The Mother You Didn't Have: Why Attachment Theory Is More Hopeful Than You Think

A Mother's Day reflection on what neuroscience — and a new book by CNIT founder Dr. Heidi Schreiber-Pan — reveal about who, and what, can mother us.

Photograph: A walnut tree, a bench, an invitation. The mothering function — being held, returned to, witnessed — does not exclusively belong to the past.

There is a contact in your phone you don't call. A draft you'll open this week and close again without sending. A holiday everyone else seems to celebrate easily, and you don't.

For a holiday meant to honor love, Mother's Day produces an extraordinary amount of silent grief. It shows up in the cards aisle, where someone stands holding a sympathy card next to a "Best Mom" card and concludes neither one fits. It shows up in the brunch invitations from friends who don't quite know how to include the woman whose mother died last spring. It shows up in therapy offices the week before and the week after, where a steady stream of clients come in carrying the same complicated weight: my mother is gone, or my mother was never really there, or my mother is the wound, and the world is asking me to celebrate her.

If that's where you find yourself this week, this essay is for you. And it begins with an unexpected source of hope: attachment theory.

The Story Attachment Theory Usually Tells

In the mid-twentieth century, the British psychiatrist John Bowlby proposed something that now seems obvious but was, at the time, controversial: that the bond between an infant and its primary caregiver — typically the mother — was not a luxury or a sentimental nicety but a biological necessity. His student Mary Ainsworth confirmed it in the lab through her famous "Strange Situation" studies, which observed how toddlers behaved when separated from and reunited with their mothers.

What Ainsworth saw was that securely attached children used their mothers as a "secure base" — a place to return to between bouts of exploration. When she left, they noticed. When she returned, they were comforted. This pattern, Bowlby and Ainsworth argued, becomes the template for all subsequent relationships. We learn whether the world is safe by learning whether our first relationship was safe. Decades of subsequent research have largely confirmed their framework, with implications stretching into adulthood: insecure attachment in childhood is correlated with anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, and even physical health outcomes later in life.

This is where the story usually ends, and it is — for the millions of people whose mothers were absent, neglectful, addicted, abusive, or simply gone too soon — a brutal one. The takeaway feels deterministic: If you didn't get it, you're broken in ways that can't easily be fixed.

But this is not what attachment researchers actually found.

The Research That Quietly Changed Everything

In the 1980s and 1990s, attachment researchers — including Mary Main, who developed the Adult Attachment Interview — began noticing something curious. Some adults who had clearly experienced disrupted or insecure childhood attachments nonetheless described those experiences with coherence, emotional regulation, and insight.

They had, somehow, become what researchers came to call "earned secure."

The implications are enormous. Attachment, it turns out, is not destiny. The neural patterns laid down by an absent or unsafe mother can be revised — not erased, but updated — through later relationships and experiences that offer what the original relationship did not. A loving partner. A skilled therapist. A grandmother, an aunt, a teacher who saw something in a child no one else did. A spiritual community. A consistent practice of self-witness.

This is no small finding. It means the most painful narrative in many people's lives — that they were doomed by who their mother was or wasn't — is not, in fact, a closed case. The body keeps the score, but the score can be revised.

And the revision, recent research suggests, may not need to come only from other humans.

The Frontier: When Nature Becomes a Secure Base

This is where Dr. Heidi Schreiber-Pan's new book, The Ground Beneath Our Work, takes a quiet but radical turn. In her chapter on tending relationships, she draws on attachment theory but expands its scope beyond the human dyad — into something that older traditions never separated in the first place: the relationship between human beings and the rest of the living world.

Her argument is grounded in current research. Polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges, demonstrates that the human nervous system can be co-regulated by a wide range of safety cues — not only a calm caregiver's voice and gaze, but also rhythms, environments, and presences that signal the world is okay right now. The slow movement of a river. The deep stillness of an old forest. The steady return of a season.

Place attachment researchers, working in environmental psychology, have for decades documented something both ordinary and remarkable: that humans form attachment-like bonds with specific places, and that those bonds function in many of the same ways human attachments do. They provide identity, comfort, regulation, and a felt sense of being known. People grieve places when they lose them. People return to places to feel held.

Schreiber-Pan's contribution is to bring these threads together for the helping professions — to ask, plainly: if attachment is a function rather than a fixed dyad, what else can perform that function?

What the Mothering Function Actually Is

To answer that, it helps to name what mothering, at its best, actually does. Stripped of its cultural sentimentality, the mothering function is something more clinical and more universal: it is being held, regulated, returned to, and witnessed. It is the body's experience of I am safe; I am seen; I can come back here.

When that function was missing in childhood, the loss is real and the grief is real. But the function itself — the capacity to be held, regulated, returned to, witnessed — does not require the original mother to perform it. It can be received. From a partner. From a therapist. From a grandmother. From a community.

And, as Schreiber-Pan and a growing body of research suggest, from the more-than-human world.

A client who lost her mother to cancer at twelve finds, in middle age, that a particular oak tree in a particular city park has become the place she goes when she needs to cry. She does not call it her mother. She does not need to. The function is being received: she is held by something larger than herself, something that has been there longer than her grief and will be there longer than her life.

A man with a disorganized attachment history, who has spent decades unable to be physically close to other humans without flooding into panic, discovers that he can sit beside a slow-moving river for an hour and feel — for the first time in his memory — what other people seem to mean by peace.

These are not metaphors, and they are not consolation prizes. They are evidence of a nervous system finally finding what it has been looking for, in a form it can finally accept.

A Different Kind of Mother's Day

Mother's Day, for those who carry the kind of loss this essay is for, may always be hard. It would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. The hole left by a mother who died, or the wound left by one who could not love well, is not closed by a walk in the woods.

But the larger story — the one most of us were never told — is that the mothering you needed does not exclusively belong to the past. The function continues to be available, in this lifetime, in the world that surrounds you. The slow rivers. The old trees. The faithful return of light. The mountain that has been there longer than every grief in human history and will be there long after.

This is not Mother Earth in the saccharine sense. This is something more interesting and more useful: the recognition that the human nervous system is built to be regulated by a living world, and that for those whose first relationship did not provide that regulation, the world itself is still offering it.

If your mother was not, or is not, or could not be — there are other mothers. They are older than you. They are quieter than you. And they are right outside.

This Mother's Day, you are invited to find one.

The draft on your phone can stay where it is.

Inspired by Dr. Heidi Schreiber-Pan's new book, The Ground Beneath Our Work: Nature-Informed Therapy and Care for a World in Need, available wherever books are sold. Learn more at https://www.natureinformedtherapy.org/book-the-ground-beneath-our-work