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The relationships between a mother and her daughter can carry a bit of a stigma or troupe for being complicated and messy.
This week, Mickenzie and Lindsey connect with Kelly McDaniel, a licensed professional counselor, author, mother, and women’s advocate, to discuss the topic she has become most known for: Mother Hunger. Together, the three explore how our relationships with our mothers—men and women—can set the stage for every other relationship in our lives and how healing our attachment is a pivotal step in healing our relationships with our mothers.
In this episode:
3:57 – What is “Mother Hunger?”
This week, Mickenzie and Lindsey connect with Kelly McDaniel, a licensed professional counselor, author, mother, and women’s advocate, to discuss the topic she has become most known for: Mother Hunger. Together, the three explore how our relationships with our mothers—men and women—can set the stage for every other relationship in our lives and how healing our attachment is a pivotal step in healing our relationships with our mothers.
In this episode:
3:57 – What is “Mother Hunger?”
8:17 – Mother-daughter relationships, cultural beliefs, and power dynamics in patriarchy
14:50 – How implicit memory impacts our relationships
20:09 – How Kelly uses Somatic Therapy to heal “Mother Hunger”
25:21 - Attachment styles, love languages, and their impact on relationships
30:43 – Grief healing and adoption
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You deserve healing. We're here to guide you! Start the process today or connect with our Admissions team at 1-800-341-7432 to discover the right experience for you!
Whether you’re in a challenging season or just want to learn and grow, Onsite has an experience to meet you right where you are and guide you to the more you’re seeking.
We pair the finest hospitality with the best clinical minds in the country to guide you toward lasting transformation. Our holistic care is thoughtfully designed to help you connect to yourself and the community you form at Onsite.
You deserve healing. We're here to guide you! Start the process today or connect with our Admissions team at 1-800-341-7432 to discover the right experience for you!
Creators and Guests
What is Living Centered Podcast?
So many of us go through life feeling out of touch with ourselves, others, and the world around us. We feel disconnected, overwhelmed, distracted, and uncertain of how to find the clarity, purpose, and direction we so deeply, so authentically, desire. The Living Centered Podcast in an invitation to another way of living.
Every episode, we sit down with mental health experts, artists, and friends for a practical and honest conversation about how to pursue a more centered life—rediscovering, reclaiming, and rooting in who we truly are.
The relationship with our mother is our first love. It's the most pivotal relationship of our entire life, and it sets the stage for every other relationship we're in.
Mickenzie Vought:Welcome to the Living Centered Podcast, a show from the humans at Onsite. If you're new to this space and just beginning this journey, we hope these episodes are an encouragement, a resource, and an introduction to a new way of being. If you're well into your journey and perhaps even made a pit stop at Onsite's Living Centered Program or 1 of our other experiences, we hope these episodes are a nudge back toward the depth, connection, and authenticity you found. In this series, we sat down with some of our favorite experts and emotional health sojourners to explore the relationships that make up our lives. From our friendships to our families or families of choice to our relationship with ourselves, Part practical resource and part honest storytelling that will have you silently nodding me too.
Mickenzie Vought:This podcast was curated with you in mind. Let's dive in. Welcome, everyone. We are so excited about this episode. Lindsay and I got to sit down with Kelly McDaniel, who is a leading expert and actually coined a term that really speaks to the impact of the relationship between daughters and mothers, and it is called mother hunger.
Mickenzie Vought:We originally heard of Kelly because we were hearing of this concept and reached out to her to see if she could join us for this series in relationships. It was a really fascinating conversation. We learned a lot. And while she focuses predominantly on the relationship of women with their mothers, I think this is a conversation that is applicable to all of us in understanding how our earliest imprints can impact the way that we show up in all of our other relationships. And I just really enjoyed this conversation.
Mickenzie Vought:It was fascinating, honestly. We just both kept saying, That's fascinating. That's so interesting. We just were both so curious throughout the conversation.
Lindsey Nobles:She's And 1 of the things that I realized in talking to her is it's so easy as we're hearing some of these, like, therapeutic concepts and constructs to begin to self assess. Like, how are we screwing up our kids? How have our mom screwed up us? And what I loved about Kelly's posture in this conversation and just with her teaching is that it's she's like, it's not about what anyone did wrong. It's about what you took away from the experience and how to make sure that you are healthy and whole so that you are not trying to live out of a place of longing and an insatiable hunger that you're trying to fill elsewhere.
