The Mother Who Doesn't Love. A Psychotherapist's View on the Complex Mother-Daughter Relationship

Elena is proud that she became a mother and devoted her entire life to her daughter. Her advice is always important to her friends, but her daughter, for some reason, doesn’t quite agree. That’s just her character—she’s just like her father. And yet, in childhood she was a completely different child. Lida is very sensitive and sickly. But she is lucky—her daughter is always near. She even lives now on the same stair landing. Lida can’t get nervous: as soon as there’s stress, “the ambulance” arrives. Her daughter always worries about her and drops everything when her mother needs it. Everything in Zoia’s family depends on her. The daughter got married and is already a mother herself, but how can you leave her without supervision? Something is bound to go wrong. And what, in general, does it mean “to leave a daughter in peace”? Zoia is still a mother! People come and go, but a daughter is forever. For more than 36 years, psychotherapist Marina Markatun has been observing the complex relationship between mother and daughter in her office. She has made sure that it’s not enough to describe a person and determine the type of relationship. You must understand how the mother sees the world and how the same events look to the daughter. 12 mothers and their adult daughters tell the story of their lives. Each is accompanied by a specialist’s commentary in which the author explains the mothers’ behavior and offers her own recommendations for getting through a conflict. All stories are based on real cases from practice. In this book you will learn:
– how a daughter copies her mother’s behavior, even when they have different views on life;
– what an adult child feels when, in childhood, they lacked their mother’s attention;
– how to make independent decisions when “mom knows better”;
– what families go through when the mother suffers from alcohol or drug dependence;
– how the world looks through the eyes of a narcissistic mother.