Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

by Kelly McDaniel

An insatiable need for sex and love. Periods of overeating or starving. A pattern of unstable and painful relationships.

Does this sound painfully familiar?

Trauma counselor Kelly McDaniel has seen these traits over and over in clients who feel trapped in cycles of harmful behaviors-and are unable to stop.

Many of us find ourselves stuck in unhealthy habits simply because we don't see a better way. With Mother Hunger, McDaniel helps women break the cycle of destructive behavior by taking a fresh look at childhood trauma and its lasting impact. In doing so, she destigmatizes the shame that comes with being under-mothered and misdiagnosed. McDaniel offers a healing path with powerful tools that include therapeutic interventions and lifestyle changes in service to healthy relationships.

The constant search for mother love can be a lifelong emotional burden, but healing begins with knowing and naming what we are missing. McDaniel is the first clinician to identify Mother Hunger, which demystifies the search for love and provides the compass that each woman needs to end the struggle with achy, lonely emptiness, and come home to herself.

Genres: Self Help, Psychology, Nonfiction, Mental Health, Parenting, Audiobook, Relationships

227 pages, Paperback

First published July 20, 2021

About the author

Hi, I’m Kelly.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’d like to introduce myself. To start, this website is my professional “self”. While I bring my whole self to the work that I do, I will focus on the evolution of my practice in this section.

I consider myself a psychotherapist who happened to write two books. My friends and colleagues who are “true” writers seem to enjoy the process of writing more than I do. The solitary nature of it, the creative juiciness of if, the thrill of finding the right word(s). Writing is hard, even if it’s a true calling. As much as I love the power of language, I prefer clinical work where much of what is “said” requires no words.

My first book, Ready to Heal: Helping Women Heal from Addictive Relationships, responded to a need I was seeing early on in my practice ~ specifically, women showing up with addictive relational patterns. Most of the literature available to help them was geared toward men. There was no mention of the toxic culture that creates “love/sex addiction”. In other words, there was very little mention of patriarchy in the literature.

Ready to Heal includes 4 cultural beliefs that I believe women inherit in a misogynistic system where our bodies are objectified and targeted; where women grow up knowing sexual fear.

Additionally, as I listened to my clients’ stories, I heard a similar, haunting theme…a primitive, tender longing for “mom”. So, without a lot of science behind me, I named “Mother Hunger” as an attachment injury that creates a climate for love to become addictive. This was 2008 before we were talking much about Attachment Theory or ACE’s, and certainly we weren’t discussing complex PTSD.

The term struck a nerve. Colleagues either dismissed me or were intrigued. But overwhelmingly, my clients experienced a resonance with the name that helped their bodies sigh with relief.

Since then, I’ve devoted myself to nurturing insecure attachment and maternal deprivation in adult women. It became very clear that Mother Hunger needed her own book, so I compiled all the research I had been doing since 2008 and published my second book, Mother Hunger; How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance (Hay House,2021).

Mother Hunger was a much harder book to write than the first one. For one reason, I was afraid. My greatest fear was that I might somehow contribute to the impossible load mothers carry every day. Each word took immeasurable attention and love to avoid this possibility.

Another reason is that like many of you who have read the book or are reading the book, I am a mother. Each chapter brought me face to face with ways I failed to attach to my child like I had hoped I could. Like I had fantasized I would. (and I already knew a lot of stuff!)

But my body carried untreated heartbreak from my own childhood, and as we know now, our intellect and rational thinking is no match for untreated trauma.

Maybe you feel Mother Hunger yourself and are looking for professional guidance in your healing process. Or maybe you’re a professional wanting to better guide your clients on their healing path. Maybe you want a speaker for your next event. No matter how you’ve arrived, I’ve designed this site to be a resource for you.

With love and hope,
Kelly.

Reviews

[Veronica · Rating 5 out of 5]

If the title sparks any kind of reaction in you, this book is for you. She explains attachment style, the three pillars of mothering (nurturing, protection, and guidance), and how to heal these wounds depending on what pillar you are missing in your relationship with your mother. Well researched, organized in a way that is easy to digest (though a lot of emotions may rise up to the surface as you are reading), and more helpful than I ever could have imagined.

[Lizzie Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so profoundly validating for those who relate to the isolating experience of “Mother Hunger”.

I do feel like this book could have been double the size and gone much more in depth, but I also think the size and pace of it is approachable for wider audiences.

So grateful for this one 💖

[Sarah Williamson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inside each of us is a hunger for our mother and when that hunger cannot be satisfied, we find other ways to fill it. This is the main thread of Mother Hunger, but the book also takes a deep look at attachment styles and the way identifying Mother Hunger leads to healing our mind, body and soul.

There are a handful of non-fiction books that are monoliths in my life. There is a great sense of knowing that I will look back at my past and remember my life before a significantly impactful book came into it, and compare this time, with the "after" of having the knowledge and information of that book in my life. Mother Hunger is definitely one of those books for me.

