Mum is not ok

In Gillian Flynn’s novel “Sharp Objects” a line pierces me through and through - 

“A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”

When I was face to face with the worst form of intimate partner violence, I would often convince myself that playing the “bigger person” was more important than even an iota of self-preservation.

Several years later, in the confines of a room with sparse furniture and large french windows,  I narrated the ordeals of that relationship to Dr J - my mentor and a psychoanalyst par excellence - he paused and asked a question shaped like a scalpel - 

“Has anyone else evoked similar feelings in you?”

The quick and obvious answer was my mother. 

I hesitated to verbalise the response because it felt like a cliche.

I wanted to sit on it like a sleepy hen but it leapt out and ran freely. 

The response wasn’t an egg waiting to crack. It was a fully formed mammal ready to run around revealing itself to everything and everyone around. 

The only way I learned to be a daughter was through equating self-worth with self-sacrifice. My mother demanded obedience; a completely devotional, back-curled-into-a-question-mark sort of fealty to her. Nothing was left unpatterned by this egotistical claim for the entirety of my existence. 

In 2018, I am in London, ready to go out in front of a gathered crowd; roughly a 100 people who are there to hear me read my work as a writer/poet. 

My friend and I have reached the venue after royally fudging up the route. Tube, buses and a cab followed by a 15 minutes walk. 

We are late, I have to pee but I have to also quickly do a soundcheck.

I am tired, sweaty and definitely low on blood sugar. 

Suddenly my phone blows up with a dozen messages. 

“Your guinea pig is sick and needs a vet.”

“You expect us to take care of your sick guinea pig?”

“I don’t have the time or energy for this”

“You are irresponsible for dumping all your burdens on me”

So on and so forth…

“My guinea pig” is a furball that she brought home when she went to buy coriander one Saturday evening. When I came home from work, she was feeding the critter coriander and had already named her. She then went back and picked up a companion for it also. Two days later, she kicked one of them simply because they kept hiding behind the fridge at night.

In psychological terms, this is called “rapid cycling” - abrupt switching between extreme behaviours where something is idealized and criticized as well as devalued in quick succession. To me, it was just an average weekday of living with my mother. 

I have grown up with these thunderclaps of anomalies. Each day crowded by its own dissonance. As a result I stay locked in a fight-flight-freeze mode even as an adult today.

Once she went to buy me school notebooks and then disappeared for the whole weekend, leaving me with my grandparents. I never got the notebooks till my grandfather went and picked them up later. 

The guinea pig was sick because she wouldn’t stop feeding it human food in my absence. Later, my younger sister messaged me that she had handled it and it was no big deal. Just some indigestion that she had medicated at home. 

Between my sister’s phone call and my mother’s incessant texting, my performance had finished and at some point - while the audience gave me a standing ovation - I fled to the exit in that performance area, kneeled near the bins and sobbed profusely. 

My whole body felt like iron sinking in saltwater. 

A scream was knotted in my throat.

A scream too blind to find its way out of the deep recesses where I locked my voice on days like those. 

Later, as the team who had organized the performance escorted us to a community dinner for all the poets and artists who had performed there, my mother texted me again - “How was your performance? You know I would have been the one performing in such places if I hadn’t become a mother so early in my life. Hope you are having fun. You are a good writer. You get it from me."

Throughout the dinner, I remained silent even though I wanted to mingle and talk to the talented, inspiring people with whom I was surrounded in a place where I was at because I had won a contest and was specially invited, the only Indian artist/panelist. It is said that narcissism is a dialectical knot between the most extreme versions of victimhood and megalomania. 

The Devouring Mother presents the most compelling proof for it. 

The ouroboros of care and control expanding and contracting without warning. 

