Mother Hunger - The Hidden Wound Driving Men's Need for Female Approval

What if she doesn't like me? What if she's disappointed in me? What happens in your life when a woman, your wife, your girlfriend, your mom, your sister, your coworker pulls away from you? She's upset. She's disappointed in you. Does it feel mildly uncomfortable or does it feel like you've just been punched in the gut? Like you've got a deep anxiety, a dread, a fear, a panic sets over you and you find yourself with a kind of compulsive need to fix it immediately? What if she's disappointed in you and feels like she's giving you feedback for something that you didn't do, and you find yourself almost incapable of hearing what she's saying because you're frantically trying to figure out whether you're gonna be okay, the relationship's gonna be okay if everything falls apart? This type of catastrophizing, this type of relating to women when what if she doesn't like me feels like death is called mother hunger. This is what I'm going to refer to as mother hunger. It's, I need mommy's attention, I need mommy to be okay with me, I need her to give me love and praise, and I need her to be all right with me all the time, otherwise I'm not okay. Now, this happens for a number of reasons, and this is one of the things most kind of insidious ways that men collapse relationships with women. And it can happen in the workplace with a colleague or a coworker or a boss. It can happen with your wife and your girlfriend. It can happen still with your mom or your sister. But this is one of the quietest ways that you as a man are collapsing or unintentionally disrupting the relationship with women. And this happens because your identity in some way has become stunted. And it's become stunted because your whole sense of self, your whole identity as a man gets wrapped up around the need to have a woman like you, to have a woman validate you, to have a woman acknowledge that you are worthy, that you have value, to give you praise. And what it does is it creates a very, very deep fragility inside of you. It creates a kind of inability to withstand a woman's disappointment, a woman's disapproval. And so anytime something like that happens, you shake, the whole foundation of your identity and your sense of self becomes disrupted and shakes immediately. So mother hunger is one of the byproducts of having a wound with, mom. And what it does is it creates this internal thirst, this kind of hole inside of you that constantly needs to be filled. And it needs to be filled with women's affection, women's attention, women's validation. And unfortunately, what it does is it outsources your sense of security, self-respect, trust, etc., onto the words of women. And it might be quietly ruining your relationship, specifically your intimate relationship. So let's talk about how this is formed. Let's talk about how it shows up in your life and what you can do to actually begin to deal with it. Say you grew up in a house where your mom was kind of cold, kind of distant, and you weren't really too sure what would get her attention, what would get her love, her praise, her affection. Because the truth is, as a child, you need love, praise, affection. And if you don't get that, a child doesn't think, "Hmm, my mom failed me. Hmm, my mom doesn't have the ability to give me love or care or nurturing." A child thinks, "Something's wrong with me." And it's not even a question. It is a statement inside of a child. And that belief, "Something's wrong with me," begins to become the primary foundation, the primary foundation of how you begin to view yourself. And it doesn't go away. So as you become an adult, as a man, you start to interact with women from this place, from this place of insecurity, fear, and a need for women to like or love you or approve of you in some way, shape, or form. And this becomes a kind of template of how you actually begin to relate to women for the rest of your life until you start to address it and deal with it, right? You don't consciously know that you're looking for your mother's love in other women. It just unfolds like that. And so here's what I want you to know, okay? When you are a kid, there's some very basic things that you need from mom. You need your needs to be met by her. She needs to be able to be present to what you need as a child, because all children are dependents. All children aren't able to actually express their needs for a long time, and it's the mother's job to attune herself to you emotionally, physically, and in some ways mentally, to be able to discern and decipher what it is that you actually need when you are pre-verbal, right, from 0 to, let's say, 2 years old. And then as you get older, you you start to be able to communicate what your needs are. Now, a whole bunch of things can happen that can interrupt that cycle that will have caused you as a child to feel as though, "Mom's not able to meet my needs because there's something wrong with me or there's something wrong with my needs." That could have been your mom sort of withholding love and affection and praise