"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 DaughtersThis 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 ChildrenJasmin 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 WoundsWith 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 WithinThis 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 Millers 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 where can i read books for free The Emotionally Absent Mother: A Guide to Self-Healing and Getting the Love You Missed
232 of 234 people found the following review helpful. The answers are hereBy Karen JIf this list describes you, then you must read this book. Then find a counselor and get some help to deal with it. It will hurt to read this book. You will have realizations that are mind-blowing and gut-wrenching. But you will find a lot of answers for why you are the way you are. This list is a quote from the book.* When you see a tender mother-child interaction, you are emotionally triggered. You may feel choked up and teary or push away the pain by becoming critical and dismissive. (It hurts to see what you didn't have.)* You would just as soon not look deeply into your relationship with your mother. Better to "let sleeping dogs lie."* When you visit your mother, you find yourself numbing or going into a trance state in which you are not fully present. Visits are always upsetting, and you find yourself back in painful childhood feelings.* You crave true closeness yet feel uncomfortable and afraid of it. It is unfamiliar to you.* You feel some core shame and suffer from feelings (often hidden) that there is something unlovable about you.* You avoid having children of your own, feeling somehow not quite like "parent material."Remember Bruce Willis's character in The Sixth Sense? The realizations I had were like when he realizes at the end that he's one of the dead people. His life flashes before his eyes in a wave of disbelief and suddenly everything makes sense. He looks back on all the times that things were not quite right but he couldn't explain them at the time.Now, there's an explanation.499 of 511 people found the following review helpful. a very important book for meBy a readerI have always carried with me the feeling that I grew up without a mother, even though I had a mother. My mother was physically present (she even stayed at home and did not work most of the years of my childhood) and certainly not a malicious person by any stretch of the imagination. So this was a crazy feeling to carry around with me as an adult. This book confirmed for me that I am in fact not crazy to feel this way, and explained very clearly how and why many daughters enter adulthood with the feeling of being motherless or under-mothered, how this affects them in their adult life, and finally gives very practical advice for how to recover.This books is clear, well-written, nuanced, and organized. In chapter two, The Many Faces of the Good Mother, it provides a clear, balanced picture of what it looks like when a mother is meeting her child's needs fully (not perfectly!). Other recovery books have helped me to see that abandonment and neglect exist on a spectrum (i.e. just because you weren't left as a baby on someone's doorstep doesn't mean you weren't abandoned on some level as a child). This book helped me to refine my understanding even further and hone in on the specific holes that I experienced in my relationship with my mother--holes that are still affecting how I function as an adult, and how I function as a mother myself. It isn't about blame or resentment, but about having clarity and taking responsibility for your needs so that you can move on. The book is very affirming in telling the reader: if it is still bothering you, then it is still bothering you. It's not over and done with until you feel finished with it. This book is written to help you move on so that you can think about other things.I found some (not all) of the recovery exercises and suggestions to be a little on the cheesy side, but as I'm by now a seasoned reader of self-help books, I have developed a high tolerance for this kind of thing. I'm sure that different readers will take what is useful for them. As long as the book can benefit me hugely overall I don't mind if it throws out a few suggestions that I'm not crazy about. I definitely rate this book as a very important one in my overall journey in recovery because I firmly believe that there are very important issues specific to the mother-daughter relationship that need to be handled separately. Finally someone did (very gracefully, I might add), and I am really grateful! The world desperately needs its "good enough" mothers, and this book is one good tool for finding your way back to what that means when it was not modeled for you. Really, what could be more important?6 of 6 people found the following review helpful. Eye opening. You are not alone.By debnI would recommend this book to anyone who has or had a mother without empathy or a mother who was emotionally absent, whatever the reason. I always have thought that it was my fault that my mother and I did not bond and that it was not a normal occurrence so it had to be me. Now I realize that I am not the only person that has gone through something like this. And maybe it is not me that caused it.I don't know that I can obtain what I never had or make up for lost time because it takes two people who want it to make it happen, However, at least now I have a better understanding of why I feel the way that I do.