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Demeter - the Greek goddess of harvest - the mother deity who reigns over cycles of life and death had a daughter Persephonne - the goddess of the underworld, rebirth and springs. Persephone was abducted by Hades (misogyny is one of the four horsemen of all mythology), the ruler of the underworld. She has to leave her mother’s side and take up position in the stygian abyss. It is said that the four seasons are symbolic of the phases that Demeter goes through. From mourning to anger to anticipation; the arrival and departure of her daughter from the underworld to the plains for a short period in time, followed by the loss of her daughter as she returns to her new abode invokes the antithesis of Demeter’s care-control axis.  

In the language of the Jungian archetypes, Demeter represents the duality of the Great Mother who is also the Devouring Mother. The glittering coin with two explicitly opposing faces imprinted on each side. 

She is both the nurturer and custodian of the child she births but she also is so sedulously enmeshed with her daughter that she has tremendous difficulty letting her go because she considers this adult woman - her beloved possession - to be a part of herself. A twin emerging from her skin and bones whom she must “protect”

In some cases, this fixation on the child and the desire to save them is misinterpreted by the mother as compulsive control - a psychological devouring - of the child. The mother years to reintegrate the child back into the body from where they were created.  

This knot between control and care often unfolds in therapy with first-born daughters (particularly South Asian women) — many of whom speak of a psychic dissonance and a coiled guilt that cinches their bond with their mothers.

I have an erratic relationship with the concept of The Elder Daughter Syndrome. 

Based on a quick evaluation, I fit it to the T. Then again, I am the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter of a South Asian household. In Irish lore, the seventh daughter of the seventh son is gifted with special powers. In South Asian households, the first daughter of the first daughter is apparently born with a spine made of titanium and skin as thick as a rhino’s hide and as chemically inert as teflon to a lifetime of microaggressions.

As a psychologist, I am also cautious of watering down sui generis experiences of psychosocial disturbances to seemingly glib, universally applicable theories that impoverish the specificity of emotional experiences by robbing them of their nuance. I am also averse to tik-tokification of complexities that constellate our psychosocial wellbeing. Maybe thats the Elder Millennial in me!

That said, when no one is watching, I do occasionally tell myself that I am probably the poster child for The Elder Daughter Syndrome. 

All my life I have mistaken duty for identity.

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The Archetype of the Devouring Mother is one which yearns to consume the offspring in order to save it. An extreme example of it is the psychopathology of “Factitious disorder imposed on another”. Its more common and controversial name is Munchhausen by proxy. The healthy child made sick in order to satisfy the mother’s need to save it while simultaneously eroding its existence. While it is hard to single out a reason why someone feels compelled to do this, psychologists and mental health researchers claim that one of the more common causes for its presence is unresolved child trauma that ferments deep feelings about abandonment, validation and a dire need for trauma reenactment.

When she finally acknowledged my abuse at the hands of her ex-husband, it was during a rather corrosive argument and her admission was not one of recognizing my pain but rather a disclosure of her own trauma. Even in that, she seemed less mad at the person who’d hurt her several decades ago and more mad at me for “forcing” her to reconcile with it. Her admission didn’t stem from a desire for catharsis but rather a competitive oblique of i-had-it-worse-than-you-so-you-need-to-shut-up. Any empathy we could have felt for each other eroded rather quickly. 

Jung asserted that an archetype is in no sense just an annoying prejudice; it becomes so only when it is in the wrong place. He proclaims that in themselves, archetypal images are among the highest values of the human psyche; they have peopled the heavens of all races from time immemorial. Therefore, we are loathe to discard them as valueless because that would be a distinct loss. Our task is not, therefore, to deny the archetype, but to dissolve the projections, in order to restore their contents to the individual who has involuntarily lost them by projecting them outside himself.”

The Devouring Mother is unwilling to view violence - psychological and/or physical - as an exception. As an aberration. She insists on its continuity because somewhere violation is the only repetitive way of engaging with another human being. In my own experience, the coddling and intrusiveness are unrelenting. Even as she has betrayed my trust through several impulsive choices for which I had to pay a heavy price, she insists on being tangled up in my life and my decisions. She eschews responsibility towards me but wants authority over me. 

