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

Ties to places anchor us

My hope is that understanding these influences will lead us to better understand ourselves and, most important, to complete the developmental tasks and heal the injuries that resulted from insufficient mothering.

hypervigilance about…

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It was clear that many patterns relating both to parenting and to marriage were cross-generational. There were also numerous examples of patterns changing when people really worked at it. One woman talked about how hard she worked to parent in a different way than her mother did. She found that becoming a mother and working so diligently at it had

Many adults who were undermothered don’t have a sense that their mothers really knew them and consequently didn’t have a sense of their mothers liking them.

“She is consistently warm and available, taking time to allow the child to satisfy his curiosity and share it. She praises his successes and applauds his discoveries. She creates opportunities for him to discover more than he could on his own and makes a conscious effort for these explorations to be fun and filled with laughter.”

It rubs up against her own wound.

While disorganized attachment is the most insecure of the attachment styles that have been identified, it is not the same as an attachment disorder, a term that refers to a condition of nonattachment and most often refers to reactive attachment disorder (RAD). With RAD, a child does not develop an attachment relationship with primary caregivers or

Better to be as self-sufficient as possible. A person with this style is more armored in relationships and tends to not allow much closeness. Letting others close enough to develop real feelings of attachment even much later in life feels scary; it is too close to the unbearable…

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