Untangling the Adult Mother-Daughter Relationship

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1:38My guest today is Kelly McDaniel. Kelly is a licensed counselor, author, mother, and women's advocate. Kelly's latest book is called Mother Hunger, how adult daughters can understand and heal from lost nurturance, protection, and guidance. In it, she explores the complexity of mother-daughter relationships and seeks to normalize the experience of yearning for maternal love. Today, we talk about how mother hunger manifests and how this type of longing impacts our sense of self-beginning in infancy. We talk about how mother hunger presents itself in other types of relationships. Kelly says that what we did to earn our mother's love is what we end up duplicating in friendships, romantic partnerships, and sometimes work.

2:21And she shares a hopeful path forward for anyone who might recognize themselves in today's conversation. Okay, let's get to my chat with Kelly McDaniel.

2:34Kelly, it's so wonderful to have you today and to be getting into this topic of mother hunger, which is something I've been thinking a lot about. And I feel like over the past year and a half or so have been able to make a lot more space, you know, in my life to talk about it. And, you know, before we dive all the way in, I'd love to hear about your beginning. You know, what was your upbringing like and what was your relationship to your own mother and kind of what brought you here? Sure. I love talking about mother hunger, but I have found that it's not a topic that just everyone is comfortable with.

3:21I think anytime as daughters, we talk about our mother, all kinds of things can come up for us. And it comes up for me personally as well. We may want to be a good daughter. We don't want to say anything unkind. And sometimes the truth, people can't hear it. They do hear it as unkind, if it's anything less than she was amazing. As far as my own upbringing, a lot of times I don't spend a great amount of time talking about that, partly because this issue of mother hunger is so big and touches so many women that I've been concerned that if I talk about me and my mother, it would somehow take the focus off the topic and instead switch the focus onto me.

4:10So I don't go into lots of details, partly for that reason. Also, because my mother is still alive. And she was so young when she had me and I think did what she could do given the misguidance at the time from the culture at large. and I think it's very difficult for a mother to go back and review ways that she let down any of her children. I think all mothers love the best they can and with what they have, at least most do. I think it'd be great to talk about how you came up with the term mother hunger and what it unlocked for you? I first came up with this term accidentally. I was writing my first book called Ready to Heal, and it was written for women who were healing and recovering from love addiction.

5:10And what I was finding in my practice is every single woman that I worked with would eventually kind of get down to the root of heartache, heartbreak. And it always come back to, I want my mom. I heard it over and over and over. And it didn't matter how old this client was, or whether or not her mother was still alive, she still wanted her. And the search for her, the search for her mother's love, is what kept bringing her into addictive type romantic relationships and complicated female friendships. So I first wrote this term in 2008 when I published that book, and I did it with a great deal of anxiety because nobody was talking about this kind of thing at all.

6:05And the book was being circulated pretty quickly in professional circles and not, I had a number of colleagues that were just wondering, what are you talking about? Attachment theory wasn't really being discussed much. And we like to think that mothers are perfect and that it couldn't have anything to do with adult trouble with relationships. But after mentioning it in that book, my whole practice exploded because the term resonated for so many adult women. And I didn't intend to write this next book, Mother Hunger, but it was demanding to be written. And the women who knew I was writing it, who were in my practice, really wanted me to talk about food as well.

6:49So the most primitive things we learn from our mother come in lessons from how we're fed and how we're held, both tied to food and then to love. So that book hadn't been written yet. So I'm glad it's here.

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8:14And when you talk about the idea of mother hunger connecting to how we're held and to food, What does it mean to have mother hunger? Is it something that speaks to a deficiency or is it something that speaks to never having enough? Well, yes, exactly. That's where the word hunger seems to resonate. It does speak to a desire to be fed in certain ways. And I have found that mother hunger is so primitive. Mother hunger emerges from lack of maternal care, but specific kinds of care. First being nurturing, the next being protecting. So the things we need the most as vulnerable babies and toddlers, we need mostly to be held, touched, looked at with delight, responded to, attuned with, and we need to feel safe.

