“Because I said so.”
• If you marry that man, you’re no longer part of this family.
• If you take that ridiculous job and move, you won’t see another dime from me.
• Don’t expect any help from me again if you don’t send the kids to Catholic school.
These are just a few examples of the stinging, domineering words of overt control. There is nothing subtle about it. There is no “I love you” manipulation, those directives masquerading as affection we saw with the overly enmeshed mother. Overt control is authoritarian and often irrational. It’s full of belittling and bullying. There are very direct orders, and warnings that disobedience is grounds for serious consequences.
Control is appropriate when a child is small. Children are impulsive, with no life experience, and they need protection. There are plenty of hot stoves and traffic-filled streets they haven’t learned to respect yet, and rules and a mother’s firm no are a valuable part of teaching and guidance. Control at that stage not only makes a child feel safe, it provides actual safety. But an important part of the parenting process is gradually stepping back to let a little girl learn for herself, and when a mother’s control precludes her child from doing that, it ceases to be helpful and loving.
The control freak mother keeps a heavy hand clamped down on a daughter for as long as she can—often deep into adulthood—with toxic effects. Just like the enmesher, she habitually returns to behavior that keeps you dependent, then takes advantage of your dependence. And all the while, she often insists that “it’s for your own good.” But the unhappy truth is that pushing you around satisfies her, and gives her a feeling of power that is often missing in the rest of her life. For the control freak mother, keeping you locked in that power imbalance is key to her happiness and fulfillment.
Perhaps most troubling, even when you take great pains as an adult to escape her reach, you’re very likely to carry with you huge reserves of the anger and resentment her control created in you. You may also have a powerful need to exert control in your own life, often by controlling other people. Or, conversely, you may live with the sense that you must always put others’ needs ahead of your own. Those are the pervasive marks of having grown up with a controlling mother.
Karen: Trapped and Bullied
When Karen, a twenty-seven-year-old department store sales associate with dark brown hair, came in for her first session, she told me immediately that she was in crisis. Her longtime boyfriend had recently proposed, but at the news of the engagement, her mother, Charlene, had gone on the warpath. Not only had she heaped invective on Karen’s fiancé, whom she’d never liked, but she’d also threatened to “disown” Karen if she went through with the marriage. Karen told me that she was scared of what would happen, but she had enough insight to know she needed to work on getting some distance from her mother’s overbearing interference.
Her story poured out when I asked for details about what was going on.
KAREN: “I guess I knew this day would come. By some miracle, I’ve been with a really great guy for the last two years, but my mother never saw it that way. For one thing, Daniel’s Latino and Catholic, and she thinks there’s something criminal about both of those. Then there’s the fact that he teaches math at an elementary school, and coaches soccer. He’s fabulous with kids, and he’s got a couple of advanced degrees so he’ll have more options with the subjects he can teach. Sounds like a dream, right? But Mom talks down to him, and she refers to him as ‘your little gym teacher friend,’ which she says with complete disdain. From the beginning she’s ridiculed him. No one I like ever measures up in her eyes, especially ‘an immigrant,’ which is what she calls Daniel.
“The whole time Daniel and I have been together, I’ve tried to keep them apart and hoped that would be enough. I thought I could just smooth things over. I’ve always apologized to Daniel about Mom after she’s been awful to him, and I tried to just change the subject when she started in with ‘How can you be serious about someone like that.’ It’s not worth arguing. But after Daniel proposed, he insisted that we go over to Mom’s and show her the ring. I wanted to go alone. . . . I know that’s crazy. Anyway, we went. What a disaster.
“Mom didn’t even try to be civil. She criticized the ring, and Daniel, and his family. He tried to be polite, but he was steaming. Finally he said, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way. Come on, honey, let’s get out of here.’ And Mom looked at me and said, ‘If you go through with this, you’re not my daughter anymore. Don’t think I don’t mean it. You’re trying to ruin your life, just like you always have. If you want to defy me, go right ahead. But forget about any help from me with the wedding, or anything else.’
“I froze. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Mom,’ and Daniel gave me the most pained look and said, ‘That’s unbelievable. You have nothing to be sorry for. Why are you apologizing?’ I didn’t know what to say or do. I just stood there crying till he pulled me out the door.”
