You’re Not Broken: Why You People-Please, Feel Anxious, & Never Feel Good Enough – and How to Heal

Today, therapist and bestselling author Kelly McDaniel is going to explain why you may feel so lost, exhausted, or like you're never good enough. There is this hidden childhood wound that you've been carrying for decades, and you're not alone.

We love our mom so much that we will do whatever we can to get her to love us. That ends up forming our personality. Whatever we did to earn her approval is who we become.

Kelly is a renowned holistic psychotherapist who graduated from Georgetown University. She's also the bestselling author of the book Mother Hunger. She explains how the connection between the struggles that you may face as an adult can all be traced back to the experiences that you had with your mom during your childhood. Is it fair to say that perfectionism, being hypercritical, eating disorders, people pleasing, feeling like everybody's happiness is your obligation, this all points back in your mind to not being mothered in the way that you needed to be.

This is the most primitive wound our body can sustain. A mother is our mother. She's our nurturer and she's our safety net. A mom is not our friend. So we don't always get back what we're putting in. We don't look to our daughters to necessarily put it back in.

How is having an unkind mother as damaging as having no mother at all?

Mother hunger that comes from a critical, unkind mother creates shame and rejection. And when we feel that from our first love, it is hard to recover from that.

This episode is gonna explain so much. It is gonna make you feel so seen, and it's gonna show you how to finally stop blaming yourself for the pain you didn't cause. Let's get into it. Are you a subscriber? If that subscribe button is lit up, it means you're not. My goal is that 50% of you are subscribers, and my team showed me that 57% of you who watch here on YouTube are not. So if it's lit up, do your friend Mel Robbins a favor and just hit subscribe. It helps me reach my goal. It's free. That way you don't miss a thing. Thanks for doing that. I really appreciate it. Please help me welcome Kelly McDaniel to the Mel Robbins Podcast.

It's a thrill to be here. The work you're doing is phenomenal, and I'm just thrilled that you're interested in talking to me about mother hunger.

Well, your work and this topic and digging into it both as a daughter and a mother um, has really changed my life and who I am. And I believe this is one of the most important topics when it comes to relationships that nobody's talking about because we're afraid to talk about it. And so where I want to start is, can you define what mother hunger is for somebody that's listening right now that has never heard that term? What is it?

Mother hunger is a term for a yearning. For a certain quality of love that a lot of times we confuse with romantic love. Hmm. We may look for this kind of love from partners, from our friends, um, and be frustrated that it's not ever really happening. So that's one piece of defining it. The other piece is related more to what we lost. So mother hunger means One of three things went missing, or maybe all three of them went missing in your formative years. Okay. We need nurturing to grow the brain. We need protection in order to flourish. We need to feel safe. And then as we get a little older, we need guidance. As daughters, we look for all of these things from our mother. We're already in love with her when we're born. We know her smell. We know her heartbeat. Her body is our first home. When we come into the world, we're expecting to stay close to her. Our bodies are designed to be near hers. That's nurturing. Stay close to mom for breastfeeding, for holding, for sleeping. We're not meant to be separated. Protection is that we feel safe enough and she is safe enough to be close to us. If she's not safe, chances are we're not gonna feel very safe. So protection is a, is a big issue. Um, and then guidance. As we grow into adolescence and then we start to think about who we are gonna be when we grow up, some of us are lucky enough to have a mom that we can look to for that inspiration, but a lot of us don't. And so Maybe we had a nurturing mother, but we didn't have a good guide. Or maybe we had a very protective mother, but she was kind of cold. Or maybe we had a mother that was just laissez-faire, go do whatever you want, and we didn't quite feel safe. There are just so many manifestations of if we missed one of those three things, we're probably gonna feel some mother hunger.

You know, one of the things that I love in your bestselling book, Mother Hunger, is that in the introduction, You tell readers that as you're learning about mother hunger, which is this kind of quiet grief that you feel because you have a big mismatch with the way that you were mothered, I guess is the word that you would use, right? Your relationship with your mom. You invite readers to really look at the topic of mother hunger through the lens of being a daughter. Why is it important to give yourself permission to look with fresh eyes at what it was truly like for you in your household growing up, what your relationship was truly like with your mother for the first time with fresh eyes through the lens of what you're about to teach us?

Well, I think it's difficult to look with fresh eyes if we read this book as a parenting manual. So if any of you out there, if you're a mom, The tendency to pick up this book and start to examine how you've been a mother or are a mother is, is ripe. And we don't— that's not why I wrote this book. In fact, I almost didn't write this book because I didn't want women to have another thing beating them up about what to do as women, what to do as a wife, a mother. I didn't want to add to the movement that has already burdened women unfairly. This book isn't about blaming mothers at all. It's about an invisible heartbreak that has been, until now, until we had a name, untouchable. When we know that we are yearning for a certain quality of love that just wasn't there, not because we're needy, not because we're broken, but because we're human and this is what little humans need to develop. Most of us didn't get it. The— our culture is not set up for parents to provide this for their children. So it's not about lack of love. It's not about somebody doing something wrong, but this is about growing up with an invisible heartache that's running the show. You didn't know it was there. You didn't know that's why you under-eat or over-eat. You didn't know that's why your relationships aren't working. You didn't know that's why you can't sit still. When we're sitting on a pile of heartbreak, without words for it, we have to keep moving.

Well, you not only wrote the book Mother Hunger, you're the first person to coin the term mother hunger, which is now a clinical term. It is used by therapists and licensed clinicians and medical professionals all over the world. When you're sitting across from somebody and they're talking to you about their life and they're talking to their other anxiety or their self-doubt or their perfectionism or their hopes and aspirations, what are the signs that you see in an expert in this kind of longing and this kind of wound?

