Inherited Hunger
Definition
There is a hunger that belongs to you and a hunger that arrived through you from somewhere older. The hunger for touch, for recognition, for safety, for enough. Not the hunger your life produces. The hunger that was present before you had any personal reason for it. The women who came before you were hungry. They were hungry in the specific ways their time and circumstance required: for food sometimes, for safety often, for the right to exist as full human beings in systems that did not grant that right. The hunger was not satisfied. It was passed forward. You received it in your body before you understood what need was.
Origins & Context
Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves traces the hunger of the psyche: the instinctual woman's hunger for freedom, for creative expression, for the wild and embodied life that culture has tried to domesticate out of her. The hunger that women carry is often the hunger for what was taken from them and from the women before them.
Christiane Northrup in Mother-Daughter Wisdom documents the transmission of hunger through the maternal body: the mother who starved herself or was starved, whose relationship to nourishment was disordered by circumstance or culture or family, passes that relationship to the daughter who nurses at her body and absorbs her relationship to need.
Mark Wolynn in It Didn't Start With You identifies specific patterns of inherited hunger in descendants of famine survivors, war survivors, and economic deprivation survivors: the overconsumption, the hoarding, the inability to feel full, the anxiety around scarcity that does not correspond to present conditions. The body is remembering a danger that the mind does not have access to.
The hunger is yours. And it is older than you. The women who came before you were hungry in ways that were never satisfied, and the body does not forget what the mind cannot hold.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
It shows up as the hunger that cannot be satisfied by eating. The woman who eats and cannot feel full, who reaches for more before the fullness has registered. The body is not hungry for food. It is hungry for something the food is standing in for.
It shows up as the insatiable need for reassurance, for love, for presence. The asking again to be told that she is loved. The need that does not quiet even when it is met, because it is not only her need. It is carrying the need of women who were not met.
It shows up as the relationship to scarcity: hoarding, overconsumption, the difficulty giving things away because there may not be enough later. The body is responding to a historical scarcity that no longer exists but that was encoded before the daughter was born.
It shows up in creative life: the hunger for expression that feels urgent and ancient. The drive to make something, say something, leave a mark, that is partly personal and partly the hunger of women who were not allowed to make marks.
Generational Transmission
Through the maternal line: The mother's hunger is the most immediate source. The mother who could not be filled, who went without and trained herself not to need, or who needed in ways that overwhelmed the family, passed that relationship to need directly. The daughter fed at the mother's body before she could distinguish her own hunger from her mother's. The hunger she carries has at least two layers: her own experience and what the mother brought to the feeding.
Through the paternal line: The paternal line carries its own hunger: for land, for status, for the recognition of men in systems that denied them. The father who was hungry for achievement, for approval, for the success that was just out of reach, transmitted that hunger to his daughter in the form of drive, or restlessness, or the specific dissatisfaction that comes from wanting something that will not be enough when it arrives.
Nikita's Note
The work with inherited hunger is not to fill the hunger but to feel it and trace it.
When I feel a need that is larger than my present circumstances seem to justify, the question I ask is: whose is this? Not in a mystical sense. In a practical one. My grandmother came from a generation where women's needs were almost entirely secondary. The hunger I carry for being fully seen and fully resourced is not irrational. It is legitimate. It is mine and it is hers.
Feeling that hunger without shame, and meeting it with whatever tools the present allows, is both personal healing and ancestral completion.
From the work
The hunger is yours. And it is older than you. The women who came before you were hungry in ways that were never satisfied, and the body does not forget what the mind cannot hold.From Born to Break the Cycle by Nikita DatarAbout this book
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See all in The Daughter's Lexicon →I wrote about this in Born to Break the Cycle — available on Amazon.