Neglectful, Rejecting, and Cruel Mothers

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Hello and welcome back to the Calling Home podcast. I'm Whitney Goodman. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and this is the podcast where we talk about the family stuff that most people don't know how to talk about. Before we get into today's episode, I want to remind you about the family cycle breakers club at Calling Home. This is our membership community where you get access to new monthly content with a new theme every month. And we have groups dedicated to specific topics like estranged adult children, adult daughters with difficult mothers, plus worksheets, videos, articles, and scripts that go handinhand with what we talk about on this show. So, if this episode hits home for you, the Family Cycle Breakers Club is the place to go deeper and actually do the work. Head to callinghome.co to join us. Today, we're talking about something I know that a lot of you have been wanting and asking about. We're going to talk about neglectful, rejecting, and cruel mothers, which is also our topic this month at Calling Home. Specifically, the impact that this has on you as an adult, why some mothers behave this way, and why this particular dynamic is so uniquely painful. Let's go ahead and dive into the episode. When we're talking about neglectful, rejecting, and cruel mothers, what does that mean? I think those are some pretty heavy words and I want to make sure that we all know that we're naming what happened accurately because that is really the first step of building awareness and then working on something. When I talk about neglect, there's a couple of types of neglect, right? Emotional neglect is the absence of attunement, warmth, interest, and responsiveness. It's often about what was missing, not this like deliberate act that was done. And I think this is why neglect can be so hard for people to understand.

[00:01:51]A neglectful mother can be physically present but emotionally checked out and your emotional world was ultimately and and may still be invisible to her. This is often one of the hardest things to identify because nothing overtly happened. And Dr. Janice Webb's work on childhood emotional neglect is really helpful here. I would definitely go check her out because what didn't happen can be just as damaging as what did.

[00:02:22]There was also a metaanalysis that was done in a psychiatry journal that neglect carries comparable or even greater risk than active abuse for developing depression, anxiety, and behavioral problems. And there's many reasons why this type of emotional neglect happens. Sometimes parents just have their own emotional blind spots.

[00:02:46]They were raised in environments where emotional support was absent. So they don't recognize that it's missing. And these parents may also be just really focused on external success or those types of developmental milestones. And the child feels like they're only valued for their achievement or for what they do. There's not a lot of effort put into emotional closeness. Parents who are also really emotionally overwhelmed themselves, they're very stressed. life is stressful often tend to check out.

[00:03:21]They do not have the capacity or the space to take care of their child's emotional needs. And this is not their child's fault, but it's ends up being a consequence that they bear. We also know that a lot of cultures and communities really focus on this like tough love, right? They have emotional detachment from their children because they believe that this will prepare the child for a hard world. And so instead of creating like this safe place that the child can rely on, they make their home mimic the cruel tough world and then the kid has just double of that. There are also a lot of cultural and generational beliefs around emotions because emotions typically had to come secondary to survival. And we are living in a new age now where people are a lot more focused on emotional health and they understand all of the impacts and consequences of not attending to that. I think also, you know, we've done some work on imshment on this podcast and in the family cycle breakers at Calling Home, but the the opposite of that is that there are a lot of parents who actually feel very worried about burdening their children with their emotions. So instead of showing any emotion, they withdraw entirely and do not show any of that to their child. We're also talking about rejecting mothers in this podcast episode and this month at Calling Home.

[00:04:50]And rejecting mothers actively communicate to their child that they are unwanted, unlovable, and a burden. A rejecting mother is going to show a lot of blatant favoritism maybe towards one sibling or another child, and it makes the rejection impossible to miss. They also may really dismiss their child's bids for connection, affection, or approval. It constantly feels like the child is just getting like pushed down or pushed away by the parent. And some of this like pushing down in away can manifest as ignoring accomplishments, withholding praise, treating the child as an inconvenience, refusing to engage with them. And this is sometimes tied to certain things about the child's identity or who they are. So the child's birth, their parent, um the child's gender. They may also remind the mother of someone she resents like that child's other parent or an exartner.