This book was originally recommended by my therapist when I was trying to describe this unknown need for something in my life. She knew I was talking about Mother Hunger but I didn't know it yet. The freedom and healing that comes from the valedation of how this feeling and ache without a name has haunted my life was immediate. I feel less crazy after having read this book and I feel like I have a name for what needs healing in my life.

Mother Hunger is a beautiful gift for women everywhere and i am excited to re-gift the reading experience of this book to myself again and again.

[Rosemary · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF- read to Chapter 4. Lots of overarching thoughts with no solid, personal examples. "Mothers Who Can't Love" by Susan Forward is a way better book for daughters who want to find healing from mama trauma. I'm sorry, reiki isn't going to help me deal with the PTSD I'm experiencing.

[Callie Hass · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were a few useful things in this book but overall it kind of left me feeling like all mothers are destined to fail their daughters. The standard set by this book is so high. I don't see how anyone could realistically meet them. I absolutely agree that all babies need nurturance, protection and guidance but do all babies need to co-sleep? It definitely felt like the only acceptable reason any mother could have to NOT breastfeed their child is if they were physically unable to which I disagree with. A lot of the information in this book butts up so hard against the world we live in now and REALITY. It would be lovely if we had paid parental leave which allowed us months or a year to stay home and bond and care for our babies, it would be amazing if we had guaranteed carers to keep house while mothers stayed cocooned with their new babies for the first months of life, it would be a dream come true if all families had reliable, free, safe childcare that wasn't needed until the child was 3 years old but these are all just dreams in modern America. Most women have none of these things and to read a book that gives the impression that by not having them, we are tipping the scales in the direction of having lonely, traumatized kids, is sad and harmful, even if it MIGHT be true.

[Cheyenne · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn’t get more than half way through this book. It is incredibly infantilizing and dismisses the role of any other nurturing caregiver besides the biological “mother”. Mothering is OF COURSE important, but this—despite the authors claims at the start that she isn’t trying to place more blame or anxiety on moms—sets mothers up for failure by trying to position them as the person with the absolute most impact and responsibility. Why are we so comfortable letting dads off the hook? What does this book imply (and even explicitly state when she claims same sex romantic and sexual exploration between girls is less about sexual orientation and more about “mother hunger”, which, YIKES) about same sex couples? I think this also places way too much emphasis on the role of women as being inherently drawn towards mothering and motherhood in a way that is super gender essentialist and really misogynistic. I try not to leave 1 star reviews but this book left me feeling totally disgusting, and it has such great reviews so it really came as a total shock to me. Very much read like a new-age, TERF-y pseudo-feminist manifesto. The author very much disguises her own opinions and experiences and presents them as facts when they are absolutely not.

[Kinsey · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at 50% - I was excited to read this book and did my best to finish it but as other reviewers have stated the author tends to go off on tangents that have little to do with providing solutions and healing. The author also seems to have a “man hate” issue that is very evident in this book. I just couldn’t keep going - life is too short!

[Lindsay Nixon · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is targeted at women who are grieving over the loss of their mother, particularly while they’re still a young adult. I was raised without my mother and feel a sort of grief about that and thought this book might help.

After two boooooring chapters of memoir (I don’t care to read about the authors life just as I don’t want my therapist spending my hour telling me about HER mommy issues…) I got into the actual book, only to drag through more and more chapters that summarized other popular books and theories (eg attachment styles). I already know about my attachment style, thanks!

By chapter 8, I still hadn’t been given anything actionable to do. It was all lecture. Not what I find helpful,

👎

[Cecilia · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at 56%.

Pseudoscientific babble that goes off on tangents about the patriarchy, porn, social media, etc. and is filled with quotes from other people and books.

The expectations for mothers are unrealistic for working women--who can afford to take three years off from work? She makes it sound like every child is doomed for psychological problems if their mother doesn't breastfeed (some women can't for various reasons), doesn't co-sleep (co-sleeping increases the risk of SIDS, which she doesn't even factor in to the discussion), and doesn't solely cater to her baby 24/7.

There is such a focus on early attachment and almost nothing so far on the relationship between mother and daughter in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Maybe there is more on that later in the book, but I doubt it given the other reviews.

Other reviews mention that the practical advice given to help daughters is almost at the end of the book and mostly consists of: see a therapist and engage in self care strategies like drinking a cup of tea. WTF?

The book Mothers Who Can't Love by Susan Forward is leagues above this book and offers real, practical advice for healing and dealing with a difficult mother-daughter relationship.

[Martine · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Recognizing what you had and what you lost directs the path toward reclaiming what you need."

A must read for all daughters and a much needed guide on the first step towards healing and wholeness. Lots of aha moments for me, especially the descriptions on attachment styles in relation to the pillars of mothering. Highly recommended!

