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

by Kelly McDaniel

Emotional outbursts are common for all children trying to regulate their developing nervous systems, but for a child already stressed, fatigue or hunger can quickly escalate to rage or despair. Researchers call this phenomenon kindling.

Kindling explains how a child or adult can seem fine one minute and outraged or fearful the next.

Misogyny explains self-hate and body hate. The sexual alarm system explains sexual fear. Mix these two powerful forces together and we have a potent cocktail that damages sexual development for women.

Although girls have more opportunity for independence, they still struggle with feeling safe, with body image, and with relationships.

Sex education hasn’t changed much, except for the unfortunate reality that porn, as we know, is a new teacher.25 On the “digital street corner,” girls are learning that danger and sex go together. That strangulation is part of foreplay. That being hot is everything.

Hotness as a virtue shows up when female role models demonstrate sexual “empowerment” by crotch grabbing, pole dancing, and gestures that seem t...

A double bind is an impossible situation where all the choices lead to negative outcomes. I found four distinct beliefs that emerge for women from this double bind: If I am sexual, I am bad. I must be good to be worthy of love. I am not really a woman unless someone desires me sexually or romantically. I must be sexual to be lovable.

These beliefs teach us that to be loved we must be sexy. But if we’re too sexy, we’re bad. Only good girls are lovable, but if you want love, you must be sexually desirable. These four beliefs create a psychological impasse that freezes healthy sexual development and sets the stage for love and sex to become painful or addictive habits rather than expressions of joy and pleasure.

In fact, as Orenstein eloquently explains in her TED talk, girls don’t generally consider their own sexual pleasure as a priority. If the par...

Mothers often land on extreme ends of the sexual protection spectrum: either overprotective or underprotective.

Overprotective mothers teach their daughters to be afraid of boys and sex.

Underprotective mothers turn the other way when their daughters need help. Underprotective mothers don’t set curfews or limit exposure to technology. They may sacrifice their daughters to fathers, brothers, and uncles.

When men become fathers, their unexamined beliefs about women, gender, and sexuality may not help.

In a recent research experiment, a mom spent seven days online pretending to be an 11-year-old girl. She uploaded a generic photo with a caption reading, “v excited to see my friends this weekend at carly’s party! Ilysm!!” Within minutes after posting the material, this pseudo 11-year-old had 7 video calls, text-chats with 17 men, and seen the genitals of 11 of those men.

Sloane Ryan, who runs the special projects team at Bark, a tech company committed to child safety, reports that in 2018, Bark alerted the FBI to 99 child predators, and in 2019, the number is more than 300 and growing.

To put it very simply, unprotected access to the open Internet isn’t safe for children.

When daughters who are still little girls are put in a position to care for their siblings, they find themselves face-to-face with adult responsibilities they aren’t ready for and didn’t choose.

Furthermore, when a child is burdened with too much of her mother’s work, siblings are robbed of the chance to be siblings. One becomes the caretaker, carrying the load of responsibility, while the younger siblings feel controlled, jealous, or victimized.

The adversity children face doesn’t have to be severe to create deep physiological and psychological changes that can lead to Mother Hunger. The severity of Mother Hunger is unique to each daughter, and the intensity of adaptations depends on the degree of missing maternal protection and the availability of alternate safe adults.

In adolescence and adulthood, adaptations might look like constant low-grade depression or chronic anxiety. Attention problems, hyperactivity, and perfectionism are also evidence of Mother Hunger. So are addictive habits—addictions are a form of self-soothing and a resourceful way to avoid pain.

If you didn’t have adequate maternal protection, hopefully the anxiety and stress you live with makes more sense now. Protecting you...

Living with fear and anxiety wears down your immune system, leaving you vulnerable to physical symptoms like migraines, joint pain, bowel disorde...

You might be attracted to powerful people who are manipulative an...

Addiction always leads to shame, and shame interferes with the legitimate hurt that needs your care.

Addiction may begin as a way to appease a mother and adapt to her vulnerability. The addictive behavior begins with the innocent hope that If I can simply do the right thing (say the right thing, be the right thing), she will protect and love me. I can calm down.

Addiction is an attempt to regulate fear and despair—fear of being unlovable or alone, fear that grows without a fundamental sense of safety.

Love addiction: Earning maternal love unconsciously with romantic partners. Love addiction may include an insatiable craving for physical touch. Sometimes this can lead to a sexual addiction.

Eating patterns: Earning a mother’s approval by looking a certain way that required food restriction. Sometimes overeating is a way to show anger toward a controlling mother.

Working too much: Compulsive busyness might have gained a mother’s approval as a child. As an adult, it might offer you the feeling of sa...

Exercising too much: Working out to the point of injury and yet being unable to rest is...

Dreams are windows into the soul, and without fail, women who suffer a lack of maternal protection have nightmarish sleep patterns and dreams.

Women who didn’t feel safe as little girls dream of homes that are flooding, burning, or infested with rodents. Inside the house, they are trapped and alone. There is no comfort.

A mother raising a daughter is never really off-duty. She guides by example, teaching her daughter to be gentle and strong, to love others without giving herself away, and to care for her female body. A mother who knows how to rest and care for herself teaches her daughter that she is worthwhile and important.

Depending on the decade, mothers learned that formula was the best nutrition for their baby and the cry-it-out method was the way to teach independence. Generations of well-meaning mothers have learned to ignore their own instincts, deferring to the “experts” as they navigate the emotions that come with motherhood.

For maternal guidance to be effective, there must first be a trusted bond. For daughters who missed out on early maternal nurturance or protection, the important role of maternal guidance is compromised.

Daughters who learn from an early age to “suck up” separation anxieties or defend themselves have been going it alone for a long time. Many have a hard time when a mother suddenly wants to be more involved.

Conflict is natural in this scenario: A mother wants to help but feels unappreciated when her efforts aren’t well received. A daughter gets angry when...

Control teaches compliance. Compliant daughters are at risk for becoming vulnerable women without healthy boundaries or self-awareness because they learned to appease their mothers.

Maternal guidance is a sacrifice of time, wisdom, and energy with no guarantee that a daughter will appreciate the effort. In fact, mothers who look for gratitude or affirmation from their daughters place an unnecessary burden on girls as they develop a sense of who they are.

Mothers who use their daughters for friendship not only misuse their power—they avoid growing up. They take a shortcut to adulthood. Rather than face their own insecurities and risk bonding with adult women (who might judge or reject them), these mothers bask in the easy proximity, vulnerability, and admiration of their daughters.

But the idea that mom and daughter could be best friends ignores the power imbalance between them. A daughter loves her mother but needs her differently than a friend. She needs her mother’s nurturance, protection, and guidance—a job description way beyond friendship.

Enmeshment is what happens when a parent manipulates a child to meet his or her own needs.

Dr. Ken Adams further adapts the concept of enmeshment as covert or emotional incest in his book Silently Seduced. Covert incest happens when an enmeshing parent treats a child as a partner. In this way, a psychological marriage forms between parent and child, where the child feels undue loyalty to her parent.

When a mother’s care is too intense, an enmeshed daughter caters to her mother’s moods, needs, and desires while losing the chance to know her own.

If enmeshment describes your upbringing, I want you to know that it’s normal to feel used and resentful. You are tired. You may feel like you have already been married, so you avoid intimate relationships.

If you do commit, it’s common to pick uninspiring partners—in this way, you keep the primary bond with Mom intact. Herein is a loss of choice. Your body is making decisions for you without your cognitive awareness.

As you recognize the legacy of enmeshment, you can move away from the duty of being your mother’s source and reclaim your own authority.

Each daughter is wired to mirror her mother, absorbing her mother’s thoughts, emotions, and dreams into herself.

When a mother behaves in troublesome ways (like conducting an affair, sharing the details with her daughter, and manipulating her into participating), a daughter’s psyche mirrors the experience. Such mirroring creates guilt and shame that doesn’t belong to her.

When a person behaves in shameless ways, disowned shame often attaches to someone else.