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

by Kelly McDaniel

Mother Hunger can be healed without your mother’s physical presence or recognition of your sorrow. Mother Hunger doesn’t mean you want to be a mother or need to be close to your mother.

Whether your mother is alive or not, healing involves replacing what was lost during your formative years.

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.

mothering requires three essential elements: nurturance, protection, and guidance.

without early maternal nurturance, we grow up hungry for touch and belonging. Without early maternal protection, we are constantly anxious and afraid. Without maternal guidance, we lack an internal compass directing our choices. These are the symptoms of Mother Hunger.

Mother Hunger is a term I created to describe what it feels like to grow up without a quality of mothering that imprints emotional worth and relational security.

Mother Hunger feels like an emptiness in the soul that is hard to describe because it may set in during infancy or before language forms and become part of how you always feel. 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.

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.

For an infant, a mother’s body is the natural habitat that regulates breathing, body temperature, sleep rhythms, and heart rate. Nature’s design is for her to stay close so that your development goes smoothly.

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.

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.

Early memories are dissociated from consciousness, but they direct our moods and our health throughout life.

Neuroscience informs us that the brain doesn’t differentiate emotional pain from physical pain. The body can’t tell the difference between a broken bone and a broken heart. An infant who is hungry or lonely feels pain.

We can’t expect infants and children not to have these needs simply because they are inconvenient for us to meet. The cost of ignoring them is too great. As Erica Komisar points out, “We want to eradicate mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and violence in children and young adults, but we don’t really want to look too deeply at the root of the problem.”15 If we look too closely, major changes would be required of us to remedy systemic issues of parental leave and misogynistic life forces that objectify and dis-empower women.

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, and careers.

Daughters of compromised mothers cling to hope—hope that the mother they have will become the mother they need. Enduring hope creates a pathological fantasy that keeps women trapped in cycles of disappointment and grief. Choices feel more like compulsions. Decision-making is based on external pressures rather than internal values.

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.

Mothers are first daughters, and they may be living with their own unidentified and untreated Mother Hunger. Every mother is carrying the resources, beliefs, and traumas of her maternal ancestors. And for each woman, “the loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy.”

Identifying Mother Hunger is about healing unmet essential needs now that you are an adult. As you go through the concepts in this book, you may vacillate between feeling angry with your mother and feeling like you’re betraying her by reading this. Most of us are trained to be good daughters, and we minimize our mother’s behavior no matter how much it hurt. On the other hand, you may want to blame your mother. Blame is a natural stage of grieving and a very normal part of Mother Hunger, but it’s a terrible place to get stuck. If you find yourself unable to move past blame, it might be a sign that you need more support for healing this wound.

Protection begins in utero and continues for a long time, as daughters require maternal protection from forces that devalue and violate girls.

mistakes don’t create Mother Hunger. Mother Hunger comes from unacknowledged damage to nurturance, protection, or guidance. Mothers who recognize their mistakes and make repairs keep bonding secure.

ongoing loneliness creates a “chronic stress state” that in turn damages the immune system; creates inflammation, heart problems, depression, and anxiety; and increases the likelihood of premature death. “Chronic loneliness is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day,” according to Dr. Murthy.

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.

this fractured connection with the most important person in your life leaves you feeling wrong or bad—and vulnerable to addictive cravings, mood swings, isolation, and shame. Many women share with me how well-meaning friends, spiritual directors, and mental health providers don’t understand this pain. In fact, some actively discourage discussing it. It’s no wonder that you might feel disloyal or ungrateful if the topic of your mother comes up. When there isn’t a safe place to talk about your loss, grief gets stuck in your body.

The emotions that come with Mother Hunger include common human feelings of sadness, anxiety, or confusion. These universal feelings usually find relief in relationships with friends and partners. But Mother Hunger complicates bonding with others, so unfortunately, relationships don’t always bring relief. For this reason, it’s easy to get stuck. Mother Hunger thrives and endures in a climate of loneliness, fear, and shame. These stressful emotions regularly need addictive relief, which is why, for so many, food, sex, love, work, exercise, or spending can become addictive.

Critical things were missing from your formative caregiving environment. Years of embedded emotions are going to find their way to the surface now as your body’s wisdom takes over. With a name for your heartache, new strength is on the horizon.

In the absence of a steady, nurturing, protective adult, early attachment lessons can lead to insecurity. Mother Hunger is a term that describes what adult insecure attachment style feels like and what happens when essential elements of maternal care are missing. Understanding the root cause of insecure attachment directs healing and increases the possibility for forming secure attachment in adulthood.

Peaceful, responsive interactions between a mother and her baby stimulate the infant brain’s reward center, activating dopamine, serotonin, and other neurotransmitters that make life feel good. The more snuggling there is in a baby’s world, the more receptive her brain will be to love and other happy feelings as she grows. In the first 18 months of her life, her rapidly growing sensory neurons are silently learning from her mother’s responsive proximity.

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. Physical proximity and sensitive interactions with the mother or primary caregiver support the biological processes that allow the brain to develop optimally.

Conflict brings a chance to learn something new about how we bond, what we need, and how others interpret our behaviors. But many of us shy away from the wisdom embedded in conflict because we don’t have the tools to understand our own troubling moods or fervent jealousy. We simply don’t know why we feel the way we do.

Without attunement, a baby can’t tolerate her mother’s proximity. It is not enough that her mother is physically there; the baby needs her to be emotionally there too.

Current research shows us that by her third month, a baby girl is mimicking her mother’s sounds and expressions.

Secure attachment comes from a relational, dependable back-and-forth between mother and child, implanting the belief that relationships ease pain.

Lack of nurturance damages brain circuits meant for connection and strengthens circuits designed for preservation. In this way, insecure attachment is set up for potential, ongoing loneliness. Insecure attachment explains the common experience many of us share—the craving for something or someone to ease the pain of isolation.

Without healthy maternal nurturance, little girls may grow up with an implicit, embodied sense that I’m alone, and it’s my fault. Thoughts like these create shame, a self-loathing that gets in the way of self-care, healthy relationships, and genuine moments of joy.

Women with avoidant attachment easily miss cues for closeness from others and are frustrated when those around them need reassurance, judging them as needy and inferior. Judgment is a psychological adaptation sheltering the tender attachment injury underneath. This self-preservation strategy creates a false sense of power, upsetting the balance in any relationship. Because these avoidant strategies are primitive implicit adaptations to unbearable emotional pain, they are largely unconscious, causing confusion for women when friends or partners point them

I like the term nursing better than breastfeeding. Nursing is nurturing. Nursing includes cuddling, eye contact, rocking, singing, and bottle feeding; anything that keeps oxytocin flowing and allows bonding and attachment to progress.

When mother rats frequently lick and groom their pups, genes turn on that protect the little animals from future stress. This early maternal protection lasts into adulthood. When babies are deprived of such care, however, the same genes remain dormant.7 Thus, early maternal care permanently alters brain regions that regulate stress reactivity.

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.

“The mother’s emotions, such as fear, anger, love, [and] hope, among others, can biochemically alter the genetic expression of the offspring.”

“When your grandmother was five months pregnant with your mother, the precursor cell of the egg you developed from was already present in your mother’s ovaries. This means before your mother was even born, your mother, your grandmother, and the earliest traces of you were all in the same body.”

Self-soothing is an advanced skill that comes later and flows naturally after bonding is secure.

Too much “self-soothing” sets up a need for other auto-regulatory substitutes (sugar, alcohol, fantasy, sex) as a child grows up, because she is learning that she must meet her own needs instead of resting in the comfort of her caregiver.

When separation happens too often and too long, the infant’s body understands that things are really bad, and the freeze response, designed to buffer pain and fear, takes over. The freeze response is a step down the brain stem from protest efforts like crying or screaming. When this lower system is engaged, the baby gets quiet and sleepy. Breathing slows down. Her body may sag, and she may appear visibly resigned. A freeze response might look like a “good” baby, but it is really a baby learning to give up. She is learning that her needs won’t be met, that human connection can’t be trusted. This painful lesson won’t unfold well as she gains maturity.

Categorically, women with Mother Hunger struggle with both food and relationships. I have never seen one problem without the other. It’s just a matter of which hurts more. From early nurturance experiences, food and love become linked in implicit memory.

If hunger cries were often ignored during your infancy or toddler years, or your mom didn’t enjoy feeding you, or the others who fed you didn’t really know how, the pleasure of bonding was compromised. Warm satisfaction and pleasure may be linked for you with the physical sensation of fullness, but not with human contact. Food brings relief from pain, but a relationship doesn’t. This is how we fall in love with food.

There it is—the implicit belief a child creates when maternal nurturance is inadequate: I’m not wanted. This belief becomes part of her internal, unconscious love map that will guide her life and self-image.

When maternal nurturance is compromised, food provides the first sense of real comfort. Food rescues a hungry heart. Perhaps this explains why, for many of us, eating is much more than a simple response to being hungry. We eat when we’re lonely, stressed, or afraid. We eat when we’re bored, tired, or ashamed. Eating rituals are windows into the soul. If you want to know yourself more deeply, notice how and when you eat.

Others are more inclined to overindulge, following the inner voice promising that pizza will make everything okay. Overeating and undereating are effective ways to mask internal distress and numb the void where maternal nurturance fell short.