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

by Kelly McDaniel

Painful, shameful, or nonexistent maternal touch may lead to touch aversion in close adult relationships. Women talk about having automatic responses to romantic partners that seem to come from nowhere—like an allergic reaction. I call this involuntary reaction intimacy intolerance. When someone gets too close, intimacy intolerance causes you to feel a little sick. Their emotional proximity feels disgusting or irritating. In Naked in Public, Staci Sprout does a remarkable job of describing intimacy intolerance: “I usually hated touching other people. . . . Whenever I tried it, I felt an odd prickly sensation and an urgent impulse to jerk my hand away.” For Staci, touching someone created a “sour-hot feeling” that covered an “ever-yawning, excruciating maw of need.”14 If the concept of intimacy intolerance resonates for you, it may be that you feel hungry for a certain type of love but are mystified by what keeps you from having it. Maybe you find solace in fantasy—the chemical changes in your body that come with imagining a perfect lover are enough. If you go toward relationships, you may be drawn to avoidant partners or friends, because they won’t threaten your unconscious intimacy threshold. For you, avoidant partners and friends are better than people who suffocate you.