TRANSCRIPT
I recently received a comment on one of my YouTube videos that said people don’t need perfect parents, but they do need parents that love them and care for them unconditionally. It got me thinking back on the subject of unconditional love.
I actually grew up in a family where my father told me repeatedly that he loved me unconditionally. It’s actually a wonderful thing to be told as a child. The problem is, what if it’s not true?
What I came to realize over time was that my father didn’t love me unconditionally, and it took me until probably into my 20s, maybe even my 30s, to really just make sense of it. What it was, was my father told me he loved me unconditionally when he actually was feeling positively toward me. And that was some of the time.
Some of the time he was really happy about my existence, and what that usually meant was that in some way I was making him happy. I was doing things that pleased him. I was making him feel good about himself. I was paying attention to him in a way that bolstered his ego. I was living up to his expectations. I was being a great son or a perfect son. I was doing well in school, or I was doing well in sports, or he liked my friends, or I was able to listen to him well and understand him and really pay good attention to him, or I really admired him a lot. All those things earned me his attention, his caring, and his declaration that he loved me unconditionally.
Now, the problem was that a lot of times he really just didn’t even pay attention to me. A lot of times he really wasn’t concerned with me, and a fair amount of the time I actually just annoyed him or he felt let down by me. He was disappointed, and he felt that I was doing things that were wrong or bad, or his attention was just completely elsewhere.
So while yes, him having loved me as a person unconditionally, the rest of the time to him, in a lot of ways, I wasn’t really even a person. I was more of just an object. So when he said, “I love you unconditionally,” I think he actually believed that the rest of the time I wasn’t a “you.” I was more of an “it” to him. And at those times, he just rejected me. He abandoned me. He was bothered by me. It was sort of like the message was pretty clear: get away from me. And if you come too close, then I’m gonna really show you how much I dislike you.
And also, what’s interesting is that this didn’t register in his mind that he didn’t love me unconditionally because somehow he was always able to come back to say it: “I love you unconditionally. I love you unconditionally.” And how is it that a parent can actually believe a lot of the time that they love their child unconditionally, and yet the rest of the time actually really dislike them and want to disavow them, get rid of them in a way, push them away, tease me, even humiliate me, annoy me, bother me?
I think, okay, it can show that parents can be pretty dissociated. They can have very split-off parts of themselves that live without a connection to other parts of them. But another part of it is looking at the history of my father. What my father came from is a background where he was actually loved a lot less than I was. I don’t think his mother liked him at all. She really disliked him, actually, from all I’ve gathered, and was actually very mean to him. And I think his father was just largely unconcerned. He shared throughout my childhood a few examples of when his father seemed to really pay attention to him, but those examples seem pretty few and far between. From what I gather, most of the time he was just a really unloved, unwanted, and abandoned child.
So by comparison, yeah, my father probably loved me quite a bit more than his parents loved him, and maybe he could use that in his mind to justify it as unconditional loving. However, what’s more interesting to me is that when I was a child, I actually believed that he loved me unconditionally. And how was I able to do that? Because I can actually analyze myself a lot more easily than I can analyze my dad. To analyze my dad, I have to put together a lot of pieces that are hearsay and try to, you know, and stories and different people’s observations and old photographs and things like that. And it’s pretty hard to piece together what actually happened.
For me, I have my memories. I was there. I have a lot more knowledge. So how was I able to believe that my dad actually loved me unconditionally? Well, what I’ve come up with is the first answer is really, really simple. I desperately needed him to love me unconditionally. I wanted it more than anything in the world. I wanted a dad who really loved me unconditionally and thought I was awesome.
Well, sometimes as a kid, I think for me it was a lot easier to just believe it was true than to have to face the reality that quite a bit of the time I was just an object to him. I wasn’t something that he loved unconditionally. I wasn’t a being that he wanted to devote his heart and soul to. And so I was able to live with that.
Now, how did I justify it at the times when he was clearly treating me with very conditional love, when I wasn’t meeting his needs and making him happy, when I wasn’t meeting that basic condition, and therefore he wasn’t loving me unconditionally? He wasn’t even loving me at all. How was I able to still live with the idea that he loved me unconditionally?
