Am I a bad daughter? Navigating estrangement from your mom as an adult daughter.
“Being painted as the villain, she's kind of like the victim, and I'm the bad [guy]... she's always the victim." Teresa's warm smile and kind eyes gleamed despite sharing the pain she can still feel. She was remembering the intense fear and anxiety she experienced when she was still in communication with her mom.
When I interviewed Teresa, she described herself as direct, outspoken, diplomatic, and "true to myself now” versus the compliant daughter she used to be. This description took years of hard inner work, lots of therapy, and she is doing everything she can to honor and care for herself in ways that were foreign to her at one time.
Teresa, grew up with a mom who for whatever the reasons couldn’t help her feel seen or heard, in fact it was quite the opposite. Teresa had to be invisible and remain compliant to be in good graces with her mother.
As a psychotherapist who specializes in working with women who have highly distanced relationships or estrangement with their mothers, I see how mother-daughter estrangement exists far more than most people realize. In my practice I have worked with many women who have gone through periods of not communicating with their mothers as an act of self-preservation. Daughters are more likely to be estranged from their mothers than sons.
According to a study from Ohio State University tracking estranged mothers found that 52% were estranged from a daughter, compared to 45% who were estranged from a son.
Mother-daughter estrangement carries a huge stigma, as women are often cast as the unofficial keepers of familial relationships. As Licensed marriage and family therapist, Annie Wright identified in her article, The Trauma of Being the ‘Good’ Daughter: How Parentification Ruins Adulthood that- "Daughters are often expected to maintain family harmony, even at their own expense. When a daughter chooses to prioritize her well-being over an unhealthy maternal relationship, it can be perceived as a radical act that disrupts the established order, triggering strong societal backlash."
In my practice I talk about the need to carry what’s broken, wisely, like a hiking pack. We can minimize the load when we know how to carry it, or we can hobble on the trail, with aches and blisters, and carry far more than necessary.
Sam, a professional in her late 30’s opened up in our interview, sharing, she wants to keep growing the boundary-setting skills she’s built with her parents. She’s had periods of not speaking with her mother and has moved into a stage where she’s found a way to keep the relationship operating, but with minimal and intentional contact. Adult daughters struggle with shame, ambiguous loss (disenfranchised grief), and isolation when the relationship with their mothers breaks a part. She went on to say, "I feel a deep envy watching others' close mother relationships". The grief resurfaces.
Both Teresa and Sam described their journeys navigating boundaries, learning to distinguish facts from feelings, figuring out how to see the good within themselves, and trust they just might actually be right about it. None of this was possible without therapy, they told me. Therapy and, as Sam put it, “chosen family”. Here’s the point of growth and new life, you get to make new and different choices for yourself. We don’t choose who or what we are born into, but we do get to choose who we let in as adults. Friends and sometimes other relatives can become a new family, or present a new maternal figure in our lives. Both Sam and Teresa, continue their own therapy and focus on the life-giving relationships in their lives as a way to keep them anchored and thriving.
For women who appear to “have it all” on the outside, but exhaustedly navigate the rupture of the mother-daughter relationship alone on the inside, you are in good company. There are many women who can sing your song back to you.
Three things you can begin now to start your healing journey:
Include yourself: Ask yourself, what would your life be like if you cared for yourself in the way you cared for others? What if you start to include yourself in all of that compassion you extend to the world around you?
Your experience is real: most people don’t know how to navigate a mother-daughter rupture and their well meaning advice does not consider the deep complexity and pain you’ve experienced leaving you feeling unheard and dismissed.
Go to a therapist who specializes in the nuanced path of Mother-daughter rupture and the experience no longer being mothered. You deserve specialized support for such a loss. Being unmothered leaves us with a complicated grief journey that is different from death-grief.
*Names of interviewees and some personal details are changed to protect privacy
Emily Bitner, MS, LCPC is a licensed psychotherapist in Maryland specializing in high-achieving women navigating the unmothered wound and the relational complexity it creates in professional and personal life. She sees clients in-person in Baltimore and virtually across Maryland.