'When I'm dead, you'll be all alone because your father doesn't want you. Just remember that and treat me nicely.' Thus Ariel Leve quotes her bohemian poet mother in her memoir about their difficult relationship, An Abbreviated Life.

In Her Last Death, writer Susanna Sonnenberg gets a call to say her mother has been in a car crash and may not survive. Her mother has pretended to be dying so many times to manipulate her daughter into feeling sorry for her and get her attention, that this time the adult Susanna decides not to rush to her side. Hence the book's title.

And in the most famous memoir about growing up with a self-absorbed mother, Mommie Dearest, about film star Joan Crawford, her adopted daughter Christina recounts a litany of abusive behaviour, including being beaten with a wire coathanger she'd used rather than the expensive padded ones that kept her clothes in daughter-of-a-movie-star condition.

So what if you feel your relationship with your mother isn't what you want it to be? What if she has always demanded to be put first? What if the way she behaves has made you minimise contact or even cut off from her? Or what if you can't do anything for her without being criticised?

It's almost a heresy to say so, but there are mothers - like the ones quoted above - who aren't that motherly. There are parents who, for various reasons, have turned the archetypal parent/child relationship on its head so that while parents are meant to be selfless and give endlessly to their children, it's the children who're required to attend to the parent's every whim or all hell breaks loose.

And while the memoirs I've quoted might sound extreme, the impact of a me-me-me parent is a common reason people come to therapy. The only difference between stories I hear in the consulting room and those in the memoirs quoted is that the authors have written them down.

The mother-daughter relationship seems particularly fraught when the parent is self-absorbed because of the high degree of identification involved. To a me-me-me mother it's often more important their child reflects well on them than that child lives their own life according to their own values and interests. If that child is a girl her mother can be prone to see her as an extension of herself if she's pleased with her - and the worst daughter in the world if she's not. But, of course, sons can have a hard time too. Me-me-me mothers tend to see their children either as a 'golden' child who reflects well on them and can do no wrong, or an 'ignored child' who doesn't and can do no right an only child can be both at different times .

The psychological jargon for this is 'narcissism', which covers a cluster of typical characteristics. In her self-help book for daughters of narcissistic mothers, Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Dr Karyl McBride describes:

• diverting most topics to talk about herself
• lacking empathy for your feelings
• being easily hurt, especially by perceived criticism which may well send her into a rage
• being obsessed by what things look like or how they appear rather than what's really going on or what they feel like
• blaming others for whatever goes wrong because nothing can ever be her fault
• having to have things her own way
• when something happens in your life illness, marriage, pregnancy, divorce... she's preoccupied with how it will affect her rather than you