The first sign I see is a lot of burnout. Mother hunger can touch our career aspirations or lack thereof, can touch our struggle with our bodies and our health. Long-term stress like this of feeling maybe that, uh, something is just wrong with me impacts our immune system. Um, A lot of us have trouble with concentration because our life energy growing up went to finding safety rather than figuring out who we are. All of our energy went into, am I okay? How do I make these people around me, my caregivers, love me? And we didn't really develop our own wishes, longings, and our attention span really got short-circuited. So a lot of us grow up, um, with concentration difficulty.

So is it fair to say that perfectionism, being hypercritical, eating disorders, totally, um, ADD, ADHD, ADD, yep, um, not being able to sit still, people pleasing, people pleasing, yeah, monitoring the emotions of everybody, everyone in the room, feeling like everybody's happiness is your obligation. Putting everybody else's needs ahead of your own. This all points back in your mind to this original wound of not being mothered in the way that you needed to be.

This is the most primitive wound our body can sustain. Because here's the thing. Tell me. We come here and the biggest biological drive in our body is our attachment system.

It is more for somebody like in like super simple ways. For somebody who doesn't know what that means, like just bottom line it.

We are more biologically wired to attach to someone than to eat. That's how biological this is. Our attachment system will trump every other system in our survival network. So we're, we're wired to eat. We're wired to drink water. We're wired to attach. It's the strongest drive there is, which tells me that if I mean, if we don't have a safe attachment person, it's gonna have a large impact. So what's gonna happen as we're little ones and we become mobile and we start moving around, the attachment figure that we have in front of us, we're gonna do whatever we can to get that person to attach to us. It's not gonna occur to us that that person, our mother or another caregiver, might be too busy, too depressed, too distracted. Not well. That doesn't occur to us. Not at all. That person's perfect. We love that person. We love our mom so much that we will do whatever we can to get her to love us. We'll go through whatever psychobiological gymnastics we can. That ends up forming our personality. Hmm. Whatever we did to earn her approval is who we become.

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.

Yeah.

And if you had a childhood where you were not nurtured, where you felt invisible, where you were not protected, you felt unsafe, whether that was because of physical violence or physical threats that were going on or your mom just wasn't around, or that your mom was emotionally not safe. You never knew what mood she was gonna be in or what tone of voice she was gonna use or what was gonna set her off. Or you just can't go to your mom for any kind of guidance 'cause she's critical or she's judgmental or dismissive, or—

Or she was in her own life, um, not safe in her primary relationships.

Mm-hmm.

And you could see that she wasn't safe, so you knew she couldn't protect you. Perhaps she never got the chance to develop her own aspirations, so she couldn't really facilitate yours. She might've even been jealous of you. There's so many ways that this can get complicated, even in well-meaning, loving families. Because the truth is, all of our families are part of a bigger system that's not really supporting the fact that The most important thing we're doing with our children is attaching.

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.

Did you see this kind of wound and this craving to be mothered, to be nurtured, to be understood by, to be loved, to be supported, all the things that kind of come to mind when you say that word mother. Did you see it in patients that were just going to therapy for things that were not that extreme as well? Like somebody just coming to you because maybe they're struggling with self-doubt in their job, or maybe they're going through something, you know, with a partner, or maybe they're struggling with perfectionism. So they come talk to you about this thing. What were you seeing in those kinds of patient relationships?

As soon as I would bring it up and kind of ask with them, do you think there's a possibility you might have missed out on some affection or affirmation as a child? Or do you think— did you feel unsafe as a child? Did you miss some protection? Or who guided you? Who inspired you? I would ask these 3 basic questions to just about everyone coming into therapy. And get an instant, "Oh yeah, no, I didn't have that." And then we can explore. And incidentally, that was gender neutral. Men felt this, women felt this. Mother hunger impacts everyone because we're all little human babies at one point. Yes. If we didn't have that foundation of knowing, first of all, that we are wanted, that we are accepted and that we are safe. Those are the two most primitive needs, that we're loved and safe. If we didn't have adequate nurturing around us, protection around us, that's gonna follow us into adulthood as a low-grade anxiety and a feeling of, I'm not good enough.

You know, one of the things that you also talk about in your research is that there is a connection between mother hunger and having a very difficult or disordered relationship with food. What is the connection between eating disorders and mother hunger?

Yeah, you may notice in the book I don't really use the word eating disorder because I think that, uh, clinical term has created a whole movement about how we treat eating disorders. Okay. That I found after working, every woman I work with has, has some form of food trouble. I'll just leave it at that. It's so normal. I can't call it a disorder. Now, if it's hospitalization, okay, let's, let's call it a disorder. But the truth is, food is our first experience of love, second to our mother's arms. So we're gonna feel love from being held as infants and having a full belly. That's what love feels like. Let's say, for example, mom didn't hold us much, or when we were in her arms, we felt her anxiety and we didn't know that, but we were restless, we were squirmy. It just wasn't a good place to be. But it felt really good when we had a full tummy with milk. For a lot of us, that's what we learned to attach to was a full tummy, was food. And then we grew up learning to comfort ourselves. Food is so comforting and it can fill in that hole. Where human connection isn't. The flip side of that though, like if we're, if we're hungry and we're feeding ourselves to kind of fill this void, soothe this broken heart, can go a couple of ways. If, I've seen that go into the overeating spectrum of, I need to stay numb. I can't, I don't wanna feel anything. And food fills that. It numbs us out. It's great. Feels good. Feels like love. But it also, is a powerful numbing agent. But then what do we do with folks that are depriving, that don't eat, that restrict? And so I was curious about all this, like, what, what is the template? What's the difference? Why are some of us starving and some of us are overeating? Some of us are so sophisticated, we do both. So all of it is, is a way we're regulating our nervous system. And if we're overeating, we're downregulating our nervous system. We need to calm down. We're anxious.