[Simona · Rating 3 out of 5]

"This is not a parenting book"

*Proceeds to spend 20% of the book giving parenting advice*

In all seriousness though, this was a pretty good read. I agreed with a lot of the points made and found some useful guidance in it. It was great to delve into her theories about misdiagnoses or diagnoses without knowing the root cause of the problem and how they relate to core childhood traumas.

HOWEVER, I found this book disturbing in a lot of ways. Men can and do experience the same traumas as women, and she barely even gave men a mention. There was also a strong emphasis on the standard nuclear family and I found a blatant lack of acknowledgement about non-standard family structures (gay or lesbian parents, non-romantic co-parents, non-binary parents, step-parents, etc). I actually thought this book was written maybe 10+ years ago because of this but then she started talking about the pandemic...

I also did not feel that this was an unbiased guide. The author obviously has some strong opinions on certain parenting methods that felt like they were being shoved down my throat.

It's worth a read but it could have benefited from some more editing or... something.

[Nesha · Rating 4 out of 5]

”Our culture gives girls the false message that their bodies, their lives and their femaleness demand an apology.” - Dr. Christiane Northrop

”Healing means you claim your own power in ways that feel healthy & constructive.”

Before we are mothers, we are all daughters…

At the risk of sounding like a cliché, I currently find myself in that thirty something self care phenomenon. I’m perpetually hungry for knowledge on how to do life and heal from all its universal unpleasantness. That being said, Mother Hunger has been my favorite quote unquote “self help” book I’ve read so far.

I was able to confront some of my own maternally sourced fears, personal trauma patterns and also name my pain received from the insidious traditional female upbringing.

I walked away from this book feeling affirmed and with tremendous clarity on femininity. I really think it’s a book all women should read.

[Renee Pelletier]

I learned a lot. But, there are many many parts where McDaniel implies that the best way to be a good mother is to be middle class and above. She states that as much time as possible should be spent with a baby after birth, never acknowledging how hard this may be now that dual incomes are necessary for working class families to make ends meet. She only blames the busyness of today’s world. It’s not just busy, McDaniel, it’s expensive! There are many other examples that give me the sense that her clients and social circle consists of upper middle class women who worry about the pressures of a career but not paying bills. Happy for them! But it’s a little out of touch.

[liv ❁ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I cannot tell if it is because of my specific mother situation, but the pacing was a bit weird in this one for me. I had the expectation that this would heavily focus on abuse / losing a mother very early on, but there is a pretty heavy focus on other aspects, such as societal factors that make it hard to be a mother which, while interesting, were just not exactly valuable to me. Each chapter did have at least one little nugget of wisdom that I found helpful, but every chapter, excluding chapter 8, was a mixed bag.

This is really just a misalignment with reality versus expectations and the reality that I have never had a mother that showed me any type of love so the fact majority of this was unrelatable, but I was reading this specifically with the intent to process something very specific, and chapter 8 was really the only part that I found super valuable, and with that most of it was just validating the healing path that I have already put myself on. Which is very validating, but I was hoping for a bit more.

I do think this is a valuable resource for people with mother wounds, especially who are just now realizing the issues they have with their mother. My situation just kinda forced me to process and come to terms with a lot of this book when I was in my tweens.

3.5/5

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good foundation, but watch out for the SWERF language in one section

[rita r. · Rating 5 out of 5]

the topic of mother-daughter relationships and how they can shape a person is one that is very dear to me, as i am the daughter of a mother who failed me throughout my life. my mom was never fit to be a mom, and fortunately, she never claimed to be a good mother. as a matter of fact, she was the first to admit that she never wanted to be a mom, but growing up as a woman in the 60s and 70s and coming from a lower class family came with a premeditated future.

my mother was a very intricate yet superficial character, plagued by medical negligence in her second pregnancy which resulted in undiagnosed gestational diabetes turning into type 1 diabetes, 5 years between my brother's pregnancy and mine. so her whole narcisistic personality and mindset paired with a chronic illness were the perfect recipe for disaster.

i dealt with my mother's negligence as a baby (the nurturing and educating part was relegated to my 10 years older sister) and then her hyper-dependence and emotional abuse as a teen. her self-neglecting nature worsened her disease to the point where she needed a caretaker. i left my parents' house in 2021, a place that stopped feeling like home a long time ago, before that could happen. i was 22 at the time, living my life for her, instead of for me. i was a maid, a babysitter to my own niece and nephew, a cook, and a nurse way before i was a person of my own. i grew up putting other people's needs above my own at all times, it was instilled in me by my mother, so that was all i knew. the moment i left and fought for my individuality was the moment i divorced her, as kelly mcdaniel describes in this book.

my mother passed away at 55 years old on march 6th 2022. with her death came a flood of various forms of grief: grief for the person she was, grief for the person she couldn't become, grief for the mother i needed yet never had. coping with your abusive mother's death will force you to stop and think about how her shortcomings affected you as a person, as a woman. but you can't pin that on her forever. that's what drives generational trauma amongst women forward. it's your responsibility to put an end to that vicious cycle and heal from the trauma your mother gave you so as to not pass it along to your children.

i'm incredibly thankful for kelly mcdaniel's research and work. it's allowing me the chance to tap into my inner self, the little girl who will always need her mother, and let her know that she turned out okay. that she will be okay, no matter what.

