Katie Reilly | Vox

Mothers and daughters fight— but it doesn’t have to be the end of the world

2024-07-08T16:42:47-04:00

“Just wait until the teen years,” a woman at a cafe recently said to me about my daughters, ages 3 and 6, in a serious, foreboding tone. Just minutes prior, she’d remarked how cute the girls were while they played happily nearby throughout our conversation. Her comment had interrupted a moment of happiness with a nebulous dread of the future.

Sadly, this isn’t an anomaly. Moms hear comments like this from family, friends, or even strangers in the supermarket. Media is filled with teenage girls slamming doors and moms shouting, such as in trope-y movies like Freaky Friday, Lady Bird, and Mean Girls, so this cultural narrative isn’t surprising.

But it did make me wonder: Is a mother-daughter blowout an inevitable rite of passage? If not, what can a mom do to weather inevitable conflict and maintain the close parent-child relationship she wants?

Is a blowout inevitable?

There’s a normal tension that happens as our children grow, says Janet Taylor, a psychiatrist based in Florida and a mother to four daughters. “They have to become individuals. And there’s a pulling away.”

Adolescence is often the first stage in the mother-daughter relationship where struggles arise. This tension is often ascribed to and dismissed as being driven by hormones. “It’s important to understand the developmental aspects that our girls are going through,” says Taylor, but experts also suggest that hormonal changes aren’t the sole culprit. What’s going on in a mother’s life is another factor in the dynamic. “Whatever crises we may have or stressors we have in our lives, we have to be aware of how that impacts how we relate to them,” says Taylor.

Rosjke Hasseldine, a mother-daughter therapist and author based in New Hampshire, says there are five or six flashpoints in a daughter’s life, such as when she moves out of the house or when she has a baby, during which tension is likely to arise.

That first flashpoint arises during adolescence. “It’s seen as hormonal, but it’s not. It’s because at that point, I think, a lot of the societal expectations we place upon women within the family starts rearing its head,” says Hasseldine. If conflict arises and is left unresolved, it can create tension later on.

Hilary Mae, a mother-daughter therapist based in Philadelphia, says the tension between mother and daughter has to do with their changing roles and selves. “The daughter is needing different things from their mom. She wants to define and figure out who she is, sometimes not through the eyes of her mother,” she says. A daughter is bound to chafe at her mother’s words sometimes when she is becoming her own person, but that doesn’t make their relationship any less special.

It’s important for mothers to know that daughters need independence. To Brittney Scott, a mother-daughter coach and counselor based in Santa Barbara County, mother-daughter tension isn’t inevitable if mothers can understand their daughters’ point of view. “Moms sometimes view it as, well, this child doesn’t listen anymore,” says Scott. “Teenagers are looked at as rebellious, but what they’re doing is trying to figure out who they’re going to be in the world. They need space to be able to do that, but they also need the safety net of knowing that they can try things and mess up and they’re not going to be judged for it by their parents.”

Despite the friction that might arise, one thing is certain: This kinship holds great significance to both parties. The mother-daughter relationship can also be a foundation for all other relationships.

Studies show that connectedness between mother and daughter contributes to a daughter’s self-esteem, and that the mother-daughter relationship continues to be an important, intimate bond for women into adulthood. “Mothers and daughters need each other. We are wired for connection,” says Hasseldine.

When I learned that a blowout isn’t inevitable, I breathed a sigh of relief. But now what? If there is a cultural expectation of a fraught mother-daughter relationship, where does a mother who wants something different start? That’s a difficult question for many of us. “Most women don’t know how to have a healthy mother-daughter relationship unless the mom has had one herself,” says Mae. “A lot of us need to learn how to have one.”

Communicate with yourself and then with your daughter

It’s important for mothers to take time to check in with themselves on a regular basis. Asking yourself “What do I need in my life?” can be a simple yet extremely difficult question to answer, but it’s a worthwhile one to ensure that the issues we face in our personal lives don’t bleed into our parental lives.

