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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. The first two—nurturance and protection—are the most primitive needs little ones have from mothers. Guidance, the third element, comes later. If we are deprived of one or more of these developmental needs, we struggle with symptoms of insecure attachment as we mature.
Three
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.
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.
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.
Dr. Allan Schore, world leader in attachment theory, stresses the importance of the first 1,000 days, which encompass conception to age two. He calls these first days “the origin of the early forming subjective implicit self.”
The kind of care we received as infants and toddlers teaches us whether we are worthy, lovable, and safe. Truly, what I’ve found is that having an unkind or neglectful mother can be as damaging as having no mother at all.
In childhood, surrogate mothers may look a lot like cake, ice cream, or fairy tales. But eventually, vodka, drugs, or hasty, head-over-heels relationships take their place. In all stages of life, untreated Mother Hunger craves a quick fix for the empty hole lurking inside.
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
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.
Send colter
Emotional trauma is difficult to quantify for this exact reason. 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.
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Missing an emotional safety net, the developing young brain focuses on finding safety elsewhere instead of playing, relaxing, or bonding with others. In this way, an emotionally abusive mother distorts her daughter’s inner life, creating personality adaptations that may bring on future trouble. 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.
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Girls with Third-Degree Mother Hunger feel unsafe and act like it. Sometimes cold and brittle, other times childlike and docile, women with Third-Degree Mother Hunger have frozen, fractured emotional development. This explains why daughters of abusive mothers may be unpredictable or untrustworthy. Reacting to life with the mind of someone young and afraid is the legacy of abuse; not an indication of character or value.
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We know that childhood sexual abuse leads to many forms of addiction and self-destructive behavior. And more than the abuse itself, women mourn the fact that no one protected them. Their mothers didn’t help them or, in some cases, refused to believe them—particularly when the offending person was someone the mother loved. Mothers who turn the other way when their boyfriends, their husbands, or their own parents sexually violate their daughters are part of the abuse.
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You aren’t defective or broken.
Identify your primary missing maternal needs. Do you crave affection and quality time from one special someone? You need more nurturance. Are you routinely anxious and afraid? You need more protection. Do you feel uninspired or lost? You need guidance.
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