We're afraid.

If we're Undereating, that's a stimulant. That's like caffeine. So some of us are undereating to give us fuel to do something. All of it is a nervous system reaction to never feeling safe and grounded. And chances are our mother didn't feel it either. Chances are her mother didn't either. So what we're seeing is generations of emotional dysregulation.

Hmm.

Which makes sense given that our ancestors grew up in times of stress and famine and war, and they didn't relax. They didn't have money. They didn't have some of the comforts we have. And our bodies are still reacting to that.

You know, you say that mother hunger is very evident in romantic relationships. So can you give us concrete examples of how it shows up? Because I know that there's going to be a lot of partners listening that will understand something about the person they love or they're in a relationship with better than they ever have because of the things you're about to list off. What do you see in relationships that go, oh, there's a person who is struggling with mother hunger?

Good. Love this one. Okay. So one of the ways you might see it in a relationship is the partner who comes in saying, I feel like I have a child I'm taking care of rather than a partner. I feel like I do everything for my partner. I'm nurturing and I'm there and I do as much for my partner as I do my children, let's say. And I'm tired. I want a partner. That's one sign.

Okay.

That's one sign. The partner who's getting all that good treatment may not identify that he or she has mother hunger because he or she's being nurtured and cared for. But the other partner who's doing all the work, they know something's out of balance.

Got it.

So that's one sign. The other sign is, let's say your partner's coming to you routinely saying, I'm just not getting enough. I need more X, Y, and Z. I don't feel safe with you. I'm not feeling that we're having enough intimacy emotionally or physically. I want more. And you're like, okay, I'm in. And you all go and you do some work and you really try to meet those needs and everything you're trying is falling short. And you've made efforts, you've changed, you've really done some good soul searching and stretched your boundaries and you hold your partner more and you create a safe environment for your relationship, which might mean we're not on our phones at certain times of day and we're living with these certain boundaries, it's not enough. Like everything you do is not enough. That might be a sign that this injury, this that your partner's going through, the craving they're experiencing is beyond you.

Hmm.

Happened, it predates you. And it's your loving job to say, I love you, but I can't do anymore. So this might be your opportunity to go do some deeper work.

Let's say you're in a relationship with somebody and every time you go visit their family, mm, you see your partner become the daughter. They change before your eyes. They are on edge or, you know, they're bending over backwards. It's all about mom. The family dynamic is just overcompensating to make sure mom's happy.

Yeah.

How do you be a better partner in that environment?

You know, that really works for some couples. Hmm. Yeah. And they can do that for years and it's just not a problem. When it does become a problem, I like to invite the partner who is not in the immediate family after the holiday's over, time to get home and rest, to just kind of gently bring it up. When it's not a loaded time to say, you know, um, when you were with your mom, I missed you. I didn't get any of you. And I feel like I didn't get to have a holiday with you. And I'm sad about that. Did you feel that too? It's always best to approach from the heart rather than, I can't believe the way you act with your mom, or who did you become? I mean, that's just not gonna work. But to really approach from a place of curiosity and love of like, what was that like for you? Because you just disappeared. You became another person.

You know what's interesting about that approach is that if you have mother hunger, you're so used to either being criticized typically, or judged, or you're, uh, the doer, doer, doer, or you're so busy monitoring. That the slower drop into the heart and have somebody be nurturing, have somebody like notice, be safe and notice, to have somebody offer care, loving guidance like that. Yeah.

It's pretty rare.

You just do feel your shoulders go, oh, that's what I didn't feel there. That's why I act the way that I do.

Right. Yeah. You're in defensive mode. You're in a freeze. You're, you're in a fear response, which could either be a collapse and you're kind of on your phone the whole time. And you're present.

Can we unpack those three things? So if you, you can recognize mother hunger in yourself, let's just say again, you're listening as a daughter or you're listening as the brother or the partner to, or the whom, or the dad who is worried about someone in your life, and now you're starting to go, I think this is it. Like, this is really explaining a lot. So you're listening from that angle. I want you to imagine you go home to visit, or your parents are coming to visit you, or you're all on some big cruise or something, or whatever. You're around your mom. You might even be on the phone with your mom, and it just shifts. What does the freeze mode look like in terms of the behaviors that you would see in the daughter? Mm-hmm.

Let's say it's a few days, so it's an extended holiday together. Um, eating is gonna get outta whack. That's gonna first go. Um, relational capacity will be slowing down. Like, there's nothing I can do right here, so I'm just not gonna do anything. That's a freeze response. Gotcha. Fight and flight would be, we're out of here, or arguments. So there are plenty of families where they just have out the argument. They just start yelling at each other. So that's one way. There's the dissociative, I'm out of here, I'm going to take a nap, I'm going to eat a lot, I'm going to drink a lot.

I'm going to eat a gummy.

There you go. So that's, that's one reaction.

And then there's the constant fawning, which is whatever I need to do in order to keep you happy and have you not be in a bad mood. And Keep the kids outta your way and do this. And like, okay, yep, yep, yep. Okay. You're describing every family and every daughter in my opinion. And you're describing the experience of every mother when she was a daughter. Mm-hmm. And I don't think there's any way to get around this because of the science related to the first 1,000 days of somebody's life and the fact that you are hardwired to be attached to your mother, not your father. Your mother and what that sets everybody up for.

Mm-hmm.

And the fact that nobody's talking about it. And, you know, I love that we started by saying this is not an indictment on moms. Look, your mom may have been a freaking monster. Your mom may be somebody that you should cut outta your life because it is too abusive, or what happened was just like, there may, there are very valid reasons that people do that. But I think for the vast majority of people, Kelly, Mm-hmm. There is a deep desire for connection. There is a deep desire for safety. There is a deep desire for love and support. And there is a major gap and a lot of guilt on how you go about talking about this and recognizing that this is a thing that you are experiencing, recognizing that it has a biological and a very profound research-backed Set a proof, recognizing that it is very, very universal that people experience this, and it's also very universal that nobody talks about it. I wanna make sure that, that somebody who's listening, who does have a good relationship with their mom, mm-hmm, but they're a perfectionist and they have disordered eating and they're burnt out at work, can actually look at this gap.

