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

by Kelly McDaniel

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.

many frightened women simply don’t have the internal resources for protection.

Either way, without healthy maternal protection, a daughter may grow up missing a felt sense of safety. Allomothers

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.”21

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.

Daughters do best when mothers create a secure environment with age-appropriate boundaries. With maternal protection, girls can tolerate a variety of stressors that come their way.

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brain and body accustomed to distress is more easily triggered by things that happen during or after a long day at school. 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.24 Kindling explains how a child or adult can seem fine one minute and outraged or fearful the next. She is highly sensitive because her nervous system is on alert.

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.

Kids need supervision and limits with electronic devices.

“At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear.”

Love addiction:

Exercising too much:

The home, which is a metaphor for the body, is blooming.

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.

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. Becoming a mother is a transition like no other, and it’s tragic that the medical community and child development experts don’t have current information about early attachment needs. For this reason, many mothers need better guidance to make important choices about their infants and toddlers.

For daughters who missed out on early maternal nurturance or protection, the important role of maternal guidance is compromised.

Mothers may demand respect with fear-inducing or controlling behaviors. This is not maternal guidance. 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.

Mothers who use their daughters for friendship not only misuse their power—they avoid growing up.

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.

covert or emotional incest in his book Silently Seduced.

But the cost is high.

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

“When someone is behaving in an offensive or violating manner, the healthy shame they are not connected to . . . spills over onto the offended party (the betrayed partner) who then ends up carrying the shame of what happened.”

when you lie so often that the lie seems truer than the actual truth, you lose the only thing that matters: the possibility of real connection.

Femininity training, or learning the “girl code,” impacts not only the work that women do but also how women are supposed to behave in relationship to men.

them. In the process, mothers sometimes teach their daughters that women can’t be trusted.

cultural influences that construct femininity.

“femininity” is a social and cultural creation based on multiple systemic factors.

On one hand, [culture was telling me] I had agency, autonomy, and responsibility for my body, my choices, my life. On the other, [the larger culture was teaching me that] I didn’t really know what was best for me. I couldn’t be trusted to say what things were. My mother knew better. My father. My teachers. My elders in general. And then, when it came to my desire, men knew, or were supposed to know, better than I did. Except the bad ones. If only it were easier to know which ones were bad.11 Cultural programming impacts mothers and daughters, complicating maternal guidance when it comes to sexuality. As understudy to our mother, we form an internal compass that directs our desires and feelings about our body by watching her. Many of us feel confused as our body develops and we first feel sexual desire. Caught in a sexual and social double bind that asks us to be good (saintly, pure, and sacrificial) and bad (sexy, erotic, and seductive) at the same time, we aren’t sure how to navigate erotic feelings in a healthy manner. When our mother hasn’t made peace with this double bind herself, we are on our own to find other guides. Fathers and Daughters When it comes to guidance, daughters benefit if and when their fathers are involved. Research shows that fathers who value relationships are more likely to have securely attached children. A father’s primary job is to protect and support the mother so she can build a base for her daughter in the early months and years. Once this ba...

Play is the language of paternal love and guidance.

Paternal guidance in the form of praise, helpful limits, and shared time increases a daughter’s confidence. Studies show that if a father enjoys his daughter and encourages her natural

strengths, she may be more inclined to see her...

Research suggests that daughters whose fathers who are involved with homework and encourage their daughters to take challenging courses have higher levels of sociability, a higher level of school performance, and fewer behavior problems. Interestingly, daughters of fathe...

They miss the important truth: each parent is necessary and has a unique purpose. They can’t both be the “favorite” all the time.

Maybe you learned that it wasn’t safe to be different—you may have picked up on your mother’s hidden hope that you would be just like her. To avoid criticism, you learned to fold the laundry like she did, fix your hair the way she wanted, and stay out of her way when she was stressed. You learned to keep your opinions to yourself if they were different from hers.

She had little patience with your natural mistakes, because your behavior reflected her mothering ability. Her unlived life was yours to fulfill.

know your value and worth. Dr. Christiane Northrup writes, “Our culture gives girls the [false] message that their bodies, their lives, and their femaleness demand an apology.”15 This makes belonging a challenge.

But along the way, we may discover that belonging means hiding our strength.

Part of the hurt and longing of Mother Hunger is the search for your mother’s power. Healing means you claim your own power in ways that feel healthy and constructive. Becoming the authority for your life may require you to find new guides and role models—people who inspire you. Healing Mother Hunger brings you the opportunity to rebuild damaged dreams and goals—and to no longer apologize for being a woman.

living with constant fear changes the brain during rapid growth periods.

If you grew up with a mother who was cruel and frightening, her behavior required your autonomic nervous system to stay in overdrive. Under constant threat, developing brain pathways meant for social behavior took a back seat to the pathways meant for safety. Unused neurons became weaker and less able to carry signals that govern attention and mood regulation. At the same time, pathways designed for self-preservation gained strength to keep you alert for signs of danger. Complex trauma explains why you were wound up, energetic, anxious, or irritable as a child and may still feel this way as an adult. Like someone anticipating a blow, your body and mind are wired for war.

You are not broken. Your body is simply biologically

wired in protective mode and responds very quickly, below your awareness, to anything that is a reminder of childhood abuse.

In other words, you don’t “choose” a reaction that may be extreme or frightening to yourself and others. Your response is automa...

But I don’t consider Third-Degree Mother Hunger a disorder; it’s a profound attachment injury that creates a constellation of symptoms that make life unbearable.

As adults, women with Third-Degree Mother Hunger often suffer physical symptoms as well as

psychological symptoms of trauma. Physical symptoms may include chronic back and neck pain, fibromyalgia, migraines, digestive problems, spastic colon or irritable bowel syndrome, allergies, thyroid and other endocrine disorders, chronic fatigue, and some forms of asthma. These symptoms may explain some of the remarkable increases in medical issues uncovered by Dr. Felitti in the original ACE study. For those with Third-Degree Mother Hunger, there is no body-based experience of comfort or safety, because the person designed to be our source of comfort became our source of fear.