Nobody thanks the doormat

I was out to dinner with my friend Lucy the other night. We were catching up and she was sharing about her feelings of being unsupported at home. She said that she had a wake-up call the other night when the family was playing a game and one of the questions was ‘what one word would you use to describe your mom?’. Her 13 year old daughter, Marissa, answered ‘maid’. She was hit by the realization that this is what her daughter really thinks of what she does for her. She said she was starting to feel resentful and angry and doesn’t want to just try to make her daughter appreciate her, but really wants to make a change. She gets that she somehow did this, but has no idea how or how to change it now.

The good news for my friend is that she gets that she is responsible for her daughter’s view of her. She has worked so hard to be a good mother that she created an environment where all of Marissa’s needs were met timely and competently that Marissa wasn’t required to meet many of them herself. This was ok when she was little, but Marissa is now an adolescent and has come to believe that her world is a world of low responsibility and high care. She is required to take care of her basic hygiene and schoolwork but Lucy admits to struggles with trying to make Marissa meet time schedules and needing to cue her to do simple things like brush her teeth. Marissa doesn’t have any other responsibilities as Lucy felt that she should concentrate on her schoolwork. She also said that things just went faster when she did them herself.

The fact is that we teach people how to treat us. This means everyone from our bosses to our children. What we bring to those encounters on a moment to moment basis teaches others about what we will and will not accept. It shows them how we feel about ourselves, our self-respect, our self value, our integrity, our yes’ and our no’s. We don’t even have to say much to communicate all of this, we carry it in our body language and in our presence.

In my friend’s case, what she hoped to teach her daughter through all of her care, attention and good-mothering, was that she is loved, and that she is capable of doing well in school and in life if she attends to things in the way she taught her to, i.e. meeting deadlines, finishing tasks, doing quality work, doing her best at everything, and being willing to go the extra mile. What she actually taught her was if you are loveable, and maybe a little helpless, those who love you will do for you and everything will be fine. Because Lucy was just as committed to feeling like a good mother and winning everyone’s love and respect as to being a good mother, her need for mirroring kept her from expecting more involvement by Marissa in her own care and work as her development progressed. She has never had to do chores, doesn’t have any responsibilities except to feed the cat, and most of the time forgets that.

Here are some tips I gave my friend to turn her train to martyrdom around:

1. Have a meeting with her family and come clean as the angry doormat that she has become. Show them the list of all the jobs involved with keeping the house and family running, and which ones she is doing. Let them know her feelings about them not stepping in during summer vacation, or while her husband hasn’t been working, etc. Be honest and openhearted about her desire for a more balanced family system that keeps things running but is shared more equally. Then allow the other family members to come forward with suggestions, ideas and discuss which things they would like to take on and set up a plan. Investment by all members is a key. She needs to step out of the Directors seat and allow for more input and less control on her part.

2. Seek support for her feelings along the way through groups, classes, etc.. Lucy needs to build tolerance to feeling frustrated and scared when she isn’t sure if Marissa is going to complete her tasks at home or school the way she would, or the way she thinks Marissa should. She will need to learn to find the right place in this developmental piece with her adolescent, so that Marissa can begin to learn self-discipline, self-manage and experience the joy of her own successes, as well as learn from her failures. There are many support groups available that can be very helpful in making changes in how we deal with the people in our life.

3. Marissa and her dad will need to form a different alliance as family members with voting rights, but also with responsibilities. At this point their biggest felt responsibility is to keep mom happy. That isn’t a skill set even if it is used by millions of people. Pleasing isn’t loving and it is never experienced as authentic. It is based in fear and manipulation and never in love and respect.

4. It would be very good if the family could do a few sessions of family therapy to learn better communication skills, team building and to help rebalance the power structure that is there right now. A family that wants to make a change like this often benefits from outside help. It is very hard to do it on their own with patterns that have become entrenched like these. More times than not the family just falls back into conditioned behaviors and ends up where they started.

5. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Have set family meetings and try and make sure that there are regular family dinners. My friend has the tendency to let her daughter occupy the conversation during dinners, and rarely talks about herself or her day. It isn’t up to others to draw us out into conversation. That is more about our own early history in our families. When we are treated like our feelings don’t matter, or are unwelcome, we learn to try and get them out through cuing. We might use body language, or silence, or looks that cue others to ask after our feelings. It is manipulative and based in fear and shouldn’t be a part of healthy communication.