Mother Hunger Healing for Therapists

Build connection and understanding around how attachment wounds from your mother impact you as a therapist.

For adult daughters who became therapists.

This group is based off the work of Kelly McDaniel, author and psychotherapist who coined the term, Mother Hunger® in her book, Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance.  

What exactly is Mother Hunger®?

Mother Hunger® describes what it feels like to grow up with a mother who failed to adequately meet your needs as a daughter. It leaves you feeling insecure about yourself and feeling unworthy in relationships. This can include feeling never good enough as a person, but also as a therapist.

As an adult, it can feel like a craving for romantic love. For therapists it may feel more like a craving to help and feel worthy in your clients’ eyes. In reality, this is a craving for the love you didn’t receive as a young child from your mother.

If you experienced Mother Hunger®, you did not receive the nurturing, protection, and/or guidance you needed growing up. If your mother was also abusive, you may have experienced “Third Degree Mother Hunger,” a term coined by Kelly McDaniel to describe the pain of your mother being the source of both your fear and comfort.

As therapists, Mother Hunger® can impact us in unique ways. We too need the healing, but may want a separate space from clients to learn about and connect around this attachment wound, so that we don’t feel the need to be “on,” even in a group format.

Mother Hunger can start in utero or infancy and may have carried on throughout your childhood years. You may still experience difficulties in your current relationship with your mother and long for her to apologize, what Kelly McDaniel calls an “apology ache.” Or you may struggle with “pathological hope,” another term Kelly discusses in her book, which describes endlessly hoping your mom will change despite evidence that she is not likely to.

Who is this group for?

This group is for you if you identify with being an adult daughter with Mother Hunger® who grew up to become a therapist. You became for your clients what you never had. It’s a place to take off your therapist hat and feel into your own understanding of what you needed from your mother, but never got. It is a place for connection with other therapists who really get what this wound feels like.

If you’re anything like me, going to therapy as a therapist can be really challenging. We can feel the intention and interventions being used on us. Yet as adult daughters we can feel lonely, disconnected, and long to feel seen, heard, and understood in the ways that we do this for our own clients. We too have pain around our relationship with our mothers. For many of us, this may be exactly what brought us into the helping profession. We never wanted someone to feel alone like we did and we set out to be that safe person for others, so that they don’t have to suffer in silence.

Many of us became tiny therapists to our mothers far before we were ready. Being a therapist came naturally to us because we had done it all our lives.

For some of us, this can lead to compulsive caretaking. We have tried to find our healing in our work. We focus on others so we don’t have to focus on ourselves and our pain. Or we feel triggered by clients or client’s caregivers who remind us of our moms. Some may keep clients at arms length because their pain strikes far too close to home. However, Mother Hunger® comes out in your personal and professional life. It’s impossible for it to not impact you.

For some it may lead to burn out. For others it may lead to overinvolvement with a client or clients. Or maybe you just find it difficult to focus on and care for yourself. You become consumed with your clients’ issues and feel their issues are more important than your own. You don’t know who you are or how to be when you’re not helping.

Adult daughters with Mother Hunger deal with “frozen grief” and shame. Once we have a name for our pain, we can begin to unfreeze that grief that’s been stored in our bodies for years and begin to heal.

This group is psychoeducational and is NOT therapy. It provides a group environment for education and understanding for your pain.

Duration: 10 weeks

Length: 90 minutes

Cost: $100/session

Includes:

·      weekly psychoeducation group, 90 minutes in length

·      weekly recorded Q&A, 30 minutes

·      access to a Facebook group to chat with other therapists from group during the week