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

by Kelly McDaniel

Maternal love is our first experience of what love feels like, and the maternal care we receive informs how we feel about ourselves throughout life.

A mother can only give her child what she has.

Our first love, a mother’s love, teaches us how love will feel in the future.

If you are reading this book, it’s likely that sometimes you feel crazy, ashamed, or broken—but you aren’t. Mother Hunger is deeply misunderstood, and people who don’t have Mother Hunger simply can’t relate to what it feels like.

Injury aptly describes Mother Hunger, because living with it hurts—all the time. It’s like grief—complicated grief that comes from carrying an unacknowledged, invisible burden all by yourself.

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.

Mother Hunger is a heartbreak that touches everything in your world, particularly your relationships with oth...

To get an idea of this, think of your biological mother as your first home. Her body, embrace, and emotions were your first environment, inseparable from your newborn body and emotions.

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.

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.

In all stages of life, untreated Mother Hunger craves a quick fix for the empty hole lurking inside.

A daughter may grow up with motherless symptoms because she is missing her mother’s attention and attunement. Attention is essential to nurturing and protecting. To feel loved, children need their mother’s emotional attunement as well as her physical presence. The absence of maternal emotional availability directly impacts the quality of her care. Lack of maternal attunement happens for many reasons, such as work demands, smartphones and screens, various addictions, or poor health. A mother’s own unhealed psychological coping can impair her capacity for attention and attunement, removing her from the present moment and her daughter.

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.

a mother’s love is your first love, planting the seeds for how you feel about yourself, other people, and the world around you.

Asking for connection requires vulnerability, and emotional vulnerability isn’t tolerable for women with avoidant attachment.

Avoidantly attached women believe they are actually stronger and more independent than they are. They get bored easily and use their friends and partners to generate energy and activity to keep them engaged. For these reasons, women with avoidant attachment can take a long time to identify Mother Hunger. It generally takes a crisis for an avoidantly attached woman to access her sadness and vulnerability. The threat of a significant loss, such as a relationship that really matters to her or a career opportunity, touches her deep fears of abandonment and causes an avalanche of sorrow that may spur her toward healing.

Pleasing and appeasing is similar to a trauma response—it’s an automatic, unconscious reaction that can become an engrained personality trait.

Although a woman carrying this type of Mother Hunger can take care of herself, she is tired of doing it. She longs for someone to take control and relieve her of responsibility, someone to let her be the little girl she never got to be.

Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) differs from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because it is caused by repeated trauma.

As you heal, the emotions you weren’t allowed to feel as a little girl will be rising up.