9:21These are biological needs. They're wired in for our survival. We don't have a choice about these needs. Having these needs doesn't mean there's anything wrong with us. This is because we're little mammals. This is what we need. Unfortunately, many mothers are given misguidance about what nurturing is or even what safety is. So, for example, a sleep training expert or a pediatrician might say it's time and it's okay to sleep train your child. But what the science is showing us is that sleep training is really an unfortunate term because one does not need to be trained to go to sleep. Sleep is biological, right?

10:03I couldn't agree with you more. And I'm sure at some point I will be having a whole nother conversation about this. And I, I personally, in all my years as a doula was completely against the idea of sleep training. I think that sleep hygiene is really the goal hygiene for both the mother, the parents and for the baby and sleep hygiene can look a number of different ways. And I do feel that sleep training is kind of the beginning of the disconnect in the sense of, you know, letting the baby cry it out, especially under the age of one, when there is just a very natural and understandable need for close contact and for a lot of, you know, connection.

10:47I'll let you keep going because I could talk about that all day. Well, I'm so glad because it's so delightful to talk with someone who's very close and centered and educated about this. I mean, think about it. The home, the first environment is our mother's body. We are growing listening to her heartbeat, her voice. We smell her. We know what she smells like. We're born already wired to stay close to her. We want to be near her heartbeat. We want to be near her voice. We're already in love, really. And when separation happens too often and too soon, it really does create our first heartbreak. In attachment theory language, it's the beginning of insecure attachment.

11:37Secure attachment relies on safety and proximity. And when those things are compromised for whatever reason, and they're often compromised because of outside circumstances, not for lack of love and not for lack of effort, but interventions that happen. So when those things are compromised, we as little ones can't make sense of that. We can't make sense of why our needs aren't being met. So we just grow in an insecure attachment. We don't really feel bonded and trust very well. And that carries with us into adulthood unless there's a healthy intervention. So you say that your book should be read from a daughter's perspective and not the mother's.

12:22Yes. Can you say more about that? Yes. I wrote this not as a parenting manual. I'm not trying to give parenting advice in this book. My agenda in this book was to help adult women make sense of mood problems, relationship problems, food problems, and and reduce the shame. The essence of mother hunger is twofold. It's shame and it's frozen grief. Shame because when we're little, little creatures growing, and this all happens before the age of three, we adore and worship. And for a long time, way beyond three, we adore our mothers. We can't see her as anything less than perfect. So if something that we need is not being met, our need for her time, our need for her touch, or our need to be fed when we're hungry, not on a schedule, or our need to be safe, protect me from my peers or my siblings, or maybe from the mother's partner.

13:27When we need protection and it doesn't happen, when we miss out on these things, we don't really think anything's wrong with our mother. we think something's wrong with us. And so, so many women are growing up with this sense of something's wrong with me. I'm broken or unlovable. And that just really translates to shame. And we can become immobilized in that shame and wonder why we have trouble identifying our dreams in life, trusting people, finding joy, being able to play. These things get really difficult with shame. And then when we have no place to talk about it, because either there's not been a name for it, or now we know maybe we have mother hunger, but who do we talk to?

14:13There's not a support group, let's say. The grief gets frozen in the body until there is adequate support. So that also complicates learning about this issue, understanding this issue, and healing from this issue. So in an effort to understand a little bit more, how does mother hunger present itself in, say, a romantic relationship or at work or female friendships? I'd love to kind of hear a little bit of how you've seen it set up. Mother hunger, first of all, generally until someone hears the term, goes under the radar. No, we don't know we have it. We just know we're hungry for something. And we go about trying to find a way to fill that hunger.

15:00What that looks like for a lot of the women that would come to see me is looking for a romantic partner to provide nurturing, safety, and also be inspiring and admirable, which is the guidance piece. That's the third thing we look for from our mothers. We want nurturing, we want protection, and we want her guidance. We want to admire her. We want to be inspired by her. So when any of these things are missing, we're going to go look for them elsewhere. We may look for them and find them actually in some places. We may work for someone who inspires us. And so that kind of meets the guidance piece.

