The Relationship Between Mothers, Daughters, and Granddaughters
Would you agree that mothers, daughters, and granddaughters have unique relationships? That’s what I’ve noticed and will focus on in this article.
The Relationship Between Mothers and Daughters is Complicated.
I have had a counseling practice for 30 years in Minnesota, California, and Ohio, including the last 10 in and around Manhattan, NYC. And, for all of the interesting perspectives those places and people have given me, I’ve learned there’s so much I don’t know. So, I thought I would start at home.
I asked my girlfriend of ten years and my sister what memories, thoughts, and feelings they have of their deceased mothers and their relationships with them. (Note: I would’ve asked my daughter, as well, but didn’t want to put her in the potentially uncomfortable position of, as my own mother used to say, ‘telling tales out of school,’ about my ex-wife.) I also asked a few friends.
What stuck out to me was the fondness several showed for their mothers, admitting that they each came from what they’d term a ‘good home.’
One recalled with a wistful look, “I remember playing and napping under mommy’s sewing machine at her bridal shop. I remember my mother’s tenderness,” then with a visible break in her countenance, “except when she was beating me with a Christmas tree.” She started to laugh, explaining that only twice in her life had her mother ever hit her or even raised her voice at her daughter – one of those was when her mother chased her up the stairs with their 4-foot tall Christmas tree, replete with lights and tinsel, and was swatting her with it hard. My friend couldn’t stop laughing at the memory.
Complicated, much?
Maybe that’s the word to begin to pull apart the goings-on between mothers and daughters. And yet, is that so much different from any other relationship a person might have? Still, it feels there is something distinctly different about that connection.
The Earlier Mom-Daughter Connection
As fraught as that mom-daughter connection is, there’s one even more complicated and powerful. It’s the precursor relationship to the mom-daughter: the mother’s relationship with herself.
Nothing impacts that mother-daughter relationship more than this, which is precisely why I tell clients and followers all the time that there’s not one single thing that will impact your parenting more than having the courage to go back and heal your own childhood. That past of the mother infuses or outright drives every decision she makes in life, most especially her parenting of her children.
How, you ask?
Recurring Mother-Daughter Themes
Over those 30 years of counseling women, spouses, daughters, moms, granddaughters, and grandmothers, I’ve seen many recurring themes. None of them is an absolute in every mother-daughter relationship, to be sure. But, to deny the repetitiveness of these themes would be negligent. To name a few:
The impact of a mother’s own self-talk – out loud – on her daughter’s body image;
The jealousy of some mothers when they witness their daughter seemingly stealing their husband’s attention and affection from her, the mom;
The worship – the absolute adoration! – of so many daughters for their mothers, adoration so powerful as to be able to bend reality from beatings and abuse to beauty and warm memories;
The modeling of behavior that says a woman’s job and worth are found in taking care of… others, everything, men, animals, responsibilities, money, food, laundry, emotional needs, dusting, and on and on. Or sometimes, also, not only the modeling of ‘taking care of,’ but also the explicit, repetitive message to do so, and the shame that is delivered when the daughter doesn’t do so;
The cross-talk between mothers and their sisters or friends, and how those conversations shape a girl’s image of women, of self, of body, of heart, and of purpose;
The anxieties modeled by moms, though words might never be said, by their distribution of time, energy, money, and attention to two things: weight and hair. It’s fascinating that how a mom spends her time, energy, and attention on those two things alone can convey such a powerful punch to a little girl, teen, young adult, and a grown woman, to the point where many women spend their lives crafting their weight and hair as a desire for approval, desire for disapproval, or an outright ‘Screw you!’ to a mother, who is sometimes long-deceased. The child still answers to the mother, even if only in rebellion belying longing;
The cringy, debilitating turning of daughter into mommy’s mini-me or, far worse, mommy’s little therapist to whom she tells her adult-size problem or even womanly secrets, all far too much for a child to bear, thereby filling the child’s love cup with pain and crippling concern for others at far too young an age;
The cross-talk between mother and father, or mother and men. Oh boy, the messages a girl learns about her ‘place’ in the world, let alone her worth, from just listening to these conversations so dense with implied meanings;
