What Emotionally Unavailable Mothers Teach Their Daughters About Love

And How Long It Takes to Unlearn It

Photo by Fuu J on Unsplash

I want to start by saying something that took me a very long time to believe.

You deserved to be loved. Fully. Without conditions. Without having to earn it. Without shrinking yourself to fit inside someone else’s comfort zone. You deserved a mother who showed up for you the way she showed up for everyone else. And if you did not get that, it is not because something was wrong with you. It is because something was wrong with the situation.

That is not a pity statement. That is just the truth.

I grew up with a mother who was present in all the ways that were visible and absent in all the ways that mattered. She was there. She just was not there for me. Not really. Not in the way a child needs someone to be there. And for a very long time I thought that was my fault.

That is the first thing an emotionally unavailable mother teaches her daughter. That love is something you have to deserve. That if you are not getting it, you must be the reason why.

I remember being a child and doing something completely innocent, the kind of thing any kid does, forgetting something, misremembering something, just being a child with a child’s brain, and being treated like I had committed a crime. Not just corrected. Not just parented. Pathologized. Made into a problem. Sent to therapy to prove that something was wrong with me when nothing was wrong with me at all.

That is a specific kind of damage. When the person who is supposed to know you best decides instead to define you by your worst moments and then spends years making sure everyone around you believes that definition, it does something to the way you understand yourself. You start to believe you are the problem before you have even figured out who you are.

And then you grow up and you carry that into every relationship you have.

You tolerate things you should not tolerate because tolerating things felt like love growing up. You shrink yourself because you learned that taking up space made someone uncomfortable. You chase people who make you feel like you have to earn their attention because that is the love you know. You confuse control with care. You confuse criticism with concern. You confuse someone needing to manage your narrative with someone loving you.

It takes years to unlearn this. Some of us spend decades in it before we even recognize what we are doing.

And here is the part that is really hard to say out loud. Some of the people who shaped us the most are still doing it. As adults. They have not stopped. The form changes. It might be commentary on your choices, your purchases, your social media posts, your parenting, your home, your life. The mechanism is different but the message is the same one you received as a child. You are doing it wrong. You need to be managed. I know better than you about your own life.

You do not have to accept that.

That is the thing nobody tells daughters of emotionally unavailable mothers clearly enough. You are allowed to stop accepting it. You are allowed to hold a boundary that does not move. You are allowed to recognize projection for what it is, someone else’s unresolved fear and insecurity being placed on you like a coat that was never yours to wear.

Projection is when someone accuses you of the very thing they are guilty of. When someone calls you the problem to avoid looking at themselves. When someone needs you to be broken so they do not have to examine their own brokenness. Learning to recognize it is one of the most freeing things you will ever do because once you see it you cannot unsee it and it loses most of its power over you.

Here is what I want you to know if you grew up in a house where love came with conditions.

You are allowed to cut off a toxic parent. That is a complete sentence. You do not need to justify it, explain it, or defend it to anyone. Family is not a free pass to treat you poorly indefinitely.

You are allowed to hold your ground even when someone tries to make you feel guilty for it. Guilt is a tool people use when they have lost other forms of control. Do not confuse someone’s anger at your boundary for proof that the boundary is wrong.

You are allowed to grieve the parent you needed and did not get. That grief is real and it is legitimate and it does not require you to hate the person who caused it. You can love someone and still acknowledge clearly that they hurt you.

You are allowed to find out who you are outside of the story someone else told about you. That process takes time. It is not linear. It involves a lot of sitting with uncomfortable things. But on the other side of it is something nobody can take from you. A self that belongs to you.

The hurt does not fully go away. I will not lie to you about that. What they call the mother wound is real and it lives in the body and it shows up in the most unexpected moments. But it does get quieter. It gets smaller. And you get bigger.

That is the work. And it is worth it.

You deserved to be loved. You still do. And you do not have to keep waiting for it to come from someone who was never able to give it.

Love,

Kyda 💚