“I think it’s really about your own self-awareness as a person, realizing how you were parented, and realizing what’s going on in your life,” says Taylor. When a mother’s needs aren’t met, she can end up expecting her daughter to meet those needs, and a rift can result. A mother not having her needs met and essentially feeling silenced within the family is often a generational experience, something that daughters learn from their moms and can pass on as a result. “If you think about it, [moms and daughters] are often fighting over who gets to be heard, who gets to be supported,” says Hasseldine.

In order to change this pattern of behavior, it’s important to understand the feelings and experiences of women within a family unit. “Without new knowledge, the brain will resort back to what it already knows, and that’s what mom saw growing up,” says Scott. One way to create this awareness is a history mapping exercise Hasseldine includes in her book The Mother-Daughter Puzzle, which charts the emotional reality of women, primarily the daughter, mother, and grandmother, in the family. In addition to factual information about the family like ages and occupations, the daughter performing this exercise is also asked to respond to questions like how they voice their needs, the emotional struggles faced by women in the family, and the strengths of women in the family.

It’s also important to create a relationship in which daughters feel like they can talk openly. Fostering positive attachment and a relationship of trust and dependability can begin at an early age, says Khara Croswaite Brindle, a mental health therapist based in Denver and author of Understanding Ruptured Mother-Daughter Relationships. One way mothers can do that is by consistently being present. “Can you slow down? Can you put down the phone? Can you look them in the eye and say, ‘I’m here with you?’” says Brindle.

Be a listener first and a fixer second

Emulate a potted plant, Scott suggests to parents. Your child knows you’re present, but listen more than you talk. During the teenage years, it’s important not to assume you know your daughter’s perspective. Put yourself in your daughter’s shoes, but don’t jump to conclusions.

Moms often want to jump in, give advice, and solve problems, says Mae, which can feel judgmental and can push daughters away. “Sometimes we want to kind of slap a Band-Aid on a situation and fix it for them, but they really just want to talk and feel heard and express how they feel,” says Mae.

Listening may mean tolerating silence to hear what comes next. When your daughter says no one cares about her or even listens to her, fight the instinct to speak over her and listen. It can also mean hearing things that may hurt your feelings, but try to not take it personally. “Your daughters especially will have a way of letting you know exactly what they’re thinking or sometimes can say things that will cut to the bone. You have to ask yourself if there could be any truth to what they’re saying so that you learn not to react but to respond,” said Taylor.

“You are not my friend,” the 19-year-old daughter of Emily Dills, the Seattle founder of two nanny agencies, has said many times. Dills admits it hurts to hear that, but acknowledges that she sometimes strives too hard to be relatable. “She just wants me to be her mom. She relies on me to be mature, stable, reassuring, and sometimes to just mind my own business.”

Not stepping in also gives your daughter the space to learn how to make the right decision on her own. “Daughters really crave the confidence and trust from their mom that their mom believes they can handle new things and new situations,” says Mae.

Issues started to arise between Stuti Sharma, now 19 and a student at the University of British Columbia, and her mom when she was 12. The relationship improved after Sharma went to college and her mother changed some of her behavior, like providing space. “She would tell me she’s going to run some errands and I’m welcome to join, but wouldn’t pressure me to accompany her,” Sharma said. “She started making me believe that she is there for me, and it is completely okay whether or not I take her up on what she offers.”

Follow your intuition

Despite how uncertain mothering can feel, trust your instincts. Fighting with your daughter over phone time is, of course, very different from concerns over her physical safety. Debi G., who asked not to use her full name for privacy, says her daughter, now 40, changed overnight when she was 17, staying out all night, hanging out with friends who were bad influences, and getting into legal trouble. It wasn’t until over 10 years later that Debi discovered that her daughter was the victim of sexual assault at a party. Since she was a minor and drinking, she was afraid to tell anyone.

At the time, others advised Debi that it was a phase and her daughter needed tough love. “Deep inside me, I knew something was very wrong,” says Debi, who wishes she’d brought her daughter to counseling earlier. If you think your daughter is struggling or are concerned for her safety, don’t be afraid to step in and seek outside help.