The watching – the ceaselessly assiduous watching, collating, and internalizing of mom data – and how it, perhaps more than anything else, shapes the girl, even more than the listening;
The longing – the pulsing… pulsing… throbbing, longing – deep in the breast of a grown mother for her mother and that mother’s soft touch, approving gaze, and gentle word – that through some feminine osmosis gets passed onto and never retreats from the corresponding place in her own daughter. Oh, the longing…
The enduring, driven by that very longing, the enduring of snubs, slights, rejections, and harsh looks; the enduring of hurtful or even mean touch, and the enduring of the words, those brutal, soul-shattering words from mothers to daughters, those words that etch deeply into the wet cement of the little girl’s soul, concretizing the girl’s worth and very identity for decades to come, perhaps even permanently. All that a woman learns to endure, often against her own best interests, because she so often first learned to endure at the hands and words, or abject neglect, of her mother;
Then there is the absolutely brutal deep-seated loathing of some mothers for their daughters because the little child is seen as somehow stealing the mother’s own life. Perhaps, it was at the moment of pregnancy when the mother realized that her own life she had dreamed and planned was now gone. Perhaps, it was when the baby was born and all eyes, particularly those of the baby’s grandmother, shifted off the pregnant mother and onto the baby, forever dashing the mother’s chances of finally getting mom’s attention. The resentment, born in those moments, festered into full-blown loathing for the rest of the child and, later, the woman’s life, though she never really knew why;
This, of course, bespeaks that other lurking reality, the eyes of others. The monstrous truth of so many mothers teaching their own daughters, often against their own best efforts, to forever see themselves and gauge their worth through the eyes of others, thereby forever giving their lives to find approval in those eyes, not the least of which are the eyes of the mother, herself;
There is the sort of reverse education that unexpectedly happens when a woman sees her mother through new eyes upon the birth of her child, let alone her daughter; multiply that by ten when that child becomes a teenager and later a grown woman.
And can we ever miss the looming twin shadows of mom’s own mother and, of course, men?
Yeah, ‘complicated’ doesn’t even begin to describe the deep interplay of the lives of daughters and mothers.
On top of that, I deliberately omitted one item from the list and its impact on the mother-daughter connection because I, quite frankly, know nothing about it and have no idea if anyone, scientist or old woman (or both), actually knows. There’s been so little research on this subject and absolutely zero to my knowledge, on its impact on mothers and daughters. I’m talking about the dreaded menopause. How does that affect the middle-aged woman’s relationship with her, often-deceased, mother?
Are you beginning to see how silly it is that a man is even pretending to write this article?
The Joy of Connecting with Mom Through Silliness
And yet, it is silliness, in some ways that the daughter seeks, in one way or another.
I had a very serious mother, born in 1928, just before the Great Depression and its impact on her small family farm, and WWII. Hers was a serious, gritty generation. Thus, nothing was more prized in our home than when mom gently teased, had a wry grin creep quietly across her mouth, or outright laughed.
That playfulness implies relaxedness. It is mother calm, even if just for a moment. It is perhaps the little girl in her coming out to play, and the daughter loves it. For just that flashing moment little girl is meeting little girl, corresponding spirits in each are connecting. And that second little girl will spend the rest of her life chasing that exact moment, that exact experience, again and again, enduring the most vicious of life storms to reclaim that.
The glow of that moment with her mother was gold like no other.
Why Are Mother-Daughter Relationships So Blessedly Difficult?
My mother might, somewhat tritely, yet generationally consistently, say it’s because there is no good without toil.
While I’d be a damn fool to disagree with that sage who was my mother, I’d add that the difficulty between mothers and daughters finds root in the fact that they’re both searching for the same thing: identity and worth. And, the latter is seeking it from the former, while the former is often still seeking it from her mother.
Too often the mother of a daughter is still trying to get her own needs met – i.e., the filling of her own love cup – whether through work, men, money, or the daughter, herself. So, she doesn’t have as much love as is necessary to be a source, rather than a siphon of love for that child.
>> Read my article on emotional incest: 9 Badass Questions About Emotional Incest
This is where it can get nasty and ugly.
