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

by Kelly McDaniel

Mothers who provide adequate nurturance, protection, and guidance create securely attached daughters who navigate life’s challenges without unnecessary distress. But the myth that all mothers love their daughters erases the truth that many women know: maternal love didn’t feel good. The fantasy of maternal love did not apply. The myth creates confusion for many daughters who never knew this kind of tenderness.

Truly, what I’ve found is that having an unkind or neglectful mother can be as damaging as having no mother at all.

Mother Hunger comes from unacknowledged damage to nurturance, protection, or guidance. Mothers who recognize their mistakes and make repairs keep bonding secure.

Women who grow up without maternal protection are accustomed to high levels of fear and anxiety.

Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) differs from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because it is caused by repeated trauma. When little ones endure parental abuse, the incidents are rarely a singular event, and the childhood trauma is ongoing. The prolonged nature of this kind of adversity creates challenging, enduring symptoms that may not go away, because living with constant fear changes the brain during rapid growth periods. In Judith Herman’s research on complex post-traumatic stress disorder, she documents adults receiving psychiatric treatment, noting that “survivors of childhood abuse display significantly more insomnia, sexual dysfunction, dissociation, anger, suicidality, self-mutilation, drug addiction, and alcoholism than other patients.”

If you grew up with a mother who was cruel and frightening, her behavior required your autonomic nervous system to stay in overdrive. Under constant threat, developing brain pathways meant for social behavior took a back seat to the pathways meant for safety. Unused neurons became weaker and less able to carry signals that govern attention and mood regulation. At the same time, pathways designed for self-preservation gained strength to keep you alert for signs of danger. Complex trauma explains why you were wound up, energetic, anxious, or irritable as a child and may still feel this way as an adult. Like someone anticipating a blow, your body and mind are wired for war.

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

Obviously, we can’t see an injury to the mind or spirit the way we can see a cut or bruise. 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.

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.

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

Dissociating might feel like tunnel vision, a hazy sense of time, a tingling in the ears, or a dreamlike sense of being someone else or somewhere else.

Dissociating protected you when you needed it, but the habit makes past events difficult to recall.

Sometimes, a mother’s behavior and her lack of remorse is so painful that it requires you to separate from her. “Divorcing” Mom is a last resort that’s not about a solution for Mother Hunger—it’s more a survival strategy. You simply can’t allow yourself to have continued exposure to her.