Karen told me that she’d been in a tailspin in the days since, uncertain about what to do or how to deal with the conflict between her mother and Daniel that she’d tried so hard to push away. I asked her if she really thought her mother would cut off contact with her if she didn’t get her way.
KAREN: “Yeah, I do. She’s been calling and badgering me about breaking up with him. She was at my place until two in the morning the other night, haranguing me about how I’m making a big mistake, and she doesn’t want grandkids from ‘a person like that.’ I told her I didn’t want to talk about it, but it didn’t get through. She just assumes that she gets to call the shots. I told her, ‘Mom, please go home,’ and she said, ‘I’ll go home when you tell me you’re not going to marry him.’
“I feel so trapped and bullied. I’m sick of her interference, but she’s my only family, and awful as she can be sometimes, I don’t want to lose her. But I keep backing down from saying anything in Daniel’s defense, and I’m sick of that, too. I’m tired of being such a wimp. I feel so disloyal saying this, but my mother has done nothing but control me my entire life. She split up with my dad when I was little and I don’t even know where he is now. But she’s always had me to boss around. Everything she has ever asked me to do has been to benefit her, not me. She controlled what I wore, what I ate, who I was friends with, even the activities I did when I was younger. And now she’s sure she can tell me who to marry.”
Dominated Daughters Easily Become Doormats
The foundation for the showdown over Karen’s engagement had long been in place. In the mother-daughter twosome left after her divorce, Charlene had assumed the role of authoritarian and boss, grinding Karen down with criticism. She had provided for her daughter’s physical needs—and many people would look at that as a sign of love—but she rarely offered affection. Instead, Karen told me, Charlene was often derisive, especially when her friends were around. Young Karen often found herself the object of unwelcome attention when the adults focused on her.
KAREN: “My mom thinks she has a great sense of humor, but really, she was just mean, especially to me. If I didn’t want to wear whatever she chose for me, she belittled and made fun of me. I picked out a dress at the store when I was maybe seven or eight, and when I came out of the dressing room she turned to her friend, who was shopping with us, and said, “Whoever thought a daughter of mine would have such trashy taste?” They both laughed at me so hard. I didn’t even know why, but the shame was seared into me. I just stood there shaking till she said, ‘Go take that thing off!’ It was a yellow dress with flowers, and I never wore yellow or flowers after that, even though I love both of them.”
Cruel digs and jokes made at a child’s expense can cut to the core, and as a girl, Karen faced them often. She learned it wasn’t safe to trust her own judgment, and like what she liked, so she protected herself by going along with her mother’s choices. After all, Charlene would brook no dissent. She didn’t hit or slap; she didn’t need to. Her words and tone underlined to Karen that her feelings and preferences didn’t matter.
As a result, Karen never had a chance to master one of the most vital life skills: knowing and asking for what she wanted.
When controllers tear their daughters down, whether with threats, ridicule, or criticism, they rob them not only of their dignity and self-respect but also of their volition. The controllers’ constant criticism destroys young daughters’ belief that they’re okay, and it makes them extremely vulnerable to control because it erodes the spirit and sense of confidence daughters need to stand up for themselves and go on to live independent lives. Criticism is the fountainhead of control, and control freak mothers discover early that if you tear your daughter down enough, you strip away her ability to be assertive and her will to resist. So they rely on insults and criticism to keep you one-down, hardly missing a beat when you become an adult.
The knocks accelerate whenever controlling mothers feel threatened, as Karen and Daniel saw when they announced their engagement. Charlene panicked, seeing that she was losing control over her daughter’s life, and that Karen was shifting her loyalty to her fiancé. In Charlene’s mind, the only way to regain the upper hand was to threaten to cut Karen off. That sounds drastic, and counterintuitive, but Charlene had controlled Karen for so long, she had every reason to believe her daughter would buckle, and that she’d never have to follow through on her threats.
Karen did come close to giving in, she told me.
KAREN: “After all the pressure from Mom, I was so tied in knots I felt physically ill. I told Daniel, ‘We’re fine like we are. We don’t have to rush things.’ He just shook his head and said, ‘I know exactly what this is about and I’m not going to have this drama hanging over us. I hate seeing your mom walk all over you, and there’s no way we can have her dictating the terms of our relationship. You need to get some counseling, do something about this.’ I don’t think I would be here if he hadn’t done that.”