Mm-hmm.

And say, that is me.

Mm-hmm.

And I still love my mom.

Mm-hmm.

And she is who she is.

Like I said, we never stop loving our mom.

Yes.

We don't.

I'm not even gonna ask her to change.

No.

I'm gonna look at healing this for myself. Mm-hmm. Because if I do the work for myself, I change.

That's right.

And when I change and I see that I need nurturing and safety and I need protection, right? And I am honest with myself that I just didn't get it for lots of reasons.

Right.

And I recognize that, and I'm, and I am going to accept that. I'm going to look to myself for the nurturing and for the protection and safety and for the guidance. I think that's the invitation here, because when you do that, now you're a different parent. You're a different partner. You're a different daughter. You're a different you.

That's right.

Well, what I also like about this, because I'm sharing this conversation immediately with my two daughters. I am— I want to know. Like, what actually— where was there a mismatch? But what I think is very hopeful is that if you have a word for it, you can talk about it. Yeah.

Yeah. But it's more than that, Mel.

Tell me.

Not only do you have a word for it, you have an open, willing, humble heart. And I think a lot of people listening to this will not have a mother with an open, willing, humble heart. So I think the risk is you hear this, you think, oh good, I've got mother hunger. I'll go talk to my mom and we can read the book together and we can have this discussion and it'll all be good. And I would really put up a caution with that. Most mothers, if they're not doing their own work, are not gonna hear this with open arms. They're not ready to hear that they did something wrong because everything I'm sure they did, they did their best. And for us to kind of think that, oh, I've got a name now, and I bet my mom will be really excited to go through this with me, might be unrealistic. And if we keep in mind that every mother, you, Mel, me, we're first daughters. We had to live with our own mothers. She had to live with her mother. And this is an intergenerational inheritance. When your mother got pregnant with you, in her body were the eggs that are now in your daughter's.

Wait, say that again.

Exactly. 3 generations at least. And it's, it could be more, but I have the science on 3 generations of eggs are all in the same female body. So that's getting carried down the line, which is why sometimes we'll have a movement that's just like our mother. It's— we are her body.

That makes so much sense. Before we go deeper, here's what I actually want to know. Why are we more irritated with our moms? Like, it burns me up that my— Chris can do no damn wrong, but I am always the one that drives everybody crazy. What is this? Is this, is this me, or is this like a normal thing that most moms feel like?

Yeah, very universal. Because I mean, the fact is, there's no one that can really take the place of a mom.

Oh my gosh, I think I just got something. If you're actually biologically wired to attach to mom because you were fashioned inside her body, created in her body, and then you are also drawn toward her when you go through that phase naturally of starting to push away from your parents and separate, she's the one you have to actually push away more. Yes. Whoa. I cannot wait to talk to my daughters about that because I, I really think it's important that we lean into this sense of guilt and betrayal that we feel when we look with clear eyes at our childhood and the way that we feel about our relationship to our moms. Okay. So this is page 13. No One Loves You Like Your Mother is a section. Mother hunger, yearning for maternal love, can come from well-meaning mothers who could not be there, or from mothers who were there and wanted to love but did not have the proper infrastructure for attachment programmed into their own psyches. Mother hunger does not discriminate based on race or class because infant needs are universal. The kind of care we received as infants and toddlers teaches us whether we are worthy, lovable, and safe. Truly, what I've found is that having an unkind or neglectful mother can be just as damaging as having no mother at all. I wanna hover there. What, how does having an unkind mother, somebody very critical of you, of your weight, of your looks, of the things that you do, somebody not supportive of the things that you're interested in, How is that as damaging as having no mother at all?

Because that creates shame and rejection. If your mother, let's say, is dead, that hurts, but you don't take it personally. She didn't shame you or rejected you. She died, which is horrible. And that does create mother hunger, but mother hunger that comes from a critical, unkind mother creates shame and rejection, two of the worst things we can feel in our lives as humans. And when we feel that from our first love, it is hard to recover from that.

What does an unkind mother look like?

A mother who would look at your developing body, let's say, and say something really cruel about your body. Um, you're too fat to wear that, or, um, A mother who would purposefully, um, pit your siblings against each other, um, in service to her. A mother who, um, routinely wasn't there to pick you up. And when you got home and you were upset, she would yell at you. A mother who, when you came home from school, let's say you're in second grade, You're a little girl and you've had a rough day at school. The teacher criticized you, or maybe your best friends all sat at a different table and you weren't invited. And you go to your mom wanting comfort and she says, "Well, who would wanna be your friend anyway? You're such a mean little girl. I don't know how you have friends." That's what I mean. A mother who literally cannot attune and will be critical. That kind of abuse, every daughter that I've worked with that has grown up with that will have an addiction.

Why?

Because an addiction gives us a sense of connection. If you think about the signs of early addiction, here are the symptoms. Well, there's a dopamine hit, so you feel higher, you feel happier. Connection does the same thing. When you connect with someone who likes you, you feel a little bit higher for that moment. You get energy from it. You get energy from an addiction as well. And then you get more clarity, like an addiction early on before it becomes a problem. You're thinking more clearly. You feel like, oh, I got this. Now I understand. I've got a goal. Same when you're in connection with someone who likes you, who's tuning in. After that connection, you don't feel depleted. You'll have lunch and you'll come out energized. You know yourself better. You know where you're gonna go next. That's connection. Every substance in its original form feels like connection. It takes the place of a human conne— it works. It's working on the same dopaminergic kind of synapses in our brain that a good friend would. That a good partner would. But then we want more and we go get more. And addiction is meant to cause a craving and we have the craving anyway if we have mother hunger, right? So we're gonna go get more and eventually addiction's gonna start kicking our butt. And that's usually when they end up in my office. And yeah. Yeah.

