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Why Mother–Daughter Relationships Feel So Complicated | EP 27 | Dear Body
30 Plays13 days ago
What happens when daughters become emotionally responsible too early?
In this episode of Dear Body, I'll be sharing the emotional complexity of mother–daughter relationships through conversations with women about emotional parentification, fear-based parenting, eldest daughter syndrome, shame, intergenerational trauma, and the invisible emotional labor carried by mothers.
The episode is dedicated to the daughters who often grow up managing emotional tension inside the home long before they are emotionally safe themselves, and how many mothers were navigating survival, sacrifice, migration, isolation, patriarchy, and unresolved trauma while raising children.
This is not an episode about villainizing mothers or romanticizing motherhood. It is about understanding how emotional patterns move through generations, how daughters internalize responsibility and fear, and why so many women grow up struggling to separate love from obligation.
At the center of the episode is one difficult question many daughters quietly carry into adulthood:
“How much of my mother lives inside me?”
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Transcript
Impact of Mother-Daughter Relationships
00:00:00
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There are some relationships in a woman's life that shape her before she is even old enough to understand them. And for many daughters, that relationship is the one they have with their mother.
00:00:11
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Not because it was nurturing, not because it felt safe, but because it taught them very early on what love would cost them. For some women, their mothers were their closest emotional companions. For others, they were unpredictable, emotionally distant, controlling or deeply wounded themselves.
00:00:32
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And for many daughters, those experiences existed at the same time. Love and fear, care and resentment, protection and control.
00:00:43
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Sometimes within the same conversation, the same memory or the same person. When I started speaking to women about their relationships with their mothers, I expected stories about conflict.
00:00:56
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What I did not expect was how many women described becoming emotionally responsible long before they were actually adults. Some became protectors, some became caretakers, some learned to stay silent to avoid emotional outbursts.
00:01:12
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Some spent their entire childhood trying to become easier daughters to love. And underneath almost every story was another realisation quietly sitting there.
00:01:23
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Many of these mothers were carrying lives they never fully got to live themselves. This episode is not about blaming mothers. But it is also not about romanticizing motherhood.
00:01:35
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It is about looking honestly at what happens when women who were never emotionally held themselves are expected to raise daughters inside systems that exhaust, control, isolate and emotionally suppress them.
Emotional Parentification: A Deep Dive
00:01:50
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Because sometimes pain inside families does not disappear. It gets inherited. It changes shape. It becomes the emotional atmosphere of the home.
00:02:00
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It becomes the way love is expressed. It becomes the silence between mothers and daughters who never fully learned how to understand each other. And for many daughters, adulthood begins with one terrifying question.
00:02:16
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How much of my mother lives inside me?
00:02:25
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I'm Sirosh and you're listening to Dear Body, a show about body politics, culture and the way society teaches us how to exist in our bodies. You'll realize that many of these women I spoke to did not describe childhood as a time when they were protected.
00:02:41
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They described it as a time when they became emotionally useful. Before they understood themselves as daughters, they'd already learned how to manage tension inside the home.
00:02:52
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In families where emotional roles become reversed, children begin carrying responsibilities that were never meant to belong to them. Instead of being comforted, they become comforting.
00:03:05
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Instead of being protected, they learn how to manage the emotional instability of the adults around them. One woman described growing up surrounded entirely by adults.
00:03:17
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I quickly learned to just please the elders, is what she told me. Over time, children in these environments become emotionally hyper-aware. They monitor moods, they avoid conflict, they learn how to shrink themselves to keep the household stable.
00:03:35
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Psychologists call this emotional parentification. This is when a child becomes responsible for emotional burdens that they were never developmentally prepared to carry.
00:03:47
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Emotional parentification is when a child becomes emotionally responsible for the adults around them. So imagine that instead of being comforted, they become the one doing the comforting. They learn how to manage a parent's sadness, absorb their loneliness, mediate comfort inside the home or regulate a mother's emotional reactions.
00:04:09
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So several of these women that I spoke to described spending years minimizing their own pain because their mothers had been through worse. One woman told me,
00:04:21
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my mother would say i was treated like that too i was sexually abused i was beaten by my parents Now that distinction matters because emotional parentification is different from instrumental parentification. Instrumental parentification is practical.