[Ashly Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

BIG meh on this book. I had really high hopes going in and was prepared to be totally blown away by what I discovered in this book, but I came away with pretty much nothing…

The concept itself of mother hunger is intriguing, but I didn’t find this particular book useful at all. Most of the things described to help, are very basic self-help tactics that I’m sure most people already know.

Right away in the beginning, the author says to read this as a daughter and not a mother, but the text is laid out in such a way that I kept forgetting to do that. There is a lot of parenting advice for a book that’s not a parenting advice book…

This book might be useful to someone who has just recently discovered they belong to the bad mom’s club, but as a longtime member, it’s unnecessary.

I also find the random religious barbs and inclusions bizarre and off-putting.

[Jokasty Lapp · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was recommended by my therapist to help me work through my relationship or lack of with my mother. It was so validating but also very hard to read. I found myself in a down mood and emotional after reading some chapters. I had to take the book in parts and really process in between. Being able to relate and see my relationship through another lens was not easy. It put into perspective why I am the way I am because of lack of guidance and nurturing which is hard. But also started some healing. Healing that I know has just begun and will be a road to get there. It also made me proud of who I am not only as a person but the mother that I want to be for my son. I highly recommend to anyone struggling into adult hood to help process if you have a strained relationship with your mother. I learned things I never knew needed to be addressed. All in all of course there were very factual parts and it is along the lines of self help. So a solid 4.5 ⭐️

[Kenisha McFadden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a super advanced book. This is definitely a read for people who are new to therapy and haven’t already pinpointed their trauma.

[Kelly Deriemaeker · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5 ⭐️🤯🥵❤️‍🩹

[Genevieve · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF
This book is going in the trash can. I can’t bear to let another woman read the 75 pages I did.

Page 73 was the nail in the coffin for this book. If you happen to be at a book store or library read the section titled “Unwanted Touch” starting on page 72. Her conclusions on 73 are infuriating. She’s victim blaming girls for being abused by their fathers while also laying blame on mother’s for not being nurturing, protecting, or guiding them enough. The author claims the mother’s behavior leaves her daughter “vulnerable to her father’s unhealthy behavior.”
I’m horrified.

I read a reviewer that had the impression the author hates men. She seems to give them a free pass on sexual abuse and wants to blame women for it.
So wrong.


Also, there are inconsistencies in her theory of mother hunger. She argues it’s all about early treatment that is emotionally encoded when we’re infants and aren’t laying down real memories.
Following that, every example to support mother hunger are real memories from the women she’s worked with.
She has no real evidence for how treatment from mothers before memory is solid affects long term behavior…just her assumptions based on tenuously connected studies and extrapolating how a woman would have treated her infant based on how the child was treated.

The first 3 chapters made me feel like I’m the worst mother in the world. She cited a study that said if a baby of 4 months old hasn’t seen her mother’s face produce every expression, the baby’s face will be frozen and unable to ever make that face. Huh? How is that a thing? Who vetted that study and how long did they track these babies? How does one even measure that??? Cameras on babies and mothers 24/7? What is the standard for “all the expressions” a human can have? Preposterous.

[Ekaterina Drozdovica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! This book was an extremely triggering and deeply personal read, but, I guess, this means I’m healing?

Coming from Eastern Europe, mother hunger is a common experience. I guess wars, famines, revolutions, political oppression, economic and political crises are not best environments for nurturing babies.

My mom had me at 24, right after the Soviet Union collapsed, during the period that she to this days dreads, the 1990s. Mortality rates skyrocketed amid lawlessness and dominance of criminal gangs. She herself had to befriend a gang member for “protection”. Plus, the hyperinflation that followed the collapse of the block shrank all of her family’s savings into the price of a pair of jeans. As a toddler I often stayed with my grandparents because my mom, who became a single parent very early on, simply couldn’t make ends meet.

Despite everything, she managed to raise me well, feed me, buy me clothes and presents, take me travelling around Europe and even send me abroad to study in a university. Was she emotionally supportive, nurturing, or attuned? Hell no, that would be asking for too much. She was reactive and anxious, but simultaneously tough and demanding, “don’t cry, man up, the world is a scary place”. I remember being afraid of her throughout my childhood. My mother’s relationship with her mother was even worse. You can’t give what you’ve never had.

