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Mothers play a significant role in shaping their daughters’ perceptions of beauty and self-worth.

Studies suggest that when mothers directly encourage their daughters to lose weight, it is linked to the development of bulimic symptoms. In fact, mothers who merely talk about dieting and body dissatisfaction are more likely to be diagnosed with an eating disorder (Hillard et al., 2016).

By role-modeling healthy behaviors, using positive body talk and communication, and forging a strong connection with their daughters, mothers can play an integral role in laying the foundation for a healthy body image (Goslin & Koons-Beauchamp, 2022).

For more than four decades, Geneen Roth has helped people step out of the exhausting cycle of control, shame, and self-judgment, and discover something far more lasting—peace. Her latest book, Love, Finally, explores her relationship with her mother, her body, and food.

Heather Rose Artushin: Share a bit about your background and what inspired you to write Love, Finally.

Geneen Roth: My background: I have a Ph.D. in compulsive eating, having gained and lost the equivalent in pounds of a baby grand piano or a small horse. I was wild, hysterical, and consumed by self-hatred for years, until I realized that I was trying to get through to myself in the only way that seemed to get my attention—pounds lost and gained.

After making peace with myself around food, I taught workshops and retreats for 30 years, focusing on the reasons—the ways we talk to ourselves, the ways we shame ourselves, the ways we deprive ourselves—we turn to food, and how to emerge from that inner war.

Although I knew that my relationship with food and, consequently, the ways I turned on myself were connected to my mother, I didn’t realize how thoroughly I had internalized her judgments about my face, my thighs, my way of living until I met my mentor Coco and realized those judgments were really conclusions I’d made about myself by the time I was 7 years old—I’m damaged, I’m unlovable, I’m too intense—and that they were lies.

I’d already done decades of therapy and meditation, and although most of it was helpful, neither dismantled the mother wound or dissolved those conclusions. So, as I’ve been doing since fifth grade when writing first discovered me, I began writing about my mother, food, Coco, and those never-true but unavoidable conclusions, which became Love, Finally.

HRA: Describe the unique connection between the mother-daughter relationship and a woman’s relationship with her body and food.

GR: If we are still judging our thighs, our faces, it has to do with us, not our mothers. It has to do with how we interpreted what they said, how they acted. It has to do with what we believed it meant, i.e., I’m damaged, I’m unlovable, I don’t belong here. And it is those interpretations that are causing our present suffering, not what our mothers told us or how they felt about their own bodies—or ours.

Sigh. I know this is a hard one. I loved my mother, but I also loved hating my mother. When I wore the badge of daughter-of-an-awful mother, I got a lot of attention. The problem is that in my attachment to that mother wound, I continued to see myself as a victim who needed a big person to see her, love her, save her, which meant that I continued to idealize and project value and goodness onto other people while secretly believing I was damaged. And when I saw this same pattern in my students, I realized how much we cling to what we don’t want.

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HRA: Your work guides women in tuning into their intuition on their journey to giving up dieting and compulsive eating. How might a woman’s inner voice actually be that of her mother? How can she best discern what belongs to her, and what she is carrying from her mother?

GR: Our true inner voice is clear, sane, and free when it is unclouded by the decisions we made as a 3- or 4-year-old. If at any moment you find yourself paralyzed or collapsed or suddenly feeling two feet tall, you know you are believing a lie. You are believing the conclusion of a 3-year-old who needed her mother to survive and, therefore, needed to do, believe, and act in ways that pleased her, even if it meant belittling yourself.

I remember, for instance, the afternoon I apologized to my mother for being so bad that she needed to hit me with a stick. I would have turned myself into a field of daisies for her to walk on, would have done anything to feel loved and glowed upon by her, so I sacrificed myself on the altar of her love, which every child does.

HRA: What three things can readers do to disentangle from the criticism and self-doubt inherited from their mothers while healing and preserving the important mother-daughter relationship?

GR: Here are three things you can do anywhere, any time, when you find yourself entranced by the mean voices. The first is to drop into your heart and ask yourself what the kindest thing you could do for yourself at that moment is. The second is to make a list, either in your head or, much better, on paper (because when you write, it automatically creates distance between the muck of your mind and the clarity with which you are writing), of the answers to this question: What is not wrong right now? There are so many more things that aren’t wrong than are, but when we believe our catastrophic thoughts, we aren’t aware of them. So go ahead and make that list. Make it first thing in the morning, any old time in the afternoon, before you go to bed. (I often begin my retreats by asking that question because it pops people out of the trance of wrongness, and it is only from there, from a clear space, that the next step to the issue you want to tackle becomes apparent). The third thing is to go outside and move, breathe, take in beauty, let it transport you.

HRA: What do you hope readers will take away from spending time with Love, Finally?

GR: I want readers to know they are so much wiser than they take themselves to be. I want them to know that everything comes to pass and that the quickest way for a judgment or self-hatred to stick around is to judge it, to want it to go away. I want them to know that they see what they believe, not believe what they see, and that if they want to change the world, they must, we all must, begin by changing ourselves—but that this change is not a matter of adding anything on. Not acquiring yet another affirmation or skill, but of subtracting the obstacles/beliefs/conclusions they have taken on that are not true. Because when we do that, peace remains.

I want them to be willing to forgive themselves now, immediately, because in that process, they will also forgive their mothers. I want them to see that anything is possible. And that the most effective way to change the world is to begin here, now. When we stop being at war with ourselves, peace remains. When we change the way we see ourselves, the things and people we see change—and in that way, one by one, we create a new world. Sign me up.

Goslin, A., & Koons-Beauchamp, D. (2022). The Mother-Daughter Relationship and Daughter’s Positive Body Image: A Systematic Review. The Family Journal, 31(1), 106648072211041. https://doi.org/10.1177/10664807221104109

Hillard, E. E., Gondoli, D. M., Corning, A. F., & Morrissey, R. A. (2016). In it together: Mother talk of weight concerns moderates negative outcomes of encouragement to lose weight on daughter body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. Body Image, 16, 21–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2015.09.004

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