00:04:38
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So it looks like cooking, raising siblings, managing chores or taking on adult responsibilities inside the household.
Long-term Psychological Effects
00:04:46
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Emotional parentification is more invisible.
00:04:50
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The child becomes emotionally useful long before they are emotionally safe themselves. Emotional parentification tends to have deeper long-term psychological consequences because it affects attachment, emotional identity, and a child's sense of self. Emotionally parentified children often appear unusually mature, responsible, empathetic, and emotionally perceptive from the outside. Notice if you can resonate with this. Many are praised for being strong, easy,
00:05:24
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or mature for their age. However, this apparent maturity is frequently rooted in survival rather than healthy emotional development because the child learns very early that their own emotions must be suppressed in order to maintain stability within the household.
00:05:42
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What was gathered from talking to these women is how emotional parentification leads to anxiety, depression, chronic guilt, emotional hypervigilance, low self-esteem and difficulties forming secure relationships in adulthood.
00:05:58
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Now, children who grow up managing adult emotions may later struggle with boundaries. How? Because they become conditioned to prioritize the emotional needs of others over their own. So, this would look like difficulty asking for help, fear of burdening others, perfectionism and over-functioning in relationships. Now, emotional parentification often develops inside households that are already under pressure.
00:06:24
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So, instances like divorce, financial instability, grief, emotional volatility, addiction, illness or even chronic conflict. Now, one woman described to me how growing up watching her mother live under constant scrutiny inside her grandparents' home after becoming a single parent.
00:06:46
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She remembers hearing her grandmother repeatedly question why her mother was still there. She would often ask, why are you still living here? For a child, witnessing that kind of tension changes your understanding of womanhood very early on.
00:07:00
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You begin to understand what dependence looks like, what social rejection looks like, what survival looks like for women with nowhere else to go. And in many single-parent households, daughters slowly become emotional companions to overwhelmed mothers, especially when family support existed conditionally or not at all.
00:07:21
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There are studies on girls in single-parent families which suggest that this can create both emotional closeness and emotional burden simultaneously. So, this would look like emotionally parentified children often struggling to recognize their childhood as emotionally harmful because the dynamic is normalized as love, as loyalty, sacrifice or even maturity. Many adults only identify the pattern later in life when they notice exhaustion in relationships, intense responsibility toward others, difficulty experiencing care without guilt or a persistent feeling that their value comes primarily from being useful to people emotionally. This brings me to the term eldest daughter syndrome.
00:08:12
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This is often used to describe a pattern where firstborn daughters are expected to become responsible far too early. They are expected to be emotionally mature, caregiving, self-sacrificing and helpful long before adulthood.
00:08:26
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While it is not a formal psychological diagnosis, the phrase has become widely used by therapists, by researchers and women who are trying to describe a very recognisable family dynamic shaped by gender, birth order and emotional leap. And in many households, that expectation begins almost immediately.
00:08:47
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I remember one woman recalled the sentence she heard constantly growing up. When the first daughter grows up, she will help her mother. Another memory stayed with this woman too.
00:08:58
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People would tell her mother, once your daughter grows up, you won't need the other woman in the house anymore. Meaning the house help, probably. Even before she understood herself as a child, she had already been assigned a future role inside the family.
00:09:14
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Now notice here, eldest daughters are often expected to act as second mothers within the household, especially in families experiencing financial stress, divorce, migration, illness, emotional instability or absent support systems.
00:09:31
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They may take care of younger siblings, mediate family conflict, emotionally support parents, manage household tasks or suppress their own needs in order to maintain stability within the family.
00:09:43
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Now, eldest daughters are not simply assigned more responsibility because they are older children but because they are girls. Absorb that. Many families unconsciously socialize eldest daughters into caregiving and emotional management earlier than sons.
00:10:02
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This often includes expectations to be understanding, to be mature, selfless and emotionally available to others. If you're the eldest daughter, I believe you can resonate with this. These dynamics can shape long-term emotional development and identity formation.
