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February 16 - March 30, 2024
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.
Almost no one talks about girls and masturbation, yet this is one of the first and strongest substitutes little ones find to replace a mother’s touch. Self-stimulation, like thumb sucking, is a resourceful way to regulate fear when you’re hungry for comfort.
Not all maternal touch feels good. When mom’s touch is icky (sexual) or intrusive (aggressive), it’s tragic. To cope, daughters shut down the desire for human closeness. The shutdown response isn’t a decision. It’s a body-based reaction to violation.
When daughters experience inappropriate touch from their mothers, shame keeps them silent. As adults, these women feel very little desire to be close to their mothers. Driven by duty, they may remain helpful, loyal, and close, but relief comes when their mother dies.
Dr. Christiane Northrup’s groundbreaking book Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom linked father–daughter sexual abuse with future sex and love addiction. Similarly, in Women, Sex, and Addiction, author and therapist Charlotte Davis Kasl connected sexual abuse to addictive love and sex.
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. Perhaps getting angry with a father for our difficulties is easier than pointing to Mom because our culture allows us to identify men as abusive before women.
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.
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.
Inside each adult woman who did not have early maternal protection is a frightened little girl. Usually her anxiety is firmly packed down under layers of defensiveness. I call this defensiveness earned protection. Earned protection manifests in many different ways. Some girls are fierce. They have rapid movements, forceful voices, and frequent demands. Displays of dominance alert others to back off and be careful. On the other end of the spectrum, some girls appear submissive or compliant, their posture bent or unsteady. They may rely on others to make decisions for them.
Externally, she might seem strong. But underneath a carefully crafted veneer, her frozen personality parts wait for attention. One part is a frightened little girl who longs for maternal protection. Another part is an angry teenager who had to figure things out by herself.
Although a woman carrying this type of Mother Hunger can take care of herself, she is tired of doing it. She longs for someone to take control and relieve her of responsibility, someone to let her be the little girl she never got to be.
Women who grow up without maternal protection are accustomed to high levels of fear and anxiety.
Too often, hard to soothe infants are called “difficult” babies, and distressed toddlers get misguided labels like “terrible twos.” Little ones who cry are seen as manipulative or oppositional when they are simply communicating the only way they know how. Blaming young children for primitive emotions is a missed opportunity for attunement and connection.
But with children, sometimes we have this turned around—we expect a new baby to adapt to the environment, even if she’s clearly not doing well in it.
Most women I know keep the doors locked when we’re home alone, have our keys ready as we walk to the car, and avoid parking garages after dark. It’s scary living in a world where we are sexual prey.
Frightened mothers can communicate that danger is near without language. Researchers at the University of California–San Francisco found that infants “catch” the psychological residue of their mothers’ anxiety and distress.
Generational and environmental adversity compromises a woman’s ability to protect herself and any children she may have.
When mothers struggle for safety, so do their children. Daughters of frightened mothers search for protection where there isn’t any.
Toxic stress activates the immature immune system and can alter genetic makeup, leading to lifelong challenges with mental and physical health.
Forms of childhood adversity include racism, parental incarceration, acrimonious parental separations, having an addicted parent, living in foster care, and witnessing a mother being threatened. With over 17,000 participants, the study shows us that sustained stress during childhood causes biochemical changes in the brain and body, drastically increasing the risk of future mental illness and health problems, including substance abuse.
The ACEs study shows a common denominator in each measure of adversity: a lack of protection. Children without a protective caregiver suffer more than children who have one.
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.
Childhood trauma isn’t something you just get over as you grow up.
The most accurate predictor of a securely attached child is protective, sensitive caregiving during the first three years.
In preparation for birth, women need support and awareness to optimize relaxation and avoid unnecessary distress.
At about six weeks gestation, the placenta connects mother to daughter. When a mother experiences fear, the cortisol released in her bloodstream crosses unfiltered to her baby. In this way, anxiety may first be experienced in utero. If you are reading this sentence with an “aha” feeling, perhaps anxiety that has been with you for a long time is making new sense.
Newborn bodies and brains have not adjusted to relatively modern parenting arrangements that separate babies from their mothers for a long workday, a vacation, 10 hours of sleep, or even a medical emergency.
Separation is scary for infants and hard on mothers for a reason: survival.
Studies show that children under the age of three who are in daycare have higher levels of cortisol in their saliva than children at home with familiar care.
While little ones benefit from socialization in daycare and preschool, they aren’t psychologically or emotionally equipped for peer interactions before they are two years old.17 Peer play goes more smoothly when early attachment needs have been met. Attachment must precede socialization, not the other way around.
Little ones depend on their relationship with their mother to soothe anxiety and stress that comes with new experiences.
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.
In the first three years, encouraging dependency is an emotional investment in future independence and health. But when mothers miss this chance early on, many find themselves bewildered when their previously compliant two-year-old becomes an angry, withdrawn adolescent. Little ones who learn to rely on themselves for comfort and safety become guarded teenagers who are hard to reach.
Some mothers may easily step into the protective maternal role, but just as often, the intergenerational legacy of adversity, fear, and submission cripples a woman’s protective instincts, overriding her conscious capacity to keep herself or her baby safe.
She isn’t purposefully causing harm, but toxic stress damages the neurocircuitry for maternal behaviors. “In fact, mothers who suffer from postpartum depression have very high cortisol levels in response to their baby’s cries, which is like a PTSD response.”
An allomother may be biologically related or not, but is emotionally invested in the well-being of the child. Fathers, grandparents, sisters, aunts, and nannies can be allomothers.
Secure attachment forms inside daily interactions with the primary caregiver, mother or allomother.
Some studies show that financial stress can negatively impact mothering, so when a mother works to ease financial burdens, the overall result can positively impact her children—especially with support from a reliable allomother.
Komisar explains that children of “two-parent working middle-class and upper-middle class families do less well in terms of their mental health when both parents work. . . . They feel their parent’s detachment and interpret it as rejection.”
Protective mothers help their little ones with separation anxiety by making up for lost togetherness in nourishing ways. Putting away phones and playing right when getting home helps reestablish connection and trust after hours of being apart.
Physical proximity at night promotes sensory connectedness, allowing sleep hours to fortify the baby’s immature immune system and developing neurological health.
Sleep time shouldn’t be stressful for little ones. Like mealtimes, it’s a chance for connection and warmth and safety.
Girls need a safe haven to return to after a day at school or time with friends—a place where they can make mistakes without punishment, learn boundaries without fear, and relax from the external pressures of growing up. Daughters do best when mothers create a secure environment with age-appropriate boundaries.
In Under Pressure, Lisa Damour, Ph.D., takes a close look at the rising number of girls who struggle with anxiety and mood problems. 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.
The digital world has added new stress and anxiety for girls and their mothers.
When girls lack maternal protection, their adaptations to fear become more noticeable as they reach school age. Ongoing fear creates symptoms of traumatic stress.
Often, unprotected children appear overly energetic or day-dreamy (dissociated) while they are at school or daycare.
Hyperactivity or being tuned out is simply a way of regulating a frightened brain. 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
