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We speak with Kelly McDaniel, who coined the term Mother Hunger. She explains what this means, and how it is the earliest trauma and a disenfranchised grief. We discuss not having “permission” to talk about our mothers, much less work out mother trauma, which leaves us isolated from mothering and healing. In this, she is able to explain how and why dissociation starts in infancy - and what it is protecting us from exactly. Trigger warning for mother related content, and reference to the mother-baby dynamic, though no specific abuse stories are discussed.
Diagnosed with Complex Trauma and a Dissociative Disorder, Emma and her system share what they learn along the way about complex trauma, dissociation (CPTSD, OSDD, DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality), etc.), and mental health. Educational, supportive, inclusive, and inspiring, System Speak documents her healing journey through the best and worst of life in recovery through insights, conversations, and collaborations.
Welcome to the System Speak podcast. If you would like to support our efforts at sharing our story, fighting stigma about dissociative identity disorder, and educating the community and the world about trauma, please go to our website at www.systemspeak.org. And there is a button for donations where you can offer a one time donation to support the podcast or become an ongoing subscriber. We so appreciate the support, the positive feedback, and you sharing our podcast with others. We are all learning together.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Kelly McDaniel is a licensed professional counselor and author who specializes in treating women who experience addictive relational patterns. Combining a master's degree in English literature from Georgetown University and a master's degree in counseling from St. Mary's University McDaniel formulates her practice around the principles of relational and cultural theory and current trauma protocols to tailor individual intensives for women who seek support for mother hunger and intimacy intolerance. McDaniel is the first clinician to name an attachment injury as mother hunger and explore the intimacy intolerance that comes from bonding with an emotionally compromised mother.
Speaker 1:In an effort to destigmatize and reduce pathological diagnoses that add shame for women who suffer with mother hunger, Kelly teaches workshops and speaks to audiences both nationally and locally. Before listening to this interview, you need to understand that what Kelly McDaniel has done is written specifically about a concept that she calls mother hunger. Due to the nature of the content of explaining this concept and discussing how it relates to trauma, there is in this interview a great deal of discussion about mothers specifically but also about caregivers. It can be a highly triggering topic and requires good check ins with yourself during and after the podcast. If right now you're in a place where talking about mothers or trauma related to early caregivers specifically, just skip this episode.
Speaker 1:If you are able to listen to it, go into it knowing that there may be things stirred up as a natural result not just to triggers content of what you hear, but also in direct response to some of the things that you learn and insights you may have. So in addition to any self care you need during or after the podcast, also be sure that you do some journaling or check-in with your therapist or support person as well. It's really good information and a powerful perspective on how significant early trauma is. But it can be difficult to listen to, to think about, and to recognize. Welcome, Kelly McDaniel.
Speaker 1:Let me say that I found you or found out about the work that you're doing because I am studying trauma and dissociation, obviously, that's the podcast, But also, I have been specifically studying attunement and some of the shame theories like Patricia De Jung and some of Susan P. Spannen's work and some of these different ideas about what happened so early, early. And what got me into that was not just my own story, but also because I have adopted children and attachment is everything. And I wanted to know what is it that I'm seeing sometimes that is beyond just the classical definition of attachment. Like, I understand those things are important but there's deeper wounds there and things that we're connecting that are outside that description.
Speaker 1:Like, it was not enough of a description for me as a mother or as a survivor. I went to several different conferences and workshops, and twice, they talked about something that you had said about mother hunger. And I it blew me away. I was like, what is this? I need to know about this right now.
Speaker 1:And so I was able to find you and contact you. So go ahead and share with us just a little bit about yourself, and then we'll get into mother hunger.
Speaker 2:Okay. What a lovely introduction. Thank you. And it makes me happy to hear that in a conference setting, you heard the term mother hunger. Because I can remember in 02/2008, '2 thousand and '9 when my first book came out and I was on a panel with other psychologists and therapists and I mentioned mother hunger in the context of looking for the root underneath addictive type cravings for love and for food.
Speaker 2:One of my colleagues turned to me and she said, What are you talking about? So it was a little ahead of its time, but now with the exciting research advances with attachment neurobiology and people doing such great trauma work, I think we're ready for this information. We need this information. We've needed it, but sometimes we don't always know what we need. I came up with the concept of mother hunger because I was studying addictive love, addictive sex, which actually I was studying those things as kind of an accident.