That’s why this book was such an important read. Although targeting daughters, this is in fact a brilliant guide on how to be a good mother yourself. I will definitely re-read it again before becoming a mother. It explains how to cultivate the three pillars of motherhood: nurturance, protection and guidance, as well as the importance of emotional attunement. Drawing on research in neuroscience, the book examines how maternal behaviours can shape a baby’s brain development and mental wellbeing in later life.

The books also explains attachment, and how relationships with our mothers play a central role in its forming. A separate section for fearful-avoidants was a rare find for popular psychology. For those who have survived maternal abuse, emotional, physical, or sexual, there is a heart-wrenching chapter that delves into the impact of such abuse and some strategies for coping and healing.

While the book is deeply introspective, like many of its kind it falls short on solutions. Most of the advice was common self-care practises like taking care of your nutrition, sleeping well, taking hot baths, buying a gravity blanket. There were some practical tasks and questions to reflect on. But, of course, self-help books aren’t magic pills to undo years of relational trauma.

[Cindi · Rating 5 out of 5]

it hurts. but only in the ways you need it to

I cried at least three times reading this book. The things that it touched on - the way it helped me understand my younger years when I wasn’t making the best decisions for myself, were just kind of hitting me pretty hard. I came from a somewhat seemingly normal household, but
There were underlying problems poisoning all of us, and the book felt relevant to that too

[Rima]

كتاب مهم جداً غير أن الترجمة غير دقيقة للعديد من المصطلحات

[Jasmine St. John · Rating 4 out of 5]

And I don’t want to be terrible to myself anymore. I don’t want to hide. I don’t want to feel desperate or lonely or hateful anymore. I want to stride forward. I want to shirk the heavy weight of all this loss. I want to throw it off like a coat worn on a summer day. I am tired of it all. I want to just be me. And to do that, I have to let you go.

My mother passed away this year. I stopped communicating with her 10 plus years ago after many off and on again attempts of keeping her actively in my life. Hence, this book comes at a curious stage in my own understanding of my relationship with my mother. I'm not sure if I would have had the same response to it, had I read it years previous. Now, it holds a spot of understanding and release.

The concept of mother hunger puts into perspective all the attachment theory, birth to three, epigenetics, and utterly deep longing there is for a mother that can't "mother" (for whatever reason) in the way that their child needs. It isn't stuff I didn't know from personal experience or from being a therapist, but still having it all put together helped. It felt like the emotional bookend that I didn't know I needed.

I wonder sometimes if I'm just in a state of dissociation not really feeling much about my mother's passing. But, in the best way possible, I have learned that the state of dissociation I feel has been the one I have felt in various different forms my whole life. It is my own mother hunger.

----- below are my pull quotes from the book -----
I see women who still have their mothers but have lost them to abandonment, addiction, memory malfunction, mental illness, and more. Some of the losses are more traumatic than others but the experience of longing that comes with this loss is the same.
-
the experience of yearning for a mother affects women on such deep levels that it is often carried not just throughout a woman’s lifetime but even passed down through generations.
-
Undoubtedly, the legacy of abandonment had left my grandmother hungry for something my mother had no business providing. It must have been a burden to be her daughter. I don’t know the specifics, because my mother has very little memory of her childhood and isn’t inclined to talk about these things.
-
Naming Mother Hunger isn’t about dismissing the importance of fathers or other primary caregivers. Nor is it about blaming mothers for what they couldn’t provide. Mother Hunger is a framework to help you identify what the essential elements of maternal care are so you can recognize what you lost and reclaim what you need.
-
Mother Hunger is less about who actually raised you than it is about which developmental needs were missing during your formative years. Mother Hunger names the longing that you live with; the yearning for a certain quality of love.
-
Mothering is a consuming occupation because little ones come with powerful survival instincts. From the very beginning of life, instincts compel newborns to stay close to their biological mother, as her voice, smell, and body are already familiar. She is home. Like adults who want one primary lover or a best friend, babies thrive in a familiar, soothing relationship during the early months. This is biology.
-
The term Mother Hunger captures a compelling, insatiable yearning for love—the sort of love we dream about but can’t find. Many of us mistake Mother Hunger for a craving for romantic love. But in truth, we are longing for the love we didn’t receive during our formative moments, months, and years.
-
As a child, if essential elements of maternal nurturance and protection were missing, you didn’t stop loving your mother—you simply didn’t learn to love yourself. This is the essence of Mother
Hunger. Mother Hunger is a heartbreak that touches everything in your world, particularly your relationships with others and your own sense of worth.
-
If for whatever reason your mother was not ready to be a mother, or if, like many, she was unaware of the concepts we will cover here, science suggests that you may carry the ambivalence, fear, or anger that she felt. Her responsiveness to your needs and her physical presence may have been inadequate. Although you have no clear memory of her early care, your body does. When essential elements of maternal care were absent, the result is an attachment injury that becomes the foundation of future thinking and feeling.
-
Emotions are stored in the body and create a certain reality or belief system: The world is safe and so am I or The world is scary and I’m all alone. Stored sensations like these become implicit
memories. Unlike explicit memory that is conscious and has language, implicit memory is unconscious and has none. Implicit memories reside deep within the limbic structures of the brain,
silently whispering messages of safety or danger to the rest of the body. Early experiences impact the developing central nervous system through feelings and bodily sensations. In this way,
“remembering” things from your early years is more of a sensation than a conscious awareness Feelings create implicit memory from preverbal, precognitive moments with and without our mother. Early emotional experiences literally become embedded in the architecture of our brain

