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4.15 AVERAGE
4.15 AVERAGE
reflective
medium-paced
This is a good, not great, self-help book that I think is probably useful to some people but over the top for many. I picked it up because Captain Awkward references it frequently. Although she has said it's applicable to relationships other than mother-daughter relationships, you'd have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to apply it to other relationships, as McBride is entrenched in the language of mothers and daughters, even referring to her clients as "daughters" throughout the book.
I do think the basic structure of the book is useful, and that McBride's exercises are probably helpful (though I personally would recommend Finding Your Own North Star). I feel like I went through the process she describes many years ago through counseling and after reading The Drama of the Gifted Child, so for me it was more of a validation of where I am now. My main struggle with this book was McBride's Freudian approach of blaming one's childhood for absolutely everything, so that (despite the fact that she mentions that narcissism is on a spectrum) you could be forgiven for believing that someone with a narcissistic mother will inevitably be a terrible parent with a substance abuse problem who has a string of divorces and can't hold down a job. I also didn't love the highly gendered language and assumptions.
I'm not sure what to do with the examples and stories that make up the bulk of the support for McBride's ideas. They're supposedly a combination of her own clients and interviews she conducted, but after a while I started feeling like they were all very similar in tone and used psychology-speak like "codependency" and "narcissistic injury" with suspicious frequency. So at best I think many of these "quotes" are paraphrased by McBride, and at worse she added in fictional examples to bolster her points.
I think that if you have a very destructive mother (or other parent or authority figure and you don't mind doing the mental gymnastics of making the examples fit) and you need some guidance in loosening their hold over your life, then this book could be a huge help to you. If this only sort of applies to you, then you may or may not find parts of the book helpful, but I think there are probably better books that would be more useful... or you could just go see a counselor.
I do think the basic structure of the book is useful, and that McBride's exercises are probably helpful (though I personally would recommend Finding Your Own North Star). I feel like I went through the process she describes many years ago through counseling and after reading The Drama of the Gifted Child, so for me it was more of a validation of where I am now. My main struggle with this book was McBride's Freudian approach of blaming one's childhood for absolutely everything, so that (despite the fact that she mentions that narcissism is on a spectrum) you could be forgiven for believing that someone with a narcissistic mother will inevitably be a terrible parent with a substance abuse problem who has a string of divorces and can't hold down a job. I also didn't love the highly gendered language and assumptions.
I'm not sure what to do with the examples and stories that make up the bulk of the support for McBride's ideas. They're supposedly a combination of her own clients and interviews she conducted, but after a while I started feeling like they were all very similar in tone and used psychology-speak like "codependency" and "narcissistic injury" with suspicious frequency. So at best I think many of these "quotes" are paraphrased by McBride, and at worse she added in fictional examples to bolster her points.
I think that if you have a very destructive mother (or other parent or authority figure and you don't mind doing the mental gymnastics of making the examples fit) and you need some guidance in loosening their hold over your life, then this book could be a huge help to you. If this only sort of applies to you, then you may or may not find parts of the book helpful, but I think there are probably better books that would be more useful... or you could just go see a counselor.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
An absolute must-read for anyone struggling to separate their own thoughts and feels from those of their mothers.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
A book on unpicking a type of toxic relationship so common that it has its own book niche.
Yeeesh...I flinched when I read the title, and throughout the book. It was so uncannily accurate that it felt like I was being scammed by a mentalist! But I did more research; it turns out there are a number of books on the subject that are more or less like this.
Two things: if you have this kind of parent, the likelihood that they're going to get a diagnosis is basically nil. So it's probably fine to guesstimate a level of narcissism here, because this book is about working on you, not your parent. If you're wrong and your parent isn't a narcissist, you will still have done something good for yourself.
Second, I did the exercises and, yes, do the parts where the author is like, "You're going to want to skip this to get to the fun part, but..." I feel a ton better.
Also, the author makes a distinction between letting go of past hurt and actually pardoning someone. You're never asked to do the latter, and in fact are given some pretty strict guidelines about when you should NOT do so, ones that made me burst out loud with laughter: yeah, no.
Recommend if the title made you flinch. Note: there are ALSO non-gendered and other books on the subject, although I'm not sure if this author has written any. Don't let the gender specifics here stop you from looking for what you need. It's out there.
Yeeesh...I flinched when I read the title, and throughout the book. It was so uncannily accurate that it felt like I was being scammed by a mentalist! But I did more research; it turns out there are a number of books on the subject that are more or less like this.
Two things: if you have this kind of parent, the likelihood that they're going to get a diagnosis is basically nil. So it's probably fine to guesstimate a level of narcissism here, because this book is about working on you, not your parent. If you're wrong and your parent isn't a narcissist, you will still have done something good for yourself.
Second, I did the exercises and, yes, do the parts where the author is like, "You're going to want to skip this to get to the fun part, but..." I feel a ton better.
Also, the author makes a distinction between letting go of past hurt and actually pardoning someone. You're never asked to do the latter, and in fact are given some pretty strict guidelines about when you should NOT do so, ones that made me burst out loud with laughter: yeah, no.
Recommend if the title made you flinch. Note: there are ALSO non-gendered and other books on the subject, although I'm not sure if this author has written any. Don't let the gender specifics here stop you from looking for what you need. It's out there.
Amazing. I learned so freaking much, and will need to come back to this on my healing journey. A must read if you are a daughter dealing with the soul wrenching pain of being raised by a narcissistic mother. There is hope for healing!