Motherless
Before there were monsters, there were motherless boys.
During pregnancy and early postpartum, a book started writing itself through me. As I held my daughter in early postpartum, feeling just how deeply sensitive she was to the world around me, I started to really understand the fracture that I have been so sensitive to my whole life — the way in which people walk around, disconnected from their bodies, as if always in some kind of low grade dissociation.
It has always perplexed me.
When I try to live outside of my body awareness, something deep inside of me revolts — like I have no choice but to maintain a life that leads body-first, attuned to the sensitivity of my own architecture and the environment around me.
And yet, modern life is structurally dissociogenic. Dissociation isn't a pathological exception but an extraordinarily common adaptive response to a culture that systematically overwhelms nervous systems.
And I believe this fracture begins within The Womb and Early Postpartum, with The Mother. Or, The Motherless.
Our degree of sensitivity begins with our time in the womb, when we are learning for the first time, how to be in matter — and more specifically, how to live in union with another for the first time — with our Mother.
Did you know that by the time we are born, our whole brainstem is already developed? The part of our nervous system that is responsible for setting the baseline background and rhythm, texture and tone of our circadian rhythm — the very rhythm that connects us into the heartbeat of the Earth, to Nature and to all of existence? Arguably, if we did not receive adequeate nourishment, love and sustenance in the womb, we have already at this stage started to split off from our true nature and our nervous system has already had dissafety and dysregulation encoded into its baseline tone.
The brainstem, whilst many call it the most primitive part of the nervous system, is what drives our most fundamental biological drives — breathing, heart rate, the primitive startle response, the basic regulation of arousal — and this arrives fully formed at birth. What this means is that the foetus is not a passive passenger in the womb. It is an active, sensing, responding being, already learning the felt texture of the world through the only world it has ever known: the mother's body.
Her stress hormones cross the placenta. Her cortisol rhythms become the infant's cortisol rhythms. Her nervous system is, in the most literal sense, the infant's first environment. Not the environment the infant will one day move through — the environment the infant is already being shaped by, before the first breath, before the first cry, before the first eye opens to light.
We are formed, first, in relationship. Before we have a self, we have a bond.
And what happens to that bond — or what fails to happen — echoes for a lifetime.
In late March 2026, CNN published the findings of a months-long investigation into what it named an online rape academy — a digital ecosystem where men share videos of drugging and sexually assaulting their wives and partners, trade tips on sedatives and dosages, and livestream assaults to paying viewers.
At the centre of this ecosystem is a pornography website.
It is called Motherless.com.
Since reading the name of the website, something deep within me has been shaking itself loose. An existential and deep primoridal chill.
Motherless.
Not “underground.” Not “hidden.” Motherless. As if whoever named it understood, at some dim unconscious frequency, exactly what they were building — and what kind of man would come looking for it.
I. The Name as Diagnosis
In somatic and developmental psychology, there is a concept we return to again and again: that the earliest relational wound — the rupture between infant and primary caregiver — does not stay buried. It resurfaces. It finds form. It organises the nervous system around its absence the way scar tissue organises around a wound.
The mother, in the archetypal sense, is not simply a biological figure. She is the first experience of being held, seen, regulated, and loved without condition. She is the felt sense that the world is safe enough to be in. That the body is welcome. That intimacy does not precede devastation.
When that experience is absent — through emotional unavailability, neglect, violence, or the thousand unnamed ways attachment ruptures — what develops in the child is not simply grief. What develops is a nervous system oriented toward threat. A body that learns: closeness is dangerous. Vulnerability invites harm. Power is the only reliable language. And this, I would argue, the invisible root system beneath everything the CNN investigation uncovered.
II. The Newborn Is an Open Field
The brainstem arrives formed. But the rest of the brain — the limbic system, the cortex, the intricate circuitry of social and emotional life — is built after birth, and it is built in relationship.
A newborn is pure felt experience. It has no buffer between itself and the world. Every sound, every smell, every temperature shift, every quality of touch — received directly, without filter, without protection. The nervous system of an infant is not simply sensitive. It is, for a time, entirely permeable.
This is why the postpartum period is not a recovery period in the passive sense. It is a developmental crucible — for the infant, yes, but also for the mother-infant dyad as a relational unit. What researchers call co-regulation: the process by which the mother’s nervous system literally teaches the infant’s nervous system how to be. Her heartbeat, her breath, her skin-to-skin warmth, her voice — these are not comforts. They are the biological curriculum of safety.
