It happened to me and first time I realised this, after the argument with my husband I was horrified!   Noooo, I don’t want to be like my mum – hating men, disrespecting them, patronizing and thinking of them they are useless feeling like a victim myself – noooooo, that’s not who I want to be and still, there I was doing it….  Whyyy???

…and then later, stories of my clients came through… 

Eliza was trying to get her struggling three year old daughter into her stroller when, to her horror, she heard herself saying words she had vowed never to utter – phrases her mother had used throughout Eliza’s childhood.  Despite all of her efforts to parent her own children very differently, Eliza found that those familiar sentences were the first to come into her brain and out of her mouth when she and her daughter were engaged in a difficult struggle.

Once it was a girl’s dream to be just like her mom.  Now it’s more like every woman’s nightmare.  Yet it happens to us all.  Like Eliza we hear our mother’s words leaving our own mouths, or we look in a mirror and catch a glimpse of a familiar expression – not our own – and, as we get older, we see surprising reflections of our mother stare back at us every time we wash our face or brush our teeth.

How does this happen?  These days I cannot think of a single client who wants to follow in her mother’s footsteps completely.  Oh yes, I do have some young women who hope to marry, have children, and live the kind of lives their mothers do; but few, at least in my practice, want to be like their mums.  And yet almost every one of them has at one time or another expressed the sensation that they were becoming their mothers! What makes this happen?

Part of the answer can be found in contemporary neuroscience. According to the research coming out of this field, we are programmed to develop through interactions with others.  This is why early parental behavior has such an impact on our psyches – parents and siblings are the main people that most infants and toddlers interact with.  This internal programming is also one of the reasons we can change over the course of our lives – interactions with friends, teachers, other relatives and lovers can all teach our brain new patterns, which can alter our relationships and our sense of self.

Daniel Siegel explains it with this image: You are at a park and there is a lake with ducks that you want to feed.  To get to the lake you have to walk through a field of high grass, and as you do, the grass bends under your feet creating a path.  When you come back, you naturally walk along the path you have just created.  The next person to go down to the lake goes along your path and comes back the same way; and the next and the next.

Siegel says that our neurons work the same way, that is, they tend to flow in an established pattern.  We can change those paths; but in certain situations, like when we go home for a holiday, familiar interactions cause the neurons to quickly re-align on old paths (like “the Thanksgiving Effect” described by Hara Estroff Morano in her terrific PT article on siblings).  This is also what happens when we hear ourselves using those familiar phrases from childhood, sentences we promised ourselves we would never say to our own children.

It of course does not explain why we see our mother’s face looking at us from our own mirror.  That may be to some extent the result of genetics – as we get older we look more like the mother we remember from our own childhood.  But that’s not all there is to it.

Nancy Chodorow, whose book “Reproduction of Motherhood” was an early feminist- psychoanalytic exploration of mother-daughter relationships, says girls have a difficult developmental task to accomplish: they have to separate from and identify with their mothers at the same time.  Many of us struggle with this process throughout our lives.  If we’re open to work on this, we get a chance to re-work some of our attitude towards those very traits we’ve criticized for years.

For example, when I was very young, my mum and I used to clash.   We did it, because we’ve been so similar.  She didn’t clash with my sister as she was very tolerant, giving and kind just like my grandma.  Soon I started realising the cause of our fights with my mum been insignificant, but what was underneath was jealousy, because my dad didn’t pay her enough attention, because she has only been kind to me when I was sick.  She kept on saying I was spoiled by my dad.  I was missing my mum all this time.  I guess she felt resentful for me pushing her away, cause I once overheard argument of my parents about her not loving me like rest of the kids.

Years later, I realised we used to clash, because we both had our own truth and both been stubborn as each other.  Also, we have mirrored each other meaning, those dark shades we didn’t like about ourselves, we’ve seen on the other and we fought with them within us.

I felt very loved by my dad, but from my mum, I always felt criticized and resentful.  I wanted to be different from her, to have my own personality, separate from hers, and besides, I did not like the things they were in her life.  She used to cry next to the window in the kitchen being so unhappy almost every day.  We got used to it with my dad.  Now I feel sad looking back and much later I apologised I never came to hug her, cause after I got married the first time, I used to experience the same and that’s when I got the pain my mum was going through.

It may well turn out that some of the behavior we have historically blamed on our parents actually has a genetic base.  Data is coming in that there are biological and chemical predeterminants of many of our personality characteristics as well as for a number of psychological disorders previously considered caused by poor parenting (for example, schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, anorexia, alcohol and drug addictions).

But does this mean that we are trapped, doomed to repeat our parents’ failings?  Are our children doomed to develop the same neuroses and difficulties with which we suffered?

Of course we like to think that the answer to these questions is “no.”  Psychotherapy is clearly one indicator that we can change these old patterns.

Here are some ideas that might help as you work on this – and as you help your own daughters do the same work with you.

1. You may sound and act like your mother, but you are not your mother

Almost all daughters sound and act like their mothers at some time and in some way.  Whether you are biologically related or not, you will have picked up some of your mother’s characteristic ways of interacting with the world.  But you have also interacted with many other people who have also affected who you are.  Even if you share genetic material and you have observed many patterns of behaviour from your mum as you grew up, you are not your mother’s clone.  You may be similar, but you are not the same!  So when you say something that sounds like her, it does not have the exact same meaning as it did when she said it.

2. Your children are not you

If you remember this tiny but crucial fact, you will also realize that your children will have different responses to your behavior than you did to your mother’s!  When my mum told me to comb my hair, I wanted to cut it off or make it more tangled.  But years later her granddaughter took the same comment as a loving communication!  It simply did not have the same meaning for her as it did for me.

3. Sometimes your children will sound more like your mother than you do

The hardest thing for most of us to remember at these times is that they are not who they sound like!  And the second hardest is not to react as you did when your mother said the same thing in the same way!  You have not suddenly become the child you once were, even if your neurons want you to believe that you have.  And your child has not become your parent!

4. Tiny alterations in your behavior can make more difference than you might imagine

Eliza discovered this as she tried to find another way to respond to her daughter’s efforts to declare her independence from the stroller.  She laughed as she told me.  “I just told her I knew she didn’t like it, but she had to get in and that we’d go outside right away. She fussed, but I didn’t argue with her or try to convince her that it was going to be okay.  We got outside and within a minute or two she was calm again.”

The key is awareness and compassion with your own self.  Maybe the question – does this behaviour serves me?  Is it moving me towards where I really want to be in life?

You can let go of your usual ways a play a little.  You can shift something just a little bit and make the outcome very different from your usual experience.

Although we may feel like we’re being just like our parents and inherited a lot of their bad traits, we copied them, because subconsciously, our brain understands that with all that they did, they survived and we survived as their children and as survival is the absolute priority for the ‘primitive’ part of our brain, we understand they must of done something right, so our subconscious copies it without asking a thing.

Its a very deeply written subconscious ways of being and therefore the way out is compassion, patience and awareness.  Applying these three principles, over the period of time, we are truly shifting our world and world of our children and all those generations to come.

And one more thing – our parents – yes, they messed up – maybe they even messed up big time and far too many times, but we chose them – to be precise, our soul did – and lets remember, they already went long way shifting the toxic patterns of their own parents affected by two world wards and all the struggle that followed.

Let’s therefore acknowledge these wonderful human beings that gave us gift of life and so much more.  Lets honour and accept them just the way they are and bring a genuine compassion understanding their own world as we are on the journey transforming ours.