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“If unloving mothers were able to see their behavious as abusive, they either would stop behaving that way or they would get help for their dysfunction. But many cannot: instead, they deny it, to themselves, their families, and the world at large, in order to avoid a sense of guilt, to avoid having to make changes in their lives, or to avoid the bruising awareness that they, too, were unloved children.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“Another step is that daughters can learn to monitor their own feelings and instincts by saying, "I feel uncomfortable (angry, dominated, usurped, inadequate, guilty, furious) with my mother more often than I do not. I have to pay attention to that, because it shows in how I treat my friends (lover, spouse, kids, colleagues). There is validity here. I don't have to blame or excuse my mother-I just have to see her so I can see myself.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“If you are told from the time you are one month that you're no good and you're not smart and you can't do it and you don't have an opinion of your own and you pick the wrong friends and you don't study the right way and you don't wear the right clothes and you don't look nice, at some point you're going to start believing it. And if you believe it, you're going to need a mommy to tell you what to do. And that's abuse. Not to let your child grow up to be an independent, respected human being.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“If it is your fault that your mother is miserable, it becomes a potentially fixable affront. Taking blame means that at least the hope of love is still there-all you have to do is deserve it.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“We forget in order to survive our childhoods, when we are totally dependent on our parents' goodwill; but to recover from such childhoods, we must begin by remembering-the bad and the good.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“If a mother has an unhealthy need to dominate her children-which she demonstrates by bullying, terrifying, neglecting, suffocating, indulging, humiliating, overprotecting or abusing them- those children must come to the recognition that such treatment is wrong in order to begin the long process of recovery and ultimate understanding.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“Another reason it's dangerous to acknowledge that you were unloved is that it implies the possibility that your mother may have been right-you are unlovable.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“When we recognize that we are not responsible for our childhood deprivations, and that we are entitled to feel anger (but not to act on it - awareness is not a license to kill), then we are able to let go of that anger and not be controlled by it.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“If your mother lived your life as though it were her own-never allowing you a moment of stress or frustration, routinely sleeping in your bed when you had a bad dream, never setting limits or establishing boundaries, seldom or never letting you out of her sight, excusing and failing to provide consequences for your negative or hurtful behaviour, insisting on a daily chronicle of every detail of your life, all in the name of maternal love-then you never had to grow up and take responsibility for your actions. You remain a child.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“Many daughters live out their lives avoiding or abiding or arguing with their mothers-burying the long-ago injury or insult or childhood deprivation under a blanket of forgetfulness-and not confronting it head-on. It's humiliating to remember the ways in which one demeaned oneself in order to prevent being in a mother's bad graces, the willingness to do anything in order to not be rejected, when rejection felt like death.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“When a mother attempts to bind a grown daughter to her, whether by fear or neediness or illness or rage, the consequences can be devastating. To continue trying to please an unpleasable mother threatens an adult daughter's mental health and all of her relationships. And yet such daughters keep coming back to their mothers, without the daughters' altering that relationship and their bitter or anguished reactions to it.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“Integral to being emotionally healthy is to have a mother who has the ability to respect her child's differences and not perceive them as betrayals.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“One reason it is vital to respond to an infant's needs is trhat the baby feels it is the cause of its own neglect, although this is not a conscious thought. Such narcissistic feelings pave the road to an infant's psychological and physical growth; since the baby senses no boundaries between herself and her mother, she "believes" that her cries cause the mother to tend to her. And if the mother does not tend to her, the baby believes that she created her own rejection by not being lovable, not worthy of care. It's a belief that haunts one's life.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“At the same time, the daughters, in adulthood, must also make the effort to really know their mothers—which many daughters do not—in order to understand what forces shaped those mothers. These daughters need to discover what torment may have unwittingly informed their mothersâ€� parental choices, and to see their mothers as composites of strengths and weaknesses, rather than as all good or all bad.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life

“I have always tried to be all the tings my mother wanted me to be; ever the lady, always polite, never inconsiderate. I run my business the way my mother ran our house - everything just so. In some ways I am my mother - full of life when I'm happy, very cold when I'm angry. People say I look just like her. I'll tell you a secret: every time I pass a mirror, I gasp. I wonder if there's more here than meets the eye." - Karen, thirty-nine.”
― Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life