15:38But typically women who come to see me are struggling. They're not finding a way to fill these needs. They don't even know they have them. They don't realize they're looking at their girlfriends or their partners, romantic partners, to fill these needs. They don't know to have them. These needs are so young and generally preverbal that we're behaving in ways that we learned as a child to try to get these needs met. So that's very diverse depending on what we each did to earn our mother's love. But what we end up doing is duplicating that with friendships, in romantic partnerships, and sometimes at work.

16:14So it's really unique, but I did see a whole lot of spectrum challenges around eating, finding a way to eat that's about nutrition, health, and fuel rather than filling this void. And same with love and sex, you know, rare to see healthy expressions of love and sex that could be playful and creative. They became instead somewhat compulsive, manipulative, automatic as a way to either earn love, earn the feeling of being loved, or have someone touch us without really saying, I need to be touched. Instead, we could be seductive or we can flirt and hope to be touched in a sexual way and hope that that meets that need.

16:58It doesn't, but it can take a long time before somebody realizes that everything I'm trying is not working.

17:11And when you say everything that they're trying is not working, it's because there is this kind of lack of identification at the core wound, the core need has to do with not having that maternal need met. Precisely, precisely. We don't know we have the need. We didn't realize it was there. We don't know we have that heartbreak. So every time we try to fix it with our adult selves and we're not doing what the little person inside us needs, we're heartbroken again. We're frustrated again. Then we feel more shame. Then we feel more grief. And that complicates and grows more intense each decade that goes by without stopping, pausing, and realizing there's a little person inside me, a little girl, a little baby girl, a little toddler who wants her mom.

18:00And now it's my job as the adult to find ways to have healthy nurturing care, have safety around me, and to find wise guidance. That makes me want to ask you about something you wrote about called pathological hope, because as I hear you talk about all of these elements, you know, I think to myself, what would be something that would sabotage the awareness maybe as you gain it? you're like, oh, I do feel like there were deficiencies, are deficiencies around how I've been mothered. How does pathological hope kind of get in the way of starting to do any type of healing work around that awareness of that lack of nurturing?

18:50Well, talk about a topic that we could just go on and on with. This is a big one. And I will thank you for asking, first of all, because I think it's a core issue that complicates the healing and it starts very young. So when we're little, mother nature protects us. Our biology is meant to keep us alive and keep us feeling safe. So instead of know that the mother we have, for whatever reason, she's too busy or she's sick, or maybe she dies prematurely, or she herself is not safe, for whatever reason, she can't give us what we need, we'll create a fantasy mother who is giving us what we need. This is about survival.

19:33This is biology. This is our use of imagination and creativity. And that capacity to create a fantasy mother also grows with us. And at different stages in life, we may wake up to a more realistic picture of our mother, but that happens at different stages and sometimes not at all. So what we do when we have this fantasy that our mother is going to somehow meet our needs is we continue going to her for those needs to be met. And the chances are if she couldn't meet them when it was age appropriate, she may not be able to meet them on down the lifespan. So we may go looking for mothering, not knowing we're looking for nurturing, not knowing we're looking for protection, not knowing we're looking for guidance.

20:27We get disappointed again, but then we do it again. This may happen daily. It could happen weekly. It may only happen once a year at a holiday, but we keep getting disappointed and feeling maybe some anger or resentment or just sadness. And we will try all kinds of psychological gymnastics to fix ourselves to get what we need before realizing it's not going to happen. And what I call pathological hope is the continually going back to the mother that we have, hoping for a different reaction, hoping for a different mom, hoping we will finally have the mom we want, not necessarily the one that we have.

21:10Making sense? That makes absolute sense. And I think the ability to embrace the concept of pathological hope is so important. I definitely was moved by that because, you know, depending on how you were raised, you know, if you're raised in a religious household, you know we could replace the term pathological hope with faith faith that it's going to be different the next time when you know it's it it really is not and then that leads me to want to touch in about disenfranchised grief because you've talked about grief a little bit in this conversation but what what is disenfranchised grief it's something that you also build into you in the book.

21:56I'm so glad you brought that up. Another topic that's vast. And before I jump into disenfranchised grief, I want to add one more thing about pathological hope that I think could be helpful for anyone listening. The nature of an addictive relationship, and the reason I wrote that first book, is we keep going back to a partner hoping for a different outcome, even though perhaps this particular partner has shown us time and time again that either he or she is not emotionally available, not going to come through for us. We keep hoping that that will change. That's what happens in an addictive relationship.