and validation, nurturing, et cetera, unless you performed a very specific way. It may have been that your mom was emotionally unavailable. Maybe she was an addict, maybe she was disconnected, maybe she was a workaholic, but she wasn't really able to emotionally care for you or nurture you emotionally, physically, and mentally. Maybe she was abusive, right? Maybe she was emotionally abusive or verbally abusive, and so you learned that a woman's love, care, affection, and attention, albeit something that you deeply, deeply, deeply crave and naturally need, is harmful, it's dangerous. And this becomes the kind of foundation where you yearn for, you crave for women's attention, and it can come out in a number of ways. All right guys, really quick aside. First off, thank you so much for tuning in to the show and to the channel. If you are wanting to go deeper, if you're a man that's working on himself in some way, shape, or form, you're wanting to be more self-led, you want to trust yourself more, you want to have a deeper level of self-worth, or maybe you're looking to improve your relationship, then I encourage you to check out the ManTalks Alliance. You can go to mantalks.com/alliance. We have over 1,000 men in this incredible community from around the world, men who are just like you, working to better themselves, to be a better husband, a better father, a better leader in your own life. So check it out, mantalks.com/alliance. You can come out in a number of ways. So let's talk about how it shows up in your life and let's talk about how you can resolve it. So here's what it actually looks like. There's a number of different ways that it can look, but notice which one of these really land for you, okay? So the first one is that whenever a woman is upset with you, whenever she's disappointed, she's frustrated, she wants you to have done something different, it feels like a crisis. It doesn't feel like there's a little disruption or a conflict. It's like any time that she's upset with you in any way, shape, or form, or even if she's not even upset with you directly, she might just be angry or frustrated, or she's having a hard time with something in her work, it feels internally to you like the world's falling apart, like everything's not okay, and you go into crisis mode. Another way that can show up is that you apologize constantly, even if you did nothing wrong. So there's kind of this chronic apologizing for anything that might have happened because you're so concerned that she might be upset with you. It also will show up in you not necessarily being able to hold a position, hold a belief, hold that something wasn't okay, hold that you want something or need something in the relationship with her. And when she pushes back with any type of emotion, any type of sadness, disappointment, anger, et cetera, you collapse. The next way that it shows up is that you have a hyper, hypervigilance towards watching her mood. It's like the weather system and you're constantly tuning in, trying to forecast and manage. And so in many ways, you can script your purpose, like your main purpose and function when you get in a relationship with a woman becomes trying to predict, forecast, and then manage that woman's mood on a daily basis. Next, how it can show up is you operate in a way, your sort of whole being shifts towards trying to garner praise, love, affection, validation. And what it looks like internally is a kind of, I'm doing this so that you think I'm a good boy. I'm doing this so that you think I'm a good man. I'm operating and making these decisions so that you approve of me. Not so that I approve of me, but so that you approve of me. So one of the last ways that it shows up is that Your sense of self-worth spikes when she's happy with you, and it collapses when she's not. If she's happy, you feel like you're on top of the world. You're the best man ever. If she's dissatisfied in some way, shape, or form, you collapse, you're crushed. And lastly, you're terrified of being seen as the bad guy. In her eyes. You have very, very little tolerance for being seen as the bad guy in her eyes. And the interesting thing about this is that this begins to collapse the polarity. It begins to collapse the sexual tension. It begins to collapse the trust and the safety within the relationship. Because when you as a man have mother hunger, again, the big piece that I want you to understand is that you're outsourcing your sense of self your sense of who you are as a man, a huge part of it is being outsourced. It's not just validation, okay? For the nice guy, it's like, yeah, it's validation. For a man that has mother hunger, who was a boy who was desperately trying to get mom's attention, desperately trying to get mom's approval, only got mom's love and affection when he performed properly, it will have created in many young boys a kind of hole inside of them, a vacancy inside of them. And they try to fill that hole with women. And so for a lot of guys, this can look like porn, OnlyFans, it can look like having multiple affairs constantly. It can look like