I was with a woman, back in my twenties, who stated quite adamantly, more than once, “Sven, I want to have children, so that I will have someone who will love me forever.” Somehow, even to my early-twenties brain, that registered as hardcore messed-up. This woman not only had a few children of her own, but when those children hit their teen years she adopted a few more. Eeeeyikes!
The problem is that mothers (and it is no less true of many fathers) often will use the child to get their own love needs met. The child exists, therein, to meet the love needs of the adult, the daughter is expected to pour love into the mother’s love cup, not vice-versa. Or, the vice-versa only thinly veils the adamantly clear expectation that the little girl feels and knows, somewhere in her, that her job is to make mom happy. And there it is! There is the little girl’s new and forever identity – making others like her so that she might get a dash of approval or acceptance when she does. Thanks, Mom!
Perhaps the mother is still trying to get her own mother’s acceptance or approval. Or, perhaps mom is using her mothering skills to prove she’s not her mom or that she’s better than her mom, and all because mom never confirmed that child’s worth, decades ago. And the little girl gets caught up in the chess match going on between mom and grandma, even if only in mom’s head. The fallout stunts that girl for decades because she then exerts all energies and focuses on culling whatever bits of approval and acceptance she can from her little friends, the mean girls, boys, daddy, daddies, work, accomplishments, or from that bitter, old, life-sucking crone that is excessive serving of others.
Women Need To Be Accepted Before They Perform
A dear friend of mine, Dr. Michael Navarre, did his Ph.D. work in the field of sports psychology, interviewing the 50, or so, collegiate coaches who coached, or had coached, both women’s and men’s sports teams. What his research revealed was a profoundly fascinating pattern.
As he pithily stated in his oral defense,
“Female athletes need to feel accepted before they perform. Male athletes need to perform before they feel accepted.”
This has become a helpful insight in my work with couples, particularly when it comes to emotional intimacy and sex. The daughter is forever seeking that acceptance as a person and a woman from the one person most able to confer it, her mother.
So powerful is that ache for the conferring of acceptance from that one person that the daughter believes that only the mother can give it. This cements a distribution of power that posits all of it in the mother. Therefore, the daughter becomes a woman who forever keys into all of the mother’s wants and expectations, hoping to meet them and gain the pot of gold.
It rarely, if ever, occurs to the adult daughter that she has all of the power because the mother is now so addicted to the child’s fealty, and servanthood that the daughter walking away would gut the mother. More treacherously, the daughter has the power to explode the family myth that protects the mother as good. Mother’s very identity is deeply rooted in the family myth that she was and is a good mom. But the daughter’s experiences and memories tell a very different story. So, the mom must exert all energies and power to keep the child either afraid or forever misdirected toward grasping the mom’s approval (or avoiding her criticism), or both. If the truth got out, Mom’s image and sense of self would be shattered.
Longing For Your Mother’s Approval
So powerful is that longing for mother’s approval that it serves as the very infrastructure, post, and beam, of the family myth system protecting mom. So fragile is often the mother’s ego that she will even engage her power over siblings, spouses, and extended family to silence the recalcitrant daughter, lest she reveal the family secrets.
At the root of so many mother-daughter difficulties is the very human longing to be liked. It really is that simple. The daughter needs it – so vital to her very existence and development – the mother wants it; and each is, in one way or another, seeking it from the other. The only problem, of course, is that one has every right to seek it from the other, and the other has no right to seek it.
If the love cup is not filled in the mother before the child is born, this longing for approval in the mom (and her not giving it to the daughter) can devolve into any manner of a sort of ‘inmates running the asylum.’ For example:
1 - The Parent Forever Needs To Be Liked By Her Child
I have seen far too many homes where the parent forever needs to be liked by the child. Liked! As if the child’s job is to fill the parent’s need for love.