Remember, no one is perfect

Parenting isn’t easy, so give yourself grace. No one is perfect and moms can’t do it all. Seek out resources, support, and a community to help. “When mom doesn’t have the support that she needs to play every role that she’s trying to play, she’s going to pull that support from her daughter. And it’s not supposed to flow that way,” says Scott.

When a conflict arises, it’s important to understand that words can mean more than one thing. So it’s important for a mother to acknowledge that what she said might have meant something else to her daughter than what she intended, says Deborah Tannen, an author and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. A common example is that daughters often feel criticized by comments that moms view as just trying to help.

“When it comes to offering advice, it is criticism. If you weren’t doing something wrong, you wouldn’t need advice or suggestions or improvements. Just acknowledging that often makes it easier,” Tannen says. Tannen also suggests that mothers focus on positive comments and remember the weight that their words carry.

When you make a mistake, it’s okay to apologize. It’s important to acknowledge that you make mistakes too and that your daughter’s emotions matter. Brindle says that adult daughters look for acknowledgment of the issue, an apology, and action after moms have made a mistake.

When mothers don’t apologize, “We’re actually standing in our own way of repairing a relationship. Moms often think that if they acknowledge and apologize, it’ll prove they’re a bad parent, when actually I think it proves the opposite,” says Brindle.

Conflict over not being allowed to do what the other kids at school are doing or TikTok habits is normal. If you don’t know what to say, try sharing your experience in an age-appropriate manner. This can include all kinds of parts of your past, such as making new friends entering in school, sexual pressures and dating, or witnessing your own parents’ relationship, for example. This might bring up tough emotions for you as a mom, so take care of yourself and be careful with your words. “When you reflect on difficulties when you were your daughter’s age, there are ways to share that without going into too much detail that will let your daughters know that you understand and are willing to talk about it,” says Taylor.

It’s never too late

Experts say it’s rarely too late to try to repair the relationship. Eighty-one percent of daughters who were estranged from their mothers later reconnected, according to a study in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

If there’s been a lot of conflict in the relationship, Hasseldine suggests working with a mother-daughter coach. It’s also important that there is a cultural understanding between the therapist and family. “I wouldn’t apply the same things to an Asian family as I would a Black family. The cultures are so different and so are the expectations between parent and child. The therapist should know and understand that,” says Scott.

There’s no certainty as to how things will go, so I remind myself while writing this that I’m not perfect and, luckily, there’s always more to learn. Being a mom isn’t easy, but this expert advice will help guide me in the future. My two daughters won’t be small forever, but I’m prepared to be there for them no matter what.

How to handle an overload of grief

2022-11-08T17:07:51-05:00

When I was 27, my mother told me she was dying of ALS, a fatal neurodegenerative disease with no cure. She died the following summer, and not long after, my father was diagnosed with cancer. He successfully completed treatment, but when the cancer returned, he didn’t survive.

From the moment my mother shared her diagnosis and leading up to my father’s funeral, it felt like my head was being held under water. I could only surface for enough air to survive, but not long enough to understand the enormity of what had occurred. Before I could come to terms with one loss, I was experiencing another.

A prior history of grief can affect the current grieving process. One study found people who lost more than one person in a short time still grieved one loss at a time, and that multiple losses affected various aspects of the bereaved individual’s life, like their health, job, and marriage.

This mental health phenomenon is often referred to as cumulative grief. I spoke to five grief experts about cumulative grief, and how to understand and manage the feelings that may arise from it.

What is cumulative grief?

Cumulative grief is the experience of multiple losses. The challenging aspects of grief can be exacerbated with each new loss, according to Litsa Williams, a licensed social worker and co-author of What’s Your Grief: Lists to Help You Through Any Loss, which can lead to fatigue and overwhelm. There is “the emotional piece, but also the other stressors — coping with the practicalities of settling an estate, sorting through belongings, family conflicts, financial strains,” she says via email. It can be hard to face a new loss when you feel like you’re starting at “half capacity.”