Lindsey Nobles:And so I think that that reminded me so much of sort of work that I've done at Onsite, the idea that we regardless of what kind of household we grew up in, sometimes there are messages we did or didn't receive, and that part of the importance of doing our own work is to dig in and just make sure that we are living our best life in the here and now. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Kelly. I sure
Mickenzie Vought:did. This interview with Kelly, as we've shared, was really profound. When we started chatting, she jumped right into talking about the concept that she has dedicated her career to, called mother hunger. So before we jumped too far into the interview, I asked her to back up and share the origins of this work. Here's what she had to say.
Kelly McDaniel:Mother hunger came, I think from 2 places. None of it was conscious or planned, but when I was young in my first graduate degree, I stumbled into women's studies courses. And for the first time, I mean, I'd grown up in the rural southeast. For the first time, I became aware that some of the way I behaved was because of gender training and patriarchy. It wasn't just me.
Kelly McDaniel:And it was so illuminating. But in those courses, I discovered Adrienne Rich's work, her book of woman born. And in that book, she said, the essential female tragedy is the loss of the daughter to the mother and the mother to the daughter. Mhmm. I get choked up thinking about it right now.
Kelly McDaniel:I read that probably as a 22 year old who was also studying Shakespeare, so studying tragedy, right? Lots of tragedy. No tragedy dealt with mothers and daughters. The center stage was fathers and sons, and occasionally there was a cruel mother figure who did terrible things, but nothing that came close to what Adrienne Rich was saying that somehow in my body, it felt true. That that loss, the mother daughter relationship, a loss there, a fracture there is tragic.
Kelly McDaniel:I didn't fully understand it, but it it it stuck. And then fast forward 20 years, I've gone back for another degree and I'm a baby therapist and I'm doing great training with doctor Patrick Carnes learning about, I thought I was gonna study eating disorders, but that led me into learning about love addiction, sex addiction. And in the literature, I was noticing most of the literature was focused on men. And even when it would address women, there was no mention of culture, no mention of patriarchy, and no mention of the role of a mother. None.
Kelly McDaniel:So I wrote the book Ready to Heal because it piggyback to mostly on doctor Khan's work. So I didn't I'd say most of that book was not original. It was but 2 chapters were a chapter on culture and how these I think as women, we solid we swallow cultural beliefs. And then that's where I first mentioned this thing called mother hunger. It was something I was seeing in my office, but I hadn't studied it.
Kelly McDaniel:So the science wasn't out on attachment yet. We didn't have any of this, but I was seeing something in my office that every time a woman would come in and tell me her story of a breakup, over and over and over again, I would hear a woman say, all kinds of women say, I want my mom. And the reality is, for many of these women, they have tried going to their mother, and it wasn't working very well. But it didn't take away the desire for her. It didn't take away the need for her.
Kelly McDaniel:It didn't take away the yearning for her. And what I began to understand is it might not be our own particular mother that we need because it the relationship's too fragmented perhaps or she's no longer living. That doesn't change that we need a maternal figure to offer us what we think of as maternal love. Yeah. So that's where the concept came from.
Kelly McDaniel:Fast forward then another 10 years and women are coming to my office just because of that word mother under. So Yeah. Changed my practice. I started doing intensives, and it became clear I was gonna need to write another book. The mother hunger book, which I never set out to do, but it needed to happen.
Lindsey Nobles:It's so interesting listening to you talk about the lack of, sort of, the presence of women in the textbooks around psychology at the time that you were going through school, which was not that long ago, especially since it's such a, in my experience, like a female dominated field
Mickenzie Vought:Mhmm.
Lindsey Nobles:That so much of it sounds like your early work was, like, really, like, translating some of the concepts that you'd learned to make them applicable for what was true for women
Kelly McDaniel:Exactly.
Lindsey Nobles:In in terms of lived experience?
Kelly McDaniel:Lived experience as well as the beliefs we have about our body, the beliefs we have about our sexuality, and the beliefs we have about each other. Why we don't trust women, how we learned that from our mothers, how we learned it from our grandmothers, how that's been translated down through the ancestral line that women cannot be trusted. Because in patriarchy, the truth is women are generally fighting for power, and that means they're fighting for men. Because there's been no other legitimate way to have power. So women have unfortunately taken the dominant model of stepping on others, which is what we learn in patriarchy.
Kelly McDaniel:We have power over, not power with. So the women's way of bonding and being in the world gets dismissed. We take on the dominant culture and we hurt each other in the process. Wow.
Lindsey Nobles:That's just interesting. And then I it's like I realized I'm, like, asking questions around, like, was my experience with my mother, it was just sort of, like, handed down to her. How how she was with me was what she sort of in her upbringing.
Kelly McDaniel:Yes.
