The Emotionally Absent Mother: A Guide to Self-Healing and Getting the Love You Missed

As we’ve learned, one of the functions of the Good Mother is to provide a safe place, a protected environment in which her child can grow and blossom. We continue to need this as an adult. We need an environment that safely and comfortably holds us and that feels nourishing. Just as the Good Mother provides this for the infant, we must learn to pro

Our relationship with our mothers has a big impact on how we experience our self as a child. A child with a critical parent often internalizes the judgment and is riddled with self-doubt, inadequacy, and shame. But with a neglectful parent, an emotionally flat or absent parent, there isn’t enough mirroring and support for a child’s fragile self to

Sharing brings no guarantee of being met. Sometimes Mom doesn’t want more contact.

(Neglectful and abusive parents are often untreated…

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She may be so undermothered and unsupported herself that she doesn’t know

Wrapped in a warm, safe place with lots of protection around me. . . . If I was securely contained, I wouldn’t need to hold myself together.

not being able to soothe yourself37 • feeling that you are to blame for what was done to you and…

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Attachment is built through attunement and caring. In the infant-mother relationship, it is spun largely out of the infant’s needs (expressed in what are called attachment behaviors) and the mother’s responses to these needs. In fact the mother’s responses, their consistency and quality, are the key ingredient.10

How we are put together, how we see ourselves, our sense of self-esteem, our unconscious beliefs about relationship—all of these are strongly imprinted by our mother.