Karyl McBride

“As an adult, I am just learning to be in touch with my feelings. I certainly didn’t learn this from Mom. I can still picture her and how controlled she was with feelings. She would put on her sunglasses and get this stone-cold face. If I got emotional, she would say, ‘Stop it or I’ll slap you!’

When Lauren, Elyse, other clients, and I allowed this grief process, we began to see how we could finally let go.

Processing feelings is very different from just talking about them. To process means to talk about the trauma, and simultaneously feel the pain in a cacophonous, blasting, rock concert. You can tell something in a story form without feeling it, but that is not processing. This is the only way to release trauma from your body.

We have to clean out trauma before we can learn to look at our situation in a healthy and different way.

1. Accepting your mother’s limitations, and allowing yourself to grieve
2. Separating psychologically from Mother, and reframing the negative messages
3. Working on your authentic sense of self
4. Dealing with Mother and your relationship with her in a healthy way
5. Treating your own narcissistic traits and refusing to pass on the legacy to your own children.

Mothers are supposed to be the most reliable source of love, comfort, and empathy, and if your mother did not provide that for you, you most likely denied your feelings about it. Daughters often blame themselves for their mother’s inability to love them. Remember my client who said, “If my own mother can’t love me, who can?” Accepting their mother’s limitations is difficult for all daughters.

Most narcissists lack the capacity to give significant, authentic love and empathy, and you have no choice but to deal with this reality. Accepting that your own mother has this limited capacity is the first step. Let go of the expectation that it will ever be different.

Remember that you cannot change others. You can change only yourself. How you view things and how you deal with your perceptions is within your control. Changing your mother is not.

Am I now relying on myself to meet most of my needs, and when someone else is there for me, do I see it as an added blessing rather than my due?

Eventually, giving myself this time, my tears would begin to leak and then pour. The trick was to let them be. To feel them. This is difficult when you have been taught to stuff it or suck it up or not to feel anything, to be phony, to pretend everything is all right when it isn’t.