The Narcissistic Mother and the Body: Why You Brace Before You Think

Narcissistic Abuse • May 04, 2026

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

In short: The body braces before the mind registers threat because a narcissistic mother’s presence was encoded as a nervous system danger cue before explicit memory formed, a response that persists into adulthood.

Introduction: The Unseen Armor

Carmen’s a litigation attorney, the kind of woman who wins the room before she’s said a word, and she’s sitting across from me with her shoulders subtly hunched and a faint tension line etched between her brows. She’s recounting a recent phone call with her mother, a conversation that, by every external measure, was perfectly pleasant.

Yet as she talks, her breath stays shallow. Her hands are clasped tight in her lap. Her gaze keeps darting to the door, as if she’s waiting for an interruption that hasn’t come yet. “It was fine,” she says, a brittle edge in her voice.

“Just catching up.” But her body’s telling a different story. It’s a story of bracing, of an invisible shield perpetually raised, ready to deflect a blow that never quite lands and never quite stops threatening to. This kind of pervasive readiness is a hallmark I see again and again in women raised by narcissistic mothers.

In my work with driven women over more than fifteen years, specifically daughters of narcissistic mothers, I’ve noticed a pattern that shows up before a single word gets spoken. The body braces first, and the mind is left to catch up and explain why. Carmen’s body had already answered the phone call before she picked it up.

This is a physical answer to a psychological picture, a body that learns to brace before the mind even registers a threat. That embodied response, often unconscious, says a great deal about the lasting impact of early relational dynamics, particularly the ones shaped by a narcissistic parent.

It’s proof of the body’s own wisdom. In the absence of consistent safety, the body develops sophisticated protective mechanisms that can persist long into adulthood, even when the conscious mind believes the danger has passed.

The Clinical Lens: Understanding the Narcissistic Mother’s Impact

To understand why the body braces, we have to first define the narcissistic mother. Clinically, Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is characterized by a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, a need for admiration, and a lack of empathy [1].

While a formal diagnosis of NPD in a parent isn’t always present, the traits of narcissism can profoundly shape a child’s development. A narcissistic mother often views her child as an extension of herself, an object to fulfill her own needs for validation, admiration, or control.

The child’s emotions, needs, and independent identity are often dismissed, minimized, or actively suppressed if they don’t align with the mother’s agenda. This creates an environment of emotional unpredictability and conditional love, where the child learns that their worth is contingent on their ability to serve the mother’s ego.

That conditional love builds a deep sense of insecurity and a constant striving for external validation, as the child internalizes the belief that their intrinsic value is tied to their performance and their ability to please the narcissistic parent.

This dynamic can lead to a specific form of relational trauma. Unlike overt abuse, which is often clearly identifiable, the trauma inflicted by a narcissistic mother can be insidious. It’s characterized by emotional neglect, gaslighting, and a constant undermining of the child’s reality.

The child is often forced into a role, whether it’s the golden child, the scapegoat, or the invisible child, each serving a function within the mother’s self-serving narrative. This constant negotiation of self within a distorted relational field profoundly shapes the developing nervous system.

The child learns to adapt, often by becoming hyper-attuned to the mother’s moods and needs, sacrificing her own authentic expression in the process. This adaptation, while necessary for survival in the family system, comes at a real cost to the child’s developing sense of self and her capacity for genuine connection.

The Nervous System Under Siege: A Body That Remembers

The nervous system is built for survival. It’s constantly scanning the environment for cues of safety or danger. In a household with a narcissistic mother, those cues get mixed and confusing on purpose or by accident. A loving gesture might get followed by a cutting remark. Praise might arrive laced with subtle criticism.

That creates a state of chronic low-grade threat, where the child’s nervous system stays in a near-perpetual state of alert. This isn’t about conscious thought. It’s a primal, embodied response, and the body doesn’t wait for permission to run it.

The body, trying to protect itself, becomes a finely tuned instrument for detecting subtle shifts in the emotional atmosphere, often long before the conscious mind can process them.