Back when I was an NCAA Head Coach for Strength, part of my de facto duties was to get to know and tend to, quietly, the inner lives of some of the coaches of the sports teams. One of the questions I used to ask each coach, on the promise of anonymity, was, “What percentage do you want your athletes to respect you and what percentage do you want them to like you? Is it 60-40? 20-80?” What started as a playful little opening to discuss their leadership focus and abilities became for me, a fascinating mini-study in winning, not to mention human needs. Shockingly, the percentage that a coach wanted to be respected (over-liked) directly correlated to that coach’s winning percentage. We had a coach who 40% wanted to be respected and 60% wanted to be liked. Her winning percentage was .400. There was another 70% who wanted to be respected and her teams consistently won ¾ of their games. Quite interestingly, one of the coaches won several national championships over the course of two decades. Wanna guess the percent he wanted to be liked by his players? 5%. And, he said, “Sven the only reason I need to be liked, at all, is because I have to go into the homes of new recruits and I can’t be totally unbearable.” I would go on to tell these coaches, particularly those who registered high on the wanting-to-be-liked percentage, that their athletes don’t exist to meet the coach’s need to be liked and approved of, or to be their friend. That’s what the coach’s friends, spouse, colleagues, and family exist for. The coach exists to draw the greatness out of the players.
Now, this is not to say that parenting is about coaching and winning. Instead, I raise this snippet to shine light on the extraordinary human longing to be liked, and its ability to undermine effective relationships. A parent using a child to get her own needs to be liked met is a parent misappropriating her power. This can manifest in seeking the child’s attention, stealing the child’s affection, commandeering the teen’s time, disallowing any boundaries between the daughter and mother, and too often co-opting or appropriating the daughter’s successes for the mother’s glory.
2 - Daughter as Therapist to Her Mother
I have even counseled families wherein the mother goes to the preteen daughter for advice on life matters, such as relationships, careers, and family. This is child-as-therapist taken to an even new low, placing too much weight on a child’s shoulders. A role reversal, rooted in profound parental insecurities, turns the child into the parent. This has the effect of squelching that child’s own voice, feelings, passions, interests, and sense of self as mattering for more than just serving the needs of others.
3 - Checking Out of Her Daughter’s Life
3. And then there’s that other way that the mothers sometimes seek to get their own love cup filled after the daughter is born. She checks out of the daughter’s life to seek her approval through career, religion, men, ministering to her own parents, endless busyness and volunteering or simply escaping it all with booze, pills, or the year of checking out to her bed behind a closed door.
From any of these, the generational curses continue – another little girl doesn’t get her love cup filled. Thus begins the collision course of this little girl with her daughter, one day.
Will she heal in time, or will the dread cycle continue one more revolution?
The Biggest Communication Issues Between Mothers and Daughters
One of the net effects of the deepest needs for love not being met in the soul of the child is that the personality of that little child begins to adapt.
As a survival tool, the child bends away from its natural course to avoid pain and to gain the life-giving love it needs. Like an oak tree that defies nature by contorting away from a power line but still, somehow, growing upward toward the sun, the child becomes whatever is necessary to gain not only the mother’s approval but the acceptance and approval of anyone – ANYONE!
This is where maladaptive traits are born. This is the advent of that girl later giving away her worth to be accepted by other girls who hurt her or giving away her sexuality to boys while seeking that same acceptance. She will seek attention from teachers, siblings, and other parents, and become whatever gets her that prized, if too often rare, positive attention from them.
But still, that longing for acceptance by her mother eats at her. And, very often in teen years or young adulthood, stretching well into middle age, the daughter develops a just-below-the-surface snotty, pissy, bitchy, orneriness. Seemingly, no matter what the mother says or does, the daughter responds with attitude.
Hurts That Mothers and Daughters Never Discuss
Why? Because the deepest hurts in the daughter are either never discussed or, more often, never even known by that daughter. So, she is perpetually cranky, but she doesn’t even know why. And so, this sort of half-impasse between mom and daughter becomes the norm.
The daughter is not angry enough to leave the relationship, plus she still has a deep-seated longing for acceptance, so that the deepest wound can finally be healed. But, because that same wound is forever pus-ing, she is not able or wanting to have an amiable connection with Mom. And mom lives in a state of bewilderment, either real or put on, at why her daughter doesn’t like her.
The Distribution of Power in the Mother-Daughter Relationship
The other element that always impacts mother-daughter relations is the, previously mentioned, distribution of power in the relationship.
