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

by Kelly McDaniel

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.

A mother’s touch is as necessary as food. But when a mother’s touch is disrespectful or aggressive, it leaves a damaging impact that can last a lifetime.

The research suggests that parents who spank their children are actually unable to regulate their own emotions.

Parents justify spanking in all kinds of ways, but it is an abuse of power.

Carrying symptoms like the victims of intimate partner violence, we struggle to make friends or find a place to belong. We feel inherently bad.

While tending to an abusive mother’s moods, a daughter loses access to her own sensations and agency.

Disorganized attachment is the potent legacy of a harmful mother.