So what about, uh, a lot of people that I see that write in talk about tension with their mom because there's a lot of loyalty owed. I gave up this for you. I expect you to be this. There's this sort of subtle thing that if you're not exactly like your mom, there's a betrayal. If you have different interests, if you have a different style, if you have a different sexual orientation, that there is this tit-for-tat loyalty thing underneath it. Is that also in the lane of unkind?

It can be, doesn't have to be, but it can be. It can go to unkindness if a mother has that capacity to punish you for not being like her, for not building her resume, for not being the daughter she needs to make herself look good. She might punish you. Some mothers won't become punitive. They become martyrs.

Give me an example. Poor me.

My daughter doesn't X, Y, or Z, and then she needs you as the daughter to make her feel better. Or she goes to complain about you. To everyone else in the household or to her own mother, or you hear her complain about you with her friends. That's a really tough spot, um, for a daughter to find herself, that if I am not my mother's twin, then she's unhappy.

Or if I don't do as she pleases exactly, she is not happy.

Right. And I think that for daughters who had mothers that, um, needed a best friend. And rather than go get her own best friend, she used you. You became her best friend. She needed you to hold her secrets. She needed you to fluff up her wellbeing, make her feel good. Um, a lot of times women with mothers like that develop a certain avoidant approach to life because they've been used. So they don't necessarily do some of the things that a more anxiously attached person would do who's hungry for more of mom. They've had enough. They've maybe had a little much. They're a little suffocated. They feel a little icky sometimes around their mother and they're ashamed. They love her, but no, it's my turn now to have a life. And I see with these daughters, mother hunger really creeps up on them. Like, you mean I really needed mothering? I thought I had too much. But too much is almost, um, like a blindfold because it looks like you're being nurtured.

And it looks like you're best friends.

You're best friends.

And it feels like you're—

I mean, look, Hollywood loves this. We got the Gilmore Girls and we have, uh, Jenny and Georgia. So we have kind of Hollywood romanticizing this best friend type thing, minimizing that what's happening is The daughter in, in having to kind of grow up to either be her own mother or be her mother's mother or be her mother's best friend doesn't get to be a little girl.

Hmm.

And so those needs that are developmentally appropriate at 3 and at 5 and at 7 and at 9 aren't getting met. A mom is not our friend. A mother is our mother. She's our guide, our inspiration. She's our nurturer and she's our safety net. If we expected our friends to do that, I don't think we'd have any friends. We might pick a friend who's nurturing, a friend over here who's inspiring, and a friend over here that we feel really safe with. But that all in one person?

No.

A mother's job is big enough. She doesn't, she's not also our friend. If she's trying to be our friend, sometimes she's taking a shortcut. She doesn't know really what else to do. So, and she maybe had a mother that was so cold that the flip side of that is, I'm just gonna be my daughter's everything. I get it. Um, but it's not the same as mothering. I think with our daughters, we don't always get back what we're putting in. Mm. We go get that from our girlfriends, our therapists, our partners. We don't look to our daughters to necessarily put it back in.

That is a beautiful distinction. I've never heard anybody explain that, that there's a huge difference between your role as a mother and the nurturing and safety and protection you provide. You're the only person that's their mom.

That's it.

And I shouldn't have the expectation that they have to give me back everything I'm giving to them.

Exactly.

Wow.

Maybe the most important piece of this is how critical our friendships are. And I think as women, too often we put our girlfriends on the back burner while we raise our kids, while we're wifing, while we're daughtering. We're gonna need our friends more than anything. And we haven't necessarily been given the skillset to prioritize our friends. Part of that is inherited misogyny and our own internalized feelings about women. It takes us a while to grow up and learn how valuable these relationships are. And if we grow up with mother hunger, we don't always trust women right away. We have to learn that. We have to start to trust ourselves, So that we can trust other women. And that's part of the work. But yeah.

What about somebody who is listening going, well, I have a great relationship with my mom.

Mm-hmm. And good.

My childhood was great. Can you still have mother hunger even if you have a great relationship with your mom or you don't remember anything or—

Well, okay. So there's a bigger context I would wanna ask someone who's saying, 'Cause I hear this a lot.

Oh, it was great.

It was great. I had a great childhood, great relationship with mom. And yet they're in my office because of addiction and relationships have all fallen apart. Work, like nothing's working. But my life was great growing up. To me, that's a disconnect. I would ask somebody, are you willing to explore that? Because some are not, and I'm not gonna push that. Mother hunger is, and it doesn't impact everyone, but if you do say, My childhood was idyllic. And yet nothing is working in your adulthood. That's incongruent. Here's what happens when the little brain gets stressed. When your infant brain gets stressed, when your toddler brain gets stressed, the body is not developed enough to handle cortisol and norepinephrine. Those come in much handier when we're older. What they do is they damage the memory center of the brain. So if an adult's telling me, oh, I don't have any memory, but I think it was all good. I'm thinking this child was completely stressed out. This adult now has amazing resources for coping that are starting to not work, but the memories literally are not encoded into the memory center because there was too much toxic anxiety going on in childhood. It doesn't mean the body doesn't have the story. The body will have it, but the body's waiting. For the right guide, the right care, the right environment to open up and tell the story. So if someone isn't, hasn't had that, the story's not gonna come out. The body knows it's not time, it's not safe. Our body's protecting us. That's its only design is to keep us alive. That's our body's design. Attach, stay alive. So we're not gonna have memory until we're safe enough. And that's the good news. Our body's not gonna flood us with information that we're not supported enough to have.

