On Tracy Culleton’s wedding day, as she walked down the stairs in her white dress, her mother barely looked at her. She didn’t offer her daughter a hug or even a compliment. Culleton, who was 26 at the time, knew exactly why.
“My father gave a speech after the ceremony. He said, ‘I’d like to give thanks to the most beautiful woman in the room – my wife’ and pointed at my mum. This was how things always went. Everything had to be about her.”
In the end, it was Culleton, from Dublin, who broke the ice. She approached her mother after the ceremony. “I said, ‘you’re looking very well’. She replied with her eyes, as if to say, ‘Obviously’. I said, ‘Are you happy for me?’ She said: ‘I’m happy you’re no longer living in sin.'”
Now aged 60, Culleton looks back on her life’s successes, of which there are many. She has won book deals and been published many times but none of these achievements were celebrated by her mother. When she won a national story competition in Ireland, for example, she called her mum to tell her. “All she said was: ‘Oh good.’ After the phone call, she didn’t even tell my dad,” she says.
Culleton believes her mother was suffering from parental envy. Jealous of her daughter’s successes, her boyfriends, her youth. “She used to become so giddy around boyfriends that I brought home,” she recalls. “She wasn’t flirting with them necessarily but she wanted their attention.”
The jealousy was sometimes clear-cut, but sometimes more complicated, as envy often is. “She always kept my books on her coffee table for everyone else to see, but she never asked me about them or seemed excited for me.”
Envious parents are taboo, partly because it seems unnatural. How could you be jealous of someone you created? How could you feel envy towards a child? A parent’s role, we are told, is to protect and celebrate children. But even up to the 1950s, a small circle of psychologists argued that most mothers were unanimously envious. American psychologist Helen Deutsch said that a mother’s protectiveness and tenderness toward her children, especially her teenage daughters, was actually a disguise for envy.
“This has since been counter-evidenced,” says Terri Apter, a social psychologist at Cambridge University and author of Difficult Mothers. “Parental envy is not common, but it does exist.”
Apter estimates that 20 per cent of parents fall into the “difficult” category – envious, distant, controlling, ambivalent, smothering. And 5 per cent of those could be labelled envious. It is not exclusively a parent’s burden, but if it does creep into this fundamental relationship, it can become particularly poisonous.
“Envy is the perception of something or someone that is good or has something good, combined with a desire to destroy it,” says Apter. “It makes the person who envies feel awful and be awful, and it’s confusing to the person who is envied, especially if it’s a child.”
Children naturally expect their parents to delight in their successes, talents and achievements. And often, an envious parent will encourage their child to succeed. “But when they do something good or impressive, the envious parent might punish them in some way,” explains Apter. “They can put down the child if they achieve anything, perhaps saying things like: ‘You’re always boasting’ or ‘You think too much of yourself’. Or there’s a reminder of a debt: ‘You didn’t do this all by yourself.’”
At best, envy comes across as coldness. “The child might come home all excited about something. Maybe they’ve scored a goal or just had lots of fun, but the parent is cold.” This is equally as confusing for the child, leading them to feel ashamed of their joyful moments. As they grow into adults, this shame is carried with them.
Shame is something that Culleton has felt deeply. “It took me a long time, well into my forties, to realise that I’m not a horrible person. I had such a lack of self-esteem and a sense of something deeply wrong with me,” she says. “You feel like you don’t really have the right to your own opinions or your own decisions.”
When Culleton left school, she thought she wasn’t good at anything, thanks to years of being denigrated by her mother. She struggled to find healthy relationships with emotionally available men, after a lack of connection with her mother. But in 1995, she gave birth to her son. She realised that it was easy to be an attentive parent. Finally, her own mother’s flaws were impossible to ignore. “I was very careful to tell my son things that he was good at,” she says. “I wanted him to have a sense of his skills as he was growing up, which I never did.”
Jealousy is, by nature, secret, and it is this unspoken dynamic that means adult children struggle to realise that their parents might be causing harm. “Envy is almost always disguised. It often takes a long time for a child to recognise what they’re dealing with,” says Apter. Culleton was in her mid-forties by the time the penny dropped. “It was then that I stopped telling her about my published books,” she says. But still, the damage was done.
Parental jealousy is common in those suffering from narcissistic personal disorder. “Narcissism is usually thought of as someone who has a terrifically inflated ego. But in psychological terms, a narcissist is really someone who has a very deflated ego,” says Apter. “They need other people to shore them up and to always feel the centre of attention. They need constant reinforcement. They become furious if someone else gets it.”
