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

by Kelly McDaniel

Since the thinking brain, or neocortex, develops sometime after age three (when children start asking “Why?” a lot), logic isn’t available before then.9 We can think of it like this: For a baby, feelings are facts. If baby is afraid or hungry and a sensitive adult responds to her cues, all is well. If no one is there, all is not well. Separation from a familiar caregiver means danger.

Future babes

Given the science that informs us that little ones don’t have the ability to think like children or adults, it’s unfortunate how many misinformed parenting experts teach parents that babies can be manipulative. Manipulation is a higher thinking process that is not yet possible—and won’t be for years. 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. In essence, babies are sharing a brain with their mothers as they wait for the cognitive brain regions that govern logic and reason to develop.

Future babes

Sometimes caregivers fear that if they respond too often or too quickly to infant cues, they will spoil their baby. But the true meaning of spoil is to leave something on a shelf to rot. There is no such thing as spoiling a baby, but this widespread misinformation is everywhere. Tending to a baby’s needs for comfort, food, and touch builds belonging, love, and trust. These are essential human needs. When these needs are met at the developmentally appropriate time, later-stage tasks of socialization, learning, and individuating flow. Attunement builds a healthy, robust nervous system that will allow a child to know herself,

Future babes

Secure attachment allows maturation to flow. Independence is a by-product of healthy dependency needs that have been met during the most vulnerable months and years. Secure attachment is like having a safe place to live, an emotional place to call home. Children with secure attachment tend to be more curious and less aggressive than their insecurely attached peers. They are able to show empathy for others and cope with certain difficulties. Securely attached children go on to form close bonds throughout their life span with friends, lovers, and their own children.

Erica Komisar explains in detail the benefits for both mother and child to sleep close to one another (in the same room or bed, within sensory recognition of each other) for up to six months or a year. Komisar says that nighttime security is even more important than daytime security—especially when a mother has been gone all day.20

Future babes

Little ones are designed for survival, so they wake easily to co-regulate themselves with their mother. Sears explains that infants who wake up alone feel startled as they search for their mother. 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.

Future babes

For so many of the women I work with, returning home stirs up longing, anger, and hunger. It’s as if being close to Mom again reminds the body of rejection and longing. Gay says, “I start to crave foods, any foods. I get uncontrollable urges to binge, to satisfy the growing ache, to fill the hollowness of feeling alone around people who are supposed to love me.”

Relatable

women “tend” (cook for, groom, or stroke their offspring) and “befriend” (gather, talk, connect with other women) when frightened.

Tend or befriend

article titled “Sometimes You Make Your Rapist Breakfast: Inside the Controversial—and Often Confusing—‘Tending Instinct’ of Women,” she writes: You can only push a man off you so many times. You can only say “not now, no thanks, I don’t want to” so many ways. I, too, have had sex I didn’t want because sex was the least bad option. Sex was a known variable. Think of it as a harm reduction tactic. Fighting and screaming and kicking and yelling at a man? Unknown outcomes. Would he hit me back? Would he let me go? Would I fight and lose? If I lost, would he have sex with me anyway, only more violently?16 Korbel captures the essence of the appeasing response. Appeasing behavior may be less risky than fighting or running. So we can understand how surrendering to unwanted sexual aggression is about survival—a resourceful, preconscious harm-reduction tactic. As children, many of us learn to appease our mother as a harm-reduction tactic.

Sometimes you make your rapisy breakfast

Many sisters become adversaries as they individually survive a mother who acts like a child. When

Explains alot

At about six weeks gestation, the placenta connects mother to daughter. When a mother experiences fear, the cortisol released in her bloodstream crosses unfiltered to her baby. In this way, anxiety may first be experienced in utero. If you are reading this sentence with an “aha” feeling, perhaps anxiety that has been with you for a long time is making new sense.

Aha

other way around. As a mother and clinician, I’m not surprised by Komisar’s findings about ADHD and other behavior problems: “I have seen society increasingly devalue mothering while idealizing work. At the same time, I have seen an epidemic of troubled children who are being diagnosed and medicated earlier and earlier with ADHD, early aggression, and other behavioral and social disorders. Many people say these two phenomena are utterly unrelated. I believe they are connected.”

Parental seperation and adhd

Mothers may demand respect with fear-inducing or controlling behaviors. This is not maternal guidance. Control teaches compliance. Compliant daughters are at risk for becoming vulnerable women without healthy boundaries or self-awareness because they learned to appease their mothers.

Source