Speaker 2:I thought I was going to be studying eating disorders and that was something that seemed more of an over problem. Obviously we have dreadful statistics about anorexia and bulimia and the way that eating disorders are impacting all of us. But in the middle of all that research, I kept coming across the fact that the women that were struggling with eating disorders were also struggling with relationship, with attachment, with self esteem, with really self esteem, what I shouldn't be saying is self loathing. And this was more interesting to me because like food, we need love, we need relationships to survive, and these two things were not working. And so I started going back to what's our first experience with food, what's our first experience with love, and it starts in utero and it starts in our mother's embrace.
Speaker 2:So that's a little bit about where or how the term came about. I am just naturally thirsty for knowledge and I wanted an explanation for how something as natural as love, how something as natural as eating gets twisted into addiction, gets twisted into craving, gets twisted into suffering. Our normal descriptions of addiction didn't seem adequate for food and love.
Speaker 1:That's exactly what got my attention. At first, of course, in regards to my children because it's easier to see them than myself sometimes. They all were drug babies and so everyone talked about addiction from the beginning and we went through withdrawal with the younger ones that came fresh from that context and so we watched them go through detox and withdraw themselves as they were infants. And then they we see it in different we see it in different behaviors and interactions with the children Yeah. That there are these addictive patterns, but that it's not about drugs because they're children in our home and in our care.
Speaker 1:But there's something that was not being explained that people were not understanding. And that's what caught my attention when I heard about you. And I thought, what? Because at first, I was at a it was a therapy conference, so it was all very process kinds of things. And I thought, how can that fit this model?
Speaker 1:And I couldn't connect it until I learned about polyvagal. And then I thought, I understand they're talking about these things over here, but I think that backs up this over here and put it together. And that's when I contacted you. It was just it explained so much. And then in my own self, seeing different patterns and in those categories seem significant because what you've just said, what we know now with research about trauma in utero and attachment in utero and those early, early days and all of that, that something is really happening there.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes. Something powerful is really happening there and I think before we go on to dive deeper into mother hunger, it might be important to acknowledge that this injury, a mother hunger wound, is somewhat universal. In that, this conversation many folks might relate to and many folks might find it troubling and dysregulating for a nervous system. You know, I find that when I talk about mother hunger, people can either start to feel a little bit sad or teary or angry and dismissive or perhaps even numb. And that's all really normal because when we're talking about mother hunger, yes, we're going to talk about mothers because our mother is our first biological experience of home, of food, of love.
Speaker 2:But what we think of when we think of mothering is we think of the three needs that we have. We need comfort, we need protection, and we need ultimately, we need some guidance. But the first two comfort and protection. These are universal human needs, and when those get disrupted in that early attachment relationship, we're going to look like we have symptoms of mother hunger as we grow, but it may not necessarily be that there was something about our mother that was wrong. But there was something in the early caregiving environment that didn't allow those needs to happen.
Speaker 2:And there are lots of ways that happens, as you know, and we can talk about that. But I want to really look at mother hunger as really a hunger for comfort. It's a hunger for protection, and it's usually pre verbal. Because it's so much of infants rely on their first biological home, their mother, We will be tying it to her body, her mind, her well-being, but that's not necessarily always about the mom.
Speaker 1:Ryan, explain to me about the connection to the loneliness.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. Good. Well, I like that you mentioned the polyvagal theory because, know because of Stephen Forges and the powerful work that Bessel van der Kolk is doing, Pat Ogden's doing, Peter Levine's been doing, and Patrick Karnes, all of these folks, we know now when infants are frightened, that if they are not soothed when they're frightened, that the biological response to fear creates a certain shutdown. And in that shutdown, which children and infants are not meant to experience on a regular ongoing basis, a pattern of loneliness begins.
Speaker 2:So if we're not tended to in those earliest moments of life, earliest months of life when we experience, let's say, something as benign as hunger and we cry out but no one is there And that happens repetitively or that we're left alone to cry in the crib because that's supposed to make us independent. In fact, what that makes is a child who is going to learn how to be alone and then because being alone is intolerable for infants and children, in fact it's a death threat, the body will dissociate. The body will disconnect from itself, from its surroundings and in the words of Stephen Porges in the Polyvagal Theory, kind of play possum, go numb and that is when loneliness first becomes very toxic.
Speaker 1:And this is very, very young. You're not talking about an older child or a preschool child. You're talking about an infant.
Speaker 2:I'm talking about an infant. Yes. A lot of the work that I do with people that are healing mother hunger is to go back to the most early formative time, because in the first eighteen months of life is when we are getting wired to know love is safe, the world is safe, I can trust and I'm okay. That is all pretty much set by the time we're three. But the most dynamic time of brain growth, where those receptors for human connection and trust are being formed, is in the first eighteen months of life.
