Learning From Love in All The Wrong Places

Ever notice how easy it is to fall into patterns that don’t get you what you want? Often we recognize that we inherited these patterns from our parents, but that doesn’t make it easier for us to undo it.

The moment we enter this world, we’re trying to figure out how it works. The biggest question is how to feel safe and nurtured. And the only way we can answer that is by looking at how our primary nurturers – our parents – demonstrate nurturing. Not just to us, but to each other.

Which can be pretty messed up.

• If your parents were abusive, you learn that nurturing looks like being abused.
• If your parents were cold, you learn that nurturing looks like emotional unavailability.
• If your parents violated yours or each other’s boundaries, you learn that nurturing looks like being dominated in one way or another.
• If your parents lacked integrity, whether in affairs with others or not fulfilling the commitments they made, you learn that nurturing looks like empty promises.
• If you only had one parent, you learned that nurturing looks like being self-sufficient, and alone.

No matter how much you might despise these characteristics as an adult, these characteristics define love for you. You learned these patterns before you were even aware you were learning them.

Humans start becoming self-aware by the age of 4. Before that time, we’re absorbing everything around us. By the time we reach 4, we’ve already built a foundation of how the world works, built when we were incapable of questioning.

This is the seed of our identity, this early precognitive input. This is what we defend when we say “I’m just wired that way.” We may not mimic our parents exactly, but we repeat the patterns they expressed. We repeat the behaviors that maintained what looked like loving us.

Our parents, how they treated us and each other, become the seed of our worldview.

It’s not easy to change these patterns. Once we recognize what we learned from our parents, then we have to acknowledge that we built our identities on that. If we want to undo our patterns, we need to be willing to undo our identities.

It is likely the change will be for the better, but these changes involve new expressions, new ways of thinking, that are completely foreign to that 3-year-old inside. It will completely rearrange the 4-year-old who began thinking for themselves, becoming a new person who has decided for themselves what love looks like. That original 4-year-old isn’t going to go lightly. They got you to where you are now, and it’s a lot to ask to shift the foundation of the sand castle made over decades.

But as you recognize, “Wow, I end up with challenging partners because I absorbed that as a child from imperfect parents,” it becomes much easier to look at the inner 3-year-old with compassion. They didn’t know. They were trying their best to figure it out, from people who were also trying their best (even if “their best” was highly destructive).

It’s both sobering and heartbreaking to see our younger selves looking up at these large adults, trying to figure out why love looks like anger or distance or boundary breaking, and trying really hard to understand how yes, child, this is what love looks like. And letting go, and accepting this as Truth.

The good thing about this realization is the level of self-compassion we can have for ourselves. And even if we can’t feel that, we can recognize we learned to judge ourselves because we thought being judged meant being loved. This is obviously a completely mind-boggling assertion to make as an adult, but as a child coming into this world, this is what our parents gave us as part of our nourishment and shelter. It’s all we knew.

But because these assertions are so mind-boggling to us as adults, it gives us the opportunity to take our 3-year-olds by the hands, and hold them, and show them new ways of loving they didn’t witness as children. We literally reparent ourselves.

But it all starts with recognizing that our identities are built on mistaken information that was innocently accepted as truths. Once we can recognize those truths were just guesses and “works for me”s, we can let them go, and decide on what really works for ourselves.