I recently reread Stephen Porges, PhD, distinguished university scientist and professor of psychiatry, whose Polyvagal Theory is the framework I come back to more than any other when I’m trying to explain why a daughter of a narcissistic mother can know, intellectually, that she’s safe, and still feel her chest go tight in the driveway. Porges developed his theory to explain how the autonomic nervous system governs social engagement, emotional regulation, and our responses to stress.

Here’s the clinical layer first. Porges describes three main autonomic states: the ventral vagal state (safe and social, marked by connection and calm), the sympathetic state (fight or flight, activated by perceived danger), and the dorsal vagal state (freeze or collapse, an older defense mechanism that kicks in when fight or flight isn’t possible).

Now the kitchen table version. Think of your nervous system as a house with three rooms and a hallway alarm. The ventral vagal room is the kitchen on a Sunday morning, coffee going, nobody bracing for anything. The sympathetic room is what happens when the smoke alarm goes off and everyone scrambles. The dorsal vagal room is what happens when the scrambling doesn’t work and the body just goes still, lights off, waiting it out. A child raised by a narcissistic mother spends most of her time in the hallway between the second and third room, because the first room was never reliably available.

And here’s what that looks like on an actual Tuesday, decades later. It’s the executive who feels her jaw clench in a board meeting before she consciously registers that her colleague’s tone shifted. It’s the woman who goes quiet and a little far away during a disagreement with her husband, not because she’s checked out, but because her body has already decided that going still is safer than staying present. Children of narcissistic mothers often move back and forth between sympathetic activation (hypervigilance, anxiety, a constant need to perform, an inability to relax) and dorsal vagal shutdown (numbness, dissociation, a sense of being invisible or unreal, profound fatigue). The body learns to anticipate danger even when the conscious mind can see that it’s safe.

This is the somatic memory of trauma, where the body holds the imprint of past experience and produces an automatic bracing response [2]. That constant state of physiological arousal and dysregulation can carry real long-term costs for physical and mental health.

Constant activation can show up as chronic muscle tension, especially in the jaw, neck, and shoulders, digestive issues such as IBS, chronic fatigue, anxiety, and even autoimmune conditions. The body is, quite literally, holding its breath and preparing for impact long after the actual threat has passed.

The feeling of being “braced” isn’t only a metaphor. It’s a physiological reality, proof of the body’s wisdom as it tries to protect itself from harm it once had every reason to expect.

This persistent readiness drains real energy. It makes it hard to fully engage in life, feel joy, or feel safe in your own skin. The body, trying to survive, ends up building a kind of prison out of tension and hypervigilance.

The Echo of Early Attachment: When Safety Feels Suspicious

I think about attachment theory almost every week in session, and I keep coming back to the original source. John Bowlby, the British psychoanalyst who pioneered attachment theory, and Mary Ainsworth, PhD, developmental psychologist whose Strange Situation experiment gave the field its first empirical evidence for different attachment styles, described something that still holds up completely in my office decades later: early relational experience shapes our capacity to form secure bonds, full stop.

Bowlby emphasized the importance of a secure base in early childhood for healthy development. Ainsworth’s research gave us the categories we still use to describe what happens when that base isn’t there.

Here’s the clinical layer. A narcissistic mother often provides inconsistent or conditional care, which tends to produce insecure attachment styles, typically anxious-preoccupied (a desperate need for closeness paired with fear of abandonment), dismissive-avoidant (suppressed emotional needs, heavy emphasis on self-reliance), or fearful-avoidant attachment, often seen in response to a parent who was frightening, or who was herself frightened.

Here’s the kitchen table version. Picture a compass that’s supposed to point toward the people who keep you safe. In a narcissistic family, the compass gets held next to a magnet, the mother’s moods, her needs, her image, and over years the needle stops pointing true north. It starts pointing at whatever keeps her calm today. The child learns that her primary caregiver isn’t a reliable source of comfort and safety. Instead, the caregiver becomes a source of distress, or worse, a source of unpredictable emotional weather the child has to move through alone, often feeling invisible or responsible for her mother’s emotional state.

And here’s the Tuesday-afternoon version, twenty or thirty years on. It’s the woman who feels her stomach drop when her partner is unusually calm and affectionate, because calm once meant a storm was coming. It’s the executive who reads a warm email from her boss three times, looking for the catch. This early relational blueprint shapes how we perceive and respond to relationships for the rest of our lives. For women raised by narcissistic mothers, genuine safety can feel unfamiliar, even suspicious.