Sometimes after multiple losses, support systems are less engaged than they previously were, Williams adds. An additional loss can make a person feel like they need more support at a time when their support system is weaker than it previously was. “Support system burnout is also a real factor. With the first loss or first couple of losses, a person may have received a lot of support from friends and family. But unfortunately, with multiple losses stacking up, support systems can start to become less engaged,” she says.

While the term “cumulative grief” often refers to deaths that occur in rapid succession, says Cara Mearns-Thompson, the co-founder of the Grief Club of Minnesota and a licensed clinical social worker focused on grieving children, that time frame isn’t an essential component. The term is most often applied to losses in a short amount of time, but losses over any period of time can result in cumulative grief.

The close succession of losses can increase feelings of overwhelm, but the timing is less relevant because grief is a lifelong journey. “Cumulative grief is cumulative over a lifetime because we grieve for our entire lives. The intensity and impact of that grief changes over time, but we still grieve the death of those we love,” says Mearns-Thompson via email.

Grief isn’t limited just to human loss or death

Cumulative grief, like grief in general, isn’t limited to deaths, according to Ajita Robinson, a grief and trauma expert and author of The Gift of Grief: A Practical Guide on Navigating Grief and Loss. “It involves all losses that impact someone,” says Jana DeCristofaro, a grief support facilitator at the Dougy Center, a nonprofit that provides support services to children and young adults who are grieving, and host of the podcast Grief Out Loud, via email. Cumulative grief can refer to the loss of a pet or a symbolic loss, like the end of a relationship, loss of employment, a friendship ending, or a family separation.

“A lot of people have a difficult time naming their losses because our society is geared toward grief being limited to physical loss, and it really negates the impact of symbolic losses that we encounter on a daily basis,” says Robinson.

Secondary and tertiary losses can also result from a single incident. For example, “think of the death of a person as the first circle, and the outer rings would be the secondary losses,” says Mearns-Thompson. If an individual’s parent died, for example, Robinson says that would be a primary loss. The potential secondary loss could be financial instability due to the loss of parental income.

These secondary losses can contribute to a feeling that “everything” has changed. It can be an overwhelming, disorienting experience that can also be invisible to others — which can cause an even larger sense of isolation in the griever.

Grief can be a lifelong journey

Five years after my father died, I miscarried at 13 weeks pregnant, which triggered memories from my parents’ passing. “A death can often trigger the feelings of prior losses,” a therapist I was seeing at the time told me, which I’d never heard before.

It’s not uncommon that a new loss brings up old memories from a prior loss, according to Mearns-Thompson, but those feelings may surprise you. Many people believe that grief won’t have a long-term effect. “We believe that the work of grief just takes time. As time goes on, the impact will be less, but that’s not true,” says Robinson.

Grief is a lifelong journey. “We don’t grieve a death and then lock it up in titanium, never to be gone back to again. We go with our assumption and our belief that grief is non-finite — is something that we take with us for the rest of our lives, that it becomes part of who we are. And every new loss or death that we experience is going to overlap and interweave with our previous losses, and there are lots of different ways that that can show up,” says DeCristofaro.

Some grief therapists, like Mearns-Thompson and Robinson, take an inventory of a client’s prior losses during counseling. This is called a “loss history,” and the practice of recording it enables both the client and counselor to better understand the person’s prior experiences with grief, their coping styles, and to explore any new tools that they may need to manage their current experience.

There is no expiration date on grief. “A loss that happened five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, even 40 years ago, can continue to affect us throughout the course of our lives, but can also affect the way that we come to future losses,” says Joanne Cacciatore, professor at Arizona State University and founder of the MISS Foundation, an organization that provides support to families struggling with traumatic grief.

Prioritize taking care of yourself when you’re grieving

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by your grief, take the time and space you need to take care of yourself. “Treat it like a psychological wound that deserves care and attention,” says Robinson.

