YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

Full disclosure, I'm not all the way through this book yet, but so far what I've read has been transformational for me. It is written for women who grew up with unloving mom's. She identifies different types of unloving mothers and the effects that each type has on young girls. The part of the book that I'm in right now is an instructional section for writing a letter to your mom that you will never send. She breaks it into four parts: part 1 - this is what you did to me, part 2 - this is how i felt about it at the time, part 3 - this is how it affected my life, part 4 - this is what i want from you now. She gives very detailed examples of how to write this and make it personal. At first I was just listening and "writing" it out in my head, but then I said fuck it, I'll do this for real. I sat down last night and wrote five pages! I feel like I could write more. It was like the more I wrote, the more the memories came flooding in. It's helping me connect the dots as far as why I have such low self esteem and why I feel like a burden when I share my feelings with other people. I'm working through this stuff in therapy, but this exercise has brought some things into clearer focus. I would definitely recommend actually doing this exercise if you think this book speaks to you.

Title: Mothers Who Can't Love
Author: Susan Forward

Thanks for sharing this! I may have to check this out. While that title would definitely be a harsh and untrue description of my mother, I definitely have a lot of unresolved "mommy" issues.

Yeah, I think the title is a little harsh too. I would describe my mom as loving but her behavior has always been unloving, if that makes any sense. I don't think you have to have a totally unloving mother to get some insights from this book, so I hope you get what you need from it!

Bumping this thread up.

I was haunting our local library the other day (I can never leave without something ) and I picked this up, thinking of a friend who is struggling with a severely narcissistic and aging mother.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17331330-mothers-who-can-t-love

A good little book that should help her...

Thank you for the bump, SnoringDog.

I just got it through Hoopla. A glance at the table of contents shows that my poor mother is to be found in the pages.

(Btw, having been estranged for over a year, I don’t know if my mother is still alive.)

I hope the book brings some comfort for your friend.

I like to read the reviews of any book, especially the low-starred ones when they're detailed and thoughtful. These often have comments that serve as debate & dialog.

Here's another that a reviewer mentioned;

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/180466.Children_of_the_Self_Absorbed