Parenting Styles and Emotional Impact
00:10:20
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Many elders' daughters report becoming highly competent, independent, emotionally perceptive adults but also struggling with chronic guilt, perfectionism, people-pleasing, anxiety, burnout, difficulty setting boundaries.
00:10:37
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Some studies suggest they become conditioned to associate love with usefulness or sacrifice, leading them to over-function in relationships and feel uncomfortable receiving care themselves. The eldest daughter syndrome frequently describes the emotional invisibility that comes with being perceived as the responsible one.
00:10:58
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Many women describe feeling praised for their maturity while privately experiencing exhaustion, resentment, loneliness, or emotional neglect. Therapists writing about the phenomenon note that eldest daughters are often viewed as naturally capable, which can cause family systems to overlook their emotional needs entirely.
00:11:20
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The eldest daughters often struggle with identity outside caregiving roles. Researchers describe how parentified eldest daughters may feel uncomfortable prioritizing themselves because their sense of value became tied to responsibility and emotional service.
00:11:38
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Some even report feeling anxious when resting, guilty for creating distance from family, or emotionally lost when they are no longer needed in caregiving roles.
00:11:49
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Now, not all eldest daughters experience parentification or emotional burden because family dynamics are shaped by multiple factors including socioeconomic stress, gender norms, parenting styles, cultural expectations and emotional health within the household. What has made the idea of eldest daughter syndrome so culturally powerful is not whether it exists as a formal diagnosis but the fact that so many women immediately recognize themselves in it.
00:12:18
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Across my conversations, eldest daughters describe remarkably similar experiences, feeling emotionally responsible for everyone around them, learning maturity through survival instead of safety, becoming mediators during family conflict and struggling later in life to separate love from obligation.
00:12:40
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And in many homes, that responsibility existed alongside another reality. Control. Several women described growing up under mothers who disciplined through fear, hypervigilance, punishment and emotional unpredictability.
00:12:56
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Psychologists often place these behaviours within what is known as authoritarian or fear-based parenting. These parenting styles are characterised by high control, strict behavioural expectations, heavy monitoring, punishment-oriented discipline and low emotional responsiveness.
00:13:17
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Now, one woman in her 30s told me, controlling food is one of the core things that a parent can exploit you over. And that word, exploit, appeared repeatedly across these conversations.
00:13:31
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Because for many daughters, obedience was not created through emotional safety or understanding. It was created through fear, guilt, shame, intimidation or the constant threat of emotional withdrawal.
00:13:46
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Controlling mothers often monitor daughters closely, from their clothing to their friendships, their movement, emotional expression, behaviour, even the way they exist inside their own bodies.
00:13:59
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But for many daughters, the psychological effects remain long after childhood ends. One woman in her 40s told me, I still have a hard time being in my body because I still hear and feel a lot of what I grew up with.
00:14:14
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Another woman in her 30s described how dependence itself became distorted inside the family dynamic. She always depended on us, she said. But instead, she told us that we depended on her.
00:14:27
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And for many women, money became part of that control too. Money became another way of controlling the children, is what she told me. Having worked from a very young age, this woman now hopes marriage might finally allow her to stop living in survival mode.
00:14:45
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not because she dreams of dependency, but because she is exhausted from carrying financial responsibility for the household for most of her life. In many collectivist and patriarchal societies, daughters are often raised with the understanding that their behaviour reflects the honour, reputation and moral standing of the family. Within that framework, control is frequently presented as protection.
00:15:12
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Psychologists note that environments like these can teach girls to constantly monitor themselves, their appearance, their emotions, their choices, even the way they move through public space.
00:15:24
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Over time, love, approval and safety can begin to feel conditional upon obedience. Now, one woman I spoke to now in her 40s, whom I have been talking about,
00:15:36
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described growing up in a hyper-vigilant Pakistani diaspora household, where cultural control shaped even the smallest parts of her childhood. She was told as a teenager, girls from families like ours don't wear American clothes.
00:15:51
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So, while other children dressed like their peers, she stepped outside in shilwar kameez and endured relentless bullying at school for the way she looked. For many daughters, the consequences of fear-based parenting do not end in childhood.