Lindsey Nobles:Was there, like, an ideal picture of what that mother child relationship should look like that that was good and then it got unraveled kinda over time, or has it always been broken?
Kelly McDaniel:Well, I think that's a really powerful question. It reminds me of something I just wanna mention that Yeah. I didn't write a parenting manual. I'm not an expert on parenting. I'm not an expert on mothering.
Kelly McDaniel:What I wrote about is what happens when the early attachment processes that we're born expecting we're gonna have adequate nurturing, adequate protection, eventually some guidance. We need this as baby humans. When those processes aren't there, here's what happens. That's I really wrote for adult daughters to understand why their eating behaviors are kind of off and why their relationships are so challenging. And I wanted women to understand the root of that because it reduces shame.
Kelly McDaniel:It reduces a sense of isolation, and it lets the frozen grief fall. Because when we're little and we're not being cared for the way we need to be, we begin to grieve. We're sad. Our heart breaks. Literally, our heart breaks, but we can't know that.
Kelly McDaniel:We're too busy surviving and we don't really look at our caregivers and blame them either. We just think something's wrong with us.
Mickenzie Vought:Yeah.
Kelly McDaniel:So that's what I was really interested in writing about. I wasn't writing a parenting manual. I don't know that mothering was ever ideal although I think from some of the research I've done when we were living more as hunters and gatherers, babies were carried all day. That's what a baby brain is designed for. The more movement a baby brain gets, the more it grows.
Kelly McDaniel:The more access to breast milk, the more comfort a baby has. The more skin to skin contact, the more milk a mother makes. The more skin to skin contact, the more prolactin, oxytocin that mother has, which increases her bonding instinct. Because the truth is the epigenetics of how we were raised is in our DNA. And we can work with that.
Kelly McDaniel:We can heal that. We can change that. But a lot of a lot of the stuff I needed to do, I hadn't done by the time I was was I was still young when I was a mom. So there was a lot of things I still needed to do. So, yeah, lots of room for regret if we read this as a parenting manual.
Kelly McDaniel:And that's why I really caution everybody. Don't do that. Don't read mother hunger as a parenting manual. Read it as a daughter, Read it as someone who might understand that you have a craving for some kind of love that you're not really even sure what it is and that you understand what it is.
Mickenzie Vought:Yeah. I liked that you started the entire book by saying, as much as you can read this as a daughter and I had to catch myself a couple different times as a mother of young girls of, like, nope. I'm not looking through that lens today. I have to put on different glasses. As I was reading Kelly's book, I was struck by an idea that she presents called implicit memory.
Mickenzie Vought:I related it to the work that we often do at Onsite, helping people access the trauma that is stored in their bodies, even if they're not conscious or acknowledging the impact that it's having. In fact, my favorite definition of trauma is that trauma isn't what happened to you, it's what's still happening to you, how it's showing up every day. With that in mind, I implored Kelly to explain the concept of implicit memory a little more to us.
Kelly McDaniel:It is fascinating, isn't it? That we have 2 kinds of memory? There's explicit memory, which is what we all kind of think of as our memory. It's stories, images we can recall. We can tell them again.
Kelly McDaniel:We, we know about them.
Mickenzie Vought:Mhmm.
Kelly McDaniel:We're conscious. But then there's the unconscious memory. I get, I like to call it preconscious because a lot of implicit memory, embodied memory, which is stories that are in the body that we don't remember where they came from. It's because a lot of times they happen before we had language. It happened before our prefrontal cortex, these frontal lobes that we have here, fully come online, which they don't really start working till we're 4, 5, 6 years old.
Kelly McDaniel:So all the stuff that's happening to us in utero, in the first 3 to 4 years of life, we're not gonna have a conscious memory of that necessarily. We may have little glimmers. Sometimes it's because people have told stories and we think we remember it, but what we're learning, the science is showing us that the body stores those early experiences as implicit memories. So the implicit memory is stored in the body and can tell a story. For example, this is why I like to pay attention when I'm working with a woman 1 on 1 to how
Mickenzie Vought:she eats. Mhmm.
Kelly McDaniel:Whether she wants to tell me about how she eats or we're gonna have a snack in my office and I'm gonna how we eat is generally telling us bit of a story of what early love felt like. Mhmm. For example, let's say we're we binge and we purge. Early love could have felt at times kinda yummy, maybe invasive, and we had to back off from it. Let's say early love felt dysregulating overwhelming.
Kelly McDaniel:There was too much stimulation. We might push it all away like anorexia. So there's all kinds of ways that our body tries to get our attention and tell us the story that is preconscious, that is unconscious, that is implicit. Pain. When we're in pain, our body's trying to get our attention.