Heinz Kohut, the Austian-American psychoanalyst and  founder of self psychology, revolutionized psychoanalysis by exploring how a fragile or fragmented sense of self develops in response to unmet empathic needs in childhood. Kohut believed that the self can only be truly understood by entering the inner sanctuaries of a person’s lived experience, not by circling it from the outside. His work reframed narcissistic parents not as overtly grandiose, but as emotionally unavailable figures who fail to mirror the child’s inner world, leaving behind a legacy of shame, emptiness, and compensatory perfectionism. At the heart of Kohut’s work is this: when a child’s need for empathic attunement goes unmet, their raw, infantile grandiosity is left untended—never sculpted into the grounded, realistic self-regard that defines mature, healthy narcissism.

In this form of analysis, we refer to the “parental imago” - a mental schema of an idealized or mirroring parent. It is a representation of what a child sees through their subjective lens. In simplest terms, it is not who the parent is but what the child experiences them to be. 

When I consider the history of generational trauma the women of my family have experienced on account of caste, gender and psychosocial challenges, I think this parental imago is so broken and unforgiving for each generation. Growing up, I experienced my mother as a natural disaster - unpredictable, intense and capable of miles of damage in a single swoop of her storms.

So much so that any act of care she bestowed upon me or my sister was feared as a bait before another round of unimaginable trauma. 

At 14, I thought she hated me and that's why she treated me so badly.

At 40, I think she hated herself and that's why she treated me so badly. 

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The mirroring imago reflects the parent who affirms the child’s greatness and joy, helping to regulate self-esteem. The idealized imago involves a parent the child can emotionally lean on—strong, calm, protective—allowing the child to borrow regulation from them. Both of these were absent in my childhood. 

When my mother was getting married to my stepfather, I was barely 7 or 8. It was a simple Arya Samaj ceremony facilitated by my uncle; her brother. I was always fond of flowers. I loved jasmine and marigold garlands in particular. There were varmalas for the bride and groom kept in a brass plate. My childlike curiosity led me to holding up the flower necklaces and put them around my neck. In a split second, a stinging slap landed at the back of my head.

It was almost like those old Looney Tunes cartoons where I could see birds spinning in front of my eyes from the sheer force of that slap. 

My mother snatched the garland from my hand and asked me to sit quietly in a corner. 

At that age, I didn’t know what marriage was or what it meant.

I knew that the man she was marrying was “bad” and had done “bad things” to me.

I knew I had told her about them.

I knew she had explicitly told me to not tell anyone else about it. 

I think for nearly 3 decades, I had suppressed the need to question why did she ask me to not tell my grandparents or my uncles and aunts about it.

Who was she protecting at that moment?

In the movie Precious, when the mother played by Mo’nique is being questioned by the social worker about the abuse her boyfriend perpetuates against her own daughter and why she didn’t intervene, she sobs and stutters - “But then who would love me?”

The Devouring Mother is so famished for acceptance and an emotional witness to herself, she puts on a blindfold to avoid seeing her own behaviours and beliefs that keep her locked in that harrowing state. Even if I were to split my soul’s horcruxes, I wouldn’t be able to find empathy for her persistent abandonment of me - emotionally and physically. That exiled child within me feels like the anger I told towards her is my own watchdog against her blind sabotages of us. Her and I, together.

Kohut proposed that empathy was not just something you feel, it is something you know. In my attempt to understand my mother’s behaviour towards me, my knowing and feeling have never felt comfortable being in the same house. 

When the parent sees you more as a disturbance than a child, you take on that perception and unconsciously allow it to shape your perspective. You remind yourself to take up less space, never ask for help, construct your own child math about how any happiness you experience must immediately be equalized by some form of psychological self-flagellation. 

I learned to intellectualize my pain, use a punishing form of stoicism and showed up as an “avoidant” on all the pop psych attachment quizzes. 

