My passion started as a personal quest in my twenties, struggling with my relationship with my own mother. When my daughter was born, I knew that I could not repeat the difficult dynamics between my mother and I. What started as a personal quest to understand the underlying dynamics between mothers and daughters quickly grew into a professional quest. Today, I have worked as a mother-daughter therapist with thousands of mothers and daughters of all ages and from different countries and cultures and have developed the Mother-Daughter Attachment® model that helps therapists and mothers and daughters uncover the hidden dynamics in their relationship and create a roadmap for change.
I wrote...
The Mother-Daughter Puzzle: A New Generational Understanding of the Mother-Daughter Relationship
The Mother-Daughter Puzzle will change how women see themselves and their mother-daughter relationship. With sensitivity and respect for the hurt, anger, guilt, and blame that are so often felt by mothers and daughters, this book teaches the reader how to peel back the layers and examine their own mother-daughter history.
Using the tool of mother-daughter history mapping, women can ‘connect the dots’ between what is happening between you and your mother or daughter, and the stories of how the women in your generational family have been treated. The result is a ‘road-map’ that points to the beliefs, behaviour patterns, and themes that need to be changed for a strong and emotionally connected mother-daughter relationship and a strengthening of all your relationships.
Mothers are too often blamed for their children’s and adult daughters’ problems. I regard Paula Caplan’s book as the quintessential text on understanding how patriarchy blames mothers and how mother-blaming harms mothers, women, and the mother-daughter relationship. Paula exposes the myths surrounding motherhood – revealing that there is no such thing as a “perfect mother.”
Patriarchy has silenced women for generations, and in my first book, I uncover how women have been taught to “play nice” and be “care-givers” rather than “care-receivers.” Uncovering women’s emotional reality, I expose the culture of female service and how no one is looking after mothers, not even mothers themselves. This book provides exercises to help women claim their voice, needs, and rights in all of their relationships.
"The Silent Female Scream" teaches "how to believe that as a woman you have the right to be heard, valued and respected, and to know that anything less is just not okay." Through case studies and discussion, the author exposes that women's sense of self-worth and entitlement to speak their needs, especially in relationships, is an area that feminism has ignored to its peril. By looking at the legacy of emotional silence that many women have inherited from long before grandmother's day, she warns that emotional silence damages the mother-daughter relationship, women's relationships with themselves and each other, and their…
This was one of the first books I read about the mother-daughter relationship and it helped me understand what was going on between my mother and I. Victoria Secunda outlines the types of behaviours or playbooks that mothers and daughters engage in and how these behaviours harm their relationships and provides helpful suggestions on how to improve their relationship.
“A book of great value for every daughter and every mother; useful for sons, too.”—Benjamin Spock, M.D.
From the Introduction: The goal of this book is to help readers achieve that separation so that they can either find a way to be friends with their mothers, or at least recognize and accept that their mothers did the best they could—even if it wasn't “good enough”—and to stop blaming them. Among the issues to be covered:
• To understand how a daughter's attachment to her mother—more so than her relationship with her father—colors all her other relationships, and to analyze why…
Losing your mother is devastating especially when a daughter is young. I’ve found that Hope Edelman’s book is a go-to book for daughters who have lost their mother and for daughters whose mother may be alive but unable to emotionally connect. Loss comes in many forms and this book helps daughters on their healing journey.
Ask any woman whose mother has died, and she will tell you that she is irrevocably altered, as deeply changed by her mother's death as she was by her mother's life. Although a mother's mortality is inevitable, no book had discussed the profound, lasting, and far-reaching effects of this loss- until Motherless Daughters , which became an instant classic. Twenty years later, it is still the book that women of all ages look to for comfort and understanding when their mothers die, and the book that they continue to press into each other's hands.Building on interviews with hundreds of mother-loss…
I like this book because it is well-researched and reveals the politics of mothering. As Vanessa Olorenshaw notes, “mothers’ rights are the flotsam left behind on the ocean surface of patriarchy.” This is a must-read book for all mothers and daughters because the women’s movement has yet to prioritize the rights of mothers to not be the world’s caregivers.
If it is true that there have been waves of feminism, then mothers’ rights are the flotsam left behind on the ocean surface of patriarchy. For all the talk of women’s liberation, when it is predicated on liberation from motherhood, it is no liberation at all. Under twenty-first century capitalism, the bonds of motherhood are being replaced with binds to the market within wage slavery and ruthless individualism. Mothers are in bondage – and not in a 50 Shades way.
Olorenshaw is clear: When mothering is on our terms, it can be liberating. The time has come for a radical,…
My book recommendations reflect an abiding passion for Japanese literature, which has unquestionably influenced my own writing. My latest literary interest involves Japanese poetry—I’ve recently started a project that combines haiku and prose narration to describe my experiences as a part-time resident in a 1300-year-old Japanese hot spring town that Bashō helped make famous in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. But as a writer, my main focus remains novels. In late 2023 the second in a planned series of novels set in Ishikawa prefecture will be published. I currently live in Kanazawa, but have also been lucky to call Sapporo, Akita, Tokyo, and Fukui home at different times.
Emmitt’s plans collapse when his wife, Mirai, suddenly backs out of purchasing their dream home. Disappointed, he’s surprised to discover her subtle pursuit of a life and career in Tokyo.
In his search for a meaningful life in Japan, and after quitting his job, he finds himself helping his mother-in-law translate Kanazawa’s most famous author, Izumi Kyoka, into English. He becomes drawn into the mysterious death of a friend of Mirai’s parents, leading him and his father-in-law to climb the mountain where the man died. There, he learns the somber truth and discovers what the future holds for him and his wife.
Packed with subtle literary allusion and closely observed nuance, Kanazawa reflects the mood of Japanese fiction in a fresh, modern incarnation.
In Kanazawa, the first literary novel in English to be set in this storied Japanese city, Emmitt's future plans collapse when his wife, Mirai, suddenly backs out of negotiations to purchase their dream home. Disappointed, he's surprised to discover Mirai's subtle pursuit of a life and career in Tokyo, a city he dislikes.
Harmony is further disrupted when Emmitt's search for a more meaningful life in Japan leads him to quit an unsatisfying job at a local university. In the fallout, he finds himself helping his mother-in-law translate Kanazawa's most famous author, Izumi Kyoka, into English.
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