00:16:06
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Research on authoritarian parenting consistently links highly controlling environments to anxiety, emotional suppression, low self-esteem, perfectionism, hypervigilance and difficulties with emotional regulation.
00:16:22
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One girl described how after conflict at home, she would lock herself in her room for days. She would stop eating, stop speaking to people. That was my punishment to her, she told me.
00:16:34
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By her, she meant her mother. But it became punishment to myself. Fear-based parenting often produces children who appear outwardly obedient while carrying significant emotional distress internally.
00:16:49
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Many daughters raised under strict maternal control were described as disciplined, responsible, modest or well-behaved. But underneath that obedience was often fear.
00:17:03
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What fear? Fear of criticism, punishment, emotional withdrawal or shame rather than genuine emotional safety. One woman recalled to me how her mother sitting beside her with a rolling pin would threaten her to eat.
00:17:20
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She would sit there and say, eat your food. Then she paused before adding, at some point she started beating me with it. Years later, her family discovered she had celiac disease, a condition where consuming gluten damages the small intestine.
00:17:39
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What had been interpreted as disobedience or stubbornness was in reality illness. Many women described becoming extremely sensitive to authority figures very early in life.
00:17:53
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Some studies suggest that children raised in highly controlling environments become emotionally preoccupied with avoiding mistakes. Why? Because mistakes do not simply lead to correction, they lead to fear, humiliation or emotional danger.
00:18:10
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Beyond physical discipline, many daughters described something more difficult to name – psychological control. Unlike ordinary behavioral guidance, psychological control works through emotional manipulation.
00:18:24
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It can look like guilt, emotional withdrawal, humiliation, invalidation or intrusion into a child's sense of self. Over time, the child's emotional world becomes organized around parental approval.
00:18:39
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Instead of learning who they are, they learn how to avoid disappointing the person controlling the atmosphere around them. Studies involving daughters specifically suggest that maternal control can become deeply connected to gender socialization.
00:18:55
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Girls are often taught to associate safety with restriction and respectability with self-surveillance.
Inheritance of Emotional Patterns
00:19:03
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Monitoring clothing, mobility, speech, sexuality or social interaction can therefore become normalized as protection, especially in environments where mothers themselves experience judgment, danger or social policing growing up.
00:19:19
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In this sense, research increasingly frames controlling motherhood not simply as individual behaviour but behaviour shaped by broader cultural fears and pressures placed on women.
00:19:33
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Research also points to the emotional conditions that can shape harsh or controlling maternal behaviour. Chronic stress, unresolved trauma, relationship conflict, emotional insecurity, financial pressure,
00:19:48
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isolation, and lack of support can all reduce a mother's emotional capacity and increase reactive or coercive parenting patterns. When someone is emotionally overwhelmed for years, control can begin to replace emotional regulation.
00:20:04
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Several of the women I spoke to described mothers who were carrying enormous amounts of invisible pressure long before they became parents. One woman described her mother this way.
00:20:15
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She moved to a new country, learned a new language and had to let go of her dreams. Another explained how her mother's love marriage led to isolation from her extended family.
00:20:27
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She was like an unpaid worker, she told me. She had to handle everything. And another remembered growing up mostly alone with her mother and younger brother while her father travelled constantly for work.
00:20:41
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My mother worked as a teacher, is what she told me. Most of the time, it was just us. Across these conversations, motherhood rarely appeared as an emotionally supported role.
00:20:54
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It appeared as survival, labour, sacrifice, exhaustion stretched across years. Importantly, contemporary research distinguishes authoritarian parenting from authoritative parenting. Both styles may involve rules and boundaries, but authoritative parenting combines structure with warmth, communication, emotional validation, and explanation.
00:21:21
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Children tend to fare better psychologically in authoritative households because discipline is paired with emotional safety and mutual respect rather than fear and intimidation.
00:21:33
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My accounts from daughters frequently describe growing up under controlling mothers as emotionally confusing. Because control is often framed as love or sacrifice.
00:21:44
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Many women describe learning to monitor themselves constantly, hiding parts of their identity to avoid criticism, fearing emotional honesty, or struggling later in life with decision-making and boundaries.
