A therapist says most women have 'mother hunger' that affects their relationships — here are 2 signs you have it

• Therapist Kelly McDaniel coined "mother hunger" to describe a grief-related pattern she saw in her patients.
• It stems from a mother's inability to provide protection, nurturing, and guidance to her daughter.

Therapist Kelly McDaniel has spent more than a decade helping her clients overcome grief.

In counseling hundreds of women, she noticed a particular grief many of them experienced that had nothing to do with death. Rather, McDaniel saw women who longed for the love of a mother, even if theirs was still alive.

In 2008, McDaniel coined the term "mother hunger" in her book "Ready to Heal." She fleshed out the term in her 2021 book "Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance" after noticing the phenomenon in so many of her clients.

Mother hunger isn't a medical diagnosis. Rather, it's McDaniel's theory to explain how specific types of childhood neglect lead to attachment injuries, which can impact how a person acts in future relationships.

"There was an urgency with that craving and that desire to have comfort, love, safety, and inspiration all in one place. My clients were all looking for romance to fill those needs, but they kept coming up short," McDaniel told Insider. She uses the word "hunger" to explain a phenomenon that she believes stem from a biological need for mothering, she said.

On a recent episode of Facebook Watch's "Red Table Talk," McDaniel spoke with "iCarly" child star Jennette McCurdy about her own mother hunger, which they both agreed stemmed from McCurdy's abusive and co-dependent dynamic with her late mother Debra. McDaniel said McCurdy experienced "third-degree" mother hunger because her situation was so extreme and involved her mother teaching her disordered eating habits and bathing her when she was 11.

Mother hunger is something nearly every woman will experience, in part because of societal failures to support mothers and motherhood, McDaniel said.

What is mother hunger?

When McDaniel looked up "mothering" in the dictionary for the first time, she saw the definition included the word "mother."

She wanted to come up with a way to describe mothering that was more granular and descriptive of a mother figure's duties, and she landed on three pillars, based on attachment theory:

• Nurturance is the nonverbal language that tells a newborn, "I love you and I'm here." It involves tending to the needs of someone who is dependent on you through holding, feeding, soothing, and responding, starting from birth.
• Protection involves acting as a buffer from mental and physical threats, like angry siblings or lack of shelter, and prevents extreme fear or anxiety from forming in girls.
• Guidance starts in the teenage and young adult years, when daughters look for cues from their mothers about how to be a woman. A daughter might not accept or trust their mother's guidance if she didn't receive proper nurturance and protection when she was younger.

The 2 biggest signs of mother hunger

If a woman misses out on one of these three pillars and she or her mother don't acknowledge it, it can lead to an inexplicable feeling of loss, according to McDaniel.

To fill this hole, a woman might seek out ways to soothe herself or meet the needs her mother couldn't, she said.

If a mother fails to provide guidance, protection, or nurturance, it could lead to trouble with food and relationships, the two biggest signs of mother hunger, McDaniel said.

If someone had a mother who was physically or emotionally absent, they could deeply crave and seek out relationships and love at the expense of their own wellbeing. But if a mother was always present and smothered her child, that child may become emotionally unavailable and hide from relationships as an adult, McDaniel told Insider.

She added that if a mother failed to protect their daughter, it could lead to heightened and chronic anxiety as an adult.

To heal, a woman needs support from her friends, partners, and family, McDaniel said. If she wants more help, therapy is the way to go.