healing the mother wound
What Eleven Women Taught Me About Courage, Connection, and the Longing to Be Held
In the winter of 2026, I had the privilege of co-facilitating a six-week psychotherapy group with my friend and colleague, Deb Hargrove. Our group was designed for women exploring what Kelly McDaniel calls Mother Hunger—the deep longing for the nurturance, protection, and guidance we needed but did not fully receive.
Eleven women gathered in a circle.
Some were mothers.
Some had chosen not to become mothers.
Some were single.
Some were partnered.
Some had lost their mothers in childhood or in adulthood.
Others had mothers who were physically present but emotionally unavailable.
Some carried stories of neglect, criticism, abandonment, betrayal, enmeshment, addiction, or loss.
Each woman arrived carrying her own story, yet beneath the details of those stories was a familiar ache.
A longing to be seen.
A longing to feel safe.
A longing to know that their needs mattered.
Naming the Heartache
McDaniel (2008) describes mother hunger as the absence of three essential experiences:
Nurturance
Protection
Guidance
When these needs go unmet, the wound is often invisible. There are no casts, stitches, or scars others can easily recognize. Yet many women describe carrying an ache they cannot fully explain.
Throughout the group, we often returned to the image of a burn.
Not a scrape.
Not a bruise.
A third-degree burn.
A wound so deep that it changes the tissue beneath the surface.
Many women spend years adapting to this injury. They become highly capable, independent, successful, nurturing toward others, and deeply resilient. Yet underneath, there is often a quiet longing for something that should have been there from the beginning.
The work of healing is not pretending the wound never happened.
It is learning how to tend it with compassion.
Creating a Circle
One of the most powerful aspects of group therapy is that healing does not occur in isolation.
It happens in relationship.
Over six weeks, we created a circle where women could bring forward parts of themselves that had often remained hidden. The parts carrying grief. The parts carrying anger. The parts carrying confusion, shame, loneliness, and longing.
The group was built around safety, choice, and pacing.
No one was required to share more than they wanted.
No one was pushed into vulnerability.
We focused on "regulation over revelation"—the idea that healing comes not from exposing everything at once, but from staying connected to ourselves while gently telling our stories.
As trust grew, so did the willingness to be seen.
Attachment in Real Time
During the third week, we explored attachment patterns and the ways our earliest relationships continue to shape how we move through the world.
We discussed secure, anxious, avoidant, and fearful attachment styles not as labels, but as adaptations.
Brilliant survival strategies.
What fascinated me most as a clinician was watching the group's wisdom emerge organically.
During one session midway through, I noticed participants gelled and sat with group members who identified with their attachment style.
Without instruction or planning, those who identified with avoidant and fearful patterns naturally gravitated toward one side of the room.
Those who identified with anxious and preoccupied patterns gathered on the other.
No one orchestrated it.
Their bodies knew.
Their nervous systems knew.
The room became a living map of attachment.
As the discussion unfolded, something remarkable happened.
Women began to understand one another beyond judgment.
The anxious styles could begin to appreciate how distance might be a form of protection rather than rejection.
The avoidant styles could begin to appreciate how reaching for connection might be rooted in fear of abandonment rather than neediness.
For a moment, they tried on each other's experience.
They stepped into another worldview.
They discovered compassion.
By the third week, the group had become so connected that Deb and my roles shifted significantly.
The women no longer needed us to direct the conversation.
The circle itself had become the teacher.
Betrayal, Grief, and the Stories We Carry
Another theme that emerged repeatedly was grief.
Not only grief for what happened.
But grief for what never happened.
The apology that never came.
The protection that never arrived.
The guidance that was missing.
The nurturance that was never offered freely.
Many women realized they had spent years waiting for someone to finally repair what had been broken.
Others discovered they were carrying burdens that never belonged to them in the first place.
Betrayal often lives quietly within these stories.
Sometimes betrayal is obvious.
Other times it appears in subtle ways—when a child's needs are consistently minimized, when she is asked to care for others before herself, or when she learns that survival requires silence.
Naming these experiences in community transformed isolation into belonging.
Again and again, women discovered that their reactions made sense.
Their symptoms made sense.
Their adaptations made sense.
Healing Beyond Words
Some of the deepest moments of the group happened without language.
We incorporated somatic and experiential practices that invited participants to move beyond thinking and into direct experience.
One of the most meaningful was an infinity-circle movement practice inspired by Indigenous wisdom traditions and body-centered healing approaches.
Participants were invited to notice what they were ready to release and what they were ready to receive.
The movement was gentle.
Slow.
Nonverbal.
There was no need to explain.
No need to perform.
The body already knew.
From a bird's-eye view, the exercise became a beautiful metaphor for healing itself.
All eleven women were moving in the same direction, yet each traveled at her own pace.
Some walked closely together, naturally seeking connection and companionship.
Others moved with more space between themselves and the group, honoring their own rhythm and need for distance.
Some stayed near the center of the infinity circle, while others moved along the outer edges.
There was no right way.
Only the wisdom of each person's nervous system guiding her movement.
The infinity symbol itself represented two interconnected pathways: letting go and receiving.
Some women moved naturally between both sides of the figure eight.
Others continued circling the path of release, grief, and surrender, returning again and again to what they were not yet ready to put down.
Only when their bodies felt ready did they cross into the accompanying circle of receiving.
Receiving support.
Receiving compassion.
Receiving guidance.
Receiving the possibility of something new.
The midpoint of the infinity circle became a living metaphor for transformation. It was the place where opposites met—holding and
releasing, grief and hope, the known self and the emerging self. It represented the tension that accompanies all growth. The
stretching beyond old patterns while still feeling their pull. The question many women carried into the circle was not simply, What
am I letting go of? but What am I making room for? Standing in that center point required trust. Trust that something new could
emerge before it was visible. Trust that the soul knows how to move toward wholeness. In many ways, the center of the infinity
circle became a symbol of healing itself—the sacred threshold between who we have been and who we are becoming.
As I watched from the outside, I was struck by how accurately the movement reflected each woman's healing journey.
No one could be rushed.
No one could be pushed into receiving before they were ready.
And yet every woman remained part of the same circle.
Each honoring her own timing while witnessing the journeys of others.
The exercise reminded us that healing is rarely linear. We revisit losses, release burdens in layers, and often return to the same places more
than once. Yet even when our paths look different, we are still moving.
Together.
The circle became a place where women could connect not with the version of themselves they show the world, but with the deeper self underneath—the one carrying both wounds and wisdom.
The one who had been waiting to be witnessed.
And perhaps most importantly, the one who discovered she was not alone.
Healing Beyond the Ordinary
One of the most meaningful moments of the group began with a simple invitation: each woman was asked to bring an object, symbol, or story representing her source of healing, wisdom, guidance, or connection beyond the ordinary world.
What unfolded continues to move me.
Women arrived carrying sacred objects, books, jewelry, photographs, tattoos, and symbols representing deeply personal sources of strength and meaning. Around the circle were Christian, Catholic, Buddhist, and Wiccan traditions. Some women spoke of ancestors whose presence they still felt guiding their lives. Others shared how nature, meditation, dreams, intuition, creativity, or moments of synchronicity had sustained them through difficult seasons.
What struck me most was not the diversity of beliefs, but the quality of attention within the room.
There was curiosity.
Respect.
Listening.
Wonder.
For a moment, eleven women with different histories, different wounds, and different worldviews sat together and shared what helped them make meaning of suffering and what helped them continue moving toward healing.
As a clinician, it felt like witnessing something increasingly rare in our culture—a community capable of honoring differences without judgment.
The sources each woman brought reflected something essential: healing rarely happens through insight alone. It often requires connection to something larger than the individual self—a faith tradition, nature, creativity, ancestry, spirituality, community, or a sense of purpose that helps us navigate life's deepest wounds.
In a group focused on mother hunger, this exercise became a reminder that guidance can emerge from many places. Sometimes the nurturance, protection, and wisdom we longed for are discovered through unexpected sources that help us find our way back to ourselves.
What I Learned
As a clinician, I offered the group hoping to create a healing experience for my clients.
What I witnessed instead was women creating one together.
Again and again, I saw courage.
Not the loud kind.
The quiet kind.
The courage required to speak the truth.
The courage required to grieve.
The courage required to stop minimizing pain.
The courage required to believe that healing is possible.
I witnessed women who began to identify their unmet needs with greater clarity.
I witnessed them recognizing old attachment patterns without shame.
I witnessed them soften toward themselves.
And I witnessed them discover that healing does not always come from the person who wounded us.
Sometimes healing comes from community.
Sometimes it comes from friendship.
Sometimes it comes from nature.
Sometimes it comes through therapy, spirituality, creativity, movement, or grief.
Often it comes through learning how to become a trustworthy companion to ourselves.
The women who entered our circle did not leave "fixed."
That was never the goal.
They left with something far more valuable:
A deeper understanding of themselves.
A greater capacity to honor their needs.
A stronger connection to their bodies.
And the lived experience of being witnessed by other women who understood.
Mother hunger may leave a profound ache.
But healing reminds us of something equally profound:
We are capable of finding nurturance, protection, and guidance in new places.
We are capable of building secure relationships.
We are capable of grieving what was lost while still embracing what is possible.
And perhaps most importantly, we are capable of becoming the safe place we have been searching for all along.
In gratitude to the eleven women who shared their stories, their courage, and their humanity. It was an honor to walk beside you.