Allan Schore, whose work on affective neuroscience and right brain development has been foundational in this field, describes the first two years of life as the period of maximum neuroplasticity — the window during which the architecture of the social and emotional brain is being laid down in direct response to the relational environment. Put simply: the quality of early attachment does not shape personality. It shapes the brain itself.
And what the brain learns in those early months — about safety, about trust, about whether a body in distress will be met with warmth or absence — it carries forward. Into childhood. Into adolescence. Into the bed where a man lies beside a woman he has chosen to marry.
III. What Ancient Cultures Understood
Ancient cultures have always known this to be true — they simply encoded it in practice rather than peer-reviewed papers.
In traditional Chinese postpartum practice — zuo yuezi, or “sitting the month” — a new mother does not leave the house for thirty days after birth. She does not cook, clean, or engage in the demands of the outside world. She is fed, tended, and held so that she can hold. The logic is both physical and relational: her body is in profound recovery, and her baby is in profound formation, and the two are understood as inseparable. Some families are so fiercely protective of this threshold that they will, famously, chase away visitors with a broom.
This is not a practise of superstition — it is a civilisational wisdom that understood, long before attachment research formalised it, that the postpartum world must be made small, quiet, and safe — because the one being born into it is a field with no fence.
Similar practices exist across Indigenous cultures throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific. The confinement is not about the mother’s weakness. It is about the infant’s radical openness, and the understanding that the quality of the container in those first weeks will shape the vessel for life.
We in the Western world have largely abandoned these practices. We send women home from hospital within twenty-four hours. We expect them back at their desks within weeks. We measure postpartum success by how quickly a mother bounces back — as if the baby had not just arrived into a body that is still learning to exist outside of one.
And then we wonder why the rates of insecure attachment keep climbing.
IV. Six Weeks
When my daughter was born, I stayed indoors with her for the first six weeks of her life.
I did this not because I was told to, though the traditional wisdom resonated deeply. I did it because I could feel, with the full weight of my clinical and embodied understanding, that she was not ready for the world — and that the world was not yet ready for her. That her nervous system was still largely continuous with mine. That what she needed was not stimulation, or socialising, or the well-meaning voices of everyone who wanted to meet her. What she needed was the shelter of my body, my breath, my smell, my constancy.
I protected her sensitivity the way you would protect a seedling from a late frost. Not because sensitivity is a weakness to be managed, but because sensitivity is a gift that needs time to take root before it meets the wind.
She is older now. And she is one of the most emotionally attuned, internally connected, securely attached children I have ever known — already in possession of something many adults spend decades trying to recover in therapy.
I cannot prove causation. I am not suggesting the six weeks alone made her who she is. But I will say this: I believe the quality of that early container matters more than we have language for. I believe that what we offer an infant in those first months is not simply care. It is the architecture of their interior world.
We are built, first, in the body of another.
V. The Ocean We Sealed
We protect infant sensitivity so it can become attunement. But we do not extend that protection to our boys for long.
I wrote an essay not long ago — We’ve Been Reading Men’s Emotions Wrong — that began with something a psychologist friend said to me: “I actually think men feel things more deeply than women. They’ve just been trained to hide it.” My first instinct was to push back. The more I sat with it, the more the evidence gathered around her words.
The neuroscience is remarkable and actually validates my friends theory. When researchers measure emotional responses physiologically — heart rate variability, cortisol, skin conductance — rather than relying on self-report, males often show equivalent or greater autonomic arousal than females in response to emotional stimuli. The body is reacting. It is the reported experience that doesn’t match. Neuroimaging suggests that while amygdala activity in males responds robustly to emotional stimuli, it shows weaker connectivity to the prefrontal regions responsible for verbal processing and articulation. Something is clearly happening inside. It simply doesn’t become words.
But perhaps the most striking finding is developmental. Before the full force of social conditioning takes hold — roughly in the first three to five years of life — boys are documented to be more emotionally reactive than girls of the same age. More easily distressed. More difficult to regulate. More intense in their responses.
It suggests that the emotional hierarchy we observe in adults — expressive women, contained men — is not the natural state. It is the product of decades of sustained social pressure applied to a nervous system that began, if anything, on the more sensitive end of the spectrum.
We begin as open fields. Boys and girls alike. And then, slowly, we teach the boys in particular, to close.