I hear that often. Partners or friends may well be the catalyst that pushes you toward change because they see so clearly how unable you are to do anything about the situation.
It’s very difficult to move forward from a limbo like Karen’s when your healthy instincts to disagree, to say no, to become your own best authority on yourself—all the essential elements of individuation—have been stunted. All the criticism she heard from her mother when she was small turned Karen into, as she put it, “the most people-pleasing person I know.” And she felt paralyzed as she tried to figure out how to do the impossible and make both Charlene and Daniel happy. Notably, she never thought to put herself in the equation. It wasn’t something she’d had much practice doing.
KAREN: “I avoid conflict at all costs. I’ll do pretty much anything I’m asked. But here’s the weird part: When I don’t please someone in authority—my boss, my mother—I tend to get sick, break out in hives, and become very withdrawn or shut down altogether. I feel terrible, terrible guilt.”
Karen became the person who would take jobs no one wanted and be ever available to fill the role of doormat while she ignored her own needs. Raised to be dominated, she had a finely honed ability to abdicate decision making to other people, her mother above all.
The Perfectionists:
Holding You to Impossible Standards
Some controlling mothers, like Karen’s, seem to turn on their negativity almost on a whim, focusing on their daughters’ most recent desires and squashing them, or dispensing cruel put-downs or criticism just because they need to make themselves feel better in the moment. But another variety of controller is far more systematic. These are the perfectionists who seem driven to hold you to a standard that’s impossible to meet. They build their households around rules, routines, and drills that are not to be questioned, and they regard anything less than perfection as failure.
Michelle: How Criticism Creates a Critic
Michelle, a thirty-four-year-old graphic artist, told me at our first session that her relationship with her boyfriend, Luke, was on the verge of breaking up. Things had been tense between them for a while, she said, and their last fight had been a big one—he’d taken a few of his things and gone to stay with a friend.
MICHELLE (in tears): “I really thought he was the one, that we’d get married, but he’s fed up and he says this is it. I just don’t understand why my relationships are so messed up.”
I suggested that the two of them come in for a session, and Michelle persuaded Luke, a lanky thirty-year-old video game designer with shaggy brown hair, to join her for an appointment. The two of them came to my office the following week, and I asked Luke to fill me in on what was going on, from his point of view.
LUKE: “Well . . . it seems like the longer we live together—it’s been almost a year now—the worse it gets. I had to get away for a while, and right now I’m sleeping on my buddy’s couch, but at least I’ve got a little peace. Michelle’s so damn critical. She picks at me for the smallest things. If I’ve got my stuff scattered around my computer, in my own office in my own home, she goes ballistic. I didn’t realize when we first got together how compulsive she was about where she lived and stupid things like the T-shirts I wear. But boy is she ever.”
MICHELLE: “Well in my own defense, he’s no angel. Yes I have my faults, but would it kill him to put his socks in the hamper or put on something decent? How hard would that be? He’s always leaving a dish in the sink, and it’s so easy to put it in the dishwasher. Little things matter.”
LUKE: “Come on, Michelle. Of all the things in the world to get obsessed with, why is that such a big, freakin’ deal? God, you sound just like your mother.”
Their irritation with each other was clear, and it was apparent to me that there was more involved than dirty dishes in the sink. I told Michelle that there seemed to be a whole pattern of picky, critical, perfectionist behavior on her part that was pushing Luke away.
MICHELLE: “Oh God. . . . To hear you say that . . . That’s my mom. Picky. So critical. I’ve always sworn I would never, ever be like her. And here I am.”
Our mothers’ imprinting and programming is so pervasive that it’s easy to find ourselves behaving like them without even realizing it. But patterns can be broken—with effort—once we’re aware of them, I told Luke and Michelle. Were they ready to put in the work it would take to save their relationship? I asked. They exchanged glances.
SUSAN: “Think of a container of milk that gets left out on the counter. Sometimes you can put it back in the refrigerator and it will still be sweet. But sometimes, it’s so far gone it can never be sweet again. What point do you think your relationship is at now?”
