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

Clinical studies of such children reveal that a preponderance of them have parents who have related to them in either a helpless and fearful way or a hostile and self-referential one. The children of helpless and fearful parents, in particular, have a very difficult time later in life. Their parents tend to be sweet and fragile, not hostile or aggr

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She develops an attitude of anxious expectation regarding her needs and the world. Emotional deprivation can have the same effect. If the child is very heart-centered and needs to feel loved in each moment, but her parents withdraw their heart connection whenever they are displeased or just busy with something else, the child feels emotionally aban

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If we missed out on attention when we were children, we might have learned to attend to ourselves, to become more and more creative, to look for attention from adults other than our parents. In this way, a deficiency became something beneficial, the pothole that became the portal. Likewise, our ability to reach out as adults may be directly proport

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Since my mother was struggling herself and locked into her own sympathetic and dorsal ANS responses, she was unable to provide steady attunement. As a result, my nervous system began to expect for my needs not to be met, for people to only be present part of the time, and for them to unexpectedly break off the connection. My mom’s personal struggle

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