So how common is it to have no memory? Yes.

Very, extremely common.

And it sounds like that's a very big signal to you as a therapist that somebody is struggling with mother hunger and yearning for mothering and safety.

Somebody was not safe as a child is what that's gonna tell me.

And you're not necessarily saying safe physically, you're saying safe emotionally.

Yeah. The body doesn't really differentiate danger. A threat is a threat, and the body is going to send in the protective mechanisms regardless.

Now I got a question because you sharing that.

Yeah.

I've heard almost every one of my friends say, I don't have a lot of memories from childhood. What immediately happens when you start to consider your experience as a child is that you feel like you're betraying your parents, you feel guilty. I would love to just talk about the grief. Good.

I was going there. We touched on blame for just a moment.

Barbara, let's touch on blame and grief.

You kind of beautifully said, "This isn't about blame." No. And I really want to pause that because blame is a stage of grief. Hmm. It's a necessary stage. We have to kind of— get angry for a little while and blame someone for a little while.

Okay.

We've been carrying it as if something's wrong with us our whole life. So when we first realize, oh wait, maybe it's not just me, blame will be part of it. We just don't wanna get stuck there. But I give, I give a client a lot of room to have some time to blame, and then we move on.

So let's talk about the grief. When you really can see yourself in this, yeah, or you see your daughters in it, or you see your mother in it, you see your sister or your partner in it. Suddenly this explains all of the emotional monitoring. It explains the people pleasing. It explains the critical nature of how somebody feels about themselves because they mood, mood, mood outbursts.

I mean, it explains, yes.

Oh my God. That was me. Oh my gosh. I've worked so hard on this. Just, I used to be like a walking volcano.

Oh, it's so hard.

Oh, um, yeah. But once you see this and you start, you, you do experience grief. You experience grief for what you didn't receive.

That's exactly right. So we didn't know, so we couldn't grieve it. That's what's hard. Like if you get a cancer diagnosis, you know it's time to grieve and you go find a support group. You lose a parent or a child, we culturally sanction that grief. So you can tell your friends and they're gonna bring you food and they're gonna bring you coffee and they're gonna hold you and you can go to support group. What do you do with mother hunger? We haven't talked about it. There's no place to take the grief. So first of all, the body freezes it. It's literally frozen in the body. This is why we have lots of autoimmune problems as women because that grief, if it's not acknowledged, just waits. It freezes. It's in your cells, it's in your bones, it's in your joints. But as soon as someone names it and you're like, oh, well, the first reaction is gonna be this overwhelming sense of sadness because it's gonna start to thaw. Hmm. That grief is gonna thaw. And grief has its own timing, its own rhythm. There are no perfect stages, but parts of grief can look like rage and anger. Parts can look like blame. Parts will look like sadness, parts will be numbing out, um, because we can't feel it all day. We're gonna have to pull away from it. This is where the apology ache comes in.

What is the apology ache?

So part of the pathological hope, the hoping someone will change, I think also what I found with, that my clients taught me, is there's this craving for an apology that mom will one day kind of say, I'm so sorry, and not just say, I'm sorry, forgive me. And then keep doing the same thing.

Or, "I'm sorry you feel that way." Or, well, that's gaslighting.

Yeah, exactly. But an apology is, "I'm sorry I did that, and I'm actually gonna do something different now." That's pretty rare that we get that kind of apology. Any other kind of apology is not really an apology. So most of us as grown-up women are walking around wanting this apology. I call it an ache because it's almost as biological as the hunger. Please just recognize what happened and then I'll be okay. I think when we're waiting for an apology, for a recognition of this is why you're hurting, before we know where that comes from, we want our partners to apologize. We want our best friends to apologize. We want our kids to— we need someone to apologize for the fact that our feelings are hurt.

Is it, you know, if the apology's never coming, Is it possible to move on? Because I think we seek the apology because we ourselves don't actually honor the truth of what our own experience is.

Exactly.

And so you're looking for the validation from somebody to say, "Well, it's okay. I still love you. And yes, that did happen." I mean, for me, I've said that so many times to my— it is liberating to say to my daughters in particular, I was dysregulated. I was under so much financial stress. I had postpartum when you were a baby and couldn't attach to you. Right. If I could change it all, I would.

Right.

I'm responsible for that. Like, tell me how to change. Like, it is liberating to say that. At least it has been for me.

And probably for them as well. What a gift.

But you'll have to ask them. I think it is, but I don't want to presume, you know, I think it has been.

Still in process, but—

Yes, it's always gonna be in process. But is it really possible? You said you've gotta recognize that this is a thing. You've gotta honor the fact that this is your experience and you're not being disrespectful by saying it. You're telling the truth to yourself.

I named Apology Ache because it's, it is a name that I'm giving one of the stages of grief. So it's actually a form of grief, just like blame is, just like rage is. Apology Ache is a form of pining. When we lose something we love, we pine for it. That's normal. An apology ache is a form of pining. It's gonna be a, it's gonna be a phase we go through. We gotta go through it. And I think if we know that there may not be an apology coming, we can work with that grief and make amends to ourselves. And the way we do that, yes, we re-mother. We, we have to nurture, protect, and guide ourselves. One of the basic ways we do that is when we realize, here's what I would like an apology for. I want an apology for, I'm gonna do something fairly benign, that she was never on time to pick me up from school. And I always felt like an orphan waiting on my mother to come pick me up from school. Well then here's one way you make amends to yourself. Please don't abandon yourself by being late to things that you value. Show up on time because you're worth it. You're important. So whatever you're wanting that apology for sometimes informs what it is you need to give yourself.

Oh, that's beautiful. That's really beautiful. How do you navigate a relationship where you recognize that this is an issue, right? You even can hold space for understanding that it's not even intentional.