[00:05:52]And there also is often this like pickme parent dynamic that can come up here where a mother consistently prioritizes romantic partners over her children and this can make the kids feel particularly rejected and that they come second.

[00:06:12]Ronald Roner did an interpersonal acceptance rejection theory, the IART theory, which was decades of cross-cultural research across 60 plus countries. And they found that parental rejection is a universal predictor of psychological maladjustment for hostility, low self-esteem, emotional instability, and a negative worldview regardless of culture. So, parental rejection, and this is a topic that we covered at Calling Home um back in February. So, if you're a member, you still get access to all of that information, is a huge risk factor um for a lot of different consequences and impacts that will negatively affect you in both childhood and adulthood. And the last type of mother that we're talking about this month is the cruel mother, which I think being rejecting and neglectful can have its own flavor of cruelty. But with cruelty often comes this intentional infliction of emotional, verbal, or physical pain. And the cruel mother is going to use humiliation, mockery, name calling, threats, or punishment as tools of control. And they may even weaponize information that the child shares with them in moments of vulnerability to hurt them. They also will do things like gaslight them, deny events, rewrite history, blame the child for their behavior, saying like, "If you didn't do this, I wouldn't have hit you." Um, and I think we think of cruel as being like this explosive rage, but it's not limited to that. A cruel mother can also be cold, calculated, and very covert and like fly under the radar. We also know that verbal aggression from a parent can alter brain development in children in a similar way to physical abuse. So, this can be very harmful even if it is covert and flying under the radar. Now, a mother can be all three of these things at once or primarily one. Or you might find like, "No, I thought my mother was a little bit rejecting and cruel but not as neglectful." But I see these a come together a lot in mothers who have very difficult or abusive relationships with their children. Neglect and rejection often coexist because the mother who doesn't notice you is also the mother who wouldn't choose you. But there can be a level of cruelty on top of that, right? Like you're not just ignored, you're also punished for needing anything or having any needs. And some of these mothers, you have to remember, present really well publicly. The harm happens behind closed doors most often.

[00:09:02]And this can be deeply isolating for the child. Now, for any of you that are mothers or you're you're thinking about this through the lens of being a mother, I want to clarify that this is not about a mother who had a bad day or occasionally said something hurtful or wasn't perfect. These are consistent, pervasive patterns that the child can remember and experience throughout their lifetime and are likely still continuing in adulthood. And these are abusive patterns that have happened over time.

[00:09:36]And so if this resonates with you, it's resonating for a reason. And if you're a mother who's like, "Oo, I'm scared. I've I've been like this." I think that if you're having that level of awareness and that questioning, you probably haven't because most of these mothers are not really looking at themselves in that way. And it's important to note that this isn't just like a one-off experience. Let's talk about what makes a mother neglectful, rejecting, or cruel. And I think understanding can be a really powerful part of healing from this. But it does not mean that you have to excuse the behavior or even reconcile. You can set the same boundaries or have the same reaction regardless of the reason. But sometimes it helps to externalize it outside of you so that you understand this is not your quote unquote fault.

[00:10:28]The mother wound is something that is generational. Many of these mothers were neglected, rejected, or treated cruy by their own mothers. And the mother wound is often described as a a matrinal burden that manifests in women and is passed on from generation to generation.

[00:10:47]And there's there's three categories, I think, that come up here, right? You can say, "My mother did not love me. She intentionally hurt me and wanted me to suffer.

[00:10:59]You may also believe my mother did not know how to love me or herself. She was suffering and harmed me regularly. She is unwilling to look at how she harmed me. Or my mother did not know how to love me or herself. She was suffering and harmed me regularly. She is willing to look at it and learn a new way. And each one of those carries with it a different sense of pain and a different way of healing and moving forward from that. I think each of those lead to a very different emotional experience for each of you and and you can think about which one feels the most true for you. I think that um the poverty example is very interesting here to think about.

