When Mothers Don't Apologize
How shame, projection, and unprocessed trauma keep mothers and daughters apart—and what happens when accountability becomes possible.
I’m still trying to figure out how a clinical psychologist and middle-aged mother of adult(ish) children found herself sobbing over a middle-grade novel meant for readers ages 10 to 14.
But that’s exactly what happened when I read The Blue Dress by Rebecca Morrison. Drawing on the author’s own experiences, the novel follows Yasmin, a 7th-grade Iranian girl who immigrated to the United States a few years earlier. Yasmin struggles to belong in the way many middle-schoolers do, a challenge made even harder by being visibly different from many of her peers. This is compounded by a well-meaning mother who believes the answer to beauty and belonging lies in being thin. Through weigh-ins and skipped meals that make her mother proud, Yasmin is succeeding in becoming thinner. But the message underlying that success—that she is not okay as she is—takes a devastating toll.
The sobbing-psychologist part, at least, makes some sense. Over the years I've worked with many girls struggling with disordered eating, a hypervigilance about their appearance, or a deeply conflicted relationship with their mothers, and often all three at once. When mothers are able to empathize with their daughters, examine the wounds they’re unwittingly passing on, and, perhaps most importantly, genuinely apologize, the improvement in their daughters’ mental health can be remarkable. I’ve grown teary in many a session where I’ve been lucky enough to witness those moments.
But there are too many times it doesn’t happen.
As with Yasmin’s mother initially, many mothers struggle to apologize because doing so triggers deep-seated shame. For narcissistic mothers, or even just emotionally immature ones, the mere notion of being wrong about something can feel like an unraveling of identity, so rather than feeling like a gracious, generous act, admitting a mistake feels like a loss of power.
Women are socialized from a young age to aspire to an ideal of motherhood—unfailingly selfless, patient, and devoted. But being a Good Mother isn’t the same as being a connected mother. The pressure to live up to an impossible standard can turn motherhood into a performance, with children cast less as people to be known than as proof that you're doing it right. You can sew every Halloween costume, keep an immaculate house, have warm cookies and a hug waiting after school every day—and still let your child down if you're more focused on getting motherhood right than on understanding who your child is and what they are feeling or struggling with.1
An apology requires empathy. And empathy is hard when the thought that you've hurt your child feels like a threat to your whole identity. Gaslighting becomes a shield against shame. The tragedy is that the more a parent denies, minimizes, or deflects, the less the child can hold onto the warm cookies and tight hugs—and the wider the rift grows.
Instead, that child is made to question her sanity and must work overtime to hold onto her reality. The bad things did happen! I’m not crazy!
Withholding an apology (and often approval) also becomes a way to maintain emotional power. For mothers who rely on control to feel secure, it becomes currency.
True repair can never happen without accountability. That doesn’t mean they can’t have a relationship, but it will not be a close one. And it doesn’t mean the mother is entirely at fault. Some children are genuinely difficult to parent, and sometimes there isn’t a great personality match. But regardless, the mother is the adult and bears the responsibility of truly hearing her daughter's experience.
In The Blue Dress, Yasmin’s mother who has made her daughter believe her body is unacceptable, becomes a sympathetic character when she’s finally able to open up about her own past, helping her daughter make sense of her behavior. (Cue the middle-aged sobbing.)2
Most mothers are doing the best they can with the circumstances and tools they have. If they are able take real accountability, they just might get to experience their child’s empathy and forgiveness in return. But a parent who is unwilling or unable to examine her own wounds and how she’s acted those out on her daughter, will miss the healing it could bring to both of them.
It’s never too late
Just as I’ve witnessed teenagers and their mothers coming to a beautiful understanding, I have also witnessed this among full grown women whose mothers have finally felt able to take in their daughters’ experiences of them and apologize.
A woman I saw in therapy for nearly ten years once said to me, “My mother either does therapy with me or I’m done with her.” Lynne had grown up feeling as though everything about her was wrong and now she was beginning to watch her mother direct the same criticisms toward her teenage daughters.
