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

Intimacy requires emotional openness, a willingness to see and be seen, and letting your needs be a place where you are met. This will be challenging if you haven’t worked through the residues left by unresponsive parenting, but it is worth working toward.

not expecting emotional closeness from your partner (because you didn’t get it from your mother and don’t expect it from anyone)

Can you expose a need, have it only partially filled, and be okay with that? Do you have room to, in essence, “hold” your needs rather than pass them off like a hot potato or suppress them altogether?

In the timeless unconscious, the child continues to experience the original childhood environment as if it were the present. When current situations link back to that dysfunctional environment, the child doesn’t realize that he or she lives with you, now, in a different place.”76

It’s important to ask yourself what you want, to assess what is possible as objectively as possible, and to know what kind of risks you are willing to take. Here are some questions that may help you.

said she always felt like an intrusion in her parents’ life; later when they consciously conceived and had more children, those children and the two parents seemed like a unit that she was never fully part of. Feeling unloved as a child sets the stage for chronic loneliness.

To feel that you aren’t important to your mother leaves a hole. Most often it is felt as a hole in the heart. It’s the hole where Mother was supposed to be.

Finding situations where you can make a difference and minimizing situations where you can’t. Some situations are inherently disempowering.

Responding to the child’s physical and emotional needs promptly, consistently, and in an attuned way.