[00:11:44]You can have two kids that grow up in the same circumstances, right? they have very little access to food, um, safe housing, they're maybe moving around a lot, or they have been homeless. But there is a mother who blames her child and says things like, "You kids are so damn expensive. We wouldn't be here. If it wasn't for you, then I could actually afford things." This creates a wound that if you have another mother who instead says, "This is really hard. I'm sorry that we haven't been able to get a house yet or live somewhere consistently. I know it's scary for you.

[00:12:21]I'm working really hard. You have two children that are growing up in similar circumstances that are adverse. They're living in poverty, but they're having very different experiences through the lens of how their mother is handling those experiences.

[00:12:38]unmanaged mental health issues and mental illness are also um a big contributor to this type of dynamic between a mother and her child. So untreated depression, anxiety and PTSD in the mother manifest in these ways.

[00:12:54]Personality disorders, especially narcissistic and borderline traits, can also create patterns where the child becomes a target, a scapegoat, or an emotional container for the parent.

[00:13:08]You're also going to notice that mothers who have a very fragile sense of self may compete with their own children, right? Especially a child of the same sex. So, a mother might compete with her daughter, struggle with self-esteem, or really need to be the center of attention. And substance use disorders also complicate everything, right?

[00:13:29]There's more unpredictability, more neglect, more chaos. And you don't need to necessarily diagnose your mother from afar or give her a label. It's more about recognizing what you experienced and saying, "Okay, my mother clearly was struggling with her mental health and maybe this is what led to some of these issues in our family." There's also, of course, a lot of systemic and contextual factors that lead to wounds in the mother that then get passed on as generational trauma. So we talked a little bit about poverty, immigration, war, racism, colonialism, um patriarchal societies, having authoritarian attitudes, cross-cultural tension when a child is raised in a different culture than the parent. Um impossible beauty standards can be passed on from mother to daughter. And there are a lot of mothers who are trapped in oppressive systems and they become enforcers of those own systems with their children because it feels better to have that power than to have none at all. Or they have found that that's the only way that they feel like they can exist within that system. A mother who was never allowed to have needs may also punish or resent her daughter for publicly sharing her needs or even having them. We also know that a lot of mothers do not have support. And when they don't have guidance, resources or community, they suffer and that suffering goes somewhere and usually it lands on the shoulders of their own children.

[00:15:08]Emotional immaturity will also lead to these types of dynamics um between mothers and their children. Right? In emotionally immature households, big feelings are not welcome. They're dangerous. Vulnerability is a weakness.

[00:15:23]And needing something from a parent is often selfish or dramatic. And when the parent can't handle their own emotions, they cannot handle the emotions of their child. We've talked a lot about imshment on this podcast and in the family cycle breakers club at calling home. And I think another way that this gets passed down and this dynamic gets created between a mother and her children is that the mother can see herself as an extension of the child or the child is an extension of her. And so she criticizes anything in the child that she doesn't like in herself. The child also may not be allowed to be a separate person. And so she experiences her child's failures as her own. And some people cannot love their children, some mothers, when they hate themselves.

[00:16:19]And so when the child starts to individuate in adulthood, starts to become their own person or maybe becomes very confident, um the mother may escalate. And that neglect, rejection or cruelty becomes even more intense. And a lot of these children are in a double bind with their mother where it's like do a good job and make me proud but do not outshine me because there will be consequences to that and the child can never win in this type of dynamic. I want to talk now about how a cruel, neglectful and rejecting mother can impact you in adulthood. This can have a huge impact on your inner voice and your self-worth. That critical voice in your head is not yours. You were not born with those thoughts about yourself.

[00:17:11]Because how you were spoken to by your primary caregiver, if that was your mother, becomes the standard for how you speak to yourself in adulthood. And how you heard your mother talk about other people also becomes a very prominent voice in your head in how you speak about yourself. And so if you grew up with a lot of neglect from your mother, you may not have a loud inner critic, you may actually instead feel more of this sense of like emptiness, like I don't exist, I don't matter, I don't feel seen. If you grew up with a lot of rejection, your inner voice may constantly tell you that you are too much, you're unwanted, you're a burden.