Her nervous system, used to the subtle dance of threat and appeasement, may read calm as the quiet before a storm, or read real connection as a trap.

This can lead a woman to unconsciously seek out relationships that mirror the familiar, painful dynamics of her childhood, which keeps the cycle of relational trauma going. The body, having learned to link intimacy with potential harm, may resist real closeness even when the conscious mind wants it.

That internal conflict can show up as difficulty trusting others, a tendency to sabotage healthy relationships, or a steady undercurrent of unease even inside connections that are, by any outside measure, secure.

Composite Vignette: Regina’s Unseen Burden

It’s 6:40 on a Sunday evening, and Regina is standing in her own driveway, keys still in her hand, unable to make herself walk to the front door. She’s 46, an architect whose firm just won a museum commission that made the local business paper, and she has just left her mother’s house after what everyone at the table would have called a lovely dinner. Her travel mug, the stainless one with her firm’s logo worn half off from years of dishwashing, sits empty in the cupholder. Her jaw aches. She doesn’t remember clenching it.

“I don’t even know what she said,” Regina told me the following Tuesday, turning her wedding ring around and around on her finger. “That’s the part that gets me. I can’t point to the sentence. I just know that by dessert I was gone, like I was watching the table from the ceiling, nodding at the right times, and my shoulders were up around my ears and I didn’t notice until I was in the car. I run a team of forty people. I can read a room in four seconds flat. And I cannot tell you what my own mother said to make my body do that.”

Sitting with Regina that afternoon, I felt the particular ache I’ve come to recognize in session with driven, accomplished women who cannot locate the injury they are clearly carrying. Not confusion, exactly. A kind of grief for evidence that will never arrive, because the harm was never a sentence you could quote back. It was a climate.

What I’ve come to think of as the unseen burden is exactly this: the labor of managing a parent’s fragile ego is invisible even to the person doing it, because there is no discrete moment to point to, only a body that keeps a ledger the conscious mind was never shown. Regina’s mother, a woman of considerable charm and social grace, had spent the whole dinner subtly redirecting the spotlight back to herself, and Regina’s nervous system had logged every redirection even while her mind insisted the evening had been lovely.

Regina would leave these dinners feeling drained, her jaw tight, a dull ache settling into her shoulders, the physical residue of emotional labor she rarely had language for. She’d call it “just family stuff,” the phrase so many women use to normalize a dynamic that is, in fact, costing them something measurable.

In our sessions, Regina described how, even before her mother spoke, she’d feel a tightening low in her stomach, a subtle clench that signaled an emotional demand or a criticism was coming. This was her body bracing, a response built over decades of moving through her mother’s unpredictable emotional terrain, and it fired before Regina had a single conscious thought about the evening ahead.

Regina’s success, impressive by any outside measure, functioned like a fragile shield against an internal sense of not being enough, a sense her mother’s subtly placed remarks kept freshly reinforced. She was driven, yes, but she was also driven by a fear she rarely said out loud, and that fear showed up in her body as chronic tension and an inability to fully rest, even inside her own home, even with the museum commission sitting framed on her office wall.

Her body had become its own alarm system, on alert most of the time, even when her mind tried hard to talk it down.

The Betrayal of Trust: When the Protector Becomes the Perpetrator

I go back often to Jennifer Freyd, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and the researcher who coined the term betrayal trauma, because she names something I watch play out in my office on a near-weekly basis. Betrayal trauma occurs when a person’s trust gets violated by someone they depend on for survival or well-being. In the context of a narcissistic mother, that betrayal runs deep.

The mother, who should be the child’s primary source of safety and unconditional love, becomes instead the source of the harm. That can produce a deep sense of betrayal that isn’t only about specific events, it reaches the very foundation of trust itself.

The child learns to distrust her own perceptions, her own feelings, and eventually herself. That internal conflict, the need to trust for survival set against the reality of betrayal, creates a real disorganization in the self, and it often contributes to complex PTSD (C-PTSD).

C-PTSD differs from traditional PTSD, which typically follows a single, distinct traumatic event. C-PTSD comes from prolonged, repeated trauma, often inside relationships where the person is under the control of the one causing harm and escape is difficult, the way it is in childhood abuse or neglect.

Symptoms include trouble with emotional regulation (intense mood swings, difficulty managing anger or sadness), a distorted self-perception (worthlessness, shame, guilt), relationship difficulties (trouble forming healthy attachments, fear of intimacy), and a loss of meaning or purpose.

For women with C-PTSD from narcissistic abuse, the body often carries the weight of this unresolved trauma. It shows up as chronic pain, hyperarousal (an exaggerated startle response, trouble sleeping), or dissociative symptoms, a sense of being detached from your own body or your own reality.

Yvonne, a surgeon in her early forties, came to me with migraines that three neurologists couldn’t explain. She kept a laminated card in her white coat pocket, a list of trigger foods her last doctor had suggested, and by the time she sat down across from me she’d crossed nearly everything off it without relief. Her mother, she told me, had demanded a flawless public image and expected her children to reflect it back at her. “I was the eldest,” Yvonne said, turning the laminated card over in her hands without seeming to notice she was doing it. “So I was the one who had to be the proof. Straight A’s weren’t proof. Valedictorian wasn’t proof. I don’t think there was a version of me that would have counted as proof, and I only understood that about two years ago, and I am so angry it took that long.”

Sitting with Yvonne, I felt something settle into place that I’ve felt with dozens of driven, accomplished women before her. The migraines were not a mystery. They were a protest lodged by the only part of Yvonne still willing to tell the truth, since the rest of her had spent thirty years performing.

What I’ve come to think of as the silent protest is this: when a child’s authentic needs and emotions get suppressed for long enough in service of a parent’s image, the body eventually files the complaint the mouth was never allowed to file. Yvonne’s migraines flared reliably after calls with her mother, or whenever she believed she’d fallen short of a standard that kept moving. Her body, in its own silent protest, was signaling an internal conflict she’d carried since she was a girl. She’d learned to suppress her own needs to maintain her role as the perfect daughter, a role that left her depleted, perpetually on edge, and cut off from her own wants. The pain in her head was the pain she’d never been allowed to speak out loud, translated into the only language her body had left.

The body becomes a repository of unspoken pain, a steady reminder of the betrayal, and, for both Regina and Yvonne, a quiet insistence on being heard when words were never safe enough to carry it.

Both/And

Here’s the truth I want you to leave this section holding. Healing from the impact of a narcissistic mother asks you to hold a Both/And, not an either/or. It’s both acknowledging the real pain and damage the narcissistic parent caused, and recognizing your own capacity for healing.

It’s both understanding that your body’s bracing response was a protective mechanism, a genuinely brilliant survival strategy for a difficult environment, and learning to gently invite that same body into a state of safety, to teach it, patiently, that the danger has passed.

It’s both grieving the mother you deserved but never had, the version of her who could have offered unconditional love and support, and recognizing the woman you’re becoming now, a woman shaped by hard conditions but not reducible to them.

It’s both recognizing the systemic patterns that shaped your experience, the intergenerational habits and family roles that formed your early life, and taking up your own responsibility for your healing, understanding that you have real agency to interrupt these cycles.

This isn’t about excusing the past or blaming yourself. It’s about holding the complexity of your experience with compassion and clarity. You can both love your mother, or love parts of her, and name the harm she caused.

You can both be a driven, accomplished woman and still carry real wounds that need tending. Both/And asks you to hold these truths at the same time, without collapsing one into the other, which is what makes self-acceptance and real healing possible in the first place.

The Systemic Lens: Family Roles and Intergenerational Patterns

The pattern I just named in Yvonne and in Regina, the performing, the bracing, the body speaking what the mouth couldn’t, isn’t personal to either of them. It’s patterned, and the pattern has a structural home. To really understand what a narcissistic mother does, we have to zoom out and look at the family as a system, not just a set of individuals.

Family systems theory, developed by pioneers like Murray Bowen, a psychiatrist and professor at Georgetown University, holds that a family is an emotional unit, where each member’s behavior is interconnected with and shaped by the dynamics of the whole.