Mom starts the relationship with 100% of the power. The quality of decades-later interactions with the daughter are fundamentally determined by the mother’s willing and deliberate giving back of that power to the child. It is the letting go of the grip over the child so that the child no longer feels obligated to meet the mother’s needs. That includes letting go of the mother’s needs to be mothering, thus releasing the daughter to become the full-grown oak she was encoded to become in her little acorn self.
The releasing of power to the child enables the mother to be present – fully present – to the daughter without agenda or anxieties of her own. To methodically entrust self-power back to the child, and to teach her how to use it, means the parent is present to teen and young adult woman without the presence of the third entity that used to be in the relationship – the mother’s own inner dialogue as driven by mom’s feelings, needs and wants. In other words, mom and her own sh*t aren’t primary players in the drama.
Instead, mom can give attention, affection, acceptance, approval, acknowledgment of past pains mom has caused, and apology for said pains.
Mothers Need to Heal Themselves
And nothing – not one single thing – will positively jack up and forever change communication between mommy and daughter, well into old age and death, like mom healing her own sh*t and pulling herself out of the center of her universe, and eagerly putting daughter there when daughter needs it.
If mom has done her job of giving back power, bit by bit, when young, that same daughter leans on mom, less and less, as she ages. She has been taught she matters and that her decisions, pursuits, and soul are good. Words become unnecessary because the message has already been delivered, year in and year out,
“Trust yourself, my dear girl. For you are good. I believe in you. You’re doing just fine. You’re wonderful just the way you are!”
Healing the Mother-Daughter Divide
I regularly ask parents who’ve experienced a breach in their relationship with their adult child, which is, of course, generally the result of wounds done by the parent,
If you could have your relationship with your adult-child restored but them not be healed,
OR
You could have your adult child healed, but never get to have a relationship with that child,
Which would you choose?
Generally (hopefully!), the response is to have the child healed, even if it means losing the child.
This is the orientation that is necessary in the breast of the parent. It is to understand the adult-child’s need to heal and regain herself as primary. This means letting go of the child as existing to meet my needs, in one way or another. This only happens when the mother dives into her healing of the breached, broken, or bone-bruised relationship with her own mother, even if her mom is long dead.
Both mother and daughter have the power to heal themselves without ever receiving anything from their own mothers.
@badasscounseling Go to BadassCounseling.com. Read the counseling page. If it all looks good, reach back out thru the contact page there. Also, Get the book there, Theres a Hole in my love cup. It’s 80% of my counseling method in one book, and is required reading for every new client. It is available in audiobook, e-book, and paperback on the website. I require all clients be reading it (or have read it) during our work, as that enables us to move much faster. I also have a brand new book, BADASS WISDOM, a 366-day daily inspirational book to challenge you each day. Get the DIY vid courses there, if you prefer interactive videos. Download the FREE podcast, The BadassCounseling Show, as one more way to learn. I counsel ppl on the show. We learn by seeing how others sort thru their stuff and are comforted by seeing we’re not alone in our struggles. I’ve made 800+ FREE videos here on social, all designed to help you heal. Use them as journaling prompts in your self-care work. Every week, I do 1-4 FREE hours of taking questions LIVE on FB, YT, & IG. Tune into the LIVE and ask your questions. And even if you don’t counsel with me, I do recommend the book & podcast. Life-changers! Peace. #ceoofcounseling #foryou #fyp ♬ original sound - Badass Counseling
Healing the Relationship Between Mothers and Daughters
To heal the soul and begin the long overdue filling of the love cup is to start to flush out the pain, fear, and BS beliefs each daughter was taught by her own mother (and other parent or parents) about herself. It is only by jackhammering those false core beliefs that got pressed into the wet cement of her soul, decades prior, that each daughter finally heals herself.
To effect this outcome, I’ve created all of the tools on this website:
>> Free articles,
>> A free podcast - The Badass Counseling Show,
>> Most importantly the books: There’s a Hole in My Love Cup and BADASS WISDOM
>> Additionally, I have created 900+ free videos covering all manner of problems, solutions, and healing on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
Engaged with your courage and commitment, these tools become the very conduit to mother and daughter each healing themselves. Then, and only then, is the possibility real for a new relationship, IFF both parties actually want that, at this point. But to engage in a relationship before the healing of both parties is to ensure that power imbalances and deep wounds just get carried forward, forever infecting even the best of intentions.