[00:17:58]And if you grew up with a lot of cruelty from your mother, your inner voice may actually be really vicious and punishing and relentless. It's good to ask yourself like, what beliefs do I carry about myself that may have come directly from my mother? And is this my belief or is it theirs?

[00:18:17]We also know that cruel, rejecting, and neglectful mothers can of course impact our attachment and relationships in adulthood. Our earliest attachment relationships create internal working models for all future relationships. And this type of mother often produces insecure attachment in her children. So if you are anxiously attached, you might be feel like you're clingy. Um you fear abandonment. You need constant reassurance. And this can be because your mother's love was very unreliable.

[00:18:52]For people who develop more of an avoidant attachment, you may push people away. You struggle with vulnerability.

[00:18:59]You feel safer alone because needing your mother was very painful. Um, she may have been rejecting or cruel when you needed her or was just outright neglectful to all of your needs.

[00:19:11]Disorganized attachment leads to this feeling of I desperately want closeness while I'm simultaneously very afraid of it. And your mother may have been a source of both comfort and pain for you.

[00:19:26]Because of this, you might then in adulthood choose partners who are emotionally unavailable, critical, or dismissive because that's what feels familiar to you. That's what your earliest attachment figure was like. and you struggle to trust people who are genuinely kind and there for you because it doesn't feel safe to need them or to rely on them. And some of you may avoid relationships entirely because it's just recreating the same patterns or you struggle with any of that healthy emotional connection. Growing up with this type of mother can also lead to difficulties with emotional regulation and your mental health. Um, many of you have heard about adverse childhood experiences. The ACE study found that parental emotional abuse and neglect significantly increases the risk for depression, anxiety, PTSD, substance use, and suicidality in adulthood. It's also common for children who grow up in these types of environments to become adults who have difficulty identifying their own emotions.

[00:20:31]um especially common in neglectful environments where emotions were never mirrored or validated. You may also be someone that engages in something called fawning. I did an episode with Dr. Ingred Clayton who is the author of the book Fawning and then I also had Meg Josephson on the podcast um and she's the author of the book I think it's called Do You Hate Me? I forget the title of her book. both great books on fawning and people pleasing that you can look up. But you might have learned that the safest way to survive was to manage your mother's emotions. There's also a higher likelihood for hypervigilance. So scanning the room, reading things, anticipating moods, that can be a survival skill from childhood growing up with this type of mother. You may also have a lot of difficulty setting boundaries because every time you did so, you were punished or you were punished for having any type of needs.

[00:21:34]Children who grow up with neglectful, rejecting, and cruel mothers also carry this grief that doesn't really have a name. It's this ambiguous loss because you're mourning a mother who is probably still alive but was never really there.

[00:21:49]This dynamic is uniquely painful because your mother is your first experience with acceptance and rejection, love and hate, attention and neglect. And her actions really do influence how you see the world and yourself before you were even a human being. Before you even grew to to know about yourself, like you didn't choose this relationship. You were born into it and you were completely dependent and at the mercy of like who she is and what she brings to the relationship. And I think your mother is supposed to provide one of the only examples of unconditional love that you may experience in your lifetime. And you cannot force her to give it. And if she doesn't, it's not a reflection of your worth. There's also so many societal expectations and messaging about all mothers loving their children and that motherhood is like this sacred intuitive experience. And people will say things like, "But she's your mom.

[00:22:57]She did her best. You'll regret it when she's gone." And there is a secondary wound here, right? Because there's the isolation of not being believed for your experience and having your experience minimized and you're grieving this person that is maybe physically present but emotionally absent and society doesn't recognize this loss, right? It's also people do not want to believe that mothers can be harmful and and cruel. And there's also no real like grief rituals for mourning a mother who was like this, right? So your grief comes in waves. Every Mother's Day, every holiday, every casual mention of someone calling their mom is a reminder. And to feel not loved by your mother is a very different wound, I think, in comparison to any other. So, what can you do about this?