Speaker 1:So these early traumas are really significant and continue to play out even though they are pre verbal events or experiences.
Speaker 2:Right. In fact, I like the way you say these early traumas because I think there's a lot of misinformation about what constitutes an early trauma. I think there's a lot of misinformation still that people think that because babies don't have memory and don't have language, they don't know what's happening. So if they're left alone to cry or if they're frightened by a caregiver, that that is somehow not making an impact. But what we know now from research is that it is in fact making an impact.
Speaker 2:In fact, a mother's own body, because her body is our first home, if she's feeling intense anxiety when we are inside her, that cortisol, the high levels of cortisol, can travel through the placenta into the baby's nervous system. This is why we have some infants that seem born more wired to be hyper aware, hyper alert. They are already comfortable and used to high levels of anxiety. And a lot of this is coming from the wonderful research of Rachel Yehuda, who she has been studying the epigenetics of Holocaust survivors, but also did an extensive study for mothers that were pregnant during the nineeleven events. Through looking at what happened during that incredible stressful event to mothers who were in their last trimester, she's provided some powerful documentation about the nature of anxiety and what that does to an infant.
Speaker 1:That's so powerful.
Speaker 2:It is really powerful and I think you know information is power, knowledge is power, but I always have some concern in talking about this that it gets into the right hands. We need to know this information, but we certainly don't need more people blaming women and mothers for what goes wrong with children. And I don't know how many mothers or women can grow up in a culture that is focused more on individuality, aggression and domination. Women in this kind of environment are all walking around with some level of trauma. We are walking around as either victims from sexual assault or being objectified or being dismissed, being shamed, and so all of that's going to be then transfer to the next generation, and then the next generation.
Speaker 2:And so talking about mother hunger and talking about how important the mother is for her infant, it makes me nervous sometimes that somebody will find it another way to blame mothers and blame women, and that is certainly not what we need.
Speaker 1:One of my favorite things I've ever read is a line that you said, you sent to me. It says, every mother is first a daughter who carries her own wounds.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And I think that is where some of the sadness in learning about mother hunger, reading about it, writing about it, talking about it is as a mother myself, knowing ways that I wasn't as present with my newborn as I would have liked to have been from my own blind spots of where I still had unmet needs that had not yet been healed and repaired and we just carry this along and we can only give what we have.
Speaker 1:Well, and I don't want to go too far off track here, but I wanna pause and say two things about this. One is that there is somehow, for lack of a better word, grace in this both for myself and my own parents in a way that I haven't been able to find words for before because the more I learned about this and the more I learned about polyvagal for example and attunement, it changed how I parented because I so wanted to be more present or more this or that but we have circumstances just everyday life that still cause disruptions to those things that even though they're not intentional or I'm not necessarily being a bad mother, it still is a trauma for them. So for example, we have a medically fragile daughter, the youngest child is medically fragile and I often am just strapped to a helicopter and off we go which is so disruptive to the other children even though in their heads they understand it's not the same. For them it is the same. It's one more mom who's leaving, you know?
Speaker 1:And so even though I just use that as a neutral example because even though it's not an intentional wound or an intentional trauma, it's still part of their experience. And then the other thing just to say for those with significant dissociation who are listening is one of the things that often is part of that dynamic is this tension between mean going right back to attunement and mother hunger, this tension between I am being hurt by this person who is also the person who is supposed to protect me and later in therapy that looks like one more layer of it's hard to talk about these things because I can't say bad things about my parents but I still need to acknowledge the wounds that I have. And so at the very least, this framework has given us, like me specifically, a framework to at least say there's space in there to recognize that for whatever happened and their work is not necessarily my problem or my work to figure out, but that they were wounded or we would not have gotten to this point. And not at all to excuse what I went through and not at all to say that what happened to me was okay, but to acknowledge that there that there were wounds that they themselves had and to use that to give me, like myself, enough permission or enough space to be able to open up and say for this to heal and for this to change and for this to be better, I need to be able to say these things and maybe I can say them in this context of understanding that these wounds have been passed down and that's why it's so important to do something about it.
