Thursday 14 February 2013

PAIN-

Daughters are screaming to be heard and understood by their mothers. They are angry that their mothers are passing on to them the invisibility of women’s emotional needs and the role that mothers and women are still the uncared-for carers of families and communities.My daughter is angry with me because I looked so depressed and bored and not able to show her something different. To show  how to find  way out of being- stuck with something that was not making me happy either,to believe in self and know to speak for self and ignoring own needs is not a sustainable existence for any mother and reclaiming the lost language to express emotional needs,how women are treated by family members and they treat themselves.
Try to understand family's emotional map.the technique which can discover where needs are heard and ignored.what events and beliefs had harmed and even erased emotional needs and know how this had effected their relationship with themselves and each other. Discovering that selflessness by women was treated as a badge of honour that they had learnt to wear proudly.
 Mother-daughter conflict has been too easily brushed aside as if it isn’t important. When in truth the mother-daughter relationship is the most powerful relationship for a woman. Rosjke Hasseldine, a psychotherapist, has discovered what is harming the mother-daughter relationship and believes that the mother-daughter relationship is a mirror reflection of the emotional condition women and girls living in where a large piece of the puzzle is missing-Girls heartbreaking need to feel heard and understood by her mother. For daughters,from four to forty and older, feeling heard and understood by their mother is code for feeling loved, are the essential key ingredients for feeling loved and accepted by her.Why so many felt the conflicted pressure to meet their mother’s needs until I faced this problem myself.As the reality of having a daughter sank into my consciousness, the room I was in started to fade away into blackness and a time-line of all the abusive experiences, events and emotional neglect my great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother had experienced- I saw and even felt how each of them had suffered life-stripping emotional neglect because no one had asked them what they needed or felt. I also felt how each of them had survived this silence and invisibility by learning to believe that silent invisibility is a normal state of survival for women.
As each experience appeared on the time-line, I started to see how the emotional neglect and invisibility had shaped not just their relationship with themselves, but how it had shaped their relationship with each other. I saw how their shared experience of emotional deprivation had created an emotional hunger in the mothers that they then passed on to their daughters. Not having anywhere to be emotionally fed, and not knowing how to feed themselves or that they could ask to be responded to, each mother had turned to their daughter for feeding. 
Each mother had developed an emotionally manipulative way of communicating their emotional needs to their daughter. They had made their daughters responsible for their emotional needs because they didn’t dare voice their needs directly. They didn’t know the words to say or how to feel entitled to claim ownership for their needs or their right to feel heard, visible, and nurtured. This understanding was as foreign to these women as a language they did not understand or had even heard of.
 A daughter’s relationship with her mother lays the foundation for her relationship with herself. From her mother she will either learn how to claim her life and be fully visible in all her relationships or how to silence herself, accept invisibility as a normal way of being, and believe that caring for others and not herself is “a woman’s lot in life”.
There are just too many daughters admitting to having a difficult relationship with their mother. Too many mothers and daughters feeling misunderstood, invisible and hurt by the emotional distance between them  mourning the lack of connection and support they need from their mothers, for this to be explained away as stemming solely from their unique individual problems and issues.Just like their mothers, they did not recognise how emotionally starved they were and that they had learnt to accept emotional starvation as normal. In this starved state, they also did not recognise how dangerous it is to be disconnected from your emotional needs. They did not understand that not feeling entitled to ourselves leaves women (and men) vulnerable to being and accepting abusive behaviour from others.