00:21:58
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A recurring pattern in both research and lived testimony is that daughters raised under fear-based parenting often become adults who either over-comply with authority or deeply struggle against control altogether. Research on intergenerational transmission of trauma describes it as the process through which the psychological, behavioral, emotional and sometimes even biological effects of trauma are passed from one generation to the next.
00:22:28
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Now, in mother-daughter relationships, this often shows up as daughters inheriting emotional patterns, fears, coping mechanisms, attachment wounds, or survival strategies shaped by their mothers' unresolved experiences.
00:22:43
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So, what is passed down is not only memory, but emotional instinct.
00:22:53
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One woman described how this has shaped her understanding of motherhood itself. She shared that she has spoken to her husband about becoming a mother but still finds herself uncertain.
00:23:05
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I don't really understand what a mother is supposed to act like, she said. At times that uncertainty becomes more absolute. She adds, maybe it would be better if I didn't have kids.
00:23:17
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In that statement, motherhood is not being rejected outright, it is being held at a distance, watched through the lens of inherited fear, learned behaviour and the possibility of repeating what was never fully understood in the first place.
00:23:34
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Researchers emphasize that daughters do not necessarily inherit the exact traumatic event itself, but they can inherit its emotional consequences through family dynamics, parenting styles, emotional environments, and learned behavior.
00:23:51
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Studies on maternal trauma suggest that mothers who experienced abuse, neglect, violence, abandonment, chronic stress, displacement, or emotional deprivation in childhood may struggle later in life with emotional regulation, attachment, trust, and caregiving.
00:24:11
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Unresolved trauma can shape how a mother responds to stress and in turn affect emotional sensitivity, availability and responsiveness towards her children, especially during conflict or pressure. What often follows is not direct transmission of stories, but transmission of states.
00:24:32
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Daughters growing up in these environments may absorb anxiety, fear, hypervigilance, emotional suppression or instability, even when the original trauma is never spoken about.
00:24:45
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One of the women described a moment of recognition that stayed with her. I realised I was behaving exactly like her, she said. That was the most horrible point in my personality.
00:24:58
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The thing I feared my entire life I could feel inside my own personality. And even now, she added, when I notice changes in my behavior, I get scared that I'm repeating that pattern.
00:25:13
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Many mothers never explicitly narrate their pain to their children, but daughters still grow up sensing it, emotional tension, unpredictability, silence, shame, grief or fear that shapes the atmosphere of the home.
00:25:28
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Psychologists note that children become highly attuned to their caregivers' emotional states, particularly mothers'. because emotional survival depends on reading and adapting to those
Invisible Emotional Labor and Identity
00:25:40
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moods early. Over time what begins as adaptation can become internalization.
00:25:45
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So emotional patterns are learned as normal ways of relating to oneself and to others. now Another important area of research examines how daughters may inherit survival behaviours shaped by gendered socialisation.
00:26:00
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so In many families, especially within patriarchal or collectivist cultures, mothers teach daughters behaviours intended to protect them from danger, shame, abandonment or social punishment.
00:26:13
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In this sense, trauma can become embedded in everyday parenting practices and ideas about womanhood itself. Daughters often experience both deep emotional attachment and emotional security within the same bond.
00:26:27
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Mothers may be protective, yet emotionally unavailable. They may be loving, yet reactive. They may be caring, yet controlling. This consistency is not incidental, it becomes central to how emotional patterns are carried across generations because the child learns very early on that intimacy does not always equal safety. And within that relational backdrop, another layer of work is often happening quietly in the background.
00:26:56
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Research on emotional labour in motherhood describes it as the ongoing management of feelings, relationships, and the emotional climate of the household in ways that are largely invisible, continuous, and socially expected. What is emotional labour? It refers to unpaid, gendered emotional management inside families, anticipating needs, regulating conflict, maintaining harmony. Several of the women I spoke to described their mothers through this lens of invisible emotional burden.