Speaker 2:Well, that is so well said and I love the way that you are breaking the cycle. So I am going to address both of the very important topics that you just broke up, that you just brought up. One being from the care of one child means other children aren't getting what they need. It's another abandonment. But what you're doing by understanding the importance of attunement, understanding the polyvagal theory, understanding the delicate nervous system of your children, and that as mothers it's our job to meet our child where they are, where they can understand, which is so hard when you're outnumbered in all the different Yes,
Speaker 1:thank you for just saying that. I needed someone to say that. Thank you. Yes,
Speaker 2:it's like you're learning all these different languages to try to reach each child where they can developmentally hear you and also however they're wired and they need to hear you. But what I'm saying though is that yes, it might hurt them when you take off in a helicopter with one child. But what you're doing that mitigates trauma is you know to then go back and explain you do the repair work. Children, they can handle when, as caregivers, we are not there or we make a mistake or we lose our temper or we're having our own difficulty or we have to leave them. If we can come back explain and repair and sit with them while they cry or they're angry, we don't have mother hunger.
Speaker 2:Mother hunger is a word for complex trauma, really, and it's a way that we can communicate a very complicated traumatic manifestation by using terms that we all resonate with. Hunger for a mother's love is basically because not only was it not there or there were wounds, but those wounds never got repaired. She was not able to even see that she had caused us harm and then name it for us so that our body could heal it. So I have lots of women that are grown in all stages of life that until we can name, oh, that was awful and sit with the grief, the pain, the sadness, the fear, it's still lodged in the body waiting for someone in a motherly role to safely guide us to an answer, to a name so that our body can heal it. You're already doing that for your children, so even though they may be enduring some difficulty and they've had trouble early in life because they lost their original caregiver, you're mitigating that by being sensitive and tuned in.
Speaker 2:So I want to say that for all mothers, and the beautiful thing is the statute of limitations doesn't really run out on this, especially for daughters. Daughters kind of always want their mom, no matter how old they are, and especially as they age, and they maybe become mothers. So mothers of daughters always have a chance to kind of have a do over with humility and with grace. And so I love the word grace. So that's in response to the first part of what you're saying.
Speaker 2:But the second part about what you're saying that we have to be able to talk about this. That it is in the talking about this without feeling guilty that we're betraying our parents or our mother that the healing comes. I really couldn't agree more and I think that's why I'm so passionate about providing language that lets this conversation unfold. And it just warms me that the term mother hunger caught your attention that we can have this dialogue and that we can open up this kind of conversation people that need to have it. I work primarily with women, but there are so many men that are also struggling with mother hunger.
Speaker 1:It's so true. And one thing that got my attention about the phrase itself was because my favorite book is Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes and she talks about many mothers and different kinds of mothers and how everyone needs many mothers and I held on to that for so many years even while trying to find my way through therapy or find a good therapist because there was so much I could not fix on my own and because of safety issues, I could not have any kind of return to my mother to work things out or to to to make that. I couldn't fix that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so that was very difficult and then when my mother passed away, I thought, oh, I'm free. Like, was some guilt, maybe some shame but also just almost not caring about it. I can finally say these things out loud that I've never been able to say but when I got to therapy, I still couldn't even though she was gone. I still did not have permission to actually go through with saying these things out loud And the moment that changed it for me with the therapist was when she said what you just said earlier that about repairing, she said something about not just I'm sorry this happened or I'm sorry this was hard for you. She specifically said, I'm sorry no one helped.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry there was no one to get you out of there. I'm sorry that it took me so long to find you. And when she said words like that that went not just to acknowledging the pain but to it the attunement with it and the part about there not being the hunger part. When she got to the hunger part, it was like fire in my bones. I've never felt anything like it.
Speaker 1:It was as if heat just shot through my whole entire body.
Speaker 2:You were giving such a great explanation of how wonderful and healing it is to feel felt.
Speaker 1:That's when everything changed in therapy. That's when we were all in.
Speaker 2:Yep. Because she felt all of you. She felt it with you. You were no longer carrying that burning fear, danger and abandonment by yourself. All of yourselves were able to look at her and her body was feeling your body.
Speaker 2:That's what heals. It's amazing. It is amazing and I think you speak to the truth that most of us will not ever be able to go back to our mothers to get that experience. Unless a mother is doing a lot of her own work and can return to us as daughters with a different way, we're not going to be going to our mother for that kind of healing experience. We're going to have to find other mothers.
Speaker 2:We're going to have find a therapist who can tolerate sitting with us and feeling what we're feeling, which means we find therapists who have done their own work and are not afraid of the deep levels of despair and the deep magnitude of grief that comes up when we are touching these wounds. And you spoke to how powerful the unwritten contract is of loyalty because it really, for many women, it's not until their mothers are no longer on planet that they even come to me to treat mother hunger. Even then with her gone, the hidden contract of don't betray your parents, know, honor their mother and their father can make it very difficult for the body to thaw and to melt into those wounds that we've covered up for decades.