LUKE (looking at Michelle): “I don’t know. I’d like to make it work, but we don’t seem to be able to do it by ourselves. We just have the same arguments over and over.” (He gave her a little smile.) “But a lot of it has been very sweet.”
MICHELLE (tearing up): “I don’t want to lose him.”
I could feel the still-strong connection between them, and I suggested that Michelle and I work together on our own for a while to get at the roots of that criticism. I told Luke that I thought he needed to go back home. Many studies on marriage have shown that the longer a couple is separated, the greater the chances they won’t get back together. It would be tense at first, I told them, but if Luke could be less reactive and patient for a while, Michelle and I would be working to modify and extinguish the deeply engrained patterns of criticism that had been coming between them.
THE MAKING OF A BULLY
Daughters of unloving mothers almost universally promise themselves one thing: If I do nothing else in my life, I will never, ever, turn into my mother. Yet as we’ve seen, as adults, they often shock themselves by acting very much the way their mothers did toward them. Getting to the roots of that behavior was what Michelle and I focused on in our work together.
Things hadn’t been easy at home since Luke had returned, she told me.
MICHELLE: “He’s been calling me on my perfectionism a lot. Sometimes I just get defensive or cry or even yell at him. But I really notice what I’m saying to him now. For some reason when we were here together, I actually got it that I’ve been acting like my mom. It really scares me. . . . I got away from her as soon as I could, and we don’t see her much now—of course, she really hates Luke. He’s not perfect enough either. But obviously, I took her with me. I’m turning into her anyway. . . .”
As she told me about her childhood, we both began to see how many parallels there were between what she’d experienced and what she was living out now with Luke.
MICHELLE: “I was born to parents who never should have had kids. My father was an emotional hostage to his ultrareligious mother and workaholic father. My mother was raised in a horribly dysfunctional home with alcoholic parents and a verbally and physically abusive father. When I was growing up, Mom was a tyrant. There was nothing soft or nurturing at all. She was the strictest mother in the world. She was all about perfection. Perfect, clean home, perfect husband, perfect job, perfect kids. When I was little I would sometimes tell her, ‘I’m not perfect’ and she’d snap, ‘Well, try to be!’ That was her sole agenda in life. Her clean home and her job as a paralegal were more important than anything else. And if my sister and I weren’t there doing most of the housework, she resented us. My father was constantly working, trying to get a failing restaurant off the ground. Mom resented him, too.
“She was relentless. I worked as hard as I could to at least get good grades, but if I brought home all As and one B-plus, I lost privileges for the B. Mom drilled me in math, but it was more like a military exercise than a math lesson. She sometimes took away my allowance for wrong answers. I had chores like you wouldn’t believe, washing and cleaning and lining up the magazines just so on the spotless coffee table. But as far as she was concerned, I could never do enough.”
SUSAN: “Maybe that gives you a little clue to what Luke’s feeling. If you can remember how awful it felt for you, I think you can get a sense of how it is for him.”
MICHELLE: “You mean I’ve been making him feel like that? How could that even happen? My mom was an absolute tyrant.”
One of the most common, and distressing, offshoots of a mother’s tyrannical control is bullying, which often seems to come at daughters from every direction. Michelle told me that her mother had carefully controlled what she wore to elementary school—“I was the only girl in school who wasn’t even allowed to wear pants, let alone jeans,” she said—and made her an object of ridicule.
MICHELLE: “It was so awful. The kids made fun of me, and I was so depressed and alone. But the worst thing was that I was taunted and teased and chased by the bullies at school. It was horrible, and Mom never stood up for me. She made it happen with her stupid rules. And she never did a thing to help me—she said I had to learn to be tough. It was the worst time in my life.”
It’s not hard to see the connection between being bullied at home as a young girl and becoming vulnerable to bullying in the outside world. Pushed to be quiet, uncomplaining, and compliant by a controlling mother, it’s natural for a child to take that role at school. She learns to be a target, and she has no skills for protecting herself. She is groomed to be passive—and bullies can tell. Many of my clients have felt the pain of bullying that made them dread going to school.
