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

by Kelly McDaniel

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.

What I’ve found is that mothering requires three essential elements: nurturance, protection, and guidance.

For example, 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.

Mother Hunger is a term I created to describe what it feels like to grow up without a quality of mothering that imprints emotional worth and relational security.

Many of us mistake Mother Hunger for a craving for romantic love. But in truth, we are longing for the love we didn’t receive during our formative moments, months, and years.

Mother Hunger is deeply misunderstood, and people who don’t have Mother Hunger simply can’t relate to what it feels like. This, of course, leaves us feeling alone with all our confusing emotions and behaviors.

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.

Emotions are stored in the body and create a certain reality or belief system: The world is safe and so am I or The world is scary and I’m all alone. Stored sensations like these become implicit memories. Unlike explicit memory that is conscious and has language, implicit memory is unconscious and has none. Implicit memories reside deep within the limbic structures of the brain, silently whispering messages of safety or danger to the rest of the body.

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.

Neuroscience informs us that the brain doesn’t differentiate emotional pain from physical pain. The body can’t tell the difference between a broken bone and a broken heart.

If maternal care is compromised during the first three years, this lack of nurturance is heartbreaking for a baby.

The frightened or lonely toddler within follows us into adulthood, wreaking havoc on our bodies, relationships, and careers.17 This early broken heart is the root of Mother Hunger.

Mother Hunger—yearning for maternal love—can come from well-meaning mothers who could not be there or from mothers who were there and wanted to love but did not have the proper infrastructure for attachment programmed into their own psyches.

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.

A daughter may grow up with motherless symptoms because she is missing her mother’s attention and attunement. Attention is essential to nurturing and protecting. To feel loved, children need their mother’s emotional attunement as well as her physical presence. The absence of maternal emotional availability directly impacts the quality of her care.

Mothers are first daughters, and they may be living with their own unidentified and untreated Mother Hunger. Every mother is carrying the resources, beliefs, and traumas of her maternal ancestors.

Most of us are trained to be good daughters, and we minimize our mother’s behavior no matter how much it hurt.

When we smile at someone, their mirror neurons for smiling fire up, stimulating a chemical reaction in their brain that releases dopamine and serotonin, hormones that increase happiness and reduce stress. Likewise, when we see someone smile, it fires up our own mirror neurons for smiling.

In recent interviews, former surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy discusses the toxic nature of loneliness. He explains that ongoing loneliness creates a “chronic stress state” that in turn damages the immune system; creates inflammation, heart problems, depression, and anxiety; and increases the likelihood of premature death. “Chronic loneliness is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day,” according to Dr. Murthy.

Adapting to loneliness too early in life leaves a deep hole where love and connection should have been. We’re without an internal compass for love and life, muddling along with brains adapted to loneliness and unprepared for healthy relationships.

Without attunement, a baby can’t tolerate her mother’s proximity. It is not enough that her mother is physically there; the baby needs her to be emotionally there too.

It’s safe to say that separations that regularly create infant distress are problematic. Nothing prepares an infant for the isolation of a crib when she’s used to the sound of her mother’s heartbeat. Babies don’t understand that mom needs to go on a business trip or that she promised dad a date night. When a baby is separated from her mother for too long, unless there is a nurturing, familiar caregiver to take her place, the primitive brain registers a threat.

baby without her mother may feel a threatening loss that jump-starts her nervous system by releasing adrenaline. Crying, shaking, or screaming are signs of a distressed baby with too much adrenaline in her system; this is an infant in a fight-or-flight state. Fight-or-flight hormones are not meant for babies.

It is a travesty of medicine that some experts warn parents that crying babies are being manipulative. Ignorance like this may account for the widespread number of adults with insecure attachment.

Missing maternal care demands a substitute—someone who can take over as the primary caregiver. When a sensitive and reliable alternate caregiver is available, such as a partner, a full-time nanny, or a grandparent, infants and toddlers can benefit from relational security even when their mothers aren’t available.

Babies who don’t cry or fuss are often called “good” babies. “Good” babies sleep through the night and don’t bother their caregivers. I feel sad when I hear parents speak this way. Sleep patterns have nothing to do with being a “good” or “bad” baby. Infant cries aren’t signs of poor character. Biology fuels crying to bring a caregiver close—babies cry because this is how they communicate. Communication is central to bonding. And bonding is core to survival.

