When Mom and Dad split up, their daughter often assumes far too much responsibility for her mother's happiness.  It is as if the generations were reversed:  the daughter becomes the mother, and the mother, in her struggles to regain her self-confidence, becomes the needy child.  And since the daughter is acutely aware that her survival depends on the allegiance of the one remaining parent, she may reasonably deduce that she must jettison all traces of love for her father.  And if the father drops completely out of the picture, this may seem like a life and death matter to the daughter.  And so the daughter makes this terrible bargain: "I will love and help and defend my mother so that she, too, won't leave me".

Such a daughter may distort her perceptions of her divorced parents, so that Mom becomes always right and Dad becomes always wrong.  The daughter may come to possess a kind of parental authority that goes to her head with disastrous consequences: by becoming Mommy's "good girl", protector, and best friend, the daughter deliberately demolishes her own needs.  The tragedy of this bargain is that she drives underground her rage at her mother for putting her in this position.  Instead she trains her angry sights on Dad - or on herself.

The daughter is trapped in a terrible dilemna.  On the one hand there is the tragic mother, the woman upon whom the daughter patterns herself - but who could not keep a man.  On the other hand, there is this wretched, clinging woman upon whom the daughter's very existence depends.   Because of her loyalty conflicts, she may fear or even sabotage success in the workplace or in love, rather than risk winning where her mother so obviously lost.

The ultimate danger of this kind of overloaded mother-daughter attachment is that eventually it may collapse under its own weight.  When the mother is so injured that she cannot set right this unfortunate reversal of parental authority, and stop making her daughter feel responsible for her happiness, she may eventually lose the love and trust of her daughter.




-- Modified on 3/22/2004 7:30:51 PM