Mother Hunger Quotes

“As a child, if essential elements of maternal nurturance and protection were missing, you didn’t stop loving your mother—you simply didn’t learn to love yourself.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“Maternal love is our first experience of what love feels like, and the maternal care we receive informs how we feel about ourselves throughout life.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“Dreams are windows into the soul, and without fail, women who suffer a lack of maternal protection have nightmarish sleep patterns and dreams.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“Sometimes women compensate for misogyny by behaving like those in power—they offend someone more vulnerable.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“But the myth that all mothers love their daughters erases the truth that many women know: maternal love didn’t feel good. The fantasy of maternal love did not apply. The myth creates confusion for many daughters who never knew this kind of tenderness.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“Mother Hunger names the longing that you live with; the yearning for a certain quality of love.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“As you work to replace lost nurturance, protection, and guidance, remember that this is an ongoing process. You’re building a new brain, and like any new routine, it takes time before you feel the results. Please don’t do all this by yourself. You’ve been alone long enough. Your body is designed for well-being, but we are relational creatures and we need connection with others. Healing Mother Hunger brings you home—home to yourself—but it’s really helpful when you have a village around your home.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“Imagine for a moment what the brain must do to ignore (and eventually prune) the neurological processes that identify a dangerous mother? It must compartmentalize fear somewhere outside your consciousness so that bonding can happen. Over time, the brain shrinks danger signals, like a mother’s shrill voice or furrowed brow, so you can tolerate her proximity. Pruning alters perception and protects you when you are small and dependent, but over time, your innate ability to detect or discern risky situations is twisted. In this way, neuroception is altered, which is why exposure to early betrayal puts you at a greater risk of further victimization. Maternal abuse is a devastating betrayal because not only do you miss out on essential nurturance, protection, and guidance, but your neuroception and protective instincts are also damaged.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“If you were spanked as a child, you may feel disgusted by your body. It may be difficult to care for yourself (including pursuing medical care, dental care, regular exercise, and healthy nutrition) because your body has been a battleground. You may find it validating to know that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents avoid spanking children for any reason,”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“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 safety and control you craved as a child.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“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.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“Categorically, women with Mother Hunger struggle with both food and relationships. I have never seen one problem without the other. It’s just a matter of which hurts more. From early nurturance experiences, food and love become linked in implicit memory.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“Starving is one of the most basic ways to compensate for feeling helpless.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“Many of us mistake Mother Hunger for a craving for romantic love. But in truth, we are longing for the love we didn’t receive during our formative moments, months, and years.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“I feel like I should be happy, but I’m not. I feel an ache and a deep, deep sorrow for what never was and will never be. It’s hard to remember and know that I’m lovable, even though I wasn’t loved. I feel profoundly sad and alone, while simultaneously celebrating my own ability to mother, love, nurture. It feels like a hidden aching and gaping wound that I should be over by now, but that I will carry within all the days of my life.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“Surviving a dangerous mother is an unspeakable trauma that is difficult to recognize. Perhaps we cannot see it because deep inside each of us is a little person who remembers the vulnerability of being totally dependent, and the idea that a mother could betray this dependency is terrifying. It strikes a primitive fear in our mammal brain. The helplessness and devastation of life with Third-Degree Mother Hunger is why I believe having a dangerous, frightening mother is the worst childhood adversity of all.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“Do we stop needing our mom? Not at all. Over time, without maternal comfort, we do learn to bury the need. But the need doesn’t go away. Unmet needs for maternal nurturance and protection fester like an angry infection. The body holds the memory of emotional pain and, over time, may generate chronic distress and insecurity. When distress is the norm, it becomes toxic. Toxic stress creates physiological inflammation, weakening the immune system.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“If we can put aside mother blaming, or the tendency to make sweeping generalizations about women juggling careers and thus struggling to be present to their families, our collective understanding of Mother Hunger could guide an inspired effort to support women in preparation for motherhood”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“This book is about learning what you missed during your development so that you can reclaim the tender parts of yourself that were sacrificed to earn your mother’s love or survive her absence. As you piece together the story of being your mother’s daughter, you will find new resources for lost nurturance, protection, and guidance. Facing the heartbreak that’s running your life opens opportunities for joy and connection.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“However, if she couldn’t provide affection or tenderness when you were small, she still might not be able to. It’s a natural impulse to want her to nurture you. Part of healing Mother Hunger might mean that you take a break from reaching for her—”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“You have been trying to protect yourself for years, and you’re drained from working too much or too hard, from overeating and undereating, or from loving in destructive ways.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“Blaming young children for primitive emotions is a missed opportunity for attunement and connection.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“Adaptations to a mother’s fear can inhibit a daughter’s ability to play, learn, and feel comfortable making friends. Feeling anxious, she loses access to her inner wisdom and intuition. In the most extreme cases, a daughter may lose the ability to detect danger altogether. She will miss cues that signal that someone or something is a bad”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“Easily distressed, a vulnerable mother can’t tolerate it when her daughter has big emotions, particularly if they are negative emotions. Afraid that she has no solution, a vulnerable mother may push her daughter away to avoid feeling helpless.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“When a mother is unable to protect her daughters, not only do siblings miss out on maternal protection, but their personality adaptations also make them competitors for whatever love is available. Unprotected children grow up guarding themselves and fighting for attention. As a result, when siblings most need an ally, they frequently end up with an enemy—or, at the very least, a difficult relationship laced with competition and resentment.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“Watching the scene, we know this isn’t the first time she’s turned a blind eye to her daughter’s needs to meet her own.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“Maternal stress and anxiety pass insecurity to a daughter through touch, vocal tones, and breathing patterns, and later through behaviors and choices that put both mother and daughter in harm’s way.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“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.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“When a woman gives birth, the amygdala (the brain area responsible for regulating fear response and stress) naturally lights up. It comes online and stays online to keep a mother alert to her baby’s needs. For women with untreated 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.”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

“to warm mother–daughter relationships. They learned very young not to go toward their mothers when they were frightened or sad—”
― Kelly McDaniel, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance