struggle with looking like her

[Unicorn Cat]

I have this exact experience - and what Lillith65 and JustKathy said about thinking they ARE her when they see themselves is hauntingly familiar. I was compared to my BPD mother my whole upbringing, complete with the sister comments others have mentioned too. We really do look remarkably alike, and she made a point to keep me away from my father's side of the family so I never saw any other resemblances but hers.

My mother also sexually abused me. So when I came Out of the FOG and began therapy on all this, I went through a period where I felt nauseated every time I saw my own body, so reminiscent of hers. Gradually, it lessened and I began to see her staring back at me in the mirror and it would genuinely startle me some days and I'd scream at the reflection. My hands were the worst - because you can't get away from looking at them, can you?

But then I started doing two things as I went NC and took back my identity from her: One, every time I saw her in my hands or face or wherever, instead of looking away every time like I reflexively had been, sometimes I looked hard at that body part and said out loud, This is MY hand. This is MY hand. I would wiggle my fingers or my eyebrows and smile or wave. I would say again out loud: This is ME - I am here and she is not. This right here is MY HAND. Over and over I did this, and I still do today sometimes. I think it helped me to get really present in my own body and the current moment.

The other thing I started doing was thanking the women who came before my mother. She is adopted and found her birth mom when I was in my 20s. She was too afraid to call, so she had me do it. On the other end of the phone, I heard a woman's voice who sounded just like ours and was amazed. (That was our only contact - she didn't want a relationship with my mother - she had been raped.) But I think of that woman, who was in a similar profession to mine now and all the women who came before her. They passed on their hands and faces and voices and passions and interests and maybe a kind of generational trauma in their bones that I'm walking tall in today.

I'm currently in the process of divorcing my uNPDh, and it's hell on my child. But I think of all the women I look like and sound like, and I keep going because they did too - through God knows what. And each generation gets freer, I hope.

I hope you find comfort knowing you're not alone. And it has gotten better - though it's not gone away totally and may never for me. I'm sending you a smiling face back in the mirror.

[looloo]

I keep coming back to this thread to read the comments, and all of them are so inspiring - just wanted to say thank you for sharing your stories.  And all of the various ways you are handling this show me how I can maybe see things in a different light.

[samtosha]

 I've suffered with this  all my life, ("you look JUST LIKE your mother!") including at a recent family event, so I can't escape it even when I'm in my 50s and M is in her 80s! To be honest, I don't think we do look exactly alike, and I feel so diminished by these inane comparisons. I feel it erases me as an individual and I am feeling angry at the dumb, perhaps well-meaning, relatives who perpetuate it. But they might not be all that well-meaning, because I detect some pressure to identify with her and be more of a "good" daughter in those comments. To be honest, I've recently realized how much of a dominator my M is. Her whole existence revolves around asserting her dominance/superiority and to be told I "look just like" her is unbearably diminishing. Which is what she wants, of course.

But! Just today I was reflecting on the idea that our genes are not ours, or not only ours. We house them for the next generation and we exist to keep them alive and pass them on. Right? So SHE doesn't own the genes any more than I do! They aren't HER PROPERTY and neither am I.

I thought that might be a helpful way of looking at it.