When children have been through this kind of perfectionistic control, it’s not uncommon for them to decide that when they’re finally on their own, they’ll never again let bullies dominate them. Instead of being pushed around, they’ll do the pushing. And as adults, they start giving orders about the socks on the floor and the dishes in the sink.
Little of this happens on a conscious level, so gaining awareness of what you’re doing is vital if you want to change. It takes motivation and commitment, and the temptation to revert to old ways of being will always be with you, but once you’ve seen your patterns, you can put in place internal mechanisms that will help you become aware of the impulse to behave like your mother—and no longer have to act on it.
The Sadistic Controllers
Taken to extremes, control can become out-and-out cruelty, with a mother’s rules and standards shifting constantly and harsh punishments meted out for no reason that a daughter can anticipate or understand. Cruel controllers are more than bullies. At the far end of the spectrum, some of them exhibit strong elements of sadism. They seem to derive some kind of warped pleasure from humiliating and thwarting their daughters or seeing them suffer.
Living with a sadistic mother, daughters are constantly off balance, shamed, and often afraid, and long after they leave home, they often keep their fight-or-flight responses close to the surface. The urge to run, or to come out fighting, is a survival strategy that has served them so well, sometimes they hardly realize there are other ways to live.
Samantha: A Legacy of Anger, Turned Inward and Out
Samantha, an elegant twenty-nine-year-old African American who manages a sales team for a large pharmaceutical company, started our first session by telling me she’d had a confrontation at work that deeply disturbed her.
SAMANTHA: “We have a new area manager—we’re supposed to be peers—and she’s really working my nerves. I mean, she’s good, but she acts like she’s queen and the rest of us are nothing. At a team meeting, she came really close to trashing me, setting me up as the problem when it’s actually she who’s been so disruptive and bad for morale. I pride myself on being cool and calm and never letting people see how I really feel. I’m not cold, just professional. But after that meeting, something snapped. I lost it. I was okay while she was talking about me. My face got hot, but I didn’t say anything. It was at least the second or third time she’d done it. I wanted to just stay cool because she’s new, and people like her. But in the parking lot at the end of the day, she made some joke about me and I just lit into her. It was pure rage, and to tell you the truth, I was out of control. I yelled like a crazy person. . . . And I got this almost high feeling. I know it scared her, but it was pretty scary for me, too.”
I told Samantha that blowing up that way might feel good for a moment, but as she well knew, the consequences make your life worse, not better. A lot of people think that if they yell, they’re standing up for themselves; however, not only doesn’t it solve anything, but it also makes you lose your dignity and your credibility. There are so many better ways to deal with anger.
SAMANTHA: “I know. Yelling in general freaks me out. I grew up with it, I hate it, and I just shut down when people raise their voices. I hold things in for a long time . . . and then I explode.”
It’s common for people to try to stay safe by shrinking away from someone who’s yelling. For children, especially, it makes sense to shut down and try to disappear—to become less of a target. But the strong emotions they feel don’t go away. Samantha had clear memories of how terrified she’d been as a child when her mother yelled at her.
SAMANTHA: “My mother could be . . . a real bitch. I’m sorry but don’t think there’s another word for it. She was full of rage. I don’t know why, really. There was plenty of money—my dad was in-house counsel for a biotech company, and she works as a lawyer for a utilities company. They’re both brilliant, and I think they expected me to be on par with them from the time I was little.
“I remember when I was maybe three years old and Mom was trying to teach me the ABC’s. Most mothers have you sing the alphabet song and make it a game, but my mother didn’t believe in that. She came into my room and told me to say it, say it. Again! Again! I didn’t know my letters by heart, and she screamed at me so loudly I was terrified. I can still hear her voice in my head.”
As Samantha got older, her mother’s irrational control and cruelty took on new dimensions.
SAMANTHA: “I was always tall for my age. When I was fourteen, I made it onto the basketball team. That was my dream. We were really good, and we made it to a tournament in Boston. I was scheduled to go with my friends. I was so excited—it was going to be such a fun time. I saved every dollar I got from babysitting and bought my plane ticket. But at the last minute, my mother told me I couldn’t go because my grades weren’t good enough. I’d gotten a C on a quiz for the first time. It wasn’t even going to count! But according to her, I was going to flunk out. She said I needed the time to study, ‘not play.’ . . .