Kelly McDaniel:Right? Headaches, stomachaches, bowel problems, all of these are our body's way of saying something needs attention. And, generally, there's something embodied, implicit that we might need help excavating so we can understand the story. This is why things like, EMDR can be helpful. This is why working with horses can be helpful.
Kelly McDaniel:Horses, a lot of times, will understand what we're feeling before we do.
Mickenzie Vought:Yeah.
Kelly McDaniel:And if somebody's there to translate the language of the horse for us, we can start to know parts of ourselves that are implicit. That we may have, really disengaged from because it's uncomfortable, it's unpleasant, And we learned as little, little girls how to dissociate from things that are unpleasant and overwhelming. And those things are in our body now. So it's why a lot of us spend so much time dissociated. But a horse won't tolerate us being dissociated.
Kelly McDaniel:If we're dissociated around a horse, that horse is just gonna walk away. They will find that profoundly uninteresting. So a horse invites us to integrate. And that means we're going to get in touch probably with some implicit feelings, which can be attached to memory. I hope
Lindsey Nobles:I'm asking. I hope I'm asking. Yeah. That's so interesting.
Kelly McDaniel:So interesting.
Lindsey Nobles:With so I'm processing, like, in real time. III like eating meals and not snacks. And I'm like, what does that mean about me? And, like, yeah, it just is so interesting. And then
Kelly McDaniel:It's lovely. I mean, a meal, even the word meal sounds nourishing and food Yeah. Food is the first experience we have with the first core element of mothering, which is nurturing. Enerishment and nurturing are how we first feel love when we're fed as babies. So when we feed ourselves now as adults, that nurturing, that nourishment from that meal is how is a form of love.
Lindsey Nobles:I love that.
Mickenzie Vought:At this point, we wanted to dig a bit deeper into the actual processes that Kelly uses with her clients and how she helps them navigate and unpack both the conscious and unconscious, implicit and explicit impacts and memories of what they've experienced.
Kelly McDaniel:Well, I have a whole process for that, which is why I changed my practice from hourly sessions. I changed it to 90 minute. That wasn't enough. Then it went to 3 hours. That wasn't enough.
Kelly McDaniel:So I finally went to 2 to 3 days where I have 1 on 1 time. Because basically what I learned is that I am working with precognitive material when I'm working with mother hunger. So I developed kind of a timeline protocol that I use that every time I'm about to do it, I'm thinking, gosh, I hope it works. You know? So I feel like blown away every time when it does.
Kelly McDaniel:Yeah. It's magic somehow. So there's core questions I ask on this timeline. So we cut through a bunch of stuff, and we just get to the heart of the issue. And then I invite her to draw which sounds so I know arts and crafts y, but it's not.
Kelly McDaniel:We come up with symbols for the main concepts that I'm addressing, And what starts to happen is these symbols start to repeat. Mhmm. The symbols, when we draw and come up with a symbol for something we're trying to articulate, is going, I think, deep into the body. This is probably why art therapy works. It's going deep into the body.
Kelly McDaniel:It's actually creating a bilateral effect of thinking, drawing, putting it on paper, telling me the story as it's happening. There's so much integration happening and all that. Then what would happen at the end of 2 to 3 days, depending on the severity of mother hunger, I would help someone cure that, they walk out completely cellularly rearranged. The cells have rearranged. The story has landed.
Kelly McDaniel:There's understanding of this primitive heartbreak that wasn't there before. And I think when our body can understand it and have a story, and that's been then literally imprinted, It's a profound relief. It's amazing.
Mickenzie Vought:It sounds like it's a lot of somatic work of, like, in addition to, like, the talk therapy elements of it and kind of experiential, like, what would you say the modalities that you tend to lean into are? I'm just so fascinated by all of this and how it all comes together.
Kelly McDaniel:Right. You know, I've been trained in a in all these modalities. And Yeah. And yet not 1 in particular seemed to be the dominant thing I would use. I sometimes Yeah.
Kelly McDaniel:For instance, with the timeline, obviously, I'm gonna find some primitive traumas, and I can go do some EMDR on that, and I'm always prepared to. I've never well, recently, I haven't needed to. It's happening as we do the work. And then Yeah. I do like to do some I'm always reading the somatic signs.
Kelly McDaniel:I mean, I've got so much time with someone to do that. So that's an important part of it. But so is some family constellation work. You know, for example and I can just do a real quick demo for you here. It's, it can be jarring, so I'll prepare you for it.