Speaker 1:It's so true. Well, it's
Speaker 2:good because we're both limbic. I think we're feeling this as we're talking about it and sometimes that makes it hard to find the right words. I struggle with this a lot when I'm doing a podcast or trying to communicate with a group about Mother Hunger and I will sometimes lose my train of thought, forget where I was, stumble on my words because there almost are no words for what we're talking about here is a form of such a disenfranchised grief, because we're not supposed to talk about our mothers a negative way. We're not supposed to acknowledge it. So when we're feeling grief and it's about something we're not supposed to talk about, that grief gets disenfranchised.
Speaker 2:It's put out on the margins of ourselves and to reclaim it enough to talk about it is such a left brain experience, but it's a right brain feeling.
Speaker 1:Right. The disenfranchised grief was exactly what I was gonna talk about. And there are so many layers of that grief that you are not allowed to embrace. When something else happens, then you have permission to grieve this in this way. But in our country, you have, like, three days you're allowed to grieve.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:So so the problem with grief is a whole different issue but we see it in other mother ways when people have miscarriages, it's not talked about. Don't announce pregnancies until it's so so long and when there's a death of a child, people don't talk about it after so long. You know, all of these things that are mothering ish things that people can't talk about because all of that acknowledges this mothering above them like I'm thinking of this the tree, right, where I come from this mother who came from this mother who came from this mother and you can't talk about one piece of it without also talking about the other pieces because it's all connected. Exactly. I think too that's part of what happens with bad therapy like when therapy goes wrong the therapist does not when it's not a good match or not a good therapist or not a therapist who's done their own work, I think that's why that becomes so dangerous because it's so re traumatizing in opening that wound but not fixing it which is the wound to begin with.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And I think it's where identifying if our own mother hunger is important because then we can be hopefully better consumers of therapy. Because when we know that this is our wound, we know we've got to find a therapist who is attachment oriented, who is trauma oriented, and who understands complicated disenfranchised grief. And that's a specialty. Those are specialized folks, right?
Speaker 2:And then maybe we can give some resources for how to find well trained therapists. But you know anybody who's sensory motor trained in the Pat Ogden way and folks who have trained in EMDR who understand trauma, those are good signs but it doesn't necessarily mean they understand attachment but those are really good directions to go in.
Speaker 1:For just a minute, just so that I can hold on to it and not let it slip through my fingers. Me again what you just said well, not what you just said, but what you said in the beginning about dissociation with the infant when they're lonely and they're crying and it's not being met. Say that one more Yeah,
Speaker 2:I will. And I'm going to say it and I'm going to also acknowledge that while I'm trauma trained and I've trained with some of the best and this is the work that I do, I'm not a scientist. And so to understand dissociation and to understand how it can happen so young, I really do like to refer people to study polyvagal theory and to look at the work of the scientists out there, Siegel, who's studying the developing mind, gave us that book. But anyway, what we do know is that it's biology that when we are newly born, newly in the world, biology is already ready and online to protect us. Hopefully it doesn't have to because that's why we have caregivers.
Speaker 2:But if the caregiver is the threat either by neglect or over abuse, then our vulnerable little bodies are going to register that we are in danger. Even if it's something as benign, again, I don't think this is benign, but most people do. They think that baby is Okay crying itself out in the crib and then they eventually stop crying and people think, oh, see, good baby. We've taught them no, that's not a good baby. That's a dissociated baby because what has happened is this infant's only way of getting its need met is to cry.
Speaker 2:If that's not responded to in a sensitive, tuned in way, the baby registers, uh-oh, I'm alone. Babies are not supposed to be alone. A baby left alone in our hunter gatherer primitive mind is a baby left in the wild to die. So babies are not meant to be alone. They're meant to be attached to their caregiver.
Speaker 2:So that goes on for a period of time. The crying isn't working, which is the fight response. That's going to default. There's no way they can flee, so there's no flight or fight that can work for an infant if nobody's responding to this infant. So the next place to go is subcortical, is down into the brainstem that says, I guess we're about to die.
Speaker 2:And it slows down the heart rate, slows down the breathing. It's like playing possum. The body will put itself into a place to get ready for death and the crying stops. It looks like the baby's asleep, but it's in essence a dissociative place. And if this happens chronically over and over again, not just by being left alone in the crib, but not being responded to in ways that are safe.
Speaker 2:If a parent is aggressive, loud, sexually abusive, or perhaps even needy and unpredictable, children will learn to auto regulate themselves and not turn to that caregiver because the caregiver is too threatening and the auto regulatory response can become dissociative.
