GraceRoot Relationship Healing Institute
Maternal wounds & attachment
Maternal Wounds, Attachment, and the Survival Strategies of the Abandoned Child
A child watches his father die, is told he caused it, and runs. The film skips an entire childhood. When we return, nobody has explained why no one came looking.
The opening note does not ease you into the premise. It states it: this book uses a cartoon lion to talk about your mother, and I want to acknowledge how that sounds.
What the film provides is something else — a story almost everyone has already seen, containing a silence almost nobody has noticed. Sarabi is alive the entire time. No one searches. The film never raises it, and most viewers never think to ask.
That silence is the book's subject: what forms in a child when the person who was supposed to come never does, and no one afterwards explains why.
Two chapters keep the book honest. One is titled Your Attachment Style Is Not Your Star Sign — a caution against the tidy four-box version of attachment the internet sells. The other is Mother Was Wounded Too, which refuses the simpler story in which she is only a villain.
The book closes with a glossary, a note on the evidence behind its claims, a chapter on finding someone to do this work with, and full references — the same calibration the rest of Dr. Quinones's work runs on.
It is written for the adult who has done the arithmetic on their own childhood and found an unexplained gap in it, and for the clinicians and pastoral caregivers sitting with them.
Twenty-one chapters, four parts, a glossary, a note on the evidence, and a chapter on finding someone to do this work with.
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