Identify and Heal

Many daughters of narcissistic mothers unconsciously search for ‘surrogate’ mothers, to fill the role of the Mother they never had, and so desperately needed when they were little girls. This can lead daughters to enter into a cycle, where they go from woman to woman, trying to fill the hole inside that has been left by her narcissistic mother, looking and longing for the mother she never had.

Sometimes the daughter will find a surrogate mother and have some of her needs met, however more commonly the daughter will end up choosing women usually with the same traits and characteristics as her narcissistic mother, because they are so familiar to her. As the daughter begins to realise that the surrogate is still not meeting her unfulfilled needs, she will begin to find ways of looking for validation, or reassurance that she is worthy, and regardless of how much or how little reassurance she receives, she doesn’t believe it, due to the imprinting from her narcissistic mother. At this point the relationship will usually break down altogether. This in effect leaves the daughter feeling even more unlovable and vulnerable, due to the fact that her core issues of abandonment and rejection have been triggered, by the feelings of invalidation and unworthiness.

In looking for a ‘mother’ in these women, the daughter is recreating the dysfunctional relationship she had with her narcissistic mother, and prolonging her own agony. In order to move on and progress on her journey, she must firstly accept that she didn’t get a real mother, and allow herself to come of the merry-go-round. This is where it is so important to learn and understand the attachment process that happens in infancy between a child and its caregiver. Daughters of narcissistic mothers unfortunately didn’t learn how to securely attach, or learn how to emotionally regulate and have autonomy over her feelings, therefore she has no confidence in her own feelings and needs, because they were never recognised in a healthily responsive nurturing way. As daughters growing up, our minds grow with us and we are able to have complex functioning and thoughts, however we have adapted around our own trauma.

The solution is to not seek from others, what we missed as daughters in childhood, because we will never find what we are looking for. We must look within ourselves, because we have all the answers and tools within us, that enable us to grow, heal and progress onwards to leading a happy and fulfilling life. As adult daughters of narcissistic mothers we must learn to look within and nurture, validate, encourage and reassure ourselves, and become the mother we needed for ourselves. For many daughters, we also fill this hole within, by going on to be the mother to our own children, that we never had ourselves. These narcissistic mothers can become our greatest teachers, because they teach us about the mother we will never be, and we can break the cycle for our own children.

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