“I remember sitting in my room watching the clock, hoping until the last minute she would change her mind. I still remember the moment when I knew I was going to miss the plane. I called my coach to say my mother wouldn’t let me go. He was really upset and asked to talk to Mom, but she wouldn’t get on the phone. God, Susan—there was absolutely no plausible reason for her not letting me go! My grades were fine—I had a lot of As and Bs! She just wanted to flaunt her power over me. . . . She could take away anything she wanted.”
Some mothers get a kind of warped sense of satisfaction from depriving a young daughter of something she wants. And like so many daughters of sadistic controllers, Samantha fantasized about escaping.
SAMANTHA: “When I was in junior high, I practiced packing a little backpack with everything I needed to run away. I timed myself. I could be ready in ten minutes. I don’t know where I thought I would actually go, but I needed to believe I could.”
Her real escape, though, came when she was older, and it didn’t even require leaving home.
THE REBEL ROUTE
It’s extremely common for daughters like Samantha to “take control” of their lives and attempt to squirm out of their mothers’ rigid constrictions, rules, and punishments by rebelling.
SAMANTHA: “My mother thought she could make me do anything she wanted, but by ninth grade, I figured out that the one thing even she couldn’t really control was my body. One of my salvations came when I was able to start dating and sleeping with boys. I had to sneak out to do it, but it was worth the risk. I figured out that I could use my body to have some sense of control over myself. I started bingeing and purging then, too. I was a serious bulimic for a long time under her roof, and she never really noticed, even when I stopped eating and looked almost anorexic.
“I took honors classes and graduated early so I could get out of the house, but after all that, I think I spent a considerable amount of time in my life in college and after trying to hurt myself. I felt guilty and depressed a lot of the time, and the only things that really helped were having sex, getting drunk, or getting stoned. Purging was good, too. I mostly wanted to check out. I hated myself, I hated my life. But I had a friend who was going to AA, and she asked me to come to a meeting with her one night. And everything changed for me. If it hadn’t been for her, I don’t know what would’ve happened.”
Sadly, many daughters of unloving mothers get their first taste of freedom and often destroy it by acting out self-destructively. Whether it’s with alcohol, drugs, food, sex, or all of the above, the rebel often degrades herself in a fruitless attempt to prove that her mother no longer controls her. When we are thwarted, frustrated, and punished way out of proportion to what we’ve done, it’s inevitable that enormous anger builds inside us.
This anger may feel difficult and uncomfortable, but it can become a very good catalyst for change. When it’s not expressed appropriately, though, it can be extremely destructive. Often the anger turns into depression, which can build to the point where a daughter will do almost anything to escape the chaotic feelings inside. Some of my clients told me that they have even considered suicide. It’s a cycle of anger and despair that may well persist through adulthood.
Self-destructive rebellion isn’t freedom, because the rebels’ choices aren’t based on building up their own confidence and self-respect. They can’t be truly free. Instead they still have their mothers in their heads and act out in ways aimed to shock and upset them. They’ve never really learned how to construct a life that reflects their own desires. Ironically, their mothers are still controlling them.
What’s Driving the Controlling Mother?
As I think about the many controlling mothers my clients have had, certain facts emerge clearly. These mothers seem to be very displeased with their lives. They may have come from homes in which they were, themselves, controlled and belittled by their parents. They may be controlled and put down by their husbands or bosses. Their roles or freedom may have been limited in ways they internally chafe against, but feel helpless to change. Anger, bitterness, frustration, and disappointment may well be swirling beneath a tight smile. Without some sense of empowerment, they feel lost.
Whatever the roots of their need to control, these mothers will flex their control muscle by belittling and criticizing your appearance, choice of schools, job, partners, wedding preparations. Like so many other mothers who can’t love, the controllers make the most of your every vulnerability.
But the control that often has the most far-reaching impact on your life comes from the patterns, reactions, and expectations your mother has implanted so successfully in you—even if you think you’ve pushed her away.
If you’re struggling with people-pleasing, perfectionism, a tendency to bully or be bullied, or any of the other painful behaviors we’ve seen in this chapter, let me assure you that these are learned behaviors—and you can unlearn them.