When an infant’s vulnerable nervous system picks up that things are not safe, as with early maternal separations or insensitive care, nature calls forth a fear response. Fear releases cortisol and adrenaline, which can be toxic for developing brain regions. When fear isn’t soothed and happens regularly, a baby stores the fearful sensations in her cells, building a body and brain poised for danger—hungry for love but wary of human connection. Understanding implicit memory explains why sometimes we have no idea why we act the way we do. We can’t see the distress living
in our body. Early memories are dissociated from consciousness, but they direct our moods and our health throughout life.
-
What happens when cries go unanswered? Or meet irritated, impatient responses? Do we stop
needing our mom? Not at all. Over time, without maternal comfort, we do learn to bury the need. But the need doesn’t go away. Unmet needs for maternal nurturance and protection fester like an angry infection. The body holds the memory of emotional pain and, over time, may generate chronic distress and insecurity. When distress is the norm, it becomes toxic. Toxic stress creates physiological inflammation, weakening the immune system. In this way, lack of early nurturance or protection is a form of adversity and creates an attachment injury. The frightened or lonely toddler within follows us into adulthood, wreaking havoc on our bodies, relationships.
-
Ambiguous loss is a term she coined to explain what happens when someone we love changes, as in the case of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or a traumatic brain injury. It occurs when psychological absence co-exists with physical presence —in other words, when a person is physically present but
psychologically and emotionally absent.
-
As adults, many of us live with a deep, unconscious craving for love and security that stems from too much loneliness during vulnerable, dynamic periods of brain growth. While we might appear capable and strong, deep within there is a nagging sense of emptiness. Adapting to loneliness too early in life leaves a deep hole where love and connection should have been. We’re without an
internal compass for love and life, muddling along with brains adapted to loneliness and unprepared for healthy relationships.
-
Crying or tantrums are not efforts to manipulate caregivers—they are signs of distress and a
signal for help. Young, developing children do not have the capacity to regulate emotions by themselves. They learn this from the care they receive.
-
research documents that infant girls lose facial gestures that their mothers don’t have. Beebe’s research has profound implications for a baby girl whose mother is constantly on the phone, distracted with too many other responsibilities, or simply has a flat expression. A mother’s facial expressions not only communicate emotions, but they are also creating the brain circuitry for her baby. The quality and presence of the maternal gaze is part of this psychobiological process. So we can understand how lack of maternal attunement is a form of early adversity.
-
But infants without adequate early nurturance carry internal distress. Children without secure attachment grow up to be adults with an entire nervous system built differently than those with secure styles. As they physically mature, insecurely attached children have a hard time with emotional maturity. Insecure attachment can lead to symptoms of anxiety.
-
Insecure attachment explains the common experience many of us share—the craving for something or someone to ease the pain of isolation.
-
They learned very young not to go toward their mothers when they were frightened or sad—and
sometimes even when they were happy, because they knew that joy might threaten their emotionally fragile mother. Women recall nicknames that made them feel needy and ashamed, as if they were too much work for their mothers. Some talk about being pushed away when they needed a hug. Others felt overwhelmed with their mother’s neediness.
-
Adapted to deprivation, they have learned there’s a limited love supply. Their emotional intensity sometimes looks like a baby or toddler in a protest state (having a tantrum): crying, screaming, or
pouting to bring someone close. Anxiously attached women may rage, pout, starve, or seek revenge when they detect abandonment, even by their daughters.
-
Parents carrying their little ones in slings aren’t simply making a fashion statement; they’re oxytocin-generating factories. The more touch and proximity between the two, the more oxytocin. Research shows that infants who are touched regularly have bigger, better brains than those who aren’t. Oxytocin creates a biological reaction in the mother that can help decrease anxiety and diminishes the need to get busy. Oxytocin helps her want to interact with her infant and meet her needs.
-
He found that early maternal separation hampered the female pups’ future ability to nurture their
own offspring. Babies of mothers who licked more and nursed more not only showed significantly more capacity to manage stress, but they also nurtured their own babies in the same way. Meaney’s
conclusions explain why women who feel secure in their mother’s love are more likely to have secure infants themselves as well as enjoy stable friendships and romantic relationships throughout life.
-
Dr. Rachel Yehuda, director of traumatic stress studies at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, found that children of Holocaust survivors share post-traumatic stress symptomology with their parents and grandparents. Yehuda also discovered that babies born to mothers who developed PTSD after the World Trade Center attacks shared symptoms of toxic distress, such as being easily disturbed by loud noises and unfamiliar people. As most epigenetic transmission is matrilineal, this research helps us understand how a mother’s emotions can find their way to her children. According to Bruce Lipton, Stanford Medical School researcher and scholar, “The mother’s emotions, such as fear, anger, love, [and] hope, among others, can biochemically alter the genetic expression of the
offspring.”
-
Increased adrenaline and heart rate lead to crying and difficulty going back to sleep. Sears explains that infants who co-sleep rarely cry during the night and have less nighttime anxiety. As adults, they experience fewer sleep disturbances than adults who slept alone as infants.
-
For women with untreated Mother Hunger who are already overly alert, this increased amygdala response can set off a cascade of panic during the early bonding months, severely compromising maternal mental health. Vulnerable and raw, these women tend toward elevated sensations of
