Mean Mothers Quotes

“As Louis Cozolino Ph. D., observes, a consistent theme of adult psychotherapy clients is that they had parents who were not curious about who they were but, instead, told them who they should be. What Cozolino explains, is that the child creates a "persona" for her parents but doesn't learn to know herself. What happens is that "the authentic self"--the part of us open to feelings, experinces, and intimicy--remains underdeveloped.”
― Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

“I was younger, smarter, better educated than she, and I began to realize that she was afraid of me and the truths I told. By the”
― Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

“But sibling relationships can also be shaped by the dynamic between the unloving mother and her daughter, most particularly when a mother differentiates between her children, being loving and attentive to one but not to another. In many families, the dynamic will weaken sibling bonds.”
― Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

“I am not turning into my mother’s apologist by writing those words; I would certainly trade in my childhood experiences with her in a heartbeat. But I—and you, for that matter—are more than the sum of the parts our mothers, loving or not, bequeathed us. The process of confrontation—of feeling the pain of not being loved or known—and of becoming conscious of how we were mothered offers an unloved daughter possibilities of growth another experience might not have yielded.”
― Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

“We want desperately to believe that every mother falls in love with her baby at first sight and that the complexity of relationships, so evident elsewhere as part of the human condition, is totally absent from the connection between mother and child.”
― Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

“I know the answer now, and that knowledge absolutely coexists with a terrible longing for the mother love I never had and never will have.”
― Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

“The parent of a child, as Deborah Tannen has written, has the power not only to create the world the child lives in but the ability to dictate how that world is to be interpreted. Seen from that point of view, one of the lasting and important legacies of a mean mother is a wellspring of self-doubt. The other, explained by adaptive behavior, is a need to replicate the relationship she has to her mother with other people, regardless of how unhappy it makes her.”
― Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

“Children of mothers who are only sometimes available and who aren’t reliably attuned adapt by being ambivalently attached. Because they don’t know what to expect—is she going to be the nice mommy or the yelling one?—these children develop anxiety and insecurity about the maternal relationship and, as adults, a sense of all relationships as being essentially unreliable.”
― Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

“With insecure attachments, “a child unwittingly memorizes the precise lesson of that troubled relationship: that love is suffocation, that anger is terrifying, that dependence is humiliating, or one of a million crippling variations.”
― Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

“mother of a young daughter and son herself, she says, “I understood from a young age that there was nothing I could do to satisfy my mother. She was totally self-absorbed, a narcissist, and she was never able to see me as anything but a projection of herself. And the anger, meanness, and disappointment which began inside of her simply radiated out toward me.”
― Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

“The mother‘s relationship to her daughter not only forms the earliest, if not primary, foundation for how the daughter formulates her sense of self, but is the basic template for her understanding of how relationships work in the world.”
― Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

“A “healthy” woman had children; a “happy” and “fulfilled” woman was a mother.”
― Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

“Relational disconnection is created when there is an absence of “mutual authenticity,…when either the daughter’s voice or the mother’s voice is dominant or silenced.” As Louis Cozolino, Ph.D., observes, “A consistent theme of adult psychotherapy clients is that they had parents who were not curious about who they were but, instead, told them who they should be.” What happens, Cozolino explains, is that the child creates a “persona” for her parents but doesn’t learn to know herself. What happens is that “the authentic self”—the part of us that is open to feelings, experiences, and intimacy—“remains undeveloped.”
― Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

“The mother‘s relationship to her daughter not only formed the earliest, if not primary, foundation for all the daughter formulates her sense of self, but is the basic template for her understanding of how relationships work in the world.”
― Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

“As Adrienne Rich so acutely observed, “It is hard to write about my own mother. Whatever I do write, it is my story I am telling, my version of the past. If she were to tell her own story, other landscapes would be revealed. But in my landscape or hers, there would be old, smoldering patches of deep-burning anger.”
― Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt

“Raised on Walt Disney, most of us hear the phrase “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” and the first image that pops into our heads is that of the evil stepmother with her stark white face and red lips in the animated film and book spin-offs of Snow White. But like other folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm, their original source—and indeed their first version of the story, published in 1812—wasn’t about an evil stepmother but a mother-daughter pair, and it was Snow White’s own mother who was her envious antagonist. In the original version, the beautiful queen who pricks her finger while sewing and wishes for a child “as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the sewing frame” gives birth to Snow White. It is Snow White’s own mother who, obsessed with her own beauty, checks her magic mirror when Snow White is seven only to hear that her daughter, not she, is “the fairest of them all.” It is Snow White’s mother who tries her best to have her daughter killed throughout the rest of the story until innocence trumps maternal envy in the end. By 1819, the Grimm Brothers had banished to the cupboard of taboos the psychological truth mirrored in the original folktale—of the potential rivalry between a mother and daughter, or maternal envy—by having the “real” mother die after giving birth and a sinister stepmother take her place.”
― Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt