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

by Kelly McDaniel

But when a mother is the source of fear, her love is the traumatic event. And there is no way to make sense of this. Danger fuses with love. Instincts for self-preservation surrender to the overarching need for bonding, creating what’s known as a betrayal bond with the mother. When a mother’s love is threatening, your body remembers the pain at a molecular level. An abusive mother generates traumatic stress, because your coping capacity becomes overwhelmed and you are too young to protect yourself. Since a mother’s love is your primary defense from adversity, when she is the threat, her care is a profound relational betrayal. To bond with an unkind mother, our merciful imagination works overtime to create a different mother from the one we have. We create one who loves us, one who is taking care of us, one who isn’t betraying our vulnerability. Our brain designs a different mother to help us cope with constant fear. Sadly, in service to bonding, these necessary brain changes create long-term personality problems. Surviving Third-Degree Mother Hunger may have left you with automatic dissociative patterns, chronic shame, and the propensity to land in relationships with others who betray you. Acknowledging Abuse Describing an abusive mother is not easy. We don’t like to think of mothers who hurt their children. The idea is so abhorrent that our collective denial protects us from the knowledge that it happens. Periodically, we read tragedies of maternal neglect in the news or ...