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**Tamsen** (0:05)
Hi, friends. I'm so glad you're here with me today. Welcome back to The Tamsen Show.
So when this episode first came out, I had no idea how it was going to land. I was actually a little bit nervous. So many of you, though, wrote to me afterwards saying that you finally had a name for something you'd been carrying around your whole life, and that no one had ever put words to it before. And that is exactly how I felt after this interview. So I knew I had to bring this one back.
The first time I heard the phrase Mother Hunger, I sort of paused. I didn't really know what it meant, and I wasn't sure if it had anything to do with me. I lost my own mom when I was 20 years old, and I spent years, maybe decades, telling myself I'd already done that grieving. Then Kelly McDaniel walked into our Soho Studios, a therapist who coined the term. She sat with me and opened my eyes to something I'd been missing for decades. Mother Hunger isn't only about losing a mother. It's about the nurturing and the safety that we're wired to need from the very beginning and what it does to us when we don't get enough of it. This conversation has stayed with me ever since. So if it moved you the first time or you're finding this for the first time, I promise you're going to love this episode. I cannot wait to hear from you. Before we get started, if you have a moment, I would love if you could leave a review, please. Please don't make me beg. I'd really appreciate it. It helps the show and the people who make it happen.
Let's go ahead and get into it.

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**Tamsen** (2:38)
Kelly, it is good to see you.

**Kelly McDaniel** (2:39)
Thank you for having me. Yeah. It's wonderful to be here.

**Tamsen** (2:42)
Well, I'm excited. This conversation is going to go a lot of ways, I think, just because it's so personal to me. But I was excited to talk to you because I feel like looking through the book and reading it and just getting into parts of it that were really personal to me, it changed a lot of my perspective of some different things. So I want to start by asking you, how did you get involved in this area, in this specific space?

**Kelly McDaniel** (3:06)
Well, it was an accident.
There was no term, Mother Hunger. But I remember when I was a young woman and I was in my graduate program for English literature and I read Adrienne Rich, she wrote this beautiful book of Woman Born. And in that book, it said, the loss of the mother to the daughter and the daughter to the mother is the essential female tragedy. And that hit me. I didn't know why, but my whole body reacted. The fact that a mother daughter could be central in any way was already kind of mind-blowing. But then to really acknowledge that that loss is tragic, felt very true to me. Fast forward 20 years and some other trainings, and I'm working as a clinician with women primarily. And these are women that are struggling with things that most of us struggle with, relationships and food.
And so if either had become addictive and we were distilling it a bit, like, what's happening? I heard over and over again, I want my mom.

**Tamsen** (4:25)
Wow.