00:27:26
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One said she was an 18-year-old who had nobody. Another reflected on how motherhood itself began under obligation rather than choice. The only reason she had kids was because my father wanted kids. A major related concept in the literature is invisibilized or invisible labor. There are many aspects of caregiving like planning routines, tracking children's emotional states, remembering obligations, managing relationships with extended family, and sustaining emotional stability within the household. All of these are cognitively and emotionally intensive, but they are rarely acknowledged as real work.
00:28:05
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Studies argue that if this invisibility is structurally produced because the labour is not formally counted, compensated or socially named in the same way as paid employment. As a result, mothers often experience a gap between workload intensity and external recognition, which contributes to chronic stress and feelings of being undervalued.
00:28:28
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Survival fatigue is not always used as a standardized clinical term in research, but it is closely aligned with findings on chronic caregiving strain. This fatigue is often linked to the accumulation of always-on responsibility where mothers remain psychologically engaged with family needs,
00:28:46
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even during rest or paid work, preventing full disengagement from caregiving roles. A girl described how her mother was made to do household chores even when they had house help because she was a single mother living in her parents' house. Research on gendered household labour consistently finds that this continuous mental engagement disproportionately affects mothers compared to the fathers. One of the women I spoke to, now married, described how emotional and intellectual needs were distributed across different figures in her family. She said she would go to her mother for anything that required logic or decision making.
00:29:28
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But for emotional support, she would only go to her grandmother, her nani. What emerges here is not just a family structure, but a division of emotional roles within it.
00:29:39
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Research emphasizes that this is not only a psychological adjustment, it is also shaped by structure, unequal caregiving burdens and social expectations that position maternal identity around sacrifice, service and emotional availability for others rather than the self. Now let's look at shame.
00:30:00
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Shame is fundamentally a social emotion. It does not emerge in isolation, but it is something that is shaped through relationships, cultural expectations and early socialization.
00:30:12
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Over time, us as individuals learn what is acceptable, what is rejected and which part of ourselves must be hidden in order to remain
Complexities of Emotional Neglect and Healing
00:30:21
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accepted. In that sense, shame becomes less about individual failure and more about belonging.
00:30:27
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Now, to give you an example, one woman in her 40s reflected on this early when she said, I so wanted to be a good daughter because for a long period of my life, I felt like I was a bad person.
00:30:42
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She described how this feeling was not sudden, but formed over years of conditioning around what it meant to be a good daughter, how she should dress, how she should behave, how she should present herself in public as a Pakistani woman.
00:30:58
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Being a good daughter, she added, meant being obedient, being deferential to your parents, being in service of others. Now within this framework, shame operates as a mechanism of social control.
00:31:11
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It reinforces conformity, not through direct punishment, but through a fear of disconnection, of being seen as unacceptable, unworthy or outside belonging. In the lived experiences of the women I spoke to, this tension becomes visible in how relationships evolve over time.
00:31:31
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Now, one woman described her current relationship with her mother this way. I developed a habit of disagreeing with everything. She added, after completing my matriculation, I refuse to stay at home.
00:31:44
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I think distance slowly calmed things down for the both of us. And finally, she added, now I can understand her situation. This challenges dominant cultural narratives that equate emotional exposure with fragility or risk. So what happens when emotional absence is normalized as independence, strength or not being emotional,
00:32:08
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rather than being recognised as deprivation. Now, emotional neglect can be difficult to identify because it does not always involve active harm. Many individuals only recognise its effects in adulthood when they experience difficulties such as emotional numbness, difficulty asking for help, fear of vulnerability or persistent feelings of being unseen in relationships. In the case of mothers and daughters, daughters fear they will become like their mothers, daughters gaining understanding of their mothers only in adulthood, and the grief associated with relationships that never achieved emotional safety.
00:32:48
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While these are not single, unified diagnostic categories, they are well-documented themes across attachment research, trauma studies, and feminist psychology. A recurring finding and attachment in developmental literature is that daughters who grow up in emotionally inconsistent, controlling or neglectful environments often internalize a persistent fear of repetition.
00:33:11
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They become deeply preoccupied with the possibility that they will eventually reproduce the very emotional patterns that once caused them distress. One of the women I spoke to described this plainly.
00:33:23
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Maybe it would be better if I didn't have kids. there is a chance that I can act like her. Now, psychologists understand this not as irrational fear but as a form of intergenerational learning.