Speaker 1:That just blew my mind.
Speaker 2:Okay. Hope I'm making sense and feel free to ask questions where I'm leaving things out.
Speaker 1:No. It's fantastic. I'm talking to Siegel later today actually. Oh, fantastic. And I have studied and talked about the polyvagal on the podcast so the listeners are aware of that.
Speaker 1:What you just said is so powerful. It's so significant in understanding how real that trauma is so young. Think so often when we are accessing memory that we can recall, you know, like post verbal things or different parts of us that are able to say this is my story and what happened. There are so many layers of but what if I could have done this and what if I could have done that which doesn't make sense when you actually see a child that age. Right.
Speaker 1:When you understand, oh yeah, but I'm a grown up and that child is this size and all of those dynamics, you can understand it in your head But to go back even further and think about a child who what you just said about flight is not an option Right. For an infant. It's it's just a powerful thing and recognizing like, it's not even about blame or fault or what you could have done differently or better that this was just really hard and too much and literally as an infant overwhelming the system. Like there was it was not
Speaker 2:The system was overwhelmed and when the young system is overwhelmed biologically the protective mechanisms will start taking over. I love how you have referenced, I think in your podcast but also in our discussion together, talked about the still face experiment. Yes. Right, And so I never get tired of watching that video, and I always think it's never a bad thing to mention it again and again and again. It's wonderful that it's on YouTube now and folks have access to this video exchange between a mother and an infant.
Speaker 2:We watch the infant in microseconds adapt to her blank stare and how traumatic that is. And one can see how attachment would go awry if the caregiver is not able to tune in and be responsive. The baby instantly registers a threat and goes through the attempt to reengage by crying, by looking, by gazing. When none of that works, she collapses into a place of dissociative despair. And right there is trauma happening.
Speaker 2:Now in this video, fortunately the mother makes repair work and we see how quickly the baby but if that repair work is never done, and this is the norm, which is the case for so many children, we can see why we're growing up with all kinds of unfortunate diagnosis such as attention problems and mood disorders and addiction because those are all ways to cope with dysregulated unsafe attachment.
Speaker 1:Wow. I feel like what you've taught me today is that trauma was really traumatic. Yeah. I don't know if that makes sense, but I feel like there were so many layers of not just denial, but when you have to deal with that and grow up dealing with that, there are so many defenses that are put up to cope with it and I feel like part of what's validating about the mother hunger concept is that the trauma was really traumatic. Yes.
Speaker 1:Does that
Speaker 2:make sense? That makes such beautiful sense and it's so validating the way you just said it because I want to make mention of really important work by Jennifer Frade who is out in Oregon and she wrote the book about betrayal blindness. And what you're talking about is a form of betrayal blindness because when as children were so vulnerable and we're relying on these caregivers, if they can't protect us, we literally cannot know that. We just can't know that, which is why children think it's their fault. We have to think something's wrong with us because we cannot really think our brain won't let us think something's wrong with our caregivers when we're that young.
Speaker 2:That would be too scary. If we knew how vulnerable we really were, it would be too scary. So our brain literally becomes blind out of a way to protect us from something that is too overwhelming to know, which is why it can take decades before we can go back with a name like Mother Hunger and peel back the layers of our protective blindness, our betrayal blindness. That's got to go slowly. That is a process that we have to let our body unfold gently into because those layers were there to protect us from something that was too terrible to know.
Speaker 2:So anyway, your way of saying that, yeah, trauma is really traumatic is exactly that's exactly right.
Speaker 1:Oh my goodness. My head is so full of so many things now. Tell me what is third degree mother hunger? What are you talking about specifically there?
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm glad you asked. Yeah. You know, I think it's interesting that pretty much everything in mental health exists on a spectrum. Attachments on a spectrum, mood disorders are on a spectrum. I look at mother hunger as being on a spectrum.
Speaker 2:So mother hunger really goes back to what are our three most important developmental needs from our caregivers from our mother. First is nurturing. We need food. We need affection. We need touch.
Speaker 2:We need cradling. Without these things, we don't thrive. The next is protection. We need to be safe with her from from aggressive siblings or insensitive adults. We need her protection on through the lifespan until we can protect ourselves.
Speaker 2:And then ultimately we're going to need her guidance, right? So when I'm assessing mother hunger for let's say someone wants to come do some work with me, and I'm going go through a series of questions with this woman to determine what was missing. Was it primarily the comfort piece, the nurturing piece, or was it primarily the safety piece, like there was a real lack of protection, shelter in this woman's upbringing, or was it primarily that she didn't have a mother that she could admire? She might have had a cuddly mom, but she didn't have a mother who functioned like an adult and who she could admire and role model after. So maybe she was just missing one, maybe just two, but for many of the women that come to work with me, they were missing all three.