[00:23:59]There's no quick easy fix, but there are things that you can do to help yourself move forward. First, name what happened.

[00:24:08]If you're listening to this episode and you're like, "Yeah, what I experienced was neglect. It was rejection. It was cruelty." Naming this doesn't mean that you hate your mother or that you are being rejecting towards her. It's just about being honest about your experience. We talked a little bit about that inner voice and one of the most important parts of this process is separating her voice from yours. So identify when your mother is speaking, you know, whether that's in your head or how her beliefs impact your actions and when you're not. You need to pinpoint the thoughts and behaviors that you do that seem just like her and are not actually yours. And you can ask yourself like, is this my belief about myself or is this what my mother told me to believe? And you get to tell yourself like, I am an adult now. I I don't need to be exactly like my mother. I don't need her approval to thrive. If your mother is alive, you often have to build some resiliency and some boundaries around the relationship if they are still being cruel, neglectful, and rejecting, right? And this means reaching this place of acceptance that this is not your fault and it's not something that you can fix for her. And so you can speak kindly about yourself in her presence. you are going to take the authority back that she is not the person that gets to decide who and what you are. And you might have to limit the role that she has in your life when her voice becomes so so loud and learn how to give yourself the compassion that you aren't receiving from her, which is very very hard. But if you're still experiencing like these moments of neglect and rejection and cruelty from her, you can try to bring about change in that relationship, but it's probably not going to happen unless she sees a need for it. You can accept them and adjust your expectations or end the relationship. If your mother is working on changing, then boundaries and realistic expectations are key here.

[00:26:29]There will probably be good and bad days and this is something that the two of you can work on together. And if she has changed or she has passed and there's no potential for change, you can hold space for gratitude and resentment and give yourself outlets to process a lot of those conflicting feelings. You're also going to need to work on learning to feel again. A lot of you were told that your emotions are too much. um it feels risky to express yourself. You have a lot of shame. You feel like people don't want to listen to you. And so it takes practice. And you can do that in therapy in our groups at Calling Home on our discussion boards. Like learning how to take up space with your feelings and be human is so important here. Now, if you're at the point where you see this, you know it's true for your life, and you really want to break the cycle, I think you need to identify the patterns that you want to end with you. And that's exactly what we're doing um this month inside the family cycle breakers club at Calling Home. But I'll give you some questions to start with, asking yourself, what wounds am I at risk for passing on like to my own children or the people around me in my own relationships? Are there systemic factors or things in my life that I need support for so that I feel more supported as a parent or as a mother and I don't pass this on because of those deficits? In what ways was my mother impacted by her unique circumstances and how does understanding that help me? Can I heal the relationship I have today and is she willing to participate in that?

[00:28:10]And you can be the one to end this cycle. really begins with the realization that things can and should be different. And I know that you're probably already thinking that or you wouldn't be listening to this. As we come to the end of this episode, I want you to know that you're not too much for feeling like your mother has been this way to you. You're not ungrateful and you're not broken. This can be changed.

[00:28:35]Everyone deserves a safe, loving, present mother or parent. And if that's not what you got, your pain makes absolute sense.

[00:28:47]Fixing this and moving forward from it is not going to be fast and it's not linear, but it is possible.

[00:28:55]If you want to keep going deeper with this work, come join us inside the family cycle breakers club at callinghome.co.

[00:29:03]This month we are focusing entirely on rejecting cruel and neglectful mothers.

[00:29:09]And we have so much waiting for you.

[00:29:11]Groups, a group specifically for adult daughters with difficult mothers, the weekly topic group about this worksheets, videos, articles, and scripts to help you. And if you enjoyed this episode or it really helped you, I would love if you would take a second to like, subscribe, and leave a review wherever you're listening. It helps more people find the show and it lets me know which conversations matter most to you.

[00:29:32]Thank you for being here and I'll see you next week. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified healthcare provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Calling Home or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Home's terms of service linked in the show notes below.