Mother Hunger® the Legacy of Missing Maternal Love
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Kelly McDaniel Therapy www.KellyMcDanielTherapy.com Mother Hunger® The Legacy of Missing Maternal Love Kelly McDaniel MA, LPC, NCC Mother Hunger The Legacy of Missing Maternal Love Inadequate maternal nurturing, Mother Hunger names a corrosive, protection, or guidance leaves a hidden intolerable, hidden injury that sabotages heartbreak where human connection should well-being and craves a quick fix. The have been. As a result, millions of women primitive yet essential nature of this wound suffer from harmful relationship patterns, creates an insatiable hunger for love or compulsive food habits, substance misuse, anything that feels like love. Women may and unmanageable moods that leave them relate to the concepts listed below: feeling empty, ashamed, and alone. 1. Mother Hunger is an unconscious, Current treatments for these ongoing search for safety and maladaptive coping skills are often belonging. ineffective, or the results are temporary. 2. Mother Hunger comes from What’s missing is a deep understanding of inadequate nurturing, lack of the root cause for these endemic problems: protection, or missing guidance in the lack of secure childhood attachment to a childhood. mother or primary caregiver. In adult 3. Mother Hunger is an emotional injury women, I call this syndrome Mother that emerges from bonding to a Hunger. compromised mother. It is not a I conceived the term Mother Hunger to medical diagnosis or disorder. distill complex psychological theories into a 4. Mother Hunger happens when self- recognizable concept to help women do two development is sacrificed for self- things: name the source of their emotional preservation. pain (because if you name it, you tame it) 5. Mother Hunger is a symptom of and de-stigmatize addictive habits and mood systemic gender inequality that disorders. diminishes the critical role of mothering. 2 © 2019 Kelly McDaniel All Rights Reserved Since identifying Mother Hunger, I maternal care, but later, alcohol, drugs, have witnessed what happens when the right shopping, fantasy (from Netflix to porn) name explains mystifying habits that make may be used to regulate anxiety and stress. life tiresome and troubling. The look of Maternal care involves three essential surprise, the sigh of relief, the emotional elements that little humans need: nurture, thud that lands in the middle of the room: protection, and guidance. Research shows These are signs that a woman no longer feels that children who have a safe, attuned like a bad girl; that an overactive amygdala primary caregiver can weather life’s can finally relax. adversities with less risk of emotional The term Mother Hunger highlights trauma. Infants without nurturing and the tragedy that happens when there is an protection, however—particularly in the first original, unrepaired break in the maternal 12 months—show brain differences from bond, and our most primal needs for food, babies the same age who were well cared safety, and belonging are damaged. for. Many of us are influenced by popular The Essential Role of Mothering in Healthy Development misconceptions that child development is something that happens naturally, or that The human need for belonging is as babies have no memory. These fallacies are important as breathing. We first learn how bolstered by minimizing the magnitude of belonging feels or doesn’t feel in our infant care, and cultural/religious rules such mother’s arms. The tone of her voice, the as “honor thy mother and father” that blind quality of her eye contact, and the sensitivity us to childhood vulnerabilities. Implied in of her responsiveness teach us whether or this doctrine is an unexamined belief that all not we matter. Her care is our first parents behave honorably, but good people experience of bonding. She is our first love. don’t magically make good parents. Love is supposed to feel good, so what An encouraging trend is the happens if Mom is unpredictable, momentum of Dr. Vincent Felitti’s ACE unavailable, or frightening? We turn to study from 1997. With support from something else for comfort. Something we forward-thinking medical professionals like can rely on to soothe our overactive nervous Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, the first and system. For children, food and masturbation current surgeon general of California, much are the most available substitutes for missing 3 © 2019 Kelly McDaniel All Rights Reserved needed information about toxic stress is protection, and guidance—creating what I reaching mainstream dialogue about call Mother Hunger. parenting and childhood. In particular, see Essential Element #1: Nurturing her TED talk and her book, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Research like Dr. Harry Harlow’s Childhood Adversity. experiments with infant monkeys has taught No one wants to think that parents us that nurturing touch is as important to manipulate, neglect, or abuse their children, babies as food. Babies need skin to skin but ignorance isn’t serving us. As much as contact to thrive. In