When the only form of belonging you know is by way of antithetical phases of ownership and discarding your first caregiver, you just fold into yourself like a crusty hedgehog. 

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Someone in therapy narrates an incident when she was going through a rather heartbreaking divorce and yet her primary fear was that revealing this to her mother is going to be the actual Titanic hitting the iceberg. This is not a singular occurrence. This someone is several someones.

Imagine the potency of this enmeshed worry: you are going through something so painful in your own life but your greatest fear is how your mother (or parents in general) will blame you for things falling apart. 

You are parking your own pain to make space for someone who is inadvertently going to bulldoze you into thinking that you deserve this pain. 

In Jung’s analysis of the Devouring Mother, he refers to how India’s Sankhya philosophy has elaborated the mother archetype into the concept of prakriti (matter) and assigned to it the three gunas or fundamental attributes: sattva, rajas, tamas: goodness, passion, and darkness. He refers to three essential aspects of the mother: her cherishing and nourishing goodness, her orgiastic emotionality, and her Stygian depths.

She is both the nurturer and custodian of the child she births but she also is so sedulously enmeshed with her daughter that she has difficulty letting her go because she considers her to be a part of herself. 

My relationship with my mother unfolds as an ontological paradox wherein her narcissism—constructed as an (mal)adaptive response to intergenerational trauma—generates a relational field marked by both care-seeking and boundary violation, leaving my subjectivity perpetually negotiated within this ambivalent space.

Who she is with me is inconsistent; inconsistently protective-to-controlling in brief, firefly sparks followed by a consistent projection of her anger towards my father’s departure imprinted on me. 

On some days, trauma contaminates like a dirty chemical mixed in clean water.

On other days, it sculpts like an adept crafter who only makes the idol to eventually break it into smithreens. 

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Maternal narcissism is not something that grows outside of social structures related to gender and misogyny. My mother’s fears and experiences of abandonment often provoke extreme responses of control. Her self-worth got so tied to the male gaze that a man often became the axis around which she spun even at the risk of losing herself (and us) in the process. 

Shame’s duty is to isolate. When anger conspires with shame, we learn to isolate by using the whiplash of rejection. In many parts of Indian society, women’s worth is often externally defined—through marriage, motherhood, physical beauty, social status, and the family’s reputation. The principal grammar for various motherhoods raised in such systems often internalize a sense of conditional self-worth. The daughters become extensions of a wounded ego—tools for repairing their own unfulfilled selves. In a patriarchal system that rewards compliance and punishes autonomy in women, mothers may unconsciously replicate control as a survival strategy they themselves learned.

Motherhood is often haloed as a woman’s greatest achievement while the women herself is made to feel like her entire worth needs to be wrapped in its apron strings. 

The poet Sharon Olds recalls the response to submitting motherhood poems in the 1970s: “The editor would say, if you wish to write about your children may we suggest the Ladies Home Journal. We are a literary magazine.”

When  we look closely at The Devouring Mother, we find four faces to the persona. These faces merge and diverge because the idea is to recognize and reorient instead of pathologising without making room for recovery.

The Enmeshing Mother - Mum is in a bad mood and so are we. Rooted in Attachment Theory and Object Relations (Fairbairn, Winnicott), this is a mother whose emotional skin has no edges. The child is not a separate being, but an extension—a mirror polished to reflect her moods, fears, and unmet needs.

Often, the child is the sole anchor in the mother’s turbulent emotional sea. Any attempt by the child to step out of this role—to explore her own desires, forge an individual identity—is met with disapproval, withdrawal, or guilt-laden pullbacks. The emotional boundary between mother and child remains porous and undefined.

The message is both spoken and unspoken: your task is to soothe me, not to know yourself.

As an adult, the child carries this blueprint forward—struggling with ambivalent or anxious-preoccupied attachments, lacking a stable sense of self, caught between craving closeness and fearing engulfment. The hunger for autonomy is shadowed by an inherited dread of abandonment.

