Maternal wounds & attachment

Something Bad Happened. Then Nobody Came.

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  8 min read

There is a cut in The Lion King that goes by so fast almost nobody registers it.

Scar reports both deaths. The pride believes him. The film cuts to a desert, then to a comedy duo and a song about insects, and when we return to Pride Rock, Simba is an adult with a full mane and a philosophy.

Here is what is not in that sequence. Nobody is behind him. No lioness at the lip of the gorge. No dusk montage of adult lions fanning out across the savanna calling a name into the dark. The film has a cast of lions with excellent noses and nothing but time, and shows us none of them looking. Not once. Not badly, not briefly, not in a way that fails.

I am not indicting a fictional lioness. The film is explicit that Sarabi believes her son is dead, told so by someone with every reason to lie, and grief under an occupying regime does not permit a search party.

Simba doesn’t know any of that. All his system received is I called and no one answered. A nervous system does not file that under “complicated circumstances.” It files it under “this is how the world works,” and builds a personality on it.

The second sentence

Almost everything written for people who had hard childhoods is about one sentence. Something bad happened to me.

A real sentence, a heavy one, and it deserves its shelf space. But for an enormous number of people it is not the sentence that organizes their life. A second one arrives right after, quieter, and does the structural damage.

And then nobody came.

Two different injuries. The first is an event: a date, a shape, it happened and then stopped. The second is a non-event, the sound of a phone not ringing extended over years, with no date and no name, which is precisely why you have never been able to explain it at a dinner party.

Missing also does not require leaving. A parent can be missing while making your lunch, missing from a chair eleven feet away every night for a decade, and there is no form for it, no relative who says at the funeral well, she was never really there.

What the research shows, and what it doesn’t

In 1978, Edward Tronick and his colleagues published a paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry describing a three-minute procedure. A mother sits knee to knee with her baby, having an extremely serious conversation about nothing. Then the researchers signal, and she stops. She does not leave. She does not frown. She holds her face still.

The baby clocks it immediately, and goes to work. Smiles bigger. Points, because pointing means look with me. Kicks. Reaches with both hands. Runs the whole playbook, escalating, because the playbook has always worked and this is a good mother on a good day.

The face does not come back.

Then, between a few seconds and a couple of long minutes, he stops. Turns away. Finds his own fist and sucks it. At four months old he has moved from get help to manage alone, in less than the length of a pop song.

Now the honest part, because this study gets stretched. The mother resumes, the baby recovers. It demonstrates a mechanism; it does not measure damage. Three minutes in a lab is not a childhood. I use it as an image and it should be read as one.

What survives is the last move, not the first. The famous part is the distress; the important part is the turning away. That baby learned a rule about effort. Signaling did not produce a face. Stop signaling.

The other half explains why some people are still, at forty-three, doing something that looks like waiting. In the third volume of his trilogy, published in 1980, John Bowlby laid out four phases of mourning: numbing, yearning and searching, disorganization and despair, reorganization.

The phase I want is the second. Not sadness. Searching. Bereaved people do not merely feel bad. They look. They scan crowds. They think they see him in a car. They keep the phone charged. Searching is not a malfunction; it is attachment behavior still running in an animal whose attachment figure is gone. The system has one move, and it is find them.

Now consider a child whose parent has not died. The system runs the same program; it is the only one it has. But you cannot organize a search party for someone sitting on the couch, so it comes out sideways. A stomachache invented on a Tuesday. Trouble caused in the deniable, amateurish way that would summon an adult if an adult were coming. A report card set down in a living room, face up. Each is a call that goes unanswered without anyone knowing it was placed.

The mourner searches, and eventually reality answers. The grave is there. The chair stays empty. The answer is unbearable, and it is an answer. The child in the house gets no answer. She gets a maybe. She never stops, because nothing tells her to stop.

The word for this is not a real word

“Mother wound” is not a clinical term. It appears in no diagnostic manual, and the peer-reviewed literature contains essentially no established body of work on it as a construct. It comes from self-help writing and has no formal standing.

Now the more interesting half. It is a folk word for a cluster of things that individually are well studied: attachment insecurity, childhood emotional neglect, ambiguous loss, parentification, shame. It is imprecise the way heartbreak is imprecise. Nobody has validated that one either, and nobody is confused about what it refers to.

Unofficial word, real referent. That framing is stronger than pretending otherwise.

Danielle

Danielle is thirty-six, a nonprofit development director in Atlanta, and a composite rather than any one person. Second of four. Her brother Cole got seriously ill when she was seven, the household reorganized around it permanently, and her assignment was to require nothing. She was outstanding at it.

She was praised for being no trouble. She has never once sent food back at a restaurant. Last spring she got a performance review in which she was told she was doing an excellent job, and she said thank you, walked to her car, and cried for eleven minutes with the engine off.

The first thing she said to me, before she had taken her coat off, was: “I want to be upfront that nothing actually happened to me.”

Correct. Nothing happened to her. That is the injury.

She was not invisible, either. That word lets everybody off. Her mother, at a family dinner two decades later, said with real warmth, you were our rock that year. They saw her constantly. They saw a function.

Where this frame breaks

Handle powerful frames with gloves. Two places this one fails.

Some of you were searched for and couldn’t register it. If the turning-away strategy is running well, a teacher who asks a real question at the right moment gets “I’m good,” and concludes there is nothing there. The strategy that protects you disqualifies the evidence that would update it.

And asking is a culturally specific technology. In an enormous number of families, care does not take the form of a question about your feelings, and the absence of that question is not an absence of care. It looks like food. A paid fee, a cousin sent to sit with you, a mother working a double so a tuition bill clears. This research was built on a narrow slice of humanity, and here the seams show.

If reading this has put you somewhere raw, it goes better with a person in the room than alone at midnight with a search engine.

Something to do: the one-name list

Twenty minutes, on paper, with a timer.

Write down every person who ever noticed something.

Not the people who should have. Not the people who failed. Those names arrive first, uninvited, in ninety seconds. Put them on a separate sheet, get them out of the room, then turn the page over and start.

The threshold is deliberately low, because most people set it impossibly high and then report an empty page. A person counts if they said one accurate sentence to you, once. They need not have followed up, liked you, or stayed past the following spring. The coach who said you’ve gone quiet. The librarian who let you hide in the stacks all semester and never asked why, which was its own way of making room for you.

Then stop. Don’t analyze or rank them.

Be honest about what this is: not a tested intervention, but my own construction. The closest thing properly studied is expressive writing, and the meta-analytic average effect there is real and small, well below the enthusiasm for it.

What it borrows from is sturdier.

Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith followed every child born on Kauai in 1955, six hundred and ninety-eight of them, the whole cohort, into their thirties and forties. About a third grew up under serious concentrated adversity, and roughly a third of that group arrived in adulthood competent, confident and caring.

What she kept returning to was not temperament, intelligence or luck. It was that these children had, somewhere, at least one person who accepted them unconditionally. A grandmother. A teacher. A neighbor with a porch.

Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child put it in one flat sentence in a 2015 working paper: children who do well despite serious hardship “have had at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive adult.”

One. Not a village. The number that matters is small enough that most people have miscounted it, because they counted the wrong column.

If the page ends up empty, that is information, not a verdict, and you are allowed to be angry about it. Write the date anyway.

Something happened to you. It is just that what happened was a silence, and silences don’t leave marks, and you have spent your whole life being asked to produce the marks.