cycling through women. And as soon as you have their praise and validation, you move on to the next one. Or you get their praise and their validation, they start to really like you, and then all of a sudden, boom, you're disinterested in it. That can be an extension of how mother hunger shows up for a lot of men. And this mother hunger will not go away. There are no amount of women that will satiate your mother hunger until you do the following two things. So here's the resolution, here's how you deal with mother hunger. The first thing that you have to address is you have to stop pretending like the wound or the pain isn't there. It's really interesting because I've been working with men for 12 years. Men are quite capable and able, usually, of saying, "My dad hurt me in this way." Men are way more protective of their moms, and men are often way more unwilling to even admit that their mom hurt them, that they were wounded or hurt by their mother. So the first step is admitting, "Yeah, actually I am in pain. My mom did have an impact on me." And you can't skip this step because the grief, the admission, it can feel like a weakness, but it's actually the denial of the pain that's causing the weakness in you. So you can't heal something unless you acknowledge the truth that it's there to begin with. And that's part of what needs to happen. The next piece of what needs to happen in the grieving is that you actually need to be able to acknowledge and grieve what you didn't get from your mom. So maybe she was very emotionally disconnected. Maybe she never told you that she loved you. Maybe she never hugged you or kissed you. She never gave you physical affection or attention. Maybe she gave it all to the men that she dated or your other siblings, and for whatever reason, you just didn't get it. She wouldn't give you praise and validation. She just didn't really take an interest in your life. You need to be able to grieve, not intellectualize, not intellectually understand or make excuses for, but actually sit with the fact that a younger version of you needed something from his mom. That she either wouldn't, didn't, or couldn't give him, and to allow yourself to be affected very deeply by that truth, that you needed warmth from her, you needed tenderness, you needed care, and what you got instead was harshness or coldness or disconnection. So let the loss be real. Let what you needed be real. And this is part of the beginning of freedom, because the truth is that until you acknowledge that and grieve it, you will always seek it from women. it will always get projected onto the women you work with, the women you date, or the woman that you're married. And a lot of the times, this is the unconscious pain that's driving your action. The next step is about assembling your sense of self, starting to actually piece together who the hell you are independent from women. A lot of men, all men that have mother hunger, all men that have mother hunger are trying to assemble their identity, their actual coherent sense of self based on how women view them, based on how women perceive them, based on what women like or don't like. And so you need to begin to assemble who the hell you are independently of what women think, uh, how women think you should be, act, or behave. Now, this is very challenging because it requires that you kind of come into contact with an admission that you don't know who you are outside of a woman's perspective or opinion. So you can start to look at what do I actually value? What are my core strengths in life? And I would encourage you to go out and ask some men that are in your life that you trust for some feedback. If you are a man that has mother hunger, I would encourage you to join the Alliance. Check out my book, Men's Work. It will walk you through some specific steps And if you're in a men's group and you're in the Alliance, you can get feedback from other men on who am I actually, what are some of my strengths, what am I actually good at? And you can start to reinforce those things. The next piece is that you need to be able to develop a mechanism of internal validation. You need to be able to recognize yourself to start to say, here's my value and my worth independent of how a woman thinks or feels of me. I value this part of me. I love that I'm funny. I can acknowledge that I'm very intelligent when it comes to systems thinking, or I'm really good at woodworking. And you start to reinforce and create a daily practice and a kind of habitual nature of recognizing yourself for your skills, for your gifts, for your talents, for your strengths. And you kind of become relentless about that because in doing so, you're reinforcing, this is who I am. And you are actually acknowledging the value and the strengths and the talents that you have without needing some external force to reinforce that about yourself. And if you can't answer some of those pieces, what you're good at, what your strengths are, that's the work. That is really the first step. The truth about this, and this is how I'm gonna wrap this up, because I think this is