Sex

“Mother Hunger® is part Mythology, part Biology” – Kelly McDaniel

Chapter Two of my book Ready to Heal discusses a confining, cultural impasse that exists in our culture for women. If your romantic and relational choices regularly leave you cold and empty, exploring the inherited cultural/sexual double bind that sets you up to feel this way will help unravel unwanted beliefs driving your choices. You

Be still…what do you find inside your heart? Is there fear? Restlessness? Anger? Hurt? These emotions can be intolerable to “sit” with. Emotional pain is physical: our body resists it. It’s challenging to find the sweet spot deep inside us, the silence that comforts our being. Can you sit with yourself and invite your deepest

A mother’s love guides our “inner compass”, letting us know when we’re safe and when we’re loved. If her needs engulfed us, we struggle to identify our own desires and ambitions. If she was abusive, terror is our baseline “normal”. If we lost our mother (early death, adoption, or lengthy hospitalization), our normal is abandonment.

Do you feel the difference between solitude and loneliness? How do you distinguish? Sometimes, solitude is nourishing, a time to reflect and enjoy your own company. However, for women healing from addictive habits and Mother Hunger, loneliness feels cruel, confining, and punishing…an inescapable cavern. May you find comfort in the cave of loneliness today.

One of the saddest legacies of Mother Hunger is that women aren’t to be trusted. As much as you long for connection, the work it takes to cultivate a female friend is too taxing. Pictures like this may create feelings of irritation or longing. This is normal. But as you heal, this will change. You

Dear broken hearted,  It is said that time heals all wounds. Time may dull the pain of a broken heart, but it cannot fully heal the wound. Unlike a broken bone, heartbreak has no cast. Most of us recognize that healing a broken bone requires a “time-out” from routine, but life rarely permits anyone the

Healing chronic heartache requires you to be an artist…an architect of your brain. Find moments of beauty to stir the stagnant parts of your frozen mind. As you consciously make choices that support your health and healing, your mind will respond to your tender care.

Outlined in my book Ready to Heal are four beliefs about love and sex that women inherit from Disney land culture (McDaniel, 2008, pp. 29-40). In chapter two, I explain how fantasy images of women create an “inescapable” impasse, a sexual double bind. When conflicting rules collide, and choice A or choice B is wrong,

With the approach of autumn comes a season of beauty…a time for walking in nature’s jewel tones. Consider outdoor moments so the changing leaves can penetrate places you feel achy or alone.