Kelly McDaniel:I'm going Okay. I'm going to become your mother for just a moment. And as I become your mother, I'm going to shift my body. And as I shift my body, you can notice what happens in yours. So as your mother, I'm gonna come in closer, and you can notice what happens in your body.
Kelly McDaniel:Now I'm going to remove myself, And you can notice what happens in your body. So that's a that's a really micro movement that that can be kind of powerful if you notice what happens in your body as you think of the proximity of your mother, as you feel the proximity of your mother, you might have a sense of your attachment style.
Lindsey Nobles:Mhmm. So I
Kelly McDaniel:don't know if you feel like you want to share what that was like. You can. You don't have to. It's different in person, obviously. There's a full body Yeah.
Kelly McDaniel:Experience, but you get a little flavor of it on Zoom.
Lindsey Nobles:Mhmm.
Mickenzie Vought:Yeah. I think when I was reading your book, I was reading how you were talking about how avoidant attachment shows up and how anxious attachment shows up within your mother mother wound relationship. I had a little confusion around, like, I feel like I'm an anxiously attached person, if I would lean 1 way or the other. But the way that you were describing someone would respond was kind of avoidant, I think, in particular to my mother of like, feeling that avoidance with her of like, this is too much. But then you talked about anxious attachment for people who feel like they shift in later years to like caring for their mother, like through enmeshment.
Mickenzie Vought:And I really resonated with that. So when you were coming with me, I was like, let's not have you up in my my space right now. And then when you were moving, I was like, oh, but like, you are you okay? Do you need to come back? Like, I just I really did feel that.
Lindsey Nobles:So There you go.
Mickenzie Vought:I guess what it looked like for me.
Kelly McDaniel:That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Yeah. And and I just wanna piggyback on what you're saying, which by the way, thank you for sharing it. Thank you very much.
Kelly McDaniel:But our attachment style, we may have a dominant tendency, but it changes based on who we're in a relationship with.
Mickenzie Vought:That's helpful.
Kelly McDaniel:If we end up in a, like, a really close girlfriend or a romantic partnership, and that person is more avoidant than we are, let's say, we might look more anxious in that relationship by school. Or with someone who's more anxious than we are, we may look profoundly avoidant in that relationship. So we we it's a spectrum. It's not a box. It's not a box.
Kelly McDaniel:We move around on that attachment spectrum all the time.
Mickenzie Vought:Yeah. That's super helpful.
Lindsey Nobles:I have a really rich fabric of friendships and the 1 on 1 relationships, the or, like, I haven't had a ton of romantic relationships. And I'm, like, fiercely independent in those relationships, and that's definitely where I would, like, see myself show up more withdrawn or avoidant. But, yeah, it's interesting because I feel like a lot of times it is communicated like you're all of 1 thing. And even it's spoken about sometimes, like, you can't heal from your attachment styles, and I love what you're talking about with your work because it really is kinda getting at the core and and doing the work of healing so that people leave with a more secure attachment, it sounds like.
Kelly McDaniel:Right. I mean, the science tells us we can earn a secure attachment, and that that is really the work of healing and psychotherapy. That's the work that I think we're that horses are really good at helping us with. I mean, we we can earn a secure attachment. With that said, the attachment style that's not really talked about much is disorganized attachment.
Kelly McDaniel:And I call it 3rd degree mother hunger. That's a whole separate chapter in the book because I have found that women with 3rd degree mother hunger where okay. So mother hunger comes from missing some nurturing, some protection, some guidance. Maybe all of it. Maybe just 1 or 2 of it.
Kelly McDaniel:3rd degree mother hunger is when you miss those things and your mother was scared. Your mother was frightening. And I use examples in the book from movies rather than any of my clients because it's just too terrible to read about, and I didn't think that'd be fair to the general population. So but the truth is, when we grow up afraid of the very first person we're supposed to attach to, that does really complicate our attachment system. And that is a lifelong healing process that is different than milder forms of mother hunger.
Mickenzie Vought:Something Kelly says in her book is that love is not enough, meaning many of us grew up in homes where love was present, and yet, many of us still have needs that were unmet. I love how much Grace Kelly continues to bring throughout this conversation. It reminds me of something we often say at Onsite. It's not about naming and blaming, it's just about naming and claiming, so we can walk forward in healing. I asked Kelly to speak to a few different situations that she'd seen where love is not enough.
Kelly McDaniel:Love is not enough even in our romantic relationships, which is why I think Gary Chapman's book, The 5 Love Languages, became such a hit. Because we have to communicate love in the language our partner would receive it. We might feel very loving toward our partner. That doesn't mean it translates because we all have different love languages. Right?
Kelly McDaniel:Mine might be words of affirmation and physical touch. My partner wants acts of service and quality time, and we're missing each other. And that's an adult relationship where we actually are trying. So imagine a baby born to a mother who let's say that she was born to a mother that was cold and rejecting.
Mickenzie Vought:Yeah.
Kelly McDaniel:What she's gonna make sure she does is love in a very, different way. She wants to try it differently. So she's going to maybe demonstrate lots of physical affection and want lots of quality time. But what if her child has a different love language? What if her child is wired for more space, super active, wants to be, moving all the time and is not a cuddler?
Kelly McDaniel:And this mom's thinking, well, I I gotta cuddle because I didn't have that. And maybe trying to get some of her needs met with the child. Right? So so love is not enough because we actually have to learn the language of our child. And then let's say we have more than 1 child, then we're learning more languages.
Kelly McDaniel:And, and, you know, we've all grown up in this paradigm that you just parent all your kids the same way. Feed them the same thing, treat them the same way, and let them cope. Well, how's that working out? We've got a nation full of addiction and trauma. Right?
Kelly McDaniel:It's not working. So if more people understood how complicated it actually is to translate love to a child, It might really reorganize our thoughts around how many children we're having, if we're having them. So there's that. But then you asked a question about adoptees. I did a webinar and invited adoptees just to come teach me.
Kelly McDaniel:Because after I wrote the mother hunger book, first, I I went to some experts to understand. Because as I'm writing the book, I'm thinking, how does adoption how do adoptees survive? So I started studying it to put something in there about it. I'm not an expert, although now more so because I'm letting them teach me. But but I did learn adoptees have 50% more mental health issues than the other, the rest of the population.
Kelly McDaniel:And I just, I think there's a connection. So I go to the experts and they talk about an implicit sense of rejection that is in the body of an adoptee who was given away for whatever reason. The baby doesn't know why. The adult probably did the right thing or the teenager who had to give away a baby. What, whatever the reason nature does not care.
Kelly McDaniel:And that's what it is. Like, it may have been a loving reason to find a different home for this baby. It may have been totally necessary. The baby experiences rejection in the body, the loss of the first biological environment. So if the adoptive family is aware of this and can compensate in case the baby shows signs of distress, extra crying, or hard to soothe, rather than blame the baby.
Kelly McDaniel:What's wrong with my baby? It's let's fix the environment so that this early separation does not become a trauma. Because it doesn't have to, it doesn't have to create mother hunger, but given our parenting culture and the lack of awareness, it often becomes very traumatic. And so when adoptees have taught me that they have a double form of mother hunger, They lost the first mother. And then if the second mother didn't understand nurturing protection and guidance, they have regular mother hunger and they have a cultural pressure to be grateful for all this.
Mickenzie Vought:Yeah.
Kelly McDaniel:That you're supposed to be grateful somebody wanted you and adopted you and gave you a great home. So most adoptees have such intense frozen grief that's never had room. I mean, most women with mother hunger have frozen grief because we've never had room to talk about our mothers. It's too taboo.
Mickenzie Vought:A lot
Kelly McDaniel:of stories talk about it when she dies. So frozen grief is part of mother hunger. It's doubly so for adoptees because there's then this mythology that we all have that we're supposed to be dutiful, grateful daughters and appreciate our mothers. And I was so touched by what adoptees taught me. And and that has me thinking about all the really creative ways we can become parents that involve surrogacy, and so the baby loses their first mother.
Kelly McDaniel:And and that's not about lack of love. It's nature. It's how we're wired and then what we need to do to support nature when we intervene with man made things.
Lindsey Nobles:Yeah. I, have I am single and have a a toddler that I had later in life, through fertility and used a donor embryo. So I am like, how do how do I, you know, get more resources to care for my son to make sure that I am doing a good job mothering and acknowledging sort of the grief that he'll have not having a father or a connection to his biological, you know, family even though I carried him. So are there other resources out there that you'd recommend for people that have adopted specifically or used IVF or for, embryo adoption or
Kelly McDaniel:I wanna say 2 things, though, to answer your question. First of all, babies, toddlers, children do not need perfection. We are incredibly resilient, incredibly resilient. So even though I've written about babies need nurturing, they need protection, they need guidance, I never said they need those things perfectly. They don't.
Kelly McDaniel:And so there's that. The other thing is If you
Mickenzie Vought:want to be Oh, yeah. Thank God. Right. Yeah. My husband literally told me yesterday, we have a lot of days with them.
Mickenzie Vought:So today wasn't your best day. Tomorrow, you'll do better.
Kelly McDaniel:But I think it's grossly underestimated How long in our lifespan we actually need our parents? Mhmm. Yes. The first 3 years are very, very important for setting up attachment, but we don't stop needing our parents. And so there are all these milestones that are gonna happen in life where your child is once again gonna be like a 2 year old and need you again.
Kelly McDaniel:You know, graduations, marriages, menstruation, weddings, divorces, breakups, all of these things bring us back to wanting our mom. Mhmm. And if we're healing as the mom, we can be a lot more present than maybe we were early on. So there's all this opportunity for repair and that can be as profoundly beautiful for attachment as anything that happens early on. So I really like parents to know that that if you're doing this work, first of all, Lindsay, for you to have even asked that question, you're already doing everything your son needs because you had the awareness.
Kelly McDaniel:You asked the question, and you're involved in your own your own life, your own healing, your own process. That's all he needs. So, I mean, yes, there are ways he'll probably want that translated in his language so that he feels your love, But you've got a lifetime to do that. That's lovely.
Lindsey Nobles:Are there people that talk about the father relationship the way that you that are really experts on it the way that you have been on the mother?
Kelly McDaniel:Well, I think father issues have been talked about for decades. There's so much out there about how we suffer without fathers. And Mhmm. And fathers have been blamed for eating disorders. Fathers have been blamed for sexual problems for daughters.
Kelly McDaniel:Fathers are easy targets because the truth is they haven't had the pressure on them
Lindsey Nobles:Mhmm.
Kelly McDaniel:Bond like a mother has had. Culturally, we don't put that expectation on fathers. So they're easy targets because they're grossly making errors. And and for guys, you know, that they're they're just following the man code. That's the man code.
Kelly McDaniel:So the but Yeah. But the truth is also, I think the mother bond is so much more primitive that it is much harder to see and talk about. We can see what's happening with dads. It's not as threatening. There's a lot of power there, and I don't want to diminish their importance, but it's not the same thing.
Kelly McDaniel:It is just the same thing, and and that's why I didn't focus on it. Plenty of other people focused on it. There's plenty of material out there, and it's not all accurate, but there's a lot out there. But there just wasn't anything about mothers and daughters that I found that wasn't just really making women out to be terrible. Like narcissistic mothers, you got books like that.
Kelly McDaniel:You've got all things that will demonize a mother, but there wasn't anything putting it in a context that held a mother with gentle compassion and said, how in the world could you do this any better, given what you're up against and given what you inherited? And I needed a book that would be shame reducing and pull it out of mother blaming.
Mickenzie Vought:Yeah. Yeah. I think mothering in general is such a shameful space. I catch myself now having been a mother for almost 4 years. I just I feel like I fall into that so often that I love the way that you kind of just, like, pull it off of mothers and putting the shame on there because it's just it's just a regurgitating space even for you to say, like, you don't have to get it perfectly.
Mickenzie Vought:Like, people have told me that, but I continue to need to hear it because there are more voices telling me I'm not getting it right. I remember I think about the empathy and the saying, like, of course, you did the best you could and having such an empathetic view for mothers came from me and my living centered experience. So at Onsite, our flagship program is our living centered experience. And 1 of the activities in it is we do you do a family tree or family systems, and you look at different things that different members of your family experienced, carried with them. And it was seeing the direct line 3 or 4 generations up from my mother, where I just sat and had so much empathy for her of saying, you have gone so much farther than your mother whose mother before her, like, what you came in with, I can't believe you showed up as well as you did.
Mickenzie Vought:And it just brought me a lot of empathy, and I and I resonated with that feeling reading your book as well of how much empathy I felt for the places and spaces that felt hard or feel tender or feel like, I wish you had read my language a little bit better. But just to say, hey, you're doing the best you could with the tools that you had. And now I'm gonna stand on your shoulders and do a little better with my girls and hope they do better with their girls. But just I was really grateful for the way that you created that empathy and space. So I just wanted to thank you for that.
Kelly McDaniel:Well and thank you for sharing that. It it reminds me how how warm and wonderful it feels when I hear when I hear this. And and women write to me all the time, and they tell me that reading The Mother Hunger Book gave them a whole new sense of compassion for their own mother. So that gives me almost better feelings than just anything else, because I almost didn't write the book because I was so afraid it would be used for more mother blaming. We just didn't need any more of that.
Kelly McDaniel:We got plenty of that. And I'm I was just terrified that that's what would happen, and it's been just the opposite. So thank you for saying that. I don't ever get I that that just makes me feel like I did the right thing.
