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

by Kelly McDaniel

Women without maternal nurturance grow up hungry for both love and food and frequently confuse the two. In fact, loneliness triggers brain cravings similar to physical hunger.5 I look at maladaptive eating habits as signals of wordless despair. Eating patterns tell the story of early attachment, so I pay attention.

“Food became my comfort, my pleasure, and my stand-in for affection and touch. Touch on the inside, touch I could control.”6 Staci’s words reflect the way food becomes a primary relationship, standing in for maternal care.

“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.”

Food is a powerfully effective way to regulate emotions when human connection can’t.

caught with a secret sugar supply, some girls discover very young that food provides a virtual escape from intolerable feelings.

Restricting or overindulging is about longing: a longing to be cherished and safe. Both eating habits are forms of the fight-or-flight response. Without a sense of safety and belonging, fear is ever present, so undereating and overeating are ways to numb fear when there is nowhere to go. When food replaces maternal care, self-development may stop.

As well-practiced adults, women eat or restrict food in a mild trance, without any awareness of their childhood fear fueling the food bond. Maladaptive food patterns may continue as if they belong to someone else.

Her whole body reacts as if she is betraying her mother by telling me about her childhood. Her face flushes; she squirms and looks away. These are normal reactions many women experience as they remember maternal deprivation and begin to tell the truth.

Erotic affection between girls often has little to do with sexual orientation and frequently stems from touch deprivation. We are resourceful creatures, and one way or another, as we grow and develop, we find ways to meet essential human needs.

When maternal touch is disrespectful in any way, it leaves a lasting impact.

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.

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.

The psychobiological, social, and spiritual impact of growing up in patriarchal water means we swallow mainstream ideas about women without realizing it. Even when these ideas are damaging, we as women become versions of the gender stereotype. The way the culture looks at us is the way we see ourselves. The way the culture feels about us is the way we feel about ourselves. Internalizing patriarchal ideology isn’t a cognitive process. We don’t consciously wake up one day and decide to devalue ourselves. It’s much more insidious. We simply swim in feminine constructs that tell us how to behave, how to look, and who to love as we grow and develop. And sometimes we learn this from our mothers.

Dr. Oscar Serrallach describes the transmission of the mother wound by explaining the cultural forces that require women “to internalize the dysfunctional coping mechanisms learned by previous generations of women.” Serrallach describes the mother wound as “the pain and grief that grow in a woman as she tries to explore and understand her power and potential in a society that doesn’t make room for it.”

She describes our modern rape culture as “pornified culture” and explains how porn creates boys with less empathy and more likelihood of sexual aggression.10

As we grow, our personality develops in a type of defense mode. Defense mode may explain why some of us are angry, loud, and aggressive while others are furtive, hypervigilant, and withdrawn.

A personality of defense starts early. From a young age, we learn we aren’t safe because our body is an object that can be sexually exploited and violated. The sexual alarm system is a product of patriarchal culture.

The need to appease someone with power (perceived or real) is our biological freeze response in action—our adaptation to chronic, ongoing fear.

Her theory posits that fighting or fleeing are less advantageous for women who have babies and children depending on them. Women are therefore more at risk than males in terms of injury or dislocation when someone or something is dangerous. For this reason, she found that women “tend” (cook for, groom, or stroke their offspring) and “befriend” (gather, talk, connect with other women) when frightened.

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.

children need the protective presence of a consistent caregiver. Research shows that if a trusted adult soothes a child during adversity, the impact of distress is less damaging, and the event may not become an ACE.

Secure attachment happens gradually as trust grows in connection with predictable, warm care. If you didn’t have a sense of safety growing up, the separation anxiety that is evident in little ones might still be with you. You might feel a deep uneasiness when you are alone or when someone leaves.

The number of girls who feel “nervous, worried, or fearful” jumped by 55 percent from 2009 to 2014, and the percentage of girls experiencing depression rose from 13 percent to 17 percent.22 According to Damour’s research, this increase is not because we are better at detecting these problems than we used to be—it’s because we are seeing something new. The digital world has added new stress and anxiety for girls and their mothers.

Signs of missing maternal protection may look like: Learning difficulties or concentration problems Spacing out Anxiety and excessive need to please Perfectionism Coordination problems and compromised posture Bursts of rage or tears Stomachaches, digestive issues, and headaches

Although girls have more opportunity for independence, they still struggle with feeling safe, with body image, and with relationships. Sex education hasn’t changed much, except for the unfortunate reality that porn, as we know, is a new teacher.25 On the “digital street corner,” girls are learning that danger and sex go together. That strangulation is part of foreplay. That being hot is everything.

The severity of Mother Hunger is unique to each daughter, and the intensity of adaptations depends on the degree of missing maternal protection and the availability of alternate safe adults. In adolescence and adulthood, adaptations might look like constant low-grade depression or chronic anxiety. Attention problems, hyperactivity, and perfectionism are also evidence of Mother Hunger. So are addictive habits—addictions are a form of self-soothing and a resourceful way to avoid pain.

If you didn’t have adequate maternal protection, hopefully the anxiety and stress you live with makes more sense now. Protecting yourself for so many years takes a toll. Living with fear and anxiety wears down your immune system, leaving you vulnerable to physical symptoms like migraines, joint pain, bowel disorders, painful PMS, or autoimmune problems. You might be attracted to powerful people who are manipulative and perhaps dangerous. You might have addictions or compulsions.

Understanding how your symptoms are related to missing maternal protection may reduce your shame. Healing flows more easily without the added burden of shame, which is why if you struggle with addiction, addressing addictive behaviors is a powerful step in the right direction. Addiction always leads to shame, and shame interferes with the legitimate hurt that needs your care.

Eating patterns: Earning a mother’s approval by looking a certain way that required food restriction. Sometimes overeating is a way to show anger toward a controlling mother.

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.

Daughters who can’t turn to their mothers to talk about sex and ask questions, for whatever reason, may maintain a secret life, which is not only lonely but also a breeding ground for addictions and other harmful behaviors.

Or perhaps your mother needed you to rise above her and become something better. You had to be amazing so she could feel better about herself. She had little patience with your natural mistakes, because your behavior reflected her mothering ability. Her unlived life was yours to fulfill.

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 Overinvolvement with your own children, with periodic abandonment to take care of your mother instead Without healthy maternal guidance, it’s difficult to fully integrate and know your value and worth. Dr. Christiane Northrup writes, “Our culture gives girls the [false] message that their bodies, their lives, and their femaleness demand an apology.”15 This makes belonging a challenge.

Third-Degree Mother Hunger comes from having a compromised mother who frightened you during the years you depended on her. Instead of nurturing, protecting, or guiding you, she yelled, hit, shamed, or abandoned you. As a result, your relationship with yourself and others is devastated. Terrible mood swings startle you and anyone close to you. You have periodic bursts of energy but no direction for it. Nights are scary and sleep is difficult. Inside, you carry a haunting confusion about your basic needs and wants and a deep feeling of homelessness that creates a burning need for emotional escape.

When a mother’s love is threatening, your body remembers the pain at a molecular level. An abusive mother generates traumatic stress, because your coping capacity becomes overwhelmed and you are too young to protect yourself. Since a mother’s love is your primary defense from adversity, when she is the threat, her care is a profound relational betrayal.

I feel like I should be happy, but I’m not. I feel an ache and a deep, deep sorrow for what never was and will never be. It’s hard to remember and know that I’m lovable, even though I wasn’t loved. I feel profoundly sad and alone, while simultaneously celebrating my own ability to mother, love, nurture. It feels like a hidden aching and gaping wound that I should be over by now, but that I will carry within all the days of my life. Or this one: My own mother burned me at the stake and blames me for lighting the fire. Long, long story. I haven’t had contact in over a decade. I wish that pain would go away.

Since inadequate nurturance and protection changes brain structures, their absence is harmful. Lack of nurturance and protection is neglectful, and neglect is a form of emotional abuse. Neglect is sometimes a “quiet” form of abuse—it’s not obvious, because it happens privately. This explains why it can take decades to identify, understand, and recover from this type of emotional abuse.

when a mother treats her daughter as a friend, this is also a form of emotional abuse. The mother who tells her child, “You’re everything to me . . . I don’t know what I’d do without you,” isn’t mothering. She’s creating a confusing emotional bind for her child. A child hears these words and might feel special (I’m the favorite), which feels great at first but sets her up for disappointment and alienates her from the rest of the family. She might also feel afraid (Is Mom okay?) or excessively dutiful (I belong to Mom; it’s my job to protect her and keep her happy). This child may grow up to feel she’s betraying her mother if she has other interests or friends or wants to move away.

“You’re stupid” impact the body like a physical slap.

When a mother rejects or degrades her daughter, there may be no witness. Being left alone to make sense of the negative feelings intensifies the injury.

Emotionally abusive mothers rarely repair the hurt they cause, and the lack of acknowledgment is what causes an enduring psychological trauma.

But emotional abuse is psychologically traumatic because it betrays a fundamental role of parenting: it violates trust. Without the ability to trust a mother’s love, daughters have no idea how to love themselves.

For example, girls with abusive mothers have difficulty making friends. They struggle to trust. Prolonged activation of the stress response system (from lack of trust) disrupts developing brain architecture, making it difficult to manage emotions, moods, and thoughts. Girls with Third-Degree Mother Hunger feel unsafe and act like it.

Reacting to life with the mind of someone young and afraid is the legacy of abuse; not an indication of character or value.

Spanking is a shortcut, an emotional bypass from parental discomfort, anger, or helplessness. Parents justify spanking in all kinds of ways, but it is an abuse of power. Spanking leads to fear, aggression, humiliation, and withdrawal in children. Spanking a child is the opposite of nurturing, protecting, or guiding.

Violations of a sexual nature often lead to a full rejection of one’s sexuality, or risky sexual behavior.

Since a mother is our first intimate partner and she has access to our body at all times, her cruelty is a form of domestic violence. If she handles us aggressively or directs her rage at us, we experience unimaginable terror. Carrying symptoms like the victims of intimate partner violence, we struggle to make friends or find a place to belong. We feel inherently bad. Almost unanimously, victims of partner violence believe domestic abuse is their fault. Daughters of abusive mothers do too.

Little girls with abusive mothers rarely talk about the abuse. In fact, they generally don’t identify abusive maternal behavior at all. It just feels normal. Adaptations to intimate violence change the brain’s ability to make sense of what’s happening by prioritizing safety over learning and communicating.

Some professionals use the term pathological accommodation to describe what happens when a child learns to survive abuse. Accommodating and appeasing a frightening mother is an adaptation to inescapable fear. While tending to an abusive mother’s moods, a daughter loses access to her own sensations and agency.

Trauma bonds—strong emotional attachments between an abused person and her abuser—form when the human neuropathway for danger and attachment are activated simultaneously and damage the attachment system.22