘toxic’, ‘wounding’, ‘narcissistic’, ‘controlling’, and ‘the cause of the daughter’s attachment disorder’ and that she should cut off contact, I attributed these stories as isolated cases of unskilled therapists in mother-daughter attachment dynamics. But as their stories become commonplace, and my graduates were hearing them too, I knew that the therapy profession had a problem that needed to be exposed.

One of the shocking aspects of this observation is that it goes against women’s development research. Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller, and the researchers at the Stone Center, Wellesley College found that mothers and daughters of all ages are wired for connection, and the mother-daughter bond is central to women’s emotional growth and development. These researchers found that contrary to the human development theories created by white men, women and girls learn about who they are within relationships, and this learning starts with their mother. They found that the concept of ‘separation’ as a necessary step to becoming your own person is inaccurate for women (and I suspect for men as well). Women and girls learn best about themselves within their relationship with their mother, rather than on the outside where they are on their own.

The commonplace practice of therapists advising daughters to cut off contact from their mothers without a deep analysis of the underlying dynamics in their relationship is causing a lot of unnecessary emotional pain, harming both the daughter’s and mother’s emotional health and development as women, and it is ignorant of women’s development and the Mother-Daughter Attachment® Model (MDAM). It is also sentencing mothers and daughters to a life without each other. And the way that estrangement is being treated by daughters and their therapists as an ‘empowered’ choice goes against the research. The only exception should be for the small percentage of daughters whose mothers are truly abusive, where estrangement is a necessary lifesaving choice. Most mothers do not set out to harm their daughter! Most mothers are desperate for connection, to feel known by and to know her daughter, and to care for and support her. The avalanche of mothers being labeled as ‘toxic’, ‘wounding’, and ‘narcissistic’ within therapy offices is a false and misleading picture of mothers, mothering, and the mother-daughter connection today.

• What justification do therapists have to use these so-called diagnostic labels?
• How does blaming the mother help a mother and daughter and facilitate healing and change?
• Why do therapists not understand that mother-daughter conflict is the canary-in-the-coalmine, warning us that something in their family and cultural environment is harming women, and setting the mother and daughter up for conflict?
• Why are therapists not helping daughters dig below the hurt and anger they feel towards their mother, and helping them tell the story of their generational experience with patriarchy, violence, racism, and that these harmful experiences are causing their conflict with their mother?

Continuing the case study from the second blog in this series where Dallas, the twenty-five-year-old daughter cut off contact from her mother Susan through her work with an individual therapist because of what Dallas and her therapist called “Susan’s narcissism and emotional problems”. (Names and identifying details changed to protect their confidentiality.) Happily, Dallas agreed to join Susan for a couple’s session. I was eager to understand Dallas’s experience with her mother, and why she thought her mother was narcissistic and emotionally unwell, when I saw little evidence for these ‘diagnostic labels’.

I also wanted to understand how her work with her individual therapist had led her to cut off contact from her mother. At the start of the session Dallas said, “My therapist helped me recognize that mom is a narcissist. Mom has a ton of emotional problems that I can’t deal with. I am an anxious person because of mom. She wasn’t emotionally available for me when I was a baby, and the way she doesn’t listen to me is too triggering for me. I can’t be around her anymore. It is because of mom that I don’t trust people and I test people. And I am tired of being responsible for mom’s feelings. I am tired of feeling bad about not calling her and checking how she is.”

In the rush to blame Susan, Dallas’s therapist might have missed an important clue that could have prevented the heartbreaking estrangement. When Dallas said that she was “tired of being responsible for mom’s feelings” and “feeling bad about not calling her and checking how she is”, Dallas opened an important window of understanding into the underlying dynamics in their relationship. Her therapist needed to understand, as MDAM explains, that there are some real generational and systemic reasons why Dallas, as Susan’s eldest child and only daughter, felt responsible for taking care of her mother. And that this, and other relational dynamics are easily challenged and healed.

In conclusion, the therapy profession needs to –

1. Do an urgent rethink of how it treats women, and how it uses diagnostic labels to blame mothers.
2. Examine how human development and counseling theories that were created by white men view women through the creators’ internalized sexism.
3. Be more cognizant of how patriarchy blames and labels women for its survival, and how these patriarchal norms become infused and normalized within human development and counseling theories and practices.
4. Be more systemic in the way it views women, because it is missing important contextual information about how women and the mother-daughter dyad is harmed by patriarchy and how, as the MDAM reveals, mother-daughter conflict is the canary-in-the-coalmine.
5. Examine why mother-daughter attachment continues to be marginalized in mental health training programs, when therapists know the mother-daughter relationship is always in the room.

In the next and final blog in this series, “Part 4: Mother-daughter estrangement trend explained”, I reveal the conclusions that my observations and explorations have led me to, and what this trend is warning us about. Estranged daughters are our canary-in-the-coalmine! They are warning us that something is harming women, and in this final blog I suggest what we must challenge and change for women.