Mm-hmm.

Because I, I do think that there's a huge mistake that society makes in thinking that somebody that has a challenging personality is doing it intentionally. Like, I, I've come to believe more that no, it's just all reactive. They're just in their own like reactive tra— traumatic cycle. They've got their own longing for mothering they never got, and they're just reacting, reacting, reacting. There's no thinking at all. It's all emotion. You're just at the, like, mercy, mercy of it. So if you're in a situation where you've already said you might not want to have this conversation with your mom, because unless they're doing the work, it's a very confronting thing to say to somebody.

It is.

And I felt that like, oh my God, I'm, I've caused this. I'm the world's worst, but like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you, the defensiveness is real. It is. When you look at it, the sense of guilt and betrayal as a daughter is real. And I think it's easier for most daughters to do the work, to hold space, to understand what their mom might have been dealing with. But it's harder to also hold space for yourself and the truth of what you didn't receive. Yes. And what you needed then and what you probably still need now.

Exactly. Those needs don't go away. They just grow in intensity.

So say that again. What do you mean those needs don't go away? And those needs being you need nurturing, right? You need to feel safe and be protected, right? And you're looking for guidance.

That's right.

And if you didn't get one of those things or all of those things, and you don't even remember it because this happens in the first couple years of your life when this attachment is established or not, that If you didn't get those things, how— what do you mean they keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger?

Unmet needs grow. That's just biology. They just grow.

Oh, like hunger. Yeah. It's like you don't feed yourself, you get hungry.

What's gonna happen? Right. You don't drink water. What's gonna happen? You don't just suddenly learn how to cope without water. It's the same with emotional attachment needs, the same with protective needs. It is a horrifying epiphany at times because the reality is No matter how, depending on how long you've lived with this injury, the craving doesn't go away overnight. It will require that now you become your own mother.

But I don't wanna be my own mother.

I was like, okay, see, this voice is so good. This is great, Mel. Oh, so what I would suggest, 'cause I've had this like where I'm, I'm trying to mother myself, right? And I'm thinking I don't have time to make a good meal, or I'm just irritated with my whatever. That's how my mother felt. It's in my body. So we have to come up against that voice that says, "I don't wanna do this," and really think, whose voice is that? 'Cause chances are when we were really tiny, our mother had other things she would rather be doing because she's human and the world's an exciting place and being a mom sometimes isn't all that exciting. So we're gonna hear that voice. As we try to mother ourselves and we come up with resistance, that's a story for probably what it was like when we were little.

You know, one other thing that you write here, daughters of compromised mothers cling to hope, hope that the mother they have will become the mother they need. Enduring hope creates a pathological fantasy that keeps women trapped in cycles of disappointment and grief. Choices feel more like compulsions. Decision-making is based on external pressures rather than internal values. Talk to me about that hope that things are gonna change.

Mm-hmm.

And that cycle that you get into of bending over backwards, hoping that it will.

Mm-hmm. I think most of us can relate to pathological hope around something, whether it's wishing or hoping for our mother It may be wishing or hoping that a lover returns or that a boss would finally be kind or that, um, we can finally understand our own child. I think hope is wired into us. Where it becomes pathological is when the hope— we get all this evidence that it's not happening. It's just not happening. We may have done decades of research to try to have someone's approval or care or love. It's not happening. It becomes pathological when we keep on trying, expecting that if we just try it this way or that way, that it'll work this time. That's where I really like to help people let themselves off the hook. Relax, quit trying, see what happens. Where else could we put your energy? It sounds like you could use the care that you're trying to put out in the world.

So the assignment here is share this with your best girlfriends and your partners and your sisters and talk about this?

No, no. Let me be clear. Siblings in a rela— in a family are all going to have a different mother, even if it's the same mother. So you cannot always trust going to your sibling because you've had an aha and you realize you have mother hunger to talk about it because they may still be thinking mom's great or they've got a whole nother perspective on their life and they don't want to hear it either, or they don't have a mother wound.

Because they were— mom was in a different place.

Could be very, very much the case.

Yes. You might have been number 2 in line and your sister's number 7. And by then there was money and things were stable and mom had more.

Like, who knows?

Who knows? Parents are different parents for every single child. It's absolutely true.

So you may not be able to go to your siblings to talk about this. You may not even be able to go to your girlfriends to talk about this if they don't understand it. They could add more shame. Part of realizing you have it is to be very protective of yourself. Now, this is your first job as the mother of yourself. Protect yourself. Be careful who you talk to.

How do you know who to talk to?

Well, first, one of the safest places is to try a coach or a therapist and give them the book. If they don't already have it, give it to 'em. Say, I, I need a place to talk about this. And if they're unwilling to do it, that's not who you wanna talk to. But any therapist worth the, their salt or coach is gonna say, okay, I'm here for that. That's a safe place. If you have a friend that's reading the book with you or start a book group, start a book group with your friends so that everybody reads it, everybody underlines what they wanna talk about and you bring it in. That's free. You could even make a meal while you're doing it. So you might have to create your own safety net to protect yourself.

So as you're kind of waking up and recognizing how this need for nurturing and safety and guidance was missing, right? And that you long for it. And it's impacting you as an adult. You recognize the signs. You're lonely. You're burnt out. Everybody's needs come before yours. You are a people pleaser. You're a perfectionist. You're super critical of yourself. Or you have destructive habits, like you write about in the book how addiction can become a replacement for your mom. Once you have the self-awareness and you can recognize that this hunger for mothering, for nurturing, for protection, for guidance is there, where do you begin? Like, do you need to forgive your mom?