the first months of life, a we want to believe all mothers and mother’s physical proximity and sensitive caregivers instinctively offer their little ones touch extends the womb-like environment a caring, secure foundation for life, stressed- and regulates her baby’s nervous system out mothers have stressed-out, insecure Children need nurturing specifically children. Levine and Heller (2014) report from their primary caregiver in order to that approximately half of our population develop the necessary brain circuits for suffers from insecure attachment. healthy relationships in life. A mother’s Additionally, systemic, generational sensitive attunement imprints the felt sense neglect and disregard for women creates that connection with others will be enjoyable what sociologists and researchers call a and safe. Through thousands of daily mother wound. According to Dr. Oscar interactions, mothers are brain architects for Serrallach, an Australian family practitioner, their children, wordlessly building an inner “The mother wound is both ancient and love map, an imprint for all future modern, entwined in Western patriarchy… a relationships. learned behavior passed subconsciously, Without adequate nurturing, deprived subtly from mother to daughter” (Sellerach, children become hungry teens and adults n.d.). starved for affection and care, unconsciously As the mother wound passes through craving the maternal love they did not generations of mothers and daughters, receive. women struggle to offer what they themselves never had—adequate nurturing, 4 © 2019 Kelly McDaniel All Rights Reserved Essential Element #2: Protection healthy hygiene. But as a girl reaches Stress about the next paycheck or an puberty, she needs her mother’s support in angry partner makes it hard to be attentive to even more ways. In a world that diminishes babies or children. When a mother is unsafe female sexuality, power, and potential, she in her environment or living with high levels needs a mother who can guide her toward of anxiety, she signals danger to her little womanhood with confidence and courage. one. Cortisol and adrenaline—the fight and Sadly, generations of patriarchal double flight hormones—are released into the standards pollute the water between mothers and daughters. Teaching more from example baby’s body to prepare for danger. These life-saving neurochemicals are essential in a than words, mothers pass along survival crisis, but toxic for optimum infant tools like dieting or secret keeping that may development when they regularly flood the not help their daughters. system. Sometimes, a mother’s way of guiding Ideally, a mother protects her child her daughter is based in fear and rigid rules, from environmental threats. Without which creates a lonely chasm between them. protection, a child uses energy for self- Or a mother unconsciously grasps friendship preservation instead of brain development. and security from her daughter, creating a A frightened baby who is rigid and hard to psychological union that stunts relational soothe becomes an anxious child who has development for both. A daughter who must trouble concentrating, sleeping, or playing. mother her mother becomes a tired and New situations are frightening for children resentful adult. who don’t have a safe refuge with their Identifying missing maternal guidance mothers; some agitated children become is complicated, because many adult women quiet and withdrawn, while others grow loud feel confused or guilty if they speak about and domineering. their mothers in unfavorable ways, even in psychotherapy. These daughters long for a Essential Element #3: Guidance mother to admire, one who will champion The need for guidance emerges after their dreams, but have boarded up their the more primitive needs for nurturing and vulnerabilities and learned to navigate life protection are established. Guidance begins alone. with things like regular bedtimes and 5 © 2019 Kelly McDaniel All Rights Reserved A Note About Blame Mother Hunger examines lost maternal care but is not an invitation to blame mothers. Every mother is first a daughter carrying her own emotional wounds into motherhood. Blame is a normal reaction to the grief that is part of Mother Hunger but it can become a cycle that is hard to exit, and it is Book Cover: “Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine,” not an effective remedy for emotional pain. by Gail Honeyman To avoid getting stuck, it is essential to One morning, Eleanor wakes with a find healthy replacements for unmet hangover after ending a long-standing nurturing, protection, and guidance. While obsession with an unknown musician. As no one can replace a mother’s love, missing she notices her row of empty vodka bottles, maternal elements can be restored. she thinks “I ought to feel ashamed that someone will find [them] but I feel nothing.” Instead of feelings, Eleanor has thoughts. Like many women who learn to shut off Not Completely Fine their emotions to endure maternal criticism or rejection, Eleanor’s cognition is sharp but In her book Eleanor Oliphant Is her self-concept is distorted and dark.