Mothers Who Can‘t Love

Bestselling author Susan Forward looks at the devastating impact unloving mothers have on their daughters and provides effective techniques for overcoming that painful legacy. Over the course of thirty-five years as a therapist, Susan Forward has worked with a large number of women struggling to escape the emotional damage inflicted by the women who raised them. Subjected to years of criticism, competition, role reversal, smothering control, emotional neglect, and other forms of abuse, women raised by mothers who can‘t love are plagued by anxiety, depression, relationship problems, lack of confidence, and difficulties with trust. But as Forward explains in Mothers Who Can‘t Love, it is possible to heal the mother wound and find help and validation. The many different kinds of unloving mothers—the narcissistic mother, the competitive mother, the overly enmeshed mother, the control freak, mothers who need mothering, and mothers who abuse or fail to protect their daughters from abuse—are all described in these pages. They each bring unique issues to the mother-daughter dynamic and need to be understood in order for healing to begin. Filled with compelling case histories, Mothers Who Can‘t Love outlines the self-help techniques Forward has developed to transform the lives of her clients, showing women how to overcome the pain of their childhoods and act in their own best interests. Riveting and compassionate, this landmark book will give daughters the emotional support and tools they need to reclaim their confidence and self-respect so that the emotional destructiveness they grew up with does not constitute a legacy for future generations.