While some babies are born with a peaceful or quiet temperament, the idea that a “good” baby is a quiet baby is uninformed and unkind. Expecting a baby to sleep a full night without needing her mother is an unfortunate misunderstanding of infant development and parental responsiveness.

Babies without sensitive, responsive nurturance may eventually stop crying when they need something. Constant crying is too hard on a vulnerable little body. Crying cessation is an example of adapting to compromised care. So, it’s possible that a quiet baby might be a resigned baby.

Sleep training experts argue that infants can self-soothe, but they demonstrate a profound lack of neurobiological accuracy. This is such harmful information for new parents who are trying to do the right thing for their little ones. Infants can’t self-soothe. Self-soothing is a sophisticated higher function that develops much later in life. In fact, most adults can’t self-soothe. And why do adults who prefer sleeping with a partner expect a baby to sleep alone?

Anything that looks like self-soothing, such as thumb sucking, is purely auto-regulation, a scientific term for coping with isolation. Self-soothing, or auto-regulation, is what we do in a pinch.

Often parents hide or throw away these early attachment substitutes in an attempt to make their child more independent—which is simply uninformed and heartbreaking—and leaves a deep mark of mistrust.

This is understandable. Infant care is challenging, frustrating, and hard, so while taking a shortcut makes sense, it may backfire.

Too much “self-soothing” sets up a need for other auto-regulatory substitutes (sugar, alcohol, fantasy, sex) as a child grows up, because she is learning that she must meet her own needs instead of resting in the comfort of her caregiver.

Milk and mother bring pleasure, and we learn that a full belly, our mother’s touch, her voice, and her smell are the same. This is how human connection gets associated with pleasure so that we want more of it. Hunger and bonding are inextricably biologically linked.

Categorically, women with Mother Hunger struggle with both food and relationships. I have never seen one problem without the other. It’s just a matter of which hurts more.

From early nurturance experiences, food and love become linked...

Warm satisfaction and pleasure may be linked for you with the physical sensation of fullness, but not with human contact. Food brings relief from pain, but a relationship doesn’t. This is how we fall in love with food.

In Geneen Roth’s transformative book When Food Is Love, she states that “many of us have been using food to replace love for so many years that . . . we wouldn’t recognize love if it knocked us over.”

When maternal nurturance is compromised, food provides the first sense of real comfort. Food rescues a hungry heart.

Women with Mother Hunger are conflicted about eating because maternal deprivation required substitute comfort. Some avoid meals and restrict calories to feel strong, visible, or safe. Starving is one of the most basic ways to compensate for feeling helpless. Others are more inclined to overindulge, following the inner voice promising that pizza will make everything okay. Overeating and undereating are effective ways to mask internal distress and numb the void where maternal nurturance fell short.

Hunger is a human experience. So are hunger pains. 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.

Similarly, in the powerful memoir Hunger, Roxane Gay discusses the connection between food and love. She shares how visiting her family triggers powerful cravings for food: “I am so much more than hungry when I am home. I am starving. I am an animal. I am desperate to be fed.”

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

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. Hidden beneath the urge to eat or starve is a little one waiting for love and protection.

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.

One moment, she was her mother’s best friend, and the next, she somehow made her mad.

Babies need maternal affection the way plants need water: without it, they wilt. If mom is not nurturing, resourceful infants and girls find other ways to meet this primal need. Little girls are comfort-seeking missiles, and if they are lucky, they cuddle safely with siblings, other mothers, fathers, grandparents, stuffed animals, and pets—someone or something warm and soft.

In Being There, Erica Komisar writes about the importance of transitional objects: “Respect your child’s needs for blankets, stuffed animals, and/or pacifiers which represent you and the security you provide in your absence. . . . If your child naturally takes to a transitional object, it will be easier for you to leave for short periods of time.”

Little girls without maternal affection are especially vulnerable to those who might take advantage of them. They don’t recognize inappropriate touch, because it’s better than no touch. In this way, early sexual abuse may go decades without discovery.

Like food, orgasm medicates emotional starvation.