The same tactics that work to help grieving individuals through one loss can be applied to multiple-loss grief. Taking care of your physical body through nutrition, sleep, and movement, making time to journal or join a support group, and trying out remembrance activities like sorting through pictures or sharing stories are just some ways to help yourself work through your feelings, says DeCristofaro.

A counselor or therapist can also be an important part of the healing process. While support and community are extremely important when dealing with cumulative losses, sometimes you’ll find that your support system isn’t showing up for you or is stretched thin. Still, you should try to find independent and community-based ways to heal, and seek support through a counselor or therapist.

On a daily basis, exercise and sleep have helped me the most. And longer-term, speaking with a therapist, writing about my experience, and opening up more to my closest friends have also made it more manageable. With time, I’ve also learned to show myself more compassion when my grief arises, which has helped.

Don’t judge yourself for your feelings of loss

Multiple experiences of loss can be destabilizing and can lead to internal judgment, according to DeCristofaro. “Each time we experience a new loss, we experience ourselves grieving in a new way, and that can lead to judgment or criticism about how we have or haven’t grieved in the past, or what does it mean about the person and what they meant to us in our lives if we are responding really differently,” says DeCristofaro.

Sometimes we don’t grieve someone the way we anticipate, which can be confusing. If you lost someone as a teenager and then lose someone later as an adult, those grief experiences likely won’t be the same. As an adult, you’ve had years to mature and it’s easy to reflect on your younger self grieving with nostalgia, or at times criticism, says DeCristofaro. You may feel hit harder emotionally by the death of someone you had a complicated relationship with, or feel that you should grieve “more” for a current loss, says DeCrisotfaro.

These reactions are normal, and the more we understand that we can grieve each loss differently, the more we can give ourselves permission to do just that.

There isn’t just one way to grieve

You need to be compassionate with yourself, your grief, and how you’re feeling, says Robinson. “We often discount what our experiences are and tell ourselves that we shouldn’t feel that way. There is a lot of feedback that we receive about what we should do that often impacts our ability to just feel and grieve.”

Remember that there isn’t one way to grieve. You’re going to feel your grief in your own way and time, says DeCristofaro. “It is probably not going to fall on the same timeline as other people.”

Our reactions will be impacted by a variety of factors, such as how supported we feel by the people in our life, the relationship we had with the person we lost, and the context of what is going on in our life and in the world, according to DeCristofaro.

Whatever your reaction, it is important to allow yourself to feel the emotions that arise. “It’s when we’re shut down and we pretend that it didn’t happen and we suppress and inhibit our own emotional experiences, and the emotional experiences associated with traumatic loss, that we suffer — in my experience — even more,” says Cacciatore.

In instances of multiple loss, be aware of whether your grief and life stressors exceed your capacity to cope, says Williams. Williams prefers the term “grief overload” over cumulative grief or bereavement overload, which are often used interchangeably, because she believes that this is the central issue for multiple losses.

“‘Cumulative grief’ as a term suggests that the issue is simply the number of losses that is the challenge. In reality, the real issue is the overload that occurs when someone’s stressors exceed their coping capacity, and when, why, and how that happens varies dramatically from griever to griever,” she says.

Learn from prior losses

Multiple losses can be devastating. In the early period of grieving, it’s hard to see past that period of intense sadness. But prior experiences of loss can also serve “as a way to draw on hope and healing and a belief in a positive future,” says Mearns-Thompson.

We need to remind “people that they have survived and they have made it through” grief before, says DeCristofaro. “They know more than they think they do about how they navigate grief and what they value, and that they can use those skills in facing the same loss.”

The losses that I have experienced devastated me, and I can’t change that. But those experiences have also become a source of pride for the obstacles I have faced and learned to live with (and still do today). If you experience grief overload, don’t be afraid to ask for help or reach out for support. It can be hard to do, but you’ll never regret giving yourself the care you deserve when facing a difficult time.

Katie Reilly is a freelance journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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