Mothers Who Can't Love Quotes

“Criticism is the fountainhead of control.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“Remember that you always have the right to be treated with respect, and to protest unfair treatment or criticism. It’s vital to reinforce those rights with boundaries.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“Nondefensive phrases: • Really? • I see. • I understand. • That’s interesting. • That’s your choice. • I’m sure you see it that way. • You’re entitled to your opinion. • I’m sorry you’re upset. • Let’s talk about this when you’re calmer. • Yelling and threatening aren’t going to solve anything. • This subject is off-limits. • I don’t choose to have this conversation. • Guilt peddling and playing the pity card are not going to work anymore. • I know you’re upset. • This is nonnegotiable. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, these phrases will act like a referee coming in to stop a fight. They nip conflict in the bud. You won’t need them when someone is pleasant, but they’re essential when you’re being blamed, bullied, attacked, or criticized.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“Women who were unprotected as children don’t believe they are worthy of love—on an unconscious level, they believe that if they were, their mothers wouldn’t have allowed them to be hurt. “I don’t trust that anything good will happen for me,” a woman who was an unprotected child tells herself.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“The healing process kicks into gear with with the words "This is what you did to me." That statement is not gentle or polite; it's absolutely direct. In fact, I know that seeing it might feel like a punch in the stomach. I deliberately removed the distancing veil of "objectivity" from the words "This is what you did" by adding 'to me'.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“I looked for the sunniest spot I could find, but you know it was the damnedest thing—it sure looked like the sun and it was bright like the sun, but there was absolutely no warmth coming from it. And this wave of sadness came over me—the sun was just like my mother.” (Quote from Heather, a patient)”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“...many daughters may never have given themselves permission to even 'consider' changing the relationship with their mothers, because they didn't think they had the right to do it.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“Remember, tears are like rivers that start in one place and flow to another—they can help carry you to healing.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“Realizing that your mother couldn’t love you is one of the most painful discoveries you’ll ever make. You deserved to be cherished, but your mother was a disturbed, unhappy woman who took out her frustrations on you. And it wasn’t your fault.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“Telltale Signs That You Grew Up as a “Little Adult” It’s often so difficult for adult daughters to step back and see how they were put into the adult helper role. To help you recognize if this dynamic echoes your experience, I’ve created a pair of checklists to help you identify how mothering your mother shaped and influenced a significant part of your life. When you were a child did you: • Believe that your most important job in life was to solve your mother’s problems or ease her pain—no matter what the cost to you? • Ignore your own feelings and pay attention only to what she wanted and how she felt? • Protect her from the consequences of her behavior? • Lie or cover up for her? • Defend her when anyone said anything bad about her? • Think that your good feelings about yourself depended on her approval? • Have to keep her behavior secret from your friends? As an adult, do these statements ring true for you: • I will do anything to avoid upsetting my mother, and the other adults in my life. • I can’t stand it if I feel I’ve let anyone down. • I am a perfectionist, and I blame myself for everything that goes wrong. • I’m the only person I can really count on. I have to do things myself. • People like me not for myself but for what I can do for them. • I have to be strong all the time. If I need anything or ask for help, it means I’m weak. • I should be able to solve every problem. • When everyone else is taken care of, I can finally have what I want. • I feel angry, unappreciated, and used much of the time, but I push these feelings deep inside myself.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“The great common denominator among women with unloving mothers is the longing for validation—to find someone who will say, “Yes, what you experienced really happened. Yes, your feelings are justified. I understand.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“A little girl wo was criticized or ignored or abused or stifled by an unloving mother becomes an adult who tells herself she'll never be good enough or lovable enough, never smart or pretty or acceptable enough to deserve success and happiness. Because if you really were worthy of respect and affection, a voice whispers inside, your mother would've given them to you.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“Love doesn’t make you feel terrified or lost or alone. It doesn’t punish you for no reason, or berate a little girl for acting like the child she is. You’re right, Samantha, what you’ve been describing isn’t love.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“The mother myth gives great cover to unloving mothers, who far too often operate undisturbed while their husbands, other family members, and society deflect any criticism or scrutiny aimed at them.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“If their children misbehave, they’ll take away privileges, but they won’t assault their dignity or value.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“A little girl wo was criticized or ignored or abused or stifled by an unloving mother becomes an adult who tells herself she'll never be good enough or lovable enough, never smart or pretty or acceptable enough to deserve success and happiness. /Because if you really were worthy of respect and affection,/ a voice whispers inside, /your mother would've given them to you./”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“Charlene had controlled Karen for so long, she had every reason to believe her daughter would buckle, that she'd never have to follow through on her threats.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“Nondefensive phrases: • Really? • I see. • I understand. • That’s interesting. • That’s your choice. • I’m sure you see it that way. • You’re entitled to your opinion. • I’m sorry you’re upset. • Let’s talk about this when you’re calmer. • Yelling and threatening aren’t going to solve anything. • This subject is off-limits. • I don’t choose to have this conversation. • Guilt peddling and playing the pity card are not going to work anymore. • I know you’re upset. • This is nonnegotiable.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“A loving mother, knowing that her daughter was being molested, would rear up in fury and take steps to end the abuse. “If anyone touched my baby like that,” one caller to my former radio program told me, “I’d want to kill him, and I’d call the police in a minute!” She was the epitome of the protective warrior mother, and every daughter deserves a mother like that. But a daughter whose mother lacks that righteous anger and strength may be abandoned for years to attacks on her body and being.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“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.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“Or, paradoxically, they may swing to the other extreme and become overly trusting, feeling so desperate to find someone who cares for them that they may ignore warning signs and find themselves involved with people who will victimize them again.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“Love doesn’t make you feel terrified or lost or alone.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“Quite often, we can’t even identify the beliefs that give us the most trouble, nor the full range of painful feelings that are propelling our behavior. They’re well hidden in our unconscious, the mind’s vast storehouse of urges, emotions, thoughts, drives, fears, memories, and experiences that exist, and influence us, without our awareness. Generally, the material in the unconscious is so uncomfortable for us that it has been pushed out of sight to protect us from our deepest shames, insecurities, and fears about ourselves.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“Many of our false beliefs have been our “truths” for so long that we don’t think to question them. They become our reality, and we don’t see them as filters that color our perceptions.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“The mother’s “you are” becomes the daughter’s “I am.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“These mothers who emotionally abandon, betray, and batter are mothers in name only. And they leave in their wake daughters who are fearful, angry, ravenous for affection, and forever struggling to find their own way.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“If you are a woman who grew up with a mother who abdicated her maternal role, you may have taken a great deal of satisfaction from being needed. Some of that behavior looks noble on the surface, but you’ve paid dearly for it. You got cheated out of a childhood. You have a right to be both sad and angry about that.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“And you can’t step fully into your life until you heal that gaping mother wound.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“I looked for the sunniest spot I could find, but you know it was the damnedest thing—it sure looked like the sun and it was bright like the sun, but there was absolutely no warmth coming from it. And this wave of sadness came over me—the sun was just like my mother.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

“Because if you really were worthy of respect and affection, a voice inside whispers, your mother would’ve given them to you.”
― Susan Forward, Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters