Many people experience persistent patterns they cannot quite explain: emotional distress, difficulty feeling secure in relationships, struggles with intimacy, food, self-worth, compulsive coping, anxiety, depression, or a deep sense of longing that does not seem to go away.

Therapist and author Kelly McDaniel, LCMHC, began noticing a common thread in the stories of many adult women: beneath the symptoms was a deep yearning for a mother’s love, attention, protection, and care that had not been fully received in childhood.

In her first book, Ready to Heal, McDaniel named this invisible attachment injury Mother Hunger, describing how disruptions in essential maternal care can affect secure attachment. The name resonated with many women and opened a new way to understand pain that had often felt confusing, private, or difficult to name.

In 2021, McDaniel expanded this framework in her book Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance, identifying three essential elements of mothering: nurturance, protection, and guidance. With the revised edition now available, this course offers a guided exploration of the core ideas that first gave language to this attachment wound.

This self-paced course is for people who want to explore Mother Hunger more deeply. Through video teaching, reflection exercises, and gentle body-based practices, Kelly helps participants understand how early experiences of care, safety, responsiveness, and guidance shape the way we relate to ourselves, our bodies, our needs, and other people.

Participants will explore how unmet maternal needs can live in the body, how attachment injuries can affect adult relationships, and why healing often begins by naming what was missing. The course also introduces concepts such as shame, frozen grief, the ache for an apology, betrayal blindness, pathological hope, and the possibility of repair.