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Was your mother too busy, too tired, or too checked-out to provide you with the nurturing you needed as a child? Men and women who were “undermothered” as children often struggle with intimate relationships, in part because of their unmet need for maternal care. The Emotionally Absent Mother will help you understand what was missing from your childhood, how this relates to your mother’s own history, and how you can fill the “mother gap” by:
- Examining the past with compassion for yourself and your mother
- Finding the child inside of you and learning to mother yourself
- Opening to the archetype of the Good Mother
- Allowing friends and loved ones to provide support, guidance, and other elements of good mothering that you missed.
Through reflections, exercises, and clear explanations, psychotherapist Jasmin Lee Cori helps adult sons and daughters heal the wounds left by mothers who failed to provide the essential ingredients that every child needs. She traces perceived personal “defects” back to mothering deficits, relieving self-blame. And, by teaching today’s undermothered adults to cultivate the mothering they missed, she helps them secure a happier future—for themselves and their children.
“This book is a revelation to those of us whose mothering was short of what we needed. The author sensitively and authoritatively weaves developmental principles into a compassionate understanding of what it means to be under-mothered.”
—Connie Dawson, PhD, coauthor of Growing Up Again: Parenting Ourselves, Parenting Our Children
"With compassion and sparkling clarity, Jasmin Lee Cori describes the effects of being under-mothered and what it takes to overcome them. Her book will be of great value to new mothers serious about creating a loving environment for their children, adult sons and daughters who want at long last to fill the holes in their hearts, and clinicians interested in understanding and healing the mother wound."
—Evelyn Bassoff, PhD, psychotherapist and author of Mothering Ourselves: Help and Healing for Adult Daughters
“Jasmin Lee Cori has done a superb job of describing the importance of childhood attachment needs and the psychological wounds that get inflicted when an emotionally absent mother cannot meet those needs well enough. She has skillfully laid out clear steps wounded adults can take to identify their inner strengths and heal attachment wounds. I wholeheartedly recommend this book for anyone who wishes to understand and heal the wounds that can arise when parented by an emotionally absent mother.”
—Shirley Jean Schmidt, MA, LPC, author of The Developmental Needs Meeting Strategy: An Ego State Therapy for Healing Adults with Childhood Trauma and Attachment Wounds
“This book effortlessly intertwines neuroscience with clinical acumen in a lovely work of extraordinary depth. In her compelling, heart-rending analysis of the importance of motherhood, Jasmin Lee Cori has created a work as significant as Alice Miller’s Prisoners of Childhood. Easily accessible and very useful, it is a must-read for parents-to-be, those in the helping professions, and adults who have been wounded by a negligent parent.”
—Kate Crowley, OTD, OTR/L, University of Southern California
“With a compassionate and steady voice, Jasmin Lee Cori guides the reader through the difficult terrain faced by adults who have grown up without sufficient emotional mothering. Relying on personal experience and practice as a psychotherapist, she provides insight and tools to help readers overcome the challenges of a painful childhood and to move into the pleasures of living adult life fully.”
—Kathryn Black, MA, psychotherapist, author of Mothering Without a Map: The Search for the Good Mother Within