In a family with a narcissistic parent, rigid roles tend to form to keep the fragile equilibrium of the system intact and protect the narcissistic parent’s ego.

These roles can include the “golden child,” who can do no wrong, is often idealized, and is also burdened by impossible expectations. The “scapegoat” carries the family’s dysfunction and gets blamed for the problems. The “lost child” becomes invisible and learns to disappear rather than risk conflict.

Children don’t choose these roles. They’re assigned, often without a word being said, by the narcissistic parent, and reinforced by other family members who may also be caught in the same dysfunctional web.

These assigned roles can leave lasting marks on a child’s sense of self and her ability to form healthy relationships. The child learns to put the needs of the family system, and especially the narcissistic parent, ahead of her own.

That can produce a deep sense of responsibility for other people’s emotions and real difficulty identifying and asserting her own boundaries. The pressure to keep up appearances, deny the reality of the abuse, and protect the family’s image can leave a person deeply isolated and ashamed.

You’re not broken for carrying this. You are a woman who was assigned a role in a system that was never built around your flourishing, and that is not a personal failing. That is a structural inheritance. The body, once again, becomes the keeper of the unspoken truth, holding the stress and suppression as chronic physical symptoms because the family system denied it any other outlet.

Narcissistic patterns also tend to carry an intergenerational component. Unresolved trauma and dysfunctional relational patterns can travel down through generations, not necessarily through anything anyone consciously teaches, but through modeling, emotional climate, and the basic structure of the family system.

Understanding that transmission matters, because it’s how you break the cycle instead of repeating it in your own relationships and, if you’re a parent, in your own parenting.

I think often of Dr. Gabor Maté, physician, author, and speaker who has spent decades on trauma, addiction, stress, and childhood development. He writes at length about how unresolved trauma in parents shows up as challenges in their children, and the line of his I keep coming back to is simple: what is not transformed is transmitted. That single sentence is, in my experience, the whole case for doing this work now rather than later.

Reclaiming Your Body: A Practical Path Forward

Healing from the impact of a narcissistic mother is a process of reclaiming your body, your emotions, and your authentic self. It’s not a straight line. It’s gentle, consistent effort, and it takes patience, self-compassion, and a willingness to sit with uncomfortable truths. Here’s a practical map, the one I actually walk through with clients like Regina and Yvonne.

1. Acknowledge and validate your experience. The first step is fully acknowledging the reality of what happened. Your feelings are valid. The pain is real. You’re not imagining it. That validation matters for healing betrayal trauma and rebuilding self-trust. Journaling, talking with a trusted trauma-informed therapist, or joining a support group for adult children of narcissistic parents can all be powerful tools here. Let yourself feel the anger, sadness, and grief without judgment. That’s part of the process, not a detour from it.
2. Learn the shape of narcissistic abuse and trauma. Understanding the dynamics of narcissistic abuse, attachment theory, and the nervous system’s response to trauma can help you depersonalize the experience and see clearly that the problem was never you. Resources like Annie Wright’s course Normalcy After the Narcissist offer structured psychoeducation and a framework for understanding your past, so what once felt senseless starts to make sense.
3. Prioritize nervous system regulation. Your body has been in a state of chronic activation for a long time, constantly on alert. Learning to regulate your nervous system matters for moving from hypervigilance toward calm and safety. A few places to start: mindful, diaphragmatic breathing that activates the ventral vagal system and signals safety to your brain; somatic experiencing, developed by Peter Levine, PhD, a body-oriented model that helps you release stored trauma through bodily sensation and complete the defensive responses that got interrupted the first time; gentle, intentional movement, yoga, walking outside, dancing, tai chi, anything that discharges built-up sympathetic energy without forcing or punishing the body; grounding through the senses, naming five things you see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell, one you can taste; and co-regulation, spending real time with safe, regulated people, a therapist, a steady friend, a partner who can hold calm long enough for your body to borrow it.
4. Establish and maintain real boundaries. This is often the hardest and most necessary step. Boundaries aren’t about punishing anyone. They’re about protecting your own well-being, energy, and emotional space. That might mean limiting contact, setting clear terms for interactions, declining invitations that drain you, or, in some cases, going no contact if the relationship stays harmful. You are not responsible for her reaction to your boundaries. Your responsibility is to yourself.
5. Rebuild your internal authority. A narcissistic mother often erodes a child’s internal sense of self, her decision-making, her trust in her own judgment. Rebuilding that authority means learning to trust your own instincts, your own perceptions, your own voice again. Start small. Build confidence one decision at a time. This process involves pushing back on internalized criticism and growing a compassionate inner voice that actually advocates for what you need.
6. Build relationships that are actually safe. Seek out people defined by mutual respect, empathy, real connection, and reciprocity. These relationships offer corrective experiences that can gradually reshape your attachment patterns and prove that safe connection is possible. A trauma-informed therapist can also function as a secure attachment figure, offering a consistent, non-judgmental space to work through relational wounds.
7. Grieve the loss. Let yourself grieve the mother you deserved, the childhood you didn’t get, the safety and unconditional love that was never offered. This grief is a natural, necessary part of healing. It’s not about staying stuck in the past. It’s about acknowledging the pain so you can move through it instead of carrying it forever. This grief can hold sadness, anger, and relief all at once, and that’s not a contradiction.
8. Come home to your authentic self. As you heal, you’ll start to uncover the self that got suppressed and hidden inside the narcissistic dynamic. This is a process of finding your real values, passions, and strengths, apart from your mother’s expectations or projections. Meet this emerging self with curiosity, not a grading rubric.

