Mother-Daughter Wisdom: Creating a Legacy of Physical and Emotional Health

Book by Christiane Northrup

Chapter One

Mothers and Daughters

The Bond That Wounds, the Bond That Heals
The mother-daughter relationship is at the headwaters of every woman's health. Our bodies and our beliefs about them were formed in the soil of our mothers' emotions, beliefs, and behaviors. Even before birth, our mother provides us with our first experience of nurturing. She is our first and most powerful female role model. It is from her that we learn what it is to be a woman and care for our bodies. Our cells divided and grew to the beat of her heart. Our skin, hair, heart, lungs, and bones were nourished by her blood, blood that was awash with the neurochemicals formed in response to her thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. If she was fearful, anxious, or deeply unhappy about her pregnancy, our bodies knew it. If she felt safe, happy, and fulfilled, we felt that too.

Our bodies and those of our daughters were created by a seamless web of nature and nurture, of biology informed by consciousness, that we can trace back to the beginning of time. Thus, every daughter contains her mother and all the women who came before her. The unrealized dreams of our maternal ancestors are part of our heritage. To become optimally healthy and happy, each of us must get clear about the ways in which our mother's history both influenced and continues to inform our state of health, our beliefs, and how we live our lives. Every woman who heals herself helps heal all the women who came before her and all those who will come after her.

A mother's often unconscious influence on her daughter's health is so profound that years ago I had to accept that my medical skills were only a drop in the bucket compared to the unexamined and ongoing influence of her mother. If a woman's relationship with her mother was supportive and healthy, and if her mother had given her positive messages about her female body and how to care for it, my job as a physician was easy. Her body, mind, and spirit were already programmed for optimal health and healing. If, on the other hand, her mother's influence was problematic, or if there was a history of neglect, abuse, alcoholism, or mental illness, then I knew that my best efforts would probably fall short. Real long-term health solutions would become possible only when my patient realized the impact of her background and then took steps to change this influence. Though health-care modalities such as dietary improvement, exercise, drugs, surgery, breast exams, and Pap smears all have their place, not one of them can get to the part of a woman's consciousness that is creating her state of health in the first place.

Before birth, consciousness literally directs the creation of our bodies. It is also constantly being shaped by our life's experiences, most especially those of childhood. No other childhood experience is as compelling as a young girl's relationship with her mother. Each of us takes in at the cellular level how our mother feels about being female, what she believes about her body, how she takes care of her health, and what she believes is possible in life. Her beliefs and behaviors set the tone for how well we learn to care for ourselves as adults. We then pass this information either consciously or unconsciously on to the next generation.

Though I acknowledge that the culture at large plays a significant role in our views of ourselves as women, ultimately the beliefs and behavior of our individual mothers exert a far stronger influence. In most cases, she is the first to teach us the dictates of the larger culture. And if her beliefs are at odds with the dominant culture, our mother's influence almost always wins.

Maternal Attention: An Essential Lifelong Nutrient


When a TV camera focuses on audience members in the studio or at sporting events, what does the person on camera shout out? More often than not, it's "Hi, Mom!"

Each of us has a primal need to be seen and noticed by our mothers, and that's why the loss of one's mother can be so devastating. In a letter at the beginning of Hope Edelman's book, Motherless Daughters, a woman whose mother died when she was thirteen wrote:

No one in your life will ever love you as your mother does. There is no love as pure, unconditional, and strong as a mother's love. And I will never be loved that way again.
One of my newsletter subscribers recently used nearly the same words, although her loss came much later in life:

I lost my mother four years ago when I was forty-nine. And I sure do miss her. Mother-daughter relationships are one of the most intimate we will ever have and often one of the most complicated. One of the most painful things I realized when my mom died was that I would never again be loved as unconditionally (in this life) as a mother loves.

A daughter's need for her mother is biologic, and it continues throughout her life. Not only was our mother's body the source of life for us but it was her face that we looked to, to see how we were doing. By gazing into our mother's eyes and experiencing her response to us, we learned crucial first lessons about our own worth.

The quality of attention we receive as babies determines in part how worthy we feel to be here on the planet. When our mother shows her approval through smiling and talking to us, then we encode the idea that we are all right. If, on the other hand, she is not present for whatever reason, or withholds her love when we don't do what she wants us to do, we feel abandoned. We'll do whatever it takes to get that attention back. As young children, our mother's approval or disapproval felt like either the kiss of life or the kiss of death. No wonder she still has the power to affect our well-being. No wonder, even as educated adult women, we keep going back to the same well of maternal attention to see if we're okay and lovable and to check out how we're doing.

I firmly believe that the mother-daughter bond is designed by nature to become the most empowering, compassionate, intimate relationship we'll ever have. How is it, then, that when we go back to that well to be refilled, the result is so often disappointment and resentment on both sides?

Too many of my patients and friends have told me painful stories about going home for the holidays. Here's one of them:

During my junior year in college, I went home on the Friday night before Mother's Day. I'd already told my mom that I'd be unable to stay and have a family dinner on Sunday because I had to get back, write a paper, and study for my final exams. When I walked into my house, my mother burst into tears. I said, "Mom, what's wrong?" She continued crying and said, "The ones you love the most hurt you the most. Don't get close to anyone."
I said, "Mom, are you upset because I'm not staying down here for Mother's Day?"
She replied, "I can't talk about it."
Of course this made me feel as though I was being a terrible daughter (which is exactly what my mother wanted to convey). I said to her, "Mom, you haven't been happy with me since the day I moved out to go to college." She obviously wasn't willing to talk about what was really going on. She refused to address this and just kept cleaning the kitchen counter. She finally said, "I promised your father we were going to have a good day. So let's have a good day."
 
This sort of thing went on around Mother's Day and every other major holiday for years, but my friend couldn't stay away. "Not going is just not an option," she told me. No wonder she goes, despite the anxiety, headaches, and upset stomach that often ensue. She keeps going back to the well of maternal attention to try to slake her thirst for unconditional recognition and approval, because for generations her cells have been programmed to do this. Though she sometimes gets a few sips of her mother's approval, there is never enough to truly fill her up, and the price is very high. She is being called upon to bear the brunt of her mother's unhappiness and lack of fulfillment. At the very time when she most needs her mother's support to move ahead in her own life, her mother is calling her back. The message may take many forms, from tears to anger to stony silence, but the subtext is always the same: if you really loved me, you'd stay here and suffer with me.

My friend's relationship with her mother needn't be this difficult. To help heal it, she must first identify and name the common web of expectations, needs, and miscommunication in which she and her mother both feel trapped. And then she needs to look below the surface of her mother's behavior and her habitual response to it. When she does, she'll see that her (and her mother's) behavior stems seamlessly from our cultural inheritance as women. Appreciating this is the first step toward healing.

Maternal Ambivalence: Our Cultural Legacy


Both men and women in this society are encouraged to view having a baby and raising a child as the most significant achievement in a woman's life. And on many levels, it is. For a significant number of women, however, motherhood brings up far more conflict and ambivalence than we feel comfortable admitting lest we be labeled as "bad" mothers whose love for our children is suspect. To admit our ambivalence about motherhood and the ensuing loss of control and status that so often accompany it is to fly in the face of one of our most cherished cultural myths.

The epidemic of undiagnosed and untreated postpartum depression and the toll it takes on society speaks volumes. Who wouldn't be ambivalent about the one decision in a woman's life that totally changes her future? Though the biological act of becoming pregnant requires little thought or planning for most, raising a healthy, secure child is, hands down, the hardest job on earth. It requires a degree of maturity and altruism for which there's no way to adequately prepare. Today it also means the loss of independence and free...