Brooke Shields Tells Oprah How She Broke Free From Her Mom | Oprah Daily | The Life You Want Class

Hello, O'Daily insiders, and hello to this beautiful audience. A few months ago, we posted here on O'Daily an article, the day I broke up with my mother. Well, it just, it blew up and struck a big old nerve and caused more responses than anything we've ever posted. Five times, the typical number, actually. Lara, who is in our audience, said that when she read that, she almost dropped her phone. So this is a topic we want to explore with you insiders. Experts call it the mother wound. And I told the team, you know who would be great for this discussion about the mother wound? Let's see if Brooke Shields will join us, because I had read her book and watched her terrific documentary that addresses this very issue. And then Brooke said yes to being here with all of us today. You may remember Brooke had a complicated relationship with her mother that played out in the press for a number of years. Help me welcome actress, best-selling author, a mother herself, and one of the most famous models of all time, Brooke Shields. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Well, I want to start by saying, yes, I met, you and I met nearly, what, 40 years ago? We were both about five. Even before the Oprah show. And we've talked many times over the years. And I've watched you live a very public life and the unforgiving glare that we all experience when you're living publicly. But you've done it with such grace and such dignity, such fortitude. So I applaud you for that, Ms. Shields. Thank you. To be in those positions, it's sort of hard for people to really relate in a way. Because everybody thinks if I was famous, everything would be just perfect. Well, nowadays, if you ask a kid what they want to be, they don't say a specific thing. They say famous. That's right. And it's so disheartening. And being around it for so many decades, you either become a victim to it, and you resent it, and then you get angry, and you get bitter and bitchy. Or you say, OK, how can I not be devoured by this? How can I surround myself with people who are grounded? How can I stay as grounded as possible to be the kind of mom for my daughters that would very easily be derailed in this industry? I mean, in any industry. I mean, mothers and daughters is so fraught. Yeah, it is. And that's why we wanted you to talk about it today. You wrote in your book that you didn't know where you began and where your mother ended. Can you explain what that looked like and why that was? Well, when I was, I went to, I've been seeing the same therapist forever. And when I first went to her, she said, I'll never forget this. You said to me, I'm afraid if my mother dies, I'll die too. But that's a visceral feeling to do, to really not know if you exist without this life force, without this. I was completely enmeshed with my mother. And although there was much about it that was joyous, and there was a lot of laughter, and there was deep love, I will say I never felt not loved by her, which was what made it more difficult. But I didn't know how to leave her. And I thought, OK, well, if I leave her as a manager, maybe that will heal us and be able to be a mother-daughter relationship. Well, that was not going to be possible. Because that was so much her identity. It was. She had been managing you since she tied you to her. And, you know, we were up to make sure I was breathing. Yes. Tell everybody that story. My mom lost her first child the day after the baby was born. And then she got pregnant with me. And she was so worried. I was two months premature. And she was so worried that I was going to die that she slept with me strapped to her chest. She tied diapers together and slept with me strapped to her chest and would hold a mirror up in front of my face to make sure that this deemed that I was alive. She was just so afraid that I was going to die. And she was a single mom. So, you know, it just started at birth. It was the two of us together. We took on the world. It was Terry and Brooke. And I was brought all over the city. And I was on her hip or, you know, just it was the two of us together. And so there was so much love. But then you couple that with the industry that we were in. She protected me fiercely. But you couldn't even, I just couldn't do anything without her. She was the first of the momagers that we know of in our generation, right? And, yeah, and that's been a really interesting thing, too, because she was not the typical type of, like Kris Jenner says this a lot, that my mom was the original momager. And my mom was one of the first ever. She, but you couldn't get, you couldn't get to me. So, like, I never had any of those casting couch moments because nobody, she was always around. And, you know, agents wanted to take me on and they didn't want her around. And so that wasn't going to happen. So she just, it was, we were very enmeshed and very in love