“If I don’t own it, she can’t steal it from me.” Revoking the bargain to stay blind to your value in order to preserve your connection with your mother.

“If I don’t own it, she can’t steal it from me.” I remember reading this statement while going through one of my old journals. I lived with a double bind in the relationship with my mother. In the moments when I was proud of myself, confident or unashamed about something, my mother would retaliate with a vengeance or “knock me down to size,” as she would say.

It was as though my mother had a sixth sense for this; if I expressed even the slightest whiff of confidence, it seemed she could feel it and would react swiftly to put me in my place. Over time, my expressions of confidence were always followed by a sense of menace or dread about her subsequent reaction to it. It felt like there was some kind of “hammer” that would inevitably come down on me and rip that moment of confidence away — a huff of disapproval, a silence when there should be celebration, a remark of humiliation, or even a slap across the face.

Feeling my own value got closely associated with shame and expecting punishment.

If I shrank in compliance with her unspoken mandate to stay small, I lost myself, but I still somehow retained some measure of connection with her. If I shined instead of shrank, I lost her — and through the pain of her retaliation, I lost access to myself too.

There was no way to have connection with myself and connection with my mother at the same time.

Publicly my mother would praise me because my successes reflected well on her as the mother. But privately it was a different story. I learned to hide and shrink around my mother to prevent triggering her insecurities, resentment or jealousy. This felt like survival, and also like I was being a good daughter. As a child, she became my focus, and I learned it was safer to not have needs, or to hide them best I could. Self-abandonment became my default as a byproduct of trying to create a bond with my mother, who saw me less as her child and more like a competitor. Her ego was satiated when I groveled to her and didn’t display too much confidence. That cost me years of struggle and having to learn from scratch how to see myself clearly as an adult, like wandering through a series of fun-house mirrors.

As a coach who has helped women heal the Mother Wound for over a decade, a powerful point on the journey is witnessing women come into the shock of realizing how beautiful, amazing, valuable, and exceptional they actually are — and the grief of realizing how actively their mothers, out of their own pain, had tried to prevent them from seeing it.

After many years of inner work, there’s the beauty, joy and freedom of finally seeing yourself clearly without your mother’s distortions and projections. It can feel like: “My mother was wrong about me. I am capable of seeing myself clearly now. And I love what I see.”

And there’s the deep grief that comes right behind the joy — the grief of how long you lived in defense and resistance against knowing your value as a means to protect yourself from someone who was supposed to protect you.

Many daughters learned to disconnect from their own value as a way of preserving connection with their mothers. It’s a real tragedy that some mothers feel so deprived that they see their daughters as competitors rather than innocent, vulnerable children who depend on them for survival. And to make it more complex, many of these daughters believe their mothers’ projections and distortions for years, if not their entire lives.

What’s really going on is that the mother is blended with her own wounded inner child much of the time, and sees her own rejecting mother looking back at her disapprovingly through her daughter’s eyes. Every win for the daughter (a graduation, an engagement, a flash of confidence) is interpreted by the mother as her own loss, confirmation of her own mother’s judgment that she was never good enough.

To avoid those painful feelings, the mother punishes her daughter, erroneously seeing the daughter as the cause, rather than an innocent catalyst, for her own past pain to be felt and healed.

It’s natural and normal to feel triggered by one’s child. This is part of parenting. The problem arises when a mother avoids doing the inner work around it and instead lives out the projection — seeing her daughter as someone to defeat, conquer, and take vengeance upon to relieve her own shame and sense of not-enoughness.

Coming out the other side of a Mother Wound like this takes tremendous courage and tenacity, because it’s still so taboo to name how mothers can be abusers, sometimes even sadistic ones at that. As children, we were invested in not seeing how damaging and unsafe our parents are — that was a matter of survival. Our compassion for our mothers initially outweighs compassion for ourselves, as the hope of the innocent child is that someday doing “enough” for mom will finally make her feel like “enough” herself, so she’ll stop abusing us and start actually mothering us.