Throughout her childhood and into adulthood, Lynne felt perpetually under review. Her mother commented on her weight, hair, clothes, and appearance, sometimes approvingly, often not, but always conveying that these things mattered enormously. Her mother was also disappointed by Lynne's different interests, tastes, and way of moving through the world. Her differences felt like a personal affront. It was as though she couldn't tolerate the fact that her daughter was a separate person. Where Lynne saw individuality, her mother saw defects.
But things were more complicated than they appeared.
As I worked with Lynne and her mother who grudgingly agreed to join us, we came to understand that many of the qualities her mother found so intolerable in Lynne were actually parts of herself she’d never fully accepted. She’d spent her life feeling ungainly, unattractive, and somehow fundamentally wrong. Unable to bear those feelings, she unconsciously disowned them and located them in Lynne instead. Once she did, she related to Lynne as though those unwanted qualities truly belonged to her daughter.
This is one way projection operates in families. A parent’s unresolved fears and self-judgments are unconsciously deposited into a child, who gradually comes to experience them as her own. She learns to see herself through the parent’s distorted lens. What makes this so confusing is that the child’s actual experience is continually contradicted. She is told, implicitly or explicitly, who she is, regardless of who she knows herself to be.
We also uncovered envy and competition. Lynne’s mother admired qualities in her daughter that she had long ago sacrificed in herself. Lynne was freer, less concerned with appearances, less preoccupied with what other people thought. Rather than recognizing those qualities as things she longed for, Lynne’s mother experienced them as threatening and tried to correct them. Her constant scrutiny made Lynne increasingly self-conscious and insecure, diminishing the very qualities that had unconsciously evoked envy and competition in the first place.
Lynne’s mother had been a Good Girl who became a Good Mother, and her daughter became a painful reminder of the parts of herself she had abandoned along the way.
As she gradually learned to distinguish her own wounds from her daughter’s reality, something began to shift. Lynne was able to step out from under her mother’s inaccurate gaze, and her mother became more capable of seeing the daughter who had been there all along. As she grew more honest about herself—her disappointments, envy, and fears—she became more available for genuine connection.
She went from offering a Livia Soprano kind of apology that centers the apologizer—weaponizing guilt, martyrdom, and self-pity (”I’m sorry I’m such a terrible mother”; “I’m sorry you took it that way”)—to genuinely grappling with the pain she had caused. No longer defending herself or managing Lynne’s reaction, she was able to sit with her daughter’s experience and take real responsibility. Watching her mother do so flooded Lynne with love. Once Lynne was allowed to be a full human being rather than a projection, she could embrace her mother's humanity in return.
For Lynne’s and Yasmin’s mothers, the unprocessed shame and trauma that made accountability feel like defeat were the very things that kept them at a distance from their children. Real repair doesn't diminish a parent. It frees a child from having to fight to be seen and makes room for both of them to be loved as they are.
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These dynamics are not unique to mothers and daughters. Parents of any gender can project unresolved shame, fears, and unmet needs onto their children. I focus on mothers and daughters because appearance, femininity, and the cultural pressures placed on women and girls often make these dynamics especially visible.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by my reaction. The Blue Dress is a beautifully rendered and painfully recognizable story about growing up female, longing to belong, and finding your way back to yourself. Officially, it’s written for young readers. Unofficially, I challenge you, my adult readers, not to cry.
Thank you -- I enjoyed reading this post, and now I can't wait to read "The Blue Dress."
So good, Jo-Ann. This piece describes my relationship with my mother to a T. I individuated from her when I was 64. I'm 65 now, she's going on 88. It's still hard, but recently, she acknowledged me that she knew it was hard having her as my mother. She apologized. Doesn't mean our stuff is gone in a puff of relief and release, but it was the first time I accepted and it's the first time I believed her. Life is complicated. Life is hard. Mothers & daughters. I think it's the hardest and most powerful relationship ever. Good or bad. I'm going to DM you about the next story slam. xo