A couple things about forgiveness. When we forgive someone, mother or anyone, for causing us harm, sometimes we do that to stay in the relationship. Sometimes we do that and we still decide to leave the relationship. We forgive so that we are not bitter. We don't get stuck in anger. We don't get stuck in blame because those toxic feelings will make us sick. So we forgive for our own wellbeing. And our own health. If that forgiveness somehow brings us to a place that we can be in the relationship, great. But forgiving is not forgetting. We don't wanna forget what this person's capable of doing. We can forgive it, but if we also forget it, then we're being pathologically, mm-hmm, kind of going right back into the storm expecting that we're gonna have the sun come out.

That goes right along with my favorite definition of forgiveness that I heard Oprah say, which was True forgiveness is when you stop wishing things were different.

There you go.

And that helps you also in this case, not forget.

That's right.

You just stop that sort of toxic, pathological hope.

Pathological hope. Exactly.

You forgive the moment you say, yes, I'm going to stop wishing things were different and accept them as they are. One of the things that I think is really exciting about the conversation, frankly, is that once you see it and you can name it, now you can do something about it.

Exactly.

And the more that you really allow yourself the space to process your grief and your sadness, the more that you accept what didn't happen and what did happen, the more you look at your own mother through compassionate and understanding eyes, but you still protect yourself. The more you realize an apology's not coming if she's not doing the work and doesn't want to. Yeah. And you stop wishing things would be different and you accept them as they are. I think the more empowered you are to say, I don't have to repeat this. And that's what's exciting is that you get to decide. Yeah. Now that this thing isn't invisible, maybe this insight gives you the access to stop criticizing yourself. Maybe this insight gives you the access to stop overextending yourself, making everybody else's happiness more important than your own. Maybe this insight gives you the insight to at least see from a distance when the guilt is coming, to at least see from a distance when that mood shifts, and to recognize that is not Your responsibility to manage. It's your responsibility to see it and protect yourself from it.

Exactly. What mother hunger healing is actually about that you're saying is an invitation to be, not do. You've been doing plenty, but to be. That the more you can replace lost nurturing, the more you can replace lost protection, your whole nervous system starts to settle down. You become more present. And what is it our kids want from us more than anything? Our full presence. So as we become, as daughters, more present to ourselves, mm, we are naturally becoming the mother they need and want. Even if we never have the children, doing this work makes us a better mother. To ourselves and to our children. That's right.

What does this look like when you have somebody who has a huge epiphany and they really start being kinder to themselves and nurturing themselves? And what, what is available? What do you see transforming people's lives?

There is going to be a lot more ease and comfort around how you feed yourself. It's as basic as recognizing hunger cues.

Mm.

Like some women have lost their hunger cues. They will come back. You'll know when you're hungry, you'll know when you're full. So I see eating leveling out. Um, I notice that women, as they start to do better, have a larger capacity to love everyone who's in their life currently. Mm. And attract relationships that are more Nourishing, that aren't just a cocktail party friendship or aren't just a work kind of superficial relationship, but relationships that you can call somebody at 2 in the morning and say, "I just need to talk." Those start to happen. Um, I've seen some people decide they don't wanna be in the marriage they're in, um, because it's too triggering every single day. It's okay if you're triggered periodically. We're going to be. That's the beauty of why we connect is we're gonna grow. But every day I've seen people wake up and say, uh, no, I can't do this anymore. And then on the flip side, some have said, this marriage that I thought that was so broken really isn't. I just need to quit expecting this partner of mine to be my mother. Hmm. So relationships get better, food gets easier, um, addiction and cravings get a little smaller. That's not to say addiction doesn't need its own treatment though. I'm not saying that if you treat mother hunger, your addictions are gonna go away. They, they may need some specific care, but all of the frenetic kind of adrenaline that, that fuels our life starts to get less. We are not flooded with those hormones all the time. We get more peace, we sleep better, Yeah.

It sounds pretty good.

It's, it's, it's, it is. It is.

If the person listening does just one thing after everything that you've taught us today, what is the most important thing that you should do after this conversation?

I have a feeling that if you've been listening to this, and you have mother hunger, you could feel pretty dysregulated after this conversation. You might feel emotionally strung out.

Or like you need a drink. I'm just speaking for myself right now.

Yep. Which is what I was basically saying. You will want to dissociate and you may do that with alcohol. You might do that with Instagram. You might do that with HDT. Go bake some bread. However you go offline, you may need to do that right now. And let's not pathologize it. Let's just say you might need to go offline for a little while. You just paid attention to some really hard stuff, tender stuff, primitive stuff. And you sweet little thing, go take a break.

Kelly McDaniel, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, um, for the profound and important work that you're doing. Thank you for giving us a name for the ache that so many women feel. Thank you for explaining to our partners and our fathers and our kids, why we may be the way that we are. And thank you for doing this through a lens of compassion for our grandmothers and our mothers and for us, because none of us want to be doing this. No, we're caught in a cycle of doing it to ourselves and each other and with system doing it to us and a system doing it to women.

Yes.

And there is something you can do about it. And the first step you've already done, you've listened to this.

Yeah.

And I would invite you to share it. I would invite you— there are people in your life that need to hear this. There are people in your life that you feel safe with, that you can talk about this with. I think it is important that we destigmatize this conversation. And we give ourselves permission to tell the truth about our experience. And then we take responsibility for how we respond to the truth that we see. And that's how you change your life. And I also wanted to say, as your friend, that I love you and I believe in you and I believe in your ability to change your life. And I know firsthand that healing this inside yourself is the single most powerful way as a daughter that you can do that. And it has unbelievably powerful ripple effects through absolutely every aspect of how you live. So thank you for being here, and I can't wait to see you and talk to you again. I'll be waiting for you in the very next episode. I'll welcome you in the moment you hit play. I'll see you there. And thank you for watching all the way to the end, and you're gonna love this next video, and I'll be waiting to welcome you in the moment you hit play.