probably a much bigger, piece of work that I could lead you guys through. But the truth about all of this, the real hard part about mother hunger, is that it will have disrupted the development of your identity as a young boy and man, and it will have outsourced your development. So you will constantly be stuck in this pattern and this cycle and this loop of trying to get women inadvertently, indirectly, to help you grow up. And there's no other way to say it. There's no other way to say it. That's just what's happening. And you're trying to get women to help you grow up because the truth is that you got stuck at a certain age developmentally and stopped learning about who you actually are from the inside. And so you've been looking to women for a long time to tell you who you are. And that's the mother hunger. Tell me I'm okay, tell me I'm safe, tell me I'm enough, tell me I'm good. And when you start to relinquish that and you start to notice, oh man, here's all of the ways that I try and get a woman to tell me who I am or how I should behave or whether it's good enough or whether I should like that, you know, what I should wear, etc., etc., etc., etc. And you start to insource, here's what I like, here's what I like to eat, here's what I like to watch, here's what I like to wear, Here's what I'm interested in. Here's my hobbies. These things genuinely matter to me because I have done the hard work to try and figure out who I am. That is maturation. That's part of the maturation process for every single human being. And as you start to do that, as you start to let go of expecting a woman to tell you who you are, and you let go of this hunger inside of you of, "Please, Mommy, like me. Please tell me I'm good enough. Please tell me who I am." And you start to do the scary thing of asking yourself the question, "Okay, I don't know who I am. I don't know what I want. Let me go and discover that." That develops resiliency. It develops maturity, and it develops a more coherent sense of self that has been internally constructed and, uh, um, art, uh, it's been internally constructed and I don't know what the word is that I was looking for, but architected. There it is. It's been internally architected. So you've started to observe, oh, here's who I actually am. Here are the parts of me that I like. I'm going to explore this part of me more because I really find it interesting and fascinating. I'm gonna explore this hobby and this strength and this talent and this interest, not because it's gonna get me attention from women, not because it's gonna get me validation from my wife or my girlfriend or my colleague or my coworker, but because I actually just give a shit about it. That is what helps you as a man mature and break free. And you have to do it in a way where you do not ask for permission. This is the last piece. You cannot ask a woman for permission for you to go on this journey. The truth in everything that I just said, and this is the most important piece, so hopefully you stayed to watch this part of the video. The most important piece of this is that you cannot ask a woman for permission to go figure out who the hell you are. You cannot ask a woman for permission to let go of the mother hunger. That's part of the trap. Along the way, as you start to discover who you are, the women in your life will inevitably be disappointed, get upset, be confused, get worried about what you are doing, because they will be used to relating to you in a way where they're used to giving you praise and reassurance and and some type of validation that you're good and that you're okay. And when you start to go on an adventure where you just start to do those things for yourself and you start to insource your own sense of joy and happiness and curiosity, the women in your life, especially your significant other, your girlfriend, your wife, et cetera, they are going to get disrupted by that because you're changing the relationship. You're changing how you relate to them, and it will cause them some discomfort, and that's okay. That is a part of you ending the mother hunger, because as you go on a journey of discovering yourself, of architecting and, uh, unearthing who you already are and who you are naturally, you will face the discomfort and the dissatisfaction and the upset from the women in your life, and you allow yourself to be okay with it, and you allow yourself to build tolerance for it. And as you do that and you reinforce who you are, it dissolves the mother hunger. It dissolves the, "I need your love and your care, mommy." So grief and the self-discovery. All right, don't forget to man it forward. Share this episode with somebody that you know needs to hear it. Ladies, maybe you're with a guy that needs to hear it, you can send this to him. But beware about what I just said. He will change. He will go on an adventure. Uh, men, don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you're not already subscribed. Uh, I think like 65% of you watch my videos but are not subscribed, so please do. 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