with our love for each other. But there was no room for me to individuate. So you started modeling at 11 months. Yes. With the ivory soap. Ivory soap. I can rock a diaper. You can rock a diaper. I'm nearing those times again. Don't make me laugh. And from then on, it was on, game was on after that happened. Game on. That kind of happened by accident. And then it was game on. Game on because I was this little baby who was pretty. And I was, wasn't just pretty, who was gorgeous, who was the idyllic child. We made a living out of it, you know? And that's, you know, if we did this movie, we got a car. Yes. We did that movie, we got to buy our apartment. Yes. You know, if we did that job, we could take an actual vacation, not just go like to the Holiday Inn indoor pool, you know, in Jersey. And, which was my favorite holiday trip for me. But it was, you know, it wasn't until I went to college that I didn't know how to exist without my mother. I was so, so homesick. I was sick about it. I couldn't fathom living away from her. And it was such an interesting thing because I knew I needed to go to university to develop my brain so that I could find my own individual thoughts so that I could deal with the industry that I was in. But it didn't occur to me how much I would miss my mother. And then I finally got my independence and that was wonderful. But when I left my mom, which was, I was late in leaving my mother. I mean, I was in my 30s. You know, I was late in onset. That is late. Individuation. Yes. And because I was always taking care of her. I was taking care of her because she was an alcoholic. I was taking care of her because she was my mom, a single mom. And we had a huge office in New Jersey. And it was Krista Inc., which was my middle name. And we had four floors. And my ex-husband convinced me that the only way to really cut the cord was to absolutely vacate the offices. So she left on a Friday, came in on a Monday, and her whole life was vacant. I, in the middle of the night, got movers and took everything. And it was such a violent act on my part that I regretted it because I believe I could have individuated and separated in a healthier way for both of us because I just, it broke her heart. And she really never recovered from it. But it was the only way I knew how to do it. Emptying out the office. Just obliterating all of it. And just, I shipped it out to where it was. Had you tried to like have a conversation? Yeah. She either got sad or angry or made it like legal. She was terrified because her whole identity and her whole livelihood. Since you were 11 months in the first ivory soap job, was you. Yeah. And it was how we lived. We had a wonderful life. We had nice things, you know what I mean? We traveled, we had wonderful people. So she would have been terrified. She would have been terrified. And add alcohol to that. You know, my mom never really was able to get sober. So the combination of that enmeshment plus the alcoholism and then the beginning of dementia. And then, you know, it just was a perfect storm. You're right. I think so many people can relate to what you wrote about your mother's heavy drinking. You said, mom would not stop drinking for me. For me. It took me about 30 years to realize that nothing I did could make her stop. Regretfully, I do have to acknowledge that the most damaging element in my life was loving and being loved by an alcoholic mother. What kind of impact did that damaging element have on you? It really just set the precedence for my whole life. I was gonna say, how did it show up in your adult life? It's in the, everything's good, everything's good. I'm a golden retriever puppy. Do you like me now? And I'll fix it. Do you have a problem? I'll fix your problem. And I can fix any, you know, and you're just like, you're constantly vigilant and wanting to make everybody fine, everybody happy. And yet you're always waiting for the ball to drop. You know, you're just in this hyper vigilance. And it's hard loving an alcoholic. And the thing that you don't understand when you're a child is that a person can't stop an addiction for another person. Nope. You know, and when I first did my first intervention, and by the way, I think you get one intervention. You don't get, if the person's halfway smart, you don't get to do it twice. Right. If it doesn't take, there gotta be other tactics because, you know, she saw it coming a mile away. She, the first intervention, I was 13 years old. And I had gone through all this training and we did the whole thing where we had a bag packed and a car ready and I was gonna go live with my father and it was this ambush. You know, this, will you meet me here? And her not knowing, her thinking it was a surprise because those were things I would do and surprise her with something. And then I said, you know, we've made arrangements and we want you to go into a 28 day program. In Minneapolis it was. And she said, fine, I'll go. But I'm going for you, not