Mother-Daughter Attachment® Model

• Systemic, trauma-informed, and culture-informed model that makes the complicated dynamics between mothers and daughters easier to understand.
• Teaches mental health professionals, coaches, and women how to uncover the often-hidden underlying dynamics between mothers and daughters and what causes conflict, emotional disconnection, and estrangement.
• Provides solutions, tools, and exercises that heal mother-daughter conflict, facilitate closer emotional connection, and generational change and healing.
• Provides solutions, tools, and exercises that heal mother-daughter conflict, facilitate closer emotional connection, and generational change and healing.
• Challenges the way society, and many human development theories, view caregiving as a female quality, rather than as a human quality.
• Reveals that mother-daughter conflict does not occur in a cultural vacuum. Rather, it is the canary-in-the-coalmine, warning us that something is wrong with the way women and girls are being treated.
• Imparts essential understanding about how to work therapeutically with women and girls, including how to gain a deeper understanding of their lives, emotional reality, and developmental needs.
• Exposes the emotional truth about women’s generational experience with patriarchy, the trauma women experience, and how patriarchy blames, shames and guilt-trips women and girls.
• Uncovers the harm human development theories like Attachment Theory inflict on mothers and daughters when mothering is defined as a selfless, self-sacrificing role, and mothers who do not live up to this role expectation are inaccurately blamed for causing their daughter’s problems.

Research Evidence

Why Mother-Daughter Attachment® Training is Essential

Women’s development and neuroscience research confirms that mothers and daughters are wired for connection! This means –

• An emotionally connected relationship is essential throughout their life for their emotional development and wellbeing.
• The mother-daughter relationship requires its own unique understanding because it has its own patterns of generational transmission, both learned and neurological.
• Theories like Attachment Theory, that reflect the patriarchal belief that mothers are primary caregivers are contributing to today’s increase in mother blaming and mother-daughter conflict.
• Neuroscience research supports that mothers teach their daughters about what it means to be female in their family, culture, and society, by passing on their beliefs, internalized sexism, and patterns of behavior, and through intergenerational transmission patterns. MRI images show that daughters can neurologically inherit their mother’s depression and trauma. (See articles below.)
• The Mother-Daughter Attachment® Model is the missing piece in Attachment Theory, providing tools and exercises on how to understand the mother’s unique truth and emotional reality, which is different to what patriarchy and male-created theories believe about motherhood.
• Some of the tools and exercises in many male-centered theories, like setting boundaries, cannot heal conflict and generational trauma. Rather, it is likely to increase conflict.
• Mother-daughter attachment® training is essential for mental health professionals and coaches who work with women, because it teaches how to understand women’s lives, emotional reality, generational patterns, generational experience with patriarchy, mother-daughter dynamics, and what women require for their mental and emotional wellbeing.

• Yamagata, B. et al “Female-Specific Intergenerational Transmission Patterns of the Human Corticolimbic Circuitry” The Journal of Neuroscience, 2016, Vol 36(4), pp.1254-1260

This is the first study investigating intergenerational transmission patterns in the brain using neuroimaging. The study found more similar brain grey matter volume in mother-daughter pairs than any other parent-offspring pair, providing physical evidence that mothers and daughters are wired for connection, and a potential neuroanatomical explanation for mother-daughter intergenerational depression.

• Colich, N. et al “Like mother like daughter: putamen activation as a mechanism underlying intergenerational risk for depression” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2017, pp.1480-1489

This study used neural imaging across two mother-daughter comparison groups, finding that a mother’s depression and her experiences of loss creates a potential intergenerational mechanism, which makes her daughter at-risk for depression, and other mental health issues during late puberty.

• Ethridge, P. et al “Intergenerational Transmission of Depression Risk: Mothers’ Neural Response to Reward and History of Depression Are Associated with Daughters’ Neural Response to Reward Across Adolescence” Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, 2022, Vol. 131, No. 6. pp.598-610

This study used EEG on girls whose mothers had no history of depression, finding a positive association between neural response to reward and pubertal development. But for girls whose mother did have a history of depression, the study found a negative association between neural response to reward and pubertal development. This suggests that depressive pathology is transmitted across generations, from mother to daughter.

These studies reveal the need for –

1. Greater awareness of and focus on the mother-daughter relationship as a uniquely wired relationship.

2. The development of intervention strategies that uncover the causes of, and how to heal women’s generational experiences with trauma, which includes the trauma that patriarchy inflicts by how it silences and neglects women and expects mothers to be selfless caregivers.

Example: When a mother is silenced, which research shows can cause depression, her daughter is likely to inherit her mother’s depression and her mother’s ‘depression wired’ brain.

This means that a daughter can inherit the emotional harm that was inflicted on her mother through the way her family, culture, and patriarchal society silenced her.