What does it mean to be a feminist mother + daughter therapist? Allow me to explain.

A mother I worked with recently was struggling with regret for the negative ways she had impacted her 20-year-old daughter.  Her guilt was searing and painful.

I tried to reassure the mother that not all of her daughter’s difficulties were her fault. I tried to help her stop blaming herself. 

She would not accept my compassion.

“But I blame my mother,” she said. “I struggle because of my mother. And now my daughter will struggle because of me.” 

Sh*t, I thought. She was right.

There would be no saving her from her self-blame. 

Just as there would be no saving for any of us.

Because as women, whether we are mothers or daughters, we are continuously caught in a cycle of responsibility and blame.

Daughters emerge into adulthood doubting their own experience but carrying a deep sense of responsibility for their mother’s feelings and needs.

And mothers are left confused but fully blamed for lacking the tools to break the cycle of emotional neglect.

And it confirmed for me in that moment, something I had long been uncomfortable with. 

That as therapists we are lending our clients a narrative of their childhoods that almost always attributes their issues quite narrowly to the fault of their mother.  So much so, that estrangement from our mothers is not only becoming more common, it is even being suggested as a solution. And the role fathers play in a family system are often left to the wayside.

Of course understanding the emotional impact of our attachment relationships and building in self-compassion rather than self-blame is essential to the healing process. But from attachment theory to social media to self-help books, the idea of the Mother Wound is all the rage.  

Mother is to blame.

Mother is always to blame.

And when those daughters become mothers themselves, the blame continues.

It is a cycle of blame. 

And I, as a therapist, working with so many daughters of “difficult” mothers, was perpetuating it. 

So I stopped.

Because I realized the blame wasn’t helping us understand who the real culprit was and how it pitted mothers and daughters against each other.

The blame didn’t help us at all understand who our mothers were or what they struggled with or how they also experienced their own neglect.

And the blame certainly didn’t help mothers understand their daughters or learn how to meet their needs. 

In fact the blame worked to raise up one generation of women while deeply silencing another. 

It was designed to make mothers bear the needs of their daughters without ever feeling entitled to reclaim those same needs for themselves.

I decide to restructure everything I did in my work with mothers and daughters — to free myself completely from the lens of pathology.

I decided to become more trained specifically in the mother-daughter dynamic so that my viewpoint was less narrow.

I was ready to reconnect women to the generations that came before them. To help ALL women be seen through a more honest, respectful, admirable lens.