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Every mother is carrying the resources, beliefs, and traumas of her maternal ancestors.
And for each woman, “the loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy.”20
“One of the best things each of us can do—not only for ourselves, but also for our children and grandchildren—is to metabolize our pain and heal our trauma.”
well-trained trauma-sensitive attachment therapist
Mother Hunger is a relational wound that wants relational repair. To avoid getting stuck in despair, it’s essential to have a trustworthy guide.
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.
If your first experience of love is positive, other relationships often are too. If not, broken maternal attachment sets the stage for all other relationships in your life.
When there isn’t a safe place to talk about your loss, grief gets stuck in your body.
Recognizing what you had and what you lost directs the path toward reclaiming what you need.
You simply can’t heal what you can’t see.
Mother Hunger is a term that describes what adult insecure attachment style feels like and what happens when essential elements of maternal care are missing.
Babies are bonding machines, biologically designed to stay close to a primary caregiver. If a baby or child isn’t thriving, it may not mean something is wrong with them. Rather, it can be an indication that something is absent in the caregiving environment.
The more snuggling there is in a baby’s world, the more receptive her brain will be to love and other happy feelings as she grows. In the first 18 months of her life, her rapidly growing sensory neurons are silently learning from her mother’s responsive proximity.
In this way, a mother’s love is the foundation for a brain that fundamentally trusts or mistrusts human connection.
Because portions of our limbic brain, specifically the amygdala where emotions are processed, are functioning at birth, initial human interactions are very important. Even as infants, we capture sensations about the environment (safety, belonging, joy, stress) in our implicit memory. Implicit memory is a primitive part of our innate intelligence, teaching us about safety and love before higher cortical areas of the brain develop and help us understand reality. From the last trimester of pregnancy through a baby’s second year of life, the brain doubles in size. During this time of rapid growth,
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Young, developing children do not have the capacity to regulate emotions by themselves. They learn this from the care they receive.
When we gain insight into our body’s sensations and pay attention to our feelings, we have more control over our choices and behaviors. This
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.
they make timely repairs when they miss a cue for connection.
The quality and presence of the maternal gaze is part of this psychobiological process. So we can understand how lack of maternal attunement is a form of early adversity.
Attunement is the invisible labor of maternal
care.
A tuned-in mother observes what calms her baby. A
Attunement is a verb and an active expression of love.
Tending to a baby’s needs for comfort, food, and touch builds belonging, love, and trust.
Attunement builds a healthy, robust nervous system that will allow a child to know herself, explore the world, and form happy connections with others in the future.
Secure attachment comes from a relational, dependable back-and-forth between mother and child, implanting the belief that relationships ease pain.
Raising a securely attached child is the magic of mothering: an active work of attunement and the monumental choreography of supporting a human being.
Mother Hunger is the term that describes what insecure attachment feels like—a hunger for belonging, for affection, and for security that doesn’t go away despite all kinds of psychological gymnastics.
Lack of nurturance damages brain circuits meant for connection and strengthens circuits designed for preservation. In
this way, insecure attachment is set up for potential, ongoing loneliness. Insecure attachment explains the common experience many of us share—the craving for something or someone to ease the pain of isolation.
Mother Hunger clears up confusion around these symptoms, illuminating the inner heartbreak beneath them.
Disorganized attachment, a rich, complex category sometimes called fearful avoidant attachment, is often overlooked or misunderstood. For this reason, I will cover disorganized attachment more thoroughly in Chapter 8 as it applies to Third-Degree Mother Hunger.
Anxious attachment happens when mothers aren’t tuned in to their daughters in predictable ways. Mothers who have difficulty showing affection or have frequent, unexplained mood swings create anxious daughters. Overly
rigid and perfectionistic mothers may also create anxious daughters. Mothers who feel overwhelmed by a child’s natural needs have facial expressions and body language that may cause a daughter to feel hurt and ashamed, leaving behind the question “am I lovable?”
earned secure attachment.
Earned security takes conscious effort, but you are taking the most important step right now: gaining awareness.
While she recognizes other familiar sounds and voices, amniotic fluid has muffled them for nine months. They are the background for the clear connection with her mother’s voice. In the first 1,000 days of life, early nurturance from their mother sets up how a newborn’s emotional, mental, and physical development will unfold.
New mothers who frequently put babies in cribs or bouncers instead of holding them may miss out on nature’s magic bonding formula. Well-meaning staff or family who separate mother and baby “so she can rest” are disrupting this critical bonding hormone.
mothers need mothering. Lack
“The mother’s emotions, such as fear, anger, love, [and] hope, among others, can biochemically alter the genetic expression of the offspring.”13
Even if your mother very much wanted to be able to nurture, protect, and guide you, her unhealed anxieties or dashed hopes may have left an imprint on your soul.
You could be carrying sadness or anger that began with your mother or your grandmother. “When your grandmother was five months pregnant with your mother, the precursor cell of the egg you developed from was already present in your mother’s ovaries. This means before your mother was even born, your mother, your grandmother, and the earliest traces of you were all in the same body.”14
Since your biological mother was your first environment, if she was stressed, ambivalent, overwhelmed, or carrying her own unhealed trauma, you may have inherited feelings of anxiety and dread before life experience taught you to feel this way.
Too many parents don’t realize how damaging hours of separation can be for dependent newborns.
Sears explains that infants who co-sleep rarely cry during the night and have less nighttime anxiety. As adults, they experience fewer sleep disturbances than adults who slept alone as infants.
parents who embrace nighttime parenting create children with higher self-esteem, less anxiety, ease with affection, and increased independence.
Mother Hunger who are already overly alert, this increased amygdala response can set off a cascade of panic during the early bonding months, severely compromising maternal mental health. Vulnerable and raw, these women tend toward elevated sensations of loneliness, despair, and boredom in the early days with their newborns. Dark emotions and hypervigilance interfere with bonding and unveil the story of a mother’s own early moments of life.
Additionally, postpartum distress can escalate when a new mother is estranged from her own mother or has a mother who is unsupportive or no longer living. In these cases, the most important source of comfort during this rite of passage is lost.
The dominant culture assigns a higher value to work outside the home than to mothering, leaving women torn when it comes to how best to have both. It’s not uncommon for mothers to feel confused about priorities, how to manage time away from their children, and even how to make their children proud. This is completely understandable, but it’s important to keep the early years out of this thought process. Little ones just want their mothers’ presence. They don’t care about her résumé.