Unresolved issues only do damage, both to each other and to those they interact with.
To remove these unresolved issues, at least if mom and daughter are going to have a real relationship, means, as my mom used to say, “eating crow,” or, as you’ve heard me say, owning your sh*t. The only real necessity that opens the door to mom-daughter intimacy is the mom humbling herself, or being humbled.
It is only when she is willing to concede faults, admit to the damage she caused, apologize, and begin the work of changing her actions toward the daughter that an authentic relationship is possible.
>> See How To Be Successful At Parenting
Without that humility and contrition that go with it, unresolved issues get papered over, and the relationship gets settled-for that is not the best it can be if mom were to get her own ego out of the way.
Daughters Transforming into Their Mother’s Caregiver
As daughters get older, they can transform into their mom’s caregiver. How can you navigate that especially if you have unresolved issues with your mother?
If there’s one thing I’ve seen in many of my middle-aged and older clients that is most befuddling to them, it’s how to heal from the past and all the pains and anger that go with it when they now have a decent relationship with their parent. Or, more pointedly, how can they be angry at mom for all she did and didn’t do when now:
She’s an old woman and they feel bad for her and/or
They have a good relationship now and/or
The daughter has to take care of her because she’s all alone.
Aaaaacckkk!!!
It’s one thing to have a parent who was a sh*t and still is a sh*t. But to basically have one you’re mad at and one you’re not, for whatever reason, is a sticky wicket. Talk about caught in the middle between the mom I hate and the mom who’s now nice or now needing me. Whaddya do???
That is precisely the distinction I draw with all of my clients in this situation.
I encourage them to reframe their life as having ‘childhood mom’ and ‘now-mom.’ And, for lack of a better term, what they have to do is slay the mother of their childhood if there is ever any hope of existing in any sort of functional relationship with now-mom.
That requires unlocking the vault that holds all their stories, memories, feeeeelings, and emotional charges attached to those memories, and everything else from childhood. It is to name them and name all the implications of what went with them.
Again, this is what I wrote There’s a Hole in My Love Cup for – to walk you through this exact process. But, if you’re not willing to honestly see and assess that childhood without kindness or quarter for childhood mom that would in any way undermine the compassion, extreme sensitivity to, and liberation of childhood you, you will not fully heal. Childhood mom must be put to death so that childhood you can be finally set free.
>> See What Makes “There’s a Hole In My Love Cup” So Badass Effective?
How To Deal with a Mother Who Refuses to Heal Herself?
If your mom isn’t interested in healing and remains entrenched in her own rightness and determination not to change for you or anyone, you have a tough situation. That’s bad news especially if you’re trying to set boundaries without hurting her.
If someone is used to you having no boundaries, especially if they’re the ones who stripped you of those boundaries and/or they’re the ones benefiting from your lack of boundaries, there’s pretty much no way you can erect and hold fast to boundaries without them being butt hurt, as the kids like to say.
In fact, the very question is part of the problem. The orientation to not hurting others is often part of the implicit BS beliefs you’re taught about yourself, growing up.
You were taught, whether by things spoken or unspoken, that you don’t matter enough to justify standing up for yourself even if it will infringe on any tiny thing in any other person, let alone hurt them. In being taught that you don’t matter, you learned how to make your life about everyone else’s feelings. So if they’re even one half-teaspoonful unhappy for even one-tenth of one milli-second, it means you’re a bad person. And you feel the weight of the badness deep in your soul. So, you become an extreme giver, because that’s the only way you think you can get even an ounce of love. And, what do extreme givers tend to attract? Extreme takers, or what everyone right down to middle school children knows to be ‘narcissists.’
Welcome to a match made in hell.
The flaw in the question is that hurting others is bad. And, as a general rule, it is. But, when you’ve become conditioned to believe that your feelings and you don’t matter, you can’t distinguish between actual pain inflicted on another and the other just being selfish, or the natural ouches and dings that come with living in a human community and relationships. So, you completely sacrifice yourself and your natural right to have your needs met, all so that you won’t hurt someone else, because when you do that you feel they won’t like you and you also feel your own seemingly innate badness.