Narcissist personality disorder is a diagnosable mental health condition that’s estimated to affect between 1 and 5 per cent of the UK population. But for the children of narcissists, it can be hard to spot, and even harder to accept. “One of the things that many adult children of narcissistic or emotionally manipulative parents carry is a sense of shame that has been put on them from a young age by the adults around them,” says Dr Sarah Davies, author of Raised By Narcissists.
“When we experience abuse or neglect, or envy from a parent, it’s too dangerous for a child to name that or to blame a parent or confront a parent about it. It is easier for children to interpret that as having more to do with themselves than it is about the actions of an adult.”
For a child, it is extremely dangerous to blame a caregiver, for fear of jeopardising their primary relationship. These children learn to internalise those feelings of shame. They may believe that they are somehow to blame for their parent’s unkindness. “They end up with low self-esteem issues or believe they are ‘not good enough’,” she explains.
For parents who are not affected by narcissistic personality disorder, envy can also be a source of shame. After striving for years to give their child the best start in life, they are left conflicted when their child is happier than they ever were. “I see a lot of this with my clients,” says Davies. “It’s the kind of ‘bitter envy’ where a parent maybe didn’t get opportunities or help or support and so have a very negative attitude if a child has that. They may think: ‘Well I didn’t get support, so why should you?’”
Davies believes this can come from a parent’s own trauma, and is often made worse if a parent is from a generation that didn’t encourage therapy, meaning they may not have the tools to recognise or reflect on their own resentment.
For her entire life, Lily, 51, from South West England, has craved her mother’s approval. She moved to a different city eight years ago to be free from the relationship, but she still feels psychologically attached to their toxic bond. It’s a pattern that began in childhood. “She would openly complain about me to other people in the family while I was there but I couldn’t understand why because I was such a quiet, unproblematic child. I was so withdrawn. I used to have panic attacks in the middle of the night as a result,” she says. “I would wake up feeling like I was choking and go to find my mum. And she would say, ‘Again?’”
Lily’s brother, by contrast, was the golden child. He would receive their mother’s attention, and leave Lily constantly seeking her approval. “My grandmother once said, about trying to get through to my mother, how many times are you going to hit your head against a wall before you realise it’s a wall?”
The problems worsened when Lily was in her teens. “My mother was celebrated for her looks,” she says. “It was all she had. So when people started to say that I looked like her, she hated it. She used to say horrible things about my aunt’s appearance and then tell people that I looked like them instead.” She banned Lily from wearing make-up. “She wouldn’t let me shave my legs or just do normal teenage girl things,” she recalls. “I didn’t really know what was happening. When I looked at my friends with their mothers, I knew her behaviour towards me wasn’t normal, but I didn’t know why.”
As Lily got older, she started to do well at school. When she got into university, her mother was annoyed. “She would say that I wasn’t bright enough to go, even though I was doing well academically,” she says. “I think she felt that, because she was from an older generation, she had to get married to have security. I think she was jealous that I got to have a choice.”
This is uncomfortably common in mother-daughter dynamics. “There is often the generational problem,” says Apter. “The parent might see that the child has more opportunities than the parent ever did. Sometimes younger women have more opportunities, more education, and a wider vision than the mothers themselves were allowed.”
For Lily, it corroded their relationship so much that eight months ago she ended all contact. “I think the devastating thing, and what most people can’t wrap their heads around, is that a mother would behave like that to her own child. That’s why many people who experience it will deny it. They refuse to accept it.”
Lily’s mother hasn’t tried to reach out or heal their relationship. Instead, she believes she has been villainised. “The rest of the family is angry at me for moving away.” There is now a financial rift too. “I have been cut out of her will and she has left everything to my brother,” she says.
At 43, Culleton also chose to become estranged from her mother, but she doesn’t believe this is the only solution. “The relationship will never be normal, easy, relaxed or mutually loving. But going no-contact is not the only option. You can manage the relationship, and effective boundaries is a huge part of that, to make it bearable,” she says. “My advice would be to tell them nothing about your successes. Don’t give them ammunition to belittle or demean you.”
Emma Davey, BACP counsellor with a specialism in recovery from narcissistic abuse, argues there is no catch-all solution. “Depending on how extreme the parent’s jealousy is and how it’s impacting your life, my advice is to keep them at arm’s length,” she says. “Only tell that parent the things you want them to know. But please do not blame yourself.”
Culleton believes her mother was a narcissist. But even after 60 years, and writing a self-help book on the topic, it’s hard to process. “One of the big things I find about this narcissistic dynamic is that it’s very hidden,” she says. “It’s so subtle. It hurts, and it’s so unfair, because our parents are supposed to be our first and biggest cheerleaders. But if they’re not capable of that, we are still valuable and wonderful.”
“I have a motto,” she says warmly. “We’re not broken and in need of fixing. We’re wounded and in need of healing.”
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