WUNRN
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rosjke-hasseldine/
AM I DESTINED TO BECOME MY MOTHER?
By Rosjke Hasseldine - Author, mother-daughter relationship
therapist, international workshop presenter, and women's group facilitator. She
works with mothers and daughters from all over the world.
From 15+ years experience, Rosjke has developed a way of mapping a woman's mother-daughter
history that connects women to their female roots, changes inherited patterns,
and broadens their understanding of what it means to be female.
12/03/14 - Like
many daughters, I have felt the familiar anxiety that I am destined to become
my mother when I hear my mother's unique brand of criticism, that I so hated
hearing when I was a girl, come out of my mouth. As a teenager, I vowed that I
wouldn't be like her. I didn't want to inherit her way of finding fault or
being critical of other people. So, in those moments when I hear her words come
out of my mouth, I worry that I am powerless against my destiny to become my
mother.
Jessica Machado
writes about this hot topic in her recent article in VICE Magazine "Are we destined to become our mothers? A scientific investigation."
And after years of listening to mothers and daughters talk about this issue, I
have learned that the answer to this question is both yes and no. Yes, we are
destined to become our mothers, and no, it is not inevitable. It makes sense
that after spending our formative years surrounded by the way our mother does
things, some of her unique behaviors and idiosyncrasies will rub off on us. We
will pick up her mannerisms, her phrases and her particular ways of reacting to
things. And more importantly, we will inherit some of what our mother feels
about herself and what she thinks is possible for her as a woman. The reality
about these inherited beliefs is that some will be full of strength and
promise, and others will be negative and self-limiting. And the good news is
that repeating negative, self-limiting beliefs is not inevitable if we
understand who our mother is and why she believes what she believes.
When I map a
woman's mother-daughter history, I see the beliefs and behaviors she has
inherited from her mother. I see how history repeats itself between her and her
mother, and between her mother and her grandmother, despite the changes
feminism has brought to their lives. I see how low self-esteem, depression,
disordered eating and violent relationships are sometimes repeated generation
after generation because the underlying emotional reasons for these problems
aren't investigated or understood.
As Jessica
Machado writes in her article, it is the less obvious behaviors that daughters
inherit that are important to investigate and understand. For example; why do
we feel anxious in the same way our mother does, and why do we put up with the
same emotionally neglectful relationships that our mother has? Lily Myers
reiterates this mother-daughter inheritance in her YouTube poem, "Shrinking Women",
sharing that as her mother's daughter, she inherited her mother's emotional
deprivation and her mother's silent accommodation.
This is the
stuff between mothers and daughters that demands attention. It is the emotional
entitlement to speak and be heard that our mother either owned or didn't own
that daughters inherit from their mothers without realizing it. And since many
of our mothers come from generations where women's feelings, emotional needs
and desires were not inquired after or acknowledged, this is a huge issue for
daughters today.
The key to
changing this legacy is to understand why our mother learned to accommodate,
why she learned to be emotionally silent and why she finds it hard to ask for
what she needs. We need to understand what our mother didn't feel entitled to
say, what emotional support she didn't get and the limitations she learned to
accept, and how this affected her. We need to look back at our mother's life so
that we can go forward in our own life aware of what is emotionally missing in
our inheritance. And we need to go back and celebrate our mother's courage and
strength, knowing that we have inherited this as well.