00:33:36
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Children do not only inherit coping mechanisms, they also develop heightened sensitivity to the behaviours that harmed them. As adults, many daughters begin to monitor their own emotional responses with precision, trying to ensure they do not replicate what they experienced. But this internal monitoring comes with its own cost.
00:33:57
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In trying to avoid becoming their mothers, some end up suppressing emotion altogether, over-regulating themselves or living in a constant state of self-surveillance. Emotionally unsafe maternal relationships can lead to what is sometimes called relational mourning in adulthood.
00:34:16
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This involves recognizing that certain emotional needs such as comfort, validation, protection or unconditional acceptance were not consistently met in childhood and may never be fully met in the current relationship.
00:34:30
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This recognition often emerges later in life, particularly when daughters enter adulthood, form intimate relationships or become mothers themselves, triggering re-evaluation of early attachment experiences. A consistent theme across these narratives is that these experiences are rarely linear or neatly resolved.
00:34:51
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Fear of becoming the mother, later life understanding of maternal complexity, and grief over the absence of emotional safety often coexist in the same emotional space.
00:35:02
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Rather than replacing one feeling with another, daughters frequently hold multiple, sometimes contradictory truths at once. One young woman in her early twenties told me, I was ashamed of telling anybody how hurt I was by my mother.
00:35:17
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I always tell everybody my mother is my best friend because she is all I have. What becomes visible here is the tension between lived emotional reality and socially acceptable language for describing it. Contemporary scholarship increasingly frames this not as dysfunction but as a predictable outcome of complex attachment histories.
00:35:38
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The emphasis shifts away from resolution and towards integration, meaning making, and psychological coherence. When we talk about healing in mother-daughter relationships, it becomes less about fixing the relationship and more about a gradual restructuring of emotional meaning, boundaries and attachment expectations. it becomes about holding two truths at the same time, that a mother can be a source of care and a source of emotional injury, sometimes within the same relational system, and learning to live within that complexity without collapsing either truth into the other. Understanding a mother's psychological, social, and generational constraints can increase cognitive empathy, but it does not automatically resolve emotional impact.
00:36:30
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Research has shown that adult daughters often experience a shift in perception over time, beginning to see their mothers as shaped by structural pressures such as poverty, patriarchy, emotional neglect, migration stress, or unresolved trauma history. This kind of understanding can soften rigid forms of blame. However, it is clear that insight alone does not dissolve attachment wounds or emotional memories formed in early development.
00:36:59
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The system evolves at different speeds, which means a person can understand something intellectually while still feeling its emotional weight. Within research, compassion and boundaries are not treated as opposites. In fact, many models position boundaries as a core mechanism of relational repair.
00:37:19
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Studies show that emotionally enmeshed or controlling family systems suggest that daughters begin to experience greater stability when they differentiate emotional responsibility from emotional connection, recognizing that care for a mother does not require carrying the burden of regulating her emotional responsibility.
00:37:39
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world Research on emotionally unsafe attachment also emphasizes the role of grief in healing. Clinical literature describes this as an ambiguous loss, where the parent is physically present but emotionally unavailable in ways that matter for development. In these cases, healing frequently involves mourning not just what happened but what did not happen, the emotionally safe, attuned version of the relationship that was never fully available. Healing in this context is less about external change and more about internal emotional safety.
00:38:15
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Even when mothers do not change significantly, daughters can experience improved regulation, reduced anxiety and greater autonomy by building internal boundaries, developing supportive relationships outside the family system and constructing more coherent narratives of their upbringing.
00:38:38
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Over time, a common pattern emerges. Healing shifts from seeking repair from the mother to building stability within the self. This includes accepting that certain emotional needs may never be fully met in that relationship, while still allowing space for moments of empathy, care or connection to coexist with distance and limitation.
00:39:01
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So ultimately, healing in mother-daughter relationships is not defined by reconciliation. It is defined by learning how to hold complexity without collapsing, maintaining compassion without erasing yourself and allowing grief, understanding and boundaries to exist simultaneously rather than in sequence. I'm your host Sarosh and you were listening to Dear Body.