“Stop being a girl”, “Man Up” — these are just some of the common expressions we press onto boys, learned from our conditioned belief systems. These are what create shame, which is the force that ends up driving the kind of abhorrent behaviours we are witnessing, within The Rape Academy, The Files and within the architecture of the boy that was never given permission to be sensitive to himself and the world around him.
And yet, the mothers I spoke to — mothers who had raised both sons and daughters — were observing in their young boys was simply this: the emotional life that precedes the mask. The sensitivity that was there before we told them to put it down.
By the time they are five, the conditioning has begun. By the time they are men, the ocean is sealed. And what cannot be felt, named, or expressed — finds another outlet.
If you want to read the full essay, you can find it here. What I want to draw forward from it into this one is this: the men on Motherless.com are not the departure from the norm. They are the far end of a continuum that begins with a boy who was never held long enough, never taught the language of his own inner world, never shown that vulnerability is survivable.
VI. What Motherless Reveals
Men who drug and rape their sleeping partners are not, at their root, monsters conjured from nowhere. They are, most often, the products of profound relational wounding — men who never learned that another person’s feelings and inner reality are real, because their own needs and feelings were never met. Men whose early experience taught them that women — beginning with the mother — are objects of need, not subjects of being.
I am not saying this to excuse what is happening or to mitigate the need for personal and collective responsibility. I am saying this because excusing and understanding are not the same thing, and if we do not understand the root of this behaviour, we cannot interrupt it.
The philosopher Jessica Benjamin wrote about how the failure of mutual recognition in early life — the failure to see and be seen as a full subject — produces a psyche that can only relate through domination and submission. The other becomes either a mirror of the self’s needs, or a threat to be controlled. Intimacy, in this structure, is not possible. Only possession is.
The men on Motherless.com are not simply criminals. They are the symptom — the most visible, most horrifying edge — of a civilisational wound that begins in the womb and is compounded at every stage by a culture that teaches boys their feelings are liabilities.
A world of motherless men.
Men who were never held in a way that taught them: you are safe. You are enough. Her body is not yours to take. Her sleep is not your opportunity. Her unconsciousness is not her consent.
Men who were given power in place of permission to feel. And who, in the absence of intimacy, learned to take.
VII. The Revolution That Begins at Birth
This is why I wrote The MotherWild Revolution.
Not because I believe that better parenting is a simple solution to systemic violence. But because I believe, with everything I know as a physiotherapist, a somatic practitioner, and a woman who has worked with human nervous systems for over a decade, that the body keeps the score of early love — and early absence.
The MotherWild is not a parenting book in the conventional sense. It is an argument — grounded in attachment neuroscience, somatic medicine, and the wisdom of Eastern postpartum traditions — that the way we receive infants into the world has consequences that ripple across an entire lifetime, and outward into culture itself.
Early secure attachment is not a luxury. It is not a middle-class aspiration or a therapy buzzword. It is a biological necessity — the felt foundation upon which a child develops the capacity for empathy, emotional regulation, and the recognition of another person’s full humanity.
When we fail at this — as individuals, as institutions, as a culture — we do not simply produce anxious adults. We produce adults whose capacity for genuine intimacy has been structurally compromised. And into the gap where intimacy was supposed to live, power rushes in.
Power over bodies. Power over sleep. Power over women who trusted the men beside them in bed.
The word Motherless is the confession the site didn’t know it was making. The wound advertising itself. The absence, naming the thing it produced.
Coda
I am sharing this today from the same place I write everything: the conviction that what can be understood can be interrupted, and what can be interrupted can, slowly, be healed.
The MotherWild Revolution is, among other things, a map of how we begin. How we receive the ones who come after us. How we build, one nervous system at a time, a world in which the body of the beloved — awake or asleep, known or unknown — is held as inviolable.
We cannot go back and re-hold the men who were never held. But we can decide, now, how we meet the small ones arriving into this world.
We can protect their sensitivity long enough for it to become empathy.
We can refuse to seal the ocean.
Because if enough children grow up having been truly held,
the wound will have a different name.
The MotherWild Revolution: Cultural Change through Generational Activism
If this essay stirred something in you — if you recognise the root of this wound and want to understand how we begin to address it from the ground up — The MotherWild Revolution is for you.
It is my latest published book about early attachment, the architecture of belonging, and why the way we meet our youngest humans is the most radical act of social change available to us.