22:36Keep going back, doing it again, doing it again, getting caught in a cycle. And I think pathological hope is a big piece of that cycle. And I think it starts so young, way before that relationship. But disenfranchised grief is grief that has no cultural awareness or permission to feel, no place to go. For example, let's say, as in the case of, and I use this as an example because I think so many of us as women have had some experience with a cancer diagnosis of some sort. And when we first hear the word cancer, it can be really terrifying. and yet at the same time, because there's so much awareness, we know a friend or we know a support group or we know a mother or we know a spouse.

23:23So we know someone who has struggled with cancer. So we know where to go to talk with people about what we can anticipate the treatment might be like, what we can anticipate the healing might look like. We can talk about our hair loss. We can talk about our fears and that helps us grieve. Grief has to have a place where we can talk about it in order to start the process of unfolding. So when grief is just enfranchised, there's nowhere to go to talk about it. People don't want to hear about it. People might think you're a bad person for even thinking that you missed out on something from your mother.

24:01the grief of what you lost of that first heartbreak freezes in the body, causes all kinds of problems from physical pain to autoimmune problems and concentration problems. I could go on and on, but the basis of this disenfranchised grief is that it freezes the process. So by the time someone realizes, first of all, I guess I have mother hunger, and then they get ready to start healing most women are advanced in, I mean, over 40 for sure, but generally 50s, 60s, and 70s, because it takes a long time to find a place, to find permission, to kind of come out of pathological hope. I find that women that start healing sooner did so because their mother passed away so young that they came face-to-face with grief faster.

24:55That's really interesting to know that it is a little bit of a later in life unlock. I think, you know, for me, I'm, I'm 35 and I feel like definitely over the past in my thirties has been the time to really start to, to, to reckon with, you know, the ways that I was undernourished again, you know, my mother is still alive. And so very much in a similar position to you in the sense of just, you know, I think saying less feels more comfortable for me. But what I do feel a lot of ease around is admitting that there is a lack and slowly making my way into what that healing process can look like. And that makes me want to ask you, what is that healing trajectory?

25:46What's the first step? So someone who's listening to this and who's, I mean, I think people probably listening to this are familiar with the idea of like the mother wound. But I think the word hunger is just so much more applicable because it has a lot to do with drive and an intensity. When you're hungry, you'll do anything to be full versus a wound. A wound is something that makes you feel like you need to take care of yourself or it's, you know, it can get gangrenous. It doesn't have the intensity that I think a lot of women actually carry with them. Someone with mother hunger can be extremely successful.

26:23There's all of these ways that we kind of reappropriate lack into fuel. And so I'm really curious, you know, like I said, what are the first steps you take if this resonates with you? That's so well said, Erica. I love the way you just framed that so beautifully and differentiated mother hunger from mother wound. I love that. So yes, hunger is an innate need. So there's a lot of energy there. We're going to get this need met one way or the other, or we're going to die trying, right? The first step though, is the name. The minute the body hears a name that feels truthful or feels resonant, there's a recognition almost in the gut, in the belly.

27:12You can just almost like, ah, that, that's it. That's me. And then as soon as the body has that name, the body does what it's designed to do, which is heal. We are designed for health. We get derailed easily. Our culture is not designed for our health, especially as women, which is why mother hunger is so intergenerational because women in patriarchy have suffered. And that suffering, sadly, transfers to the next generation and the next generation and keeps the cycle of mother hunger pretty intact. So the most powerful beginning to step out of that cycle that we've inherited from our grandmothers and our great-grandmothers and the suffering that they endured and therefore having only what they had to give, right?

28:10Is naming what happened and understanding that it's a product of the cultural distaste for women and the cultural lack of empowering mothers, supporting mothers, the cultural lack of understanding of the intense needs we have as infants for bonding. So as soon as we have a name, we know it's not that we're broken, we know it's not our fault, and it really wasn't our mother's fault, the body starts to, on its own, heal. And then, depending on the degree of mother hunger, so back to the three pillars, nurturance, protection, and guidance, based on what one actually missed, the healing is very different.