myself. And I was like, oh good. This is great. You know, because I was 13. And I thought, oh, mom's, you know, has nothing to do with her love for me. You know, it's. And how's she gonna do it, fix herself for you? It's not, it's not a possible thing and we think we can do that in relationships. Fix people, you know, fix their problems and they, the best thing you can do is the hardest which is let them, they have to figure it out because if they don't come around on their own then the decision is being made for the wrong reasons and I don't, inevitably, I don't think it works. The glasses are steaming up. We need to fix them. I know, sorry. My husband's always saying to me, you're that lady with the steamy glasses. We love that. Oh God, oh, it's probably a hot flash of some kind. I know, I was looking at it, I was thinking, God, those are unusual glasses. She's heating up as she's speaking. Unusual glasses, what is that at the bottom? I don't know. I'll turn them off for a little while. You know, so many women told us they can still hear their mother's voices and their mother's criticism in their head. Do you still hear her voice or things that she said to you? Luckily, I hear, I've worked so hard on myself to hear my own voice in my head first. Ooh. That, and that's, that's years of working on it and therapy and thinking about it and talking about it and making myself sort of freer from this. Now I hear her funny Terry-isms. You know, the things that she'll say and she'll just, those things where you, you know, those are her funny, wonderful things that made her this kind of broad from Newark, New Jersey. You know, she was, she was fabulous in that way. You know, we called her Terry-terrific and, and it's, and those of us who really knew her really understood her. She was a Leo. She, she stormed into a room and you could just feel her energy. She was, she was that, but she was also so broken and so scarred and so difficult. And I spent my entire life trying to reconcile those sides of my mother, you know. I think that it's, we remember a lot of the negative and when I read that article, what really sort of struck me was how unhappy her mother was and how exhausting it must be for her mother to live in her own self and psyche, to be that sort of battering. You know, that's, that's, that's a generation too of not really doing work on yourself. Yeah, absolutely. When that kind of anger comes out or those barbs, they're coming from somewhere and it's usually self-hatred and fear. I want to bring in Dr. Anita Phillips, author of the New York Times bestseller, The Garden Within. Dr. Anita is a trauma therapist, life coach and minister. What do you want to say about the mother womb and why it cuts so deep? This is a big one. It's a big one. Because our mother is our first relationship. I mean, it's the first voice you hear in the womb. And so your mother or the mother figure in your life gives you a sense of connection, value and safety. And those things- Or not. Or not, right. They are the source of that. And, and whatever comes of that, we internalize as a truth. And so the wound cuts deep also because it is the mother-daughter. I see the woman that I should be or could be or might not have been or was in them. And so it cuts very, very deep. And there are five areas where mothers wound. Personality. A lot of times it's just a personality difference. This was a struggle with me and my daughter to recognize that there's something in our personalities that are fighting, that is keeping my daughter from getting what she needs. The second is my past. You mentioned where in my past as a mother did pain come from that I'm still carrying? Third is power. When we fail to make the peaceful transition of power from us to our daughter at the proper time and pace, there is a wound. Prioritization of need. Whose needs get put first? And then finally, I call it the plus 10. Later on, when you look back, will you have handled this crisis in a way that your daughter will remember well? When we drop the ball in any of those areas, there's usually a wound and it lasts a long time. And it's also not knowing. I mean, I recently just said to my 17 year old, I said, you're gonna have to be a little patient with me. For 17 years, I have told you what to eat, when to eat, what to wear, what not to wear, when to go to sleep, when to stand up, who to look in the eye, how to shake hands, what to wear. I have ordered you to do things and it's been by my volition to do that forever. So now you are revealing yourself as your own independent woman. It's an adjustment for me. It's not natural to me yet. Now, I've been practicing this behavior for 17 years. So you're gonna have to understand that I'm trying, keep the communication open because I need an adjustment phase. It can't just switch like that. And I said, and so we're gonna have to be patient with each other. And if I'm starting to do something in the old fashion, tell me, let's talk about it.