Mickenzie Vought:As we rounded out this interview, I was curious on a personal level if Kelly could explain something I've wrestled with in my own parenting. I've noticed this impulse as a mother of infants and small children to lean in as the default parent, despite having a very active, attentive, and involved partner. She spoke briefly of this primal instinct earlier in the interview, and then she continued to expand into this instinct for our children to favor 1 parent over another. Here's what she had to
Kelly McDaniel:say. What I learned when I was writing this book, and therefore, I had to go study what's happening, because I Yeah. Claim this term, but I hadn't studied it. I had to study it to write the book. So I learned that much as, like, we are in our romantic relationships, we kinda wanna be 1.
Kelly McDaniel:We wanna be a favorite. We wanna be a priority. That's because of our attachment system. That's not because we're insecure or so our babies babies want 1 primary attachment.
Lindsey Nobles:Mhmm.
Kelly McDaniel:That's how we're wired. There are all kinds of secondary attachments, but we have 1 primary. And this is why, and I wish I had known this a long time ago, this is why kids suffer so much with divorce because when they're going back and forth from household to household, they have to re they have to switch their primary attention. They have to focus on 1 parent when they're in that house, the other parent when they're in the other house. And a lot of times they can't, they can't hold both at the same time.
Lindsey Nobles:Mhmm.
Kelly McDaniel:Not because something's wrong with the child, but because that is the way our attachment system works. We have a primary dominant attachment from that attachment. All the others can work without that 1. The others don't work that well. So that's the good and the bad news.
Kelly McDaniel:That's how we're wired. Apparently, that's what we need. And by virtue of having a body that can hold a baby to terms, we're it.
Mickenzie Vought:Mhmm.
Kelly McDaniel:We just got we're it. So we can bring in all kinds of help and support. And with more help and support, even if we're not doing so great, that doesn't mean mother hunger is gonna happen. Mhmm. But mother hunger speaks more to the yearning for that primary attachment.
Kelly McDaniel:We're already attached at birth. We're all we already are in love with the way our mother smells, the sound of her voice, the way her heart beats. We're already in love. We're already attached. So that's nature.
Kelly McDaniel:That's biology. Mhmm. Biology does it for us.
Mickenzie Vought:Well, Kelly, thank you so much. This has been such a powerful conversation and so illuminating. Is there any piece of encouragement you would leave us with, if someone's sitting here saying, I just wanna dive into this work, or I'm afraid of it, or even naming it. What would be your piece
Lindsey Nobles:of encouragement?
Kelly McDaniel:Oh, first of all, this conversation has been really good because you 2 were so well prepared, and thank you. Thank you. That that honors the book, my work, and and me, and I really appreciate it. Yeah. I think what I would say is listen to your body.
Kelly McDaniel:If you're hearing this conversation and you're thinking, oh, I'm not really ready to read that book. Trust that. Don't read it. Yeah. Listen to your body.
Kelly McDaniel:And if you're intrigued by this, go toward it. If you're not, or you're afraid, or it just sounds boring, just don't don't do it. The other thing I would add is that if you are listening to this and you have third degree mother hunger, you grew up with an abusive mother or a mother who didn't protect you from an abusive partner. That can be the same. It can register the same way.
Kelly McDaniel:If that's your story, I would encourage you that if you want to read this book, listen to it. Get the audiobook instead of trying to read it. And my readers have taught me this. Like, I did not know this, but I have since studied it, that if if we are trauma survivors, we don't like our own voice. And as we try to read the book, we're gonna hear our voice or our mother's.
Kelly McDaniel:So what what these women have taught me that are trying to get through the book is listen to it. So I narrate the book. And if you're a 3rd degree survivor, chances are you're not gonna be able to read it very well. That's normal. Just plug it in your ears.
Kelly McDaniel:Some women tell me they use it to fall asleep. Some will listen to a bar, and it just down regulates the nervous system, calms everything down so the material can get in, the information can get in.
Mickenzie Vought:That's fascinating.
Kelly McDaniel:Yeah. Yeah.
Lindsey Nobles:It's been so lovely being with you, and you have given me so much, just to think about and how I process my childhood, and then also how I want to show up and be a great mother. So thank you.
Mickenzie Vought:Thanks for listening to the Living Center podcast. If you're enjoying the show, we'd love for you to consider leaving us a review or rating on Apple Podcasts, cast, Spotify, or wherever else you listen. It only takes a few seconds to navigate to the show in your app and select the stars to begin your rating. It helps more people find the show, and we really appreciate it. Thanks so much.