What is Mother Hunger?

Mothers provide daughters with three important developmental needs: nurturing, protection, and guidance. If any one of these three is missing, a child grows up with an aching loneliness that distorts their self-concept and capacity for healthy relationships. Kelly McDaniel has cointed this term Mother Hunger. Why hunger? Hunger pains need relief. Mother Hunger often shows up through addiction to food, sex, romance, work, or alcohol…something to numb the inner longing for love that’s missing. Healing begins with knowing and naming what we are missing. The constant search for a mother’s love can be a lifelong emotional burden.

Those affected may experience complicated grief; the grief of not getting our needs met when we were children, which live on in our present relationships. When grief has no where to go it becomes frozen. Maybe you’re mother is still alive and you still ache for her love, care and nurturance but she cannot provide those things. Sometimes a mother can’t give her child what they need because of outside circumstances and stressors. Maybe your mother was herself under-mothered, and she couldn’t give you what she didn’t receive.

With support an awareness of this attachment injury, you can begin to heal from the effects of mother hunger and its ripple effects. You an begin to change the patterns of relationships you are drawn to and break the addictions to food, sex, alchohol, shopping (you name it), when you acknowledge and nurture your wounded inner child.