So, setting boundaries comes well into the healing process. And the healing process requires getting out all the messages that say you don’t matter. Only then will you matter enough to actually set a boundary, let alone enforce one.
Without the belief that you actually matter, you’ll never possess the strength to maintain any boundary.
So, how do you get that power?
The Healing Power of Pain
In a twisted inversion of outcomes, the one thing I’ve seen drive more people to the precipice of real healing more than any other is just sheer pain. Push someone to their breaking point, and everything changes. Nothing will cause you to erect and maintain boundaries with a parent more than the pain getting so bad that here you stand; you can do no other.
Once you’ve endured so much over so long a time, there bellows up from the soul a word so foreign, so unusual on the tongue, yet so powerfully spine-erecting that it changes you, immediately, in that exact instant. Though there are a thousand more miles to travel in healing after it, this one word is the very sine qua non of healing, the most indispensable piece. When your very being has reached the very maximum of all of its limits, up from the soul ejects the mighty word you’ve never spoken, “NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!”
For the first time in your life one true, real ‘no’ comes from the depths of your mattering. That no is the statement of your realizing you are important. It is your own soul saying,
“This is NOT who we are. This life lived this way, and all the sh*t I’ve eaten, is not me. It ends today!”
In that moment comes the willingness to endure the butt-hurts and complaints of others as you begin a life of mattering and boundaries. It all starts there.
Strong Adult Relationships Between Mothers and Daughters
So, do you have any actual happy advice, today, Sven? What thoughts do you have for having a strong, positive adult relationship between a mom and daughter?
Hahahaha. Yes, to happy. I think you’ve already gotten the point in this article and from my work that a real relationship with mom, daughter, or anyone, demands the brass balls to go inside yourself and face the dragons of all the messages and pains from your past that need to be slayed. That’s ugly-ass work.
>> See How To Do An Effective Soul Detox
But, but, but, it does NOT have to take forever. (If your healing is taking forever, please get a new therapist and/or other new tools. You’re wasting too much life waiting for that earth-shakin’, bread-breakin’ day.) Absent that deepest work, you’re just phoning it in; the results will reflect that.
But yes, the happy part.
Ensuring You Have the Best Mother-Daughter-Granddaughter Relationship
The happy part…..
Nah, hahahah. I gotta say, there ain’t no happy without the damned grit to do the hard work. That’s it. That’s just facts. If you ain’t willing to do the ugly, scary work of healing your soul all of your relationships will reflect the ugly, scary unhealed inside.
And, if you choose to not go inside to heal the ugly and scary, please don’t have children, at least not yet.
It’s not enough to say you love your child. The question is, does your love reflect in actions that are best for that adult-child or just mostly best for you?
Lastly, if you’re the daughter of the mom who did have the child, it’s never too late to heal. It is not only possible, it doesn’t have to take forever. You can have the life, fullness of the soul, and peace – the god-blessed peace you’ve yearned for all your days. You can have that peace and filling of the hole in your soul. I have seen it done every day of my adult life that I’ve been doing this work. Please find inside you the courage to heal, even if you do it completely on your own.
The world needs you to heal. Every little girl you encounter or give life to needs a healed you. By that one act, you become a life-changer. You make right the trajectory of every young acorn you encounter. Please heal.
Happy Mother’s Day!
-- Sven Erlandson, MDiv, Is The Author Of Seven Books, Including 'Badass Jesus: The Serious Athlete And A Life Of Noble Purpose' And 'I Steal Wives: A Serial Adulterer Reveals The REAL Reasons More And More Happily Married Women Are Cheating.' He Has Been Called The Father Of The Spiritual But Not Religious Movement After His Seminal Book 'Spiritual But Not Religious' Came Out 15 Years Ago, Long Before The Phrase Became Part Of Common Parlance And Even Longer Before The Movement Hit Critical Mass. He Is Former Military, Clergy, And NCAA Head Coach For Strength And Conditioning; And Has A Global Counseling/Consulting Practice with offices In NYC, NJ, And Stamford, CT: BadassCounseling.com