 Through giving my daughter life, I was given insight into how to give myself a life that is not blighted by emotional neglect and starvation. The kind of life that surely all girls and women are entitled to live.It was the first time that I was awakened to the disastrously damaging messages that I had learnt from my mother, and that she had learnt from her mother, which the culture had reinforced for all of us. We have not progressed much emotionally from our grandmothers’ and mothers’ days. Today still, girls’ and women’s emotional needs are not recognised and to know that anything less is just not okay and We have never solved the basic problem.why mothers do not know how to claim their own needs. Why they do not feel entitled to their emotional needs? Why they let themselves become completely exhausted and given-out? And why they do not realise that this is an unsustainable way of living and a warning that something is terribly wrong?Having understood the emotional map that you have inherited, the next step is to start changing the script by learning how to emotionally feed yourself. The recipe for this is both simple and hard. All we have to do is start asking ourselves “I need . . .” We need to start to look at how we relate to our needs and how visible we expect our needs to be in our relationships. We need to learn to start saying “no” and to ask “I need you to . . , because I am not feeling important to you.” Yet answering these questions and learning to feel entitled to them is far from easy.
When we start claiming ourselves and our needs, we are up against the wall of expectation that women, especially mothers, are always available. Many may not like it. Other women may not like that you are doing what they cannot do for themselves. Do not lose courage when you are suddenly called selfish, aggressive or needy. We need to learn that these words are used to keep women silent about their needs. Where girls row up feeling entitled to expect others to listen to them and respect their voices,mother-daughter conflict is far less and in families where women are treated as unpaid servants,where their roles is to meet the needs of others,where their emotional needs are treated as irrelevant or non-existent and abuse in any form is present,then mother-daughter conflict is experienced are much higher levels. So how mothers and daughters get on,reflects how emotionally healthy and safe it is for females within their family,community and society conflict is mirror reflection of the degree of silence around women's emotional needs and how they are treated.This is because emotionally starved mothers who have no way to voice their hunger are in danger of turning to the closest female, often their daughters, because they see in their daughters the next female who is supposed to be caring of others’ needs.
 I see many emotionally starved mothers and daughters who turn to each other for feeding through well practised behaviours of emotional blackmail, guilt-tripping, martyrdom, fighting about anything but their emotional selves, or speaking their needs through constant illness. Some mothers treat their daughters as if they are somehow the cause of their emptiness. Others withdraw from their daughters because their daughter’s freedom is too painful because it reminds them of their own suppressed dreams. These daughters end up feeling hurt and confused about how or why they have upset their mother. In the worst case, a daughter will stop claiming her own life in the hope of regaining her relationship with her mother. I see adult daughters who are struggling with their elderly mothers who have become what I call “payback” mothers. A “payback” mother is someone who believes that it is now her daughter’s or daughter-in-law’s turn to make up for all the sacrifice and self-neglect she has suffered.
The denial of female emotional needs is lethal for women’s emotional well being and the mother-daughter relationship. Our emotional needs are the bedrock of our ability to know ourselves, take care of ourselves, know what is right, set boundaries, be authentic and visible in our relationships, and importantly, protect ourselves from abusive people.The mother-daughter relationship holds the key to changing women’s rights and experiences worldwide. As mothers learn to save themselves and reconnect with themselves, they will be saving their daughters and changing the reality their daughters and granddaughters inherit.The silence around women’s emotional needs is so deeply ingrained that it requires a revolution on the same scale 

The Silent Female Scream Revolution - “Every female has the right to be heard, valued and respected, and to know that anything less is just not okay.”
To start the revolution that speaks women’s emotional needs,
1. Why am I doing this? Am I doing this because it is right for me or because I think I should?
2. Why do I think I should? Where did I get that message? Who told me?
3. What do I need for myself today? Don’t worry if the answers do not come immediately. When our voices have been switched-off for a while, they need some time to get switched back on again.
4. How much time for myself do I have? Time at work doesn’t count. Work is not the place to recharge your batteries.
5. Do I say what I need in my relationships?
6. If not, why not? Is there something within me that is stopping me from claiming and speaking my needs, or do I sense that my needs are not welcome in my relationships, or both?
7. Why am I still in relationships where my needs aren’t valued?
8. Reflect on your family’s history with female needs. Was there a conversation in your family that acknowledged women’s needs? Did your mother and grandmother communicate their nurturing needs? If not, why not? If they did, how? What words and sentences did they use? Were they effective.

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