Regina still turns her wedding ring when she talks about her mother. That hasn’t stopped. What has changed, six months into our work, is that she notices herself doing it now, mid-sentence, and can choose to unclench her jaw on purpose instead of finding out about the tension secondhand, in the car, an hour later. It isn’t resolution. It’s a door where there used to be a wall.

If you recognize yourself in these words, know this. The experience of being raised by a narcissistic mother leaves a real mark, and you often feel it most in the quiet language of your own body. That mark doesn’t have to define what comes next. Your capacity for reclaiming your body and your life is real, even on the days it doesn’t feel that way, and as you learn to listen to your body and gently guide it toward calm, you’re not only healing yourself. You’re interrupting a pattern that would otherwise keep moving down the family line.

Related Reading and Research

• [1] Shadid J, Ferrari AJ, Bach B, Sellbom M, Sharp C, Hutsebaut J. The global epidemiology of personality disorder: a systematic review and meta-regression. The lancet. Psychiatry. 2025. PMID: 41197646. DOI: 10.1016/S2215-0366(25)00299-8. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41197646/
• [2] Schore AN. Dysregulation of the right brain: a fundamental mechanism of traumatic attachment and the psychopathogenesis of posttraumatic stress disorder. The Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry. 2002. PMID: 11929435. DOI: 10.1046/j.1440-1614.2002.00996.x. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11929435/
• [3] Vignando M, Bizumic B. Parental Narcissism Leads to Anxiety and Depression in Children via Scapegoating. The Journal of psychology. 2023. PMID: 36595560. DOI: 10.1080/00223980.2022.2148088. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36595560/
• [4] Felitti VJ, Anda RF, Nordenberg D, Williamson DF, Spitz AM, Edwards V. Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American journal of preventive medicine. 1998. PMID: 9635069. DOI: 10.1016/s0749-3797(98)00017-8. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9635069/

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. van der Kolk BA, Stone L, West J, Rhodes A, Emerson D, Suvak M, Spinazzola J. Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder: a randomized controlled trial. J Clin Psychiatry. 2014;75(6):e559-65. doi:10.4088/JCP.13m08561. PMID: 25004196.
2. Gómez JM, Smith CP, Gobin RL, Tang SS, Freyd JJ. Collusion, torture, and inequality: Understanding the actions of the American Psychological Association as institutional betrayal. J Trauma Dissociation. 2016;17(5):527-544. PMID: 27427782.
3. Payne P, Levine PA, Crane-Godreau MA. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Front Psychol. 2015;6:93. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093. PMID: 25699005.
4. Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.
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Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Maté, Gabor. When the Body Says No. A.A. Knopf Canada, 2003.
• Ainsworth, Mary D. Salter. Patterns of attachment. Erlbaum, 1978.

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