loneliness, despair, and boredom in the early days with their newborns. Dark emotions and hypervigilance interfere with bonding and unveil the story of a mother’s own early moments of life.
-
And the infant brain learns from what it feels. A baby without her mother may feel a threatening loss that jump-starts her nervous system by releasing adrenaline. Crying, shaking, or screaming are signs of a distressed baby with too much adrenaline in her system; this is an infant in a fight-or-flight state. Fight-or-flight hormones are not meant for babies. But extended separations from familiar arms will initiate these powerful neurochemicals.
-
Infants can’t self-soothe. Self soothing is a sophisticated higher function that develops much later in life. In fact, most adults can’t self-soothe. And why do adults who prefer sleeping with a partner expect a baby to sleep alone?
-
In Being There, Erica Komisar writes about the importance of transitional objects: “Respect your child’s needs for blankets, stuffed animals, and/or pacifiers which represent you and the security you provide in your absence. . . . If your child naturally takes to a transitional object, it will be easier for you to leave for short periods of time.
-
Kasl points to men. “The role fathers play in the development of female addiction cannot be overstated. Little girls take their cues from their dads. They want that special energy, the light in Daddy’s eyes, to be directed toward them. The ache for a warm and affectionate dad who did not sexualize the relationship is deeply etched in the hearts of most women.”
-
Identifying maternal neglect or abuse doesn’t happen until later in life. It’s as if we are protected from knowing until we are truly ready to know. Perhaps getting angry with a father for our difficulties is easier than pointing to Mom because our culture allows us to identify men as abusive before women. Or maybe it’s even more primitive than that. Psychologically, it might be more threatening to lose a mother’s approval than a father’s. Most certainly, it’s a mix of these
complicated factors.
-
Self-loathing and contempt corrupt the mother– daughter bond as hatred of women is shared. “A mother’s victimization does not merely humiliate her, it mutilates her daughter, who watches her for clues as to what it means to be a woman. She passes on her affliction. The mother’s self-hatred and low expectations are binding rags for the psyche of the daughter.
-
Through media, collectively, we learn that women exist for the visual pleasure of men; but since we all look at the same things, women learn to see ourselves and each other this way: as objects.
-
The instincts that drive us to appease someone who has real or perceived power over us diminish our chances for full relational participation. Thus, many of us have never experienced a healthy romantic partnership, because relational reciprocity is a foreign experience. Toward our own protection, we “appease and please” someone else’s needs for food, sex, adoration, or even money. The need to appease someone with power (perceived or real) is our biological freeze response in action—our adaptation to chronic, ongoing fear.
-
As children, many of us learn to appease our mother as a harm reduction tactic. Rather than risk an angry mother, appeasing her meant we kept the house clean, complimented her appearance, kept her company, or stayed out of her way when she was irritated. Pleasing and appeasing is similar to a trauma response—it’s an automatic, unconscious reaction that can become an engrained personality trait.
-
One part is a frightened little girl who longs for maternal protection. Another part is an angry teenager who had to figure things out by herself. Unaware of these parts, a woman who did not have early maternal protection may find herself attracted to powerful authority figures who have status and wealth or she may work tirelessly and ferociously to build her own financial fortress. She is seeking the protection she didn’t have as a child.
-
Mothers who use their daughters for friendship not only misuse their power—they avoid growing up. They take a shortcut to adulthood. Rather than face their own insecurities and risk bonding with adult women (who might judge or reject them), these mothers bask in the easy proximity, vulnerability, and admiration of their daughters.
-
Daughters rarely identify parental enmeshment as harmful, because it feels good to be singled out. Being chosen as the favorite seems like a privilege. But the cost is high. When a mother’s care is too intense, an enmeshed daughter caters to her mother’s moods, needs, and desires while losing the chance to know her own.
-
it’s not uncommon for daughters to see their fathers judging and commenting on the way women look. Fathers who are unaware of their impact and responsibility for sexual guidance may bring “locker room talk” to the dinner table or flirt with waitresses in a restaurant. Girls learn from such fathers that feminine power comes with sex appeal, that being sexy gets attention.
-
Life without maternal guidance can lead to a few of the following characteristics:
Excessive caretaking in relationships
Deep insecurity
Difficulty making decisions that reflect your own desires
Chronic guilt and a belief that you’re never enough (for your mother)
Constantly comparing yourself to other girls and women
Dissatisfaction with your body image and appearance
Loyalty to abusive people, usually your mother or people like her
-
If you grew up with a mother who was cruel and frightening, her behavior required your autonomic nervous system to stay in overdrive. Under constant threat, developing brain pathways meant for social behavior took a back seat to the pathways meant for safety. Unused neurons became weaker and less able to carry signals that govern attention and mood regulation. At the same time, pathways designed for self-preservation gained strength to keep you alert for signs of danger. Complex trauma explains why you were wound up, energetic, anxious, or irritable as a child and may still feel this way as an adult. Like someone anticipating a blow, your body and mind are wired for war.
-
Physical symptoms may include chronic back and neck pain, fibromyalgia, migraines, digestive problems, spastic colon or irritable bowel syndrome, allergies, thyroid and other endocrine disorders, chronic fatigue, and some forms of asthma. These symptoms may explain some of the remarkable increases in medical issues uncovered by Dr. Felitti in the original ACE study. For those with Mother Hunger, there is no body-based experience of comfort or safety, because the person designed to be our source of comfort became our source of fear.
-

[Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

My review on this is mixed. On one hand, I found it really validating to put a name to the feeling (even just reading the title helped me name the specific feeling of missing and longing for my mom when I became a mom), and the breaking down with thoughtful questions at the end of certain chapters was helpful. It was also helpful to have a continued emphasis on trauma and CPTSD informed therapy and treatment, alongside support building and other forms of nurturing relationships.

On the other hand, while the author repeatedly says that this isn’t meant to be a guide for parenting, this is a decent amount of parenting advice, with opinions loosely veiled as advice about sleep training, cosleeping, childcare, and breastfeeding. I read it to be well meaning, emphasizing nurturance and closeness, but it did rub me a bit the wrong way since I know parenting decisions can be highly personal and decided for a variety of reasons.

Also, while this can serve as an excellent starting point for those beginning to name their “mother hunger”, I did wish for more detail on what to do when instances of it pop up again (she mentions the typical reoccurrence during Mothers Day, for instance, but doesn’t necessarily address long-term actions). I thought this might be especially pertinent after her “Mothering With Mother Hunger” chapter, since the process of mothering a child and simultaneously ourself can also often lead to reliving trauma and confronting the vastness of difference between how you choose to parent vs. how you remember being parented. While her chapter focuses mainly on the newborn/early infancy stage, this retraumatization happens for every major childhood milestone after, too.

Overall, I found this helpful and affirming, and especially helpful as a starting point for both naming and starting to work through mother hunger. I will take her advice with a grain of salt, particularly where she is more opinionated with parenting choices and social issues, but overall found her to be a comforting voice.

[Julia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although the topic resonated a lot with me, this book left me without answers. It was very repetitive - I get it, we need nurturance, guidance and protection, oxytocin, etc etc. But there was very little useful information on how to heal from Mother Hunger. She offered very basic self-care tips (make myself some tea, really?) and the solution she recommended most often was therapy. I feel the target audience is wealthy white women who can afford to take time off to heal and pay therapists that were trained in fancy methods.
If you are beginning to have a look at what was missing in your childhood this book may offer insight, but I was a bit disappointed.

[Veronica · Rating 5 out of 5]

If the title sparks any kind of reaction in you, this book is for you. She explains attachment style, the three pillars of mothering (nurturing, protection, and guidance), and how to heal these wounds depending on what pillar you are missing in your relationship with your mother. Well researched, organized in a way that is easy to digest (though a lot of emotions may rise up to the surface as you are reading), and more helpful than I ever could have imagined.

[Alison Zaverl-Jylha · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that every woman should read. I’ve never been called out and validated so many times in the same paragraph throughout a book in my entire reading career. An emotional journey that allows you to start healing. I’d give this book 10 stars if it was an option.

[Emily Shore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I’ve waited my whole life for this book. Grateful for the fact that it exists and grateful that there isn’t anyone in my life (except my therapist) that would understand any of it. Here’s to hope and endurance and breaking the cycle and healing and rest. Just because it has always been does not mean it has to always be.