Speaker 2:And that's what I call third degree mother hunger when there was no comfort, no protection and no guidance. That is a form of mother hunger that is so profound Because there's almost no foundation whatsoever to know what love feels like, to know how without knowing what it feels like with our mothers, we don't know how it feels in our own body. And it's where we can really be strangers to ourselves for and not know why we made the choices we've made for partnerships, for work, around food, around substances, around spending, whatever. We're just kind of foreign to ourselves if we have third degree mother hunger. So when I'm planning to work with someone with third degree mother hunger, it's a pretty sophisticated process.
Speaker 2:Nobody comes with third degree hunger ready to do an intensive. There's a lot of foundation therapy that needs to happen first. I hope that answers some of what you're asking.
Speaker 1:Yes. What are the intensives?
Speaker 2:Great question. Yeah, the intensives are my attempt to offer some support and help for women who do identify this wound. It started about five or six years ago when I wrote the second edition of Ready to Heal and I got to expand the concept of mother hunger to a whole chapter. Women started calling wondering if I would do video therapy And really, you can't heal mother hunger with video therapy, in my opinion. But I wanted to respond to a need that being responded to.
Speaker 2:And I've learned that doing mother hunger work is essentially doing expert trauma work. But even the most expertise, the most brilliantly trained clinician, if they only have an hour and a half with you, they only have two hours with you to do an EMDR session, to do a sensorimotor session, mother hunger demands more time. Mother hunger healing demands that yes, we're doing good trauma work, but we're doing it for hours in dyad, one on one, replicating that early maternal dance, the nuances, the prosody, the feelings, the sensation of what it feels like to be safe, to be contained, to be heard, to be seen, to be cradled essentially for hours. So I designed intensive to be a ten to fifteen hour, two to three day experience one on one in my office where I use various modalities to allow the body to drop into this deep, deep place of knowing because the mother hunger wound is not cognitive. It's in the body.
Speaker 2:It's waiting, waiting until it's safe to be with the wound and feel that and not be alone. Our bodies won't do this healing alone. So an intensive that's a long way of saying is a two to three day experience where tending, the attunement that comes from the clinician has a chance to stick. It's got a chance to kind of get in there and stick. Mean, the neurobiological explanation would be we give the new neural pathway time to actually form and begin to grow before a woman goes back to her regular therapist and her regular life.
Speaker 2:I don't take anyone who doesn't have a therapist, who's not getting great care, but the most wonderful therapist, if they aren't able to take you in for two or three days, can't necessarily do what I can do in an intensive. It's not for everyone. That's why I call it an intensive because it's pretty intense. I've been doing them now for five years, and I'm just now gaining enough confidence to talk about them publicly because I'm seeing the results and the work seems to last with tending, with, you know, as long as somebody goes back and keeps up with the work. And so I'm encouraged.
Speaker 2:It gives me hope and it's amazing to get to work with women in this kind of capacity.
Speaker 1:I think it's validating again just hearing you talk about it because there is not a single survivor I know who, even if they absolutely love their therapist, feels like they get to be in therapy enough or frequently enough or long enough even when the therapist is very generous about it or even when they have a good understanding of boundaries or pacing or those things. It so emphasizes hunger and why that is part of the word of the phrase mother hunger because everyone that I know who is working on trauma absolutely feels that and the separation after a therapy session is so brutal not because they're doing something wrong or because they have bad boundaries but because there is such a need and yet we're so cognizant of not wanting to be that needy client or that bad boundary person or that annoying one or whatever and and yet at the same time, it's all about learning that you have permission to have needs because you exist as a human being. You should have needs. You do have needs. That's part of just being here.
Speaker 1:That that's not a bad thing. It's not a moral trait to have needs.
Speaker 2:No. We're supposed to have these needs. And the sad thing about the legacy of trauma is those really unmet needs, They just get bigger. So the fact that you leave a therapy session and it just hurts almost like you're losing a limb, that means good therapy is happening. That means that whatever was happening in that therapy session with your fabulous therapist is so effective that you want more and that's a good thing.
Speaker 2:The sadness is for most of us our life is not set up to give us more of that beautiful exquisite attunement that we missed out on, that we got a taste of in that hour or hour and a half and we just need more. So you're right on. It's not something that's wrong with the survivor, the client or the therapist. It's just the way that that is set up isn't adequate for this type of early attachment wound that I call mother hunger. Mother hunger demands more time and it demands a container that's exquisitely designed to recreate the mother infant dance.
Speaker 2:I think maybe this is even why we like watching it when a couple dances really well together. Maybe that's why television shows like Dancing with the Stars do so well. There's something we love the choreography of two people that know how to move in sync with one another. It's like they can feel where the next foot goes, the hand goes, the eye contact, it's all beautiful. We love seeing that with a mother and her baby and that's what we need in psychotherapy.
Speaker 1:I love that you included that that means it's working because I think sometimes that's what scares people off and they quit therapy right as it's working And that's part of why we need to stay in therapy when we find a good one, even though those moments are hard because it is working.
Speaker 2:It is working. Yeah, exactly. And it's really normal to leave therapy session like that that worked so well. And I've had many clients back when I would just see people in that regular format talk to me about how after leaving my office was one of the most risky times for them relapse into an addictive behavior that they had been doing pretty well avoiding. It was in that first ten minutes to two hours after leaving my office that they were most at risk for a bench purge, calling an ex, sending a text to somebody they knew they weren't supposed to be in contact with.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh my goodness. That's so true. After therapy, we don't even drive home. We we are because of circumstances right now, we are literally four hours from the therapist, and so it's a four hour drive home. But we we don't even start the drive home because we have to hold on to that longer and don't want anything invading that space or taking it from us.
Speaker 1:And so, like, we have to go to the park or on a walk or right somewhere where it's safe and there's not people around. Like, very protective of that time after therapy because it's so brutal.
Speaker 2:Oh, that is so gorgeous. That is so gorgeous and that is such a testimony to your healing, your wisdom and to tuning into yourselves. Because I think when therapy is working well and we are finding those moments where we're more unified with the parts of ourselves that sometimes we aren't, we're preserving that by not getting too busy right after a therapy session.
Speaker 1:It's such a sacred space.
Speaker 2:It really is. It really is. It reminds me of how in lots of childbirth circles they talk about the fourth trimester. Have you heard this kind of discussion?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I kind of love this. The idea that the first three months of a child's life is really or maybe it's six months is really the fourth trimester. You've got the three trimesters in utero, but then you've got the next one, and it's preserving that proximity. Baby and mom have been one body. Let's try to stay one body for a few more months.
Speaker 2:And it's like that's what you're doing after therapy. You integrate while you're with your therapist and then you're staying with yourselves, staying with your body afterwards. That takes a lot of courage and discipline and that's impressive. You just gave language to that. It's beautiful.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's so important. There's air there and it's almost as important to us as the therapy itself, is that time before and after.
Speaker 2:Oh, lovely. Lovely.
Speaker 1:You've been so kind and gracious to talk to us today. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's been my pleasure to speak with you, and your awareness and your intelligence and your heart is so evident, and the work you're doing here to educate about dissociative ways of being in the world is so needed and so important. I'm honored to be part of the good work that you're doing.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you. Tell us your website so I can post that as well.
Speaker 2:Oh, yes, I do have a website. It's my name, Kelly McDaniel Therapy. And what's kind of interesting on my website is there's a Mother Hunger quiz. So for folks that are kind of intrigued by this idea, like wow, I wonder if I have mother hunger. Although most people, if they have it, they hear the word, they know.
Speaker 2:They already know. But if you're curious and you'd like to take a mother hunger quiz, you can go to the website and log on and take the quiz. It takes maybe four minutes. It's short. There's just 10 questions.
Speaker 2:And afterwards you'll get a response based on your score. So I would invite anyone who would like to learn more about this to read about Mother Hunger on my website and I have a new book coming out about it next year.
Speaker 1:That's amazing and you have one book already out where it's mentioned in a chapter, right? Just to introduce people?
Speaker 2:It is, yeah. The book is called Ready to Heal and it's about women that are facing addictive relationships and the healing strategies for love addiction. Chapter seven is all about mother hunger, and while that's I'm already updating it, some of it is obsolete, it's still one of the only things out there that really talks directly about this maternal wound. But your next book is all about mother hunger. Right.
Speaker 2:The whole book.
Speaker 1:Yes. So excited for it.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you. I am too. This this this is a labor of love. Yes.
Speaker 2:And I appreciate your support. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for talking to us.
Speaker 2:My pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us with System Speak, a podcast about dissociative identity disorder. You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Google Play, and iTunes, or follow along on our website, www.systemspeak.org. Thanks for listening.