The Hyper-Critical / Shaming Mother - Mum won’t like me failing. Ever.

Drawing on Kernberg’s theory of Narcissistic Injury and Projection,  when a mother is caught in a private war with her own unspoken shame and feelings of worthlessness, the shame is poured outwards towards the child.

Her love becomes an invoice of faults. The thread that binds is not warmth, but critique. Every act, every word is scrutinized, because the mother’s internal landscape is flooded with self-loathing, and it seeks relief through diminishing the child.

To be a child here is to inhabit a hall of mirrors where nothing reflects back good enough. The child’s identity forms through the lens of lack—absorbing shame as the language of the self.

Over time, this wiring runs deep. Chronic shame becomes the emotional baseline. The child grows into an adult who wears perfectionism like armour, carries guilt like currency, and struggles to believe in her own inherent worth.

The Martyr Mother: Mum's life was ruined because of me.

Psychoanalytic thinkers like Stolorow and Lachmann illuminate this dynamic through the lens of covert narcissism and collusive emotional patterns.Where the Critical Mother wounds with shame, the Martyr Mother binds with guilt—an invisible tether spun from sacrifice and silent expectations.

You know the script: “Look how much I’ve given up for you.” It is not a gift, but a ledger. It is an account of injuries and surrenders. Each act of care is presented as a debt the child can never fully repay.

The child absorbs this message somatically—feeling responsible not in a grounded, reciprocal way, but with an anxious, fluttering guilt. One that says: “Your happiness costs her pain.”

As adults, children of Martyr Mothers often move through relationships on tiptoe—over-functioning, over-apologizing, and over-sacrificing. The pattern becomes a life of compulsive caretaking, where saying no feels like betrayal, and personal needs feel selfish.

The Rivalrous Mother: Mum won't like me doing too well.

Psychoanalytic thought, from Freud’s earliest musings to Klein’s explorations of envy and narcissistic injury, illuminates a painful truth: sometimes, a mother turns the mirror into a battlefield. Here, the daughter is not simply loved—she is compared, competed with, and covertly diminished. In this dynamic, the mother casts the daughter as a rival—vying for attention, beauty, acclaim, or status. This might be informed by oppressive social dogma about gender roles that leads to developing a scarcity mindset about her place within the household. The child’s emerging confidence is perceived as a threat to her own fragile superiority, prompting subtle undermining masked as concern or casual dismissal. 

Outwardly, this mother is the life of the party: admired, magnetic, warm to the world. But behind closed doors, a colder current flows—laced with envy and hostility.

The daughter, caught between these contradictory reflections, grows up entangled in self-doubt. She learns to dim her light in female spaces, mistrusts her own success or any notes of admiration about herself, and struggles to assert worth without guilt or fear.

Jung noted that since a “mother-complex” is a concept borrowed from psychopathology, it is always associated with the idea of injury and illness. Instead, applying a psychosocial lens to these personalities could help us find boundaries and reduce relational harm. 

Over time, I have learned to divert the anger I felt towards my mother towards love I felt for street animals. I recognized that I was so attached and devoted to their

I can’t unimagine the injury. Because the injury has also come to define my choices; good and bad. I wouldn’t have taken shelter in writing if I didn’t feel so unseen by my mother. In my earliest stories I wrote as a child of 8 or 9, I was always weaving tales of magic mothers and daughters in fairytale realms. An antidote, a balm. A calming prayer against the trauma at home. 

In the end, The Devouring Mother only receded from my mother's reactions towards me when I brought an element of physical separation between us. To live in distant, different places with carefully scheduled time together. I know that she cares about me in her own sporadic manner but I also know that the care and control in her psyche are oil and water mixed together. I can’t separate them unless she is willing to let everything flow out and start filling the bucket all over again. It is often said that people don't grow out of their personality, they grow into. I can’t rescue her from herself. Nor can I wait an entire lifetime hoping for this change to turn the trajectory of our interactions. So, I do what I can do best - care for her from afar.