Mel Robbins defines "mother hunger" as an intense craving for maternal nurturing that surfaces during love addiction withdrawal. It stems from a "mother wound," an unmet need for the attention and care required for healthy brain development, not blame toward any specific mother.
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So can you take us to kind of how you came to this insight that there's this invisible grief that the vast majority of women are struggling with as adults, that most of us didn't realize there's a name for this?
So I started working with women primarily who were recovering from some process addiction or substance addiction. My focus was on love addiction. And so whenever a client would be facing withdrawal, which withdrawal from love addiction is probably one of the more painful processes a woman can go through. We need the relationship, yet we have to detox from it. It just is an impossible bind, right? So each time a brave woman would get to the point where she's like, okay, I'm gonna stop this and I'm gonna take some time off from from romance, I would hear it over and over again. I want my mom. So there was something very tender, very primitive, very powerful happening in the therapy space when this would happen. It looked biological to me. It looked like a craving. Like she could barely breathe. It's like she felt she's dying, which is what withdrawal feels like. And who did she want? Her mother. And then as we would unpack that and realize the reasons, maybe she didn't have her mother. There were so many. Mother's dead. Mother's mentally ill. Mother's an addict. Mother's not kind. Mother's just unavailable emotionally because she doesn't know herself. There would be so many reasons why she knew she couldn't really go to her mom, but she really wanted to. So I learned It's not even about wanting that specific mother. It's needing to be mothered.
Okay, let's just stop and highlight that right there. The mother wound isn't even necessarily about a person, right? It's about the desire to be mothered. Yes. And the wound that is left inside you when you did not have the experience of being mothered in the way that you needed when you were really, really little. Precisely.
And in this way, we can talk about this. And we're not blaming any mom. This is about what does a mother do that you needed because you're human, and it would have given you better brain development.
Mm-hmm.
What did you need? And most of us don't know because we don't know what a mother does. We don't have a definition of mothering until now.
That's the clearest definition. Whatever it is you had to do as a child to get your mother's attention and love becomes who you are.