Well, I think this gets into the subject of the transgenerational transmission of trauma. What my father did by splitting off and dissociating as a child, that’s what I did also. So when he wasn’t loving me, when he was hating me, when he was ridiculing me, putting me down, shaming me, doing all these awful things that I didn’t deserve at all, I split off. And in my own mind, I became an object. I became something that wasn’t really “he.” Therefore, if he didn’t love me, it was my fault. I was nothing. I was nobody. And then when he did love me again, ah, now I’m a person. Now I’m a self.
So basically, I was very, very split off. That really traumatized me, dissociation being one of the basic hallmarks of trauma. And so I survived. I lived with that level of cognitive dissonance in my mind, able to believe for a long time that he loved me unconditionally. Very, very painful. And when that dissociation started to break, whew, it was awful. The awful feelings that erupted, the feelings of I was abandoned, feeling terribly, terribly betrayed, also feeling rage at the horrible things he did and said to me.
Also, I started putting together the pieces intellectually afterward and started making sense of it and started realizing, whoa, hmm, that’s what I went through. That is how I was able to survive. And realizing that this is not at all uncommon because I’ve also heard a lot of other parents say that they love their children unconditionally. It’s really nice for a parent to believe they love their child unconditionally. They get a lot of self-esteem out of it. They really feel like they’re good people. They feel like they’re great parents.
I’ve actually also heard a lot of parents in one way or another say that they are perfect parents. Well, certainly a perfect parent would love their child unconditionally. And certainly, if a parent doesn’t love their child unconditionally, I think there is some level of imperfection in the parent.
Now, what does it really mean to love someone unconditionally? Do I love anyone unconditionally? Hmm, I think it gets down to, again, what is the definition of love? To me, loving, really loving someone is holding their best interest at heart, really caring about them, really holding them as a person who is of great respect, someone who deserves to be honored, someone who is there to be nurtured, someone who I’m willing to devote a lot of my heart and my soul to, especially if they’re my dependent. If they were my child, I would say the person in my life that I loved the most unconditionally now.
If myself, that’s been my job to make up for what I didn’t get once upon a time when I was loved pretty conditionally. And so I have to really work at it because I still have a lot of those ancient ingrained patterns in myself of holding myself to impossible standards, rejecting myself. And I’m not perfect, emotionally abandoning myself. I still have a lot of embedded shame in myself for all that time when I wasn’t loved.
Because a big part of it was in my mind as a child, “Oh, if this perfect parent of mine, this man who is the most important man in my life, doesn’t really love me, there must be something really awful with me.” And I really absorbed a lot of that really negative stuff that he said about me and the way he treated me. And I was ashamed of myself. I had a lot of self-loathing. I had a lot of self-contempt, and that is still there.
It’s pretty hard. It’s pretty hard to work through this. The good news is that when I was a child, I wasn’t particularly conscious of a lot of this. Now I’m conscious of it, so now I can do something with it. Now I can catch myself in the act of, “Wait a second, you’re treating yourself badly. You’re saying horrible things about yourself.” I’m able to put together the pieces of my history and make sense of it now and really look at it and do different actions to stop, go in, focus on myself, return to loving myself, notice that I’m not treating myself the way that I deserve to be treated.
Because a lot of ways, how did I really learn how to treat myself and how to love myself? Through the example of what my parents did to me. That, again, is the transgenerational transmission of trauma. Now, if I had had children, especially before I had started becoming aware of all this stuff, I would have done to them what my parents did to me. I think there’s no two ways around it. Even still, because a lot of this is unresolved in me, I would still play it out because it’s still powerful. It’s still unconscious.
How could I be expected to unconditionally love my child if I can’t even unconditionally love myself? Now, the irony in all this is that I’ve broken away from my parents, and my father blames me for that. He still thinks he loved me unconditionally. He may even still believe that he does love me unconditionally, which to me is, it really beggars belief. But back then, he really thinks that he did.
Part of it is that when he was really acting out a lot of his unresolved traumas on me, treating me really terribly, he wasn’t conscious of it. He wasn’t even aware of what he was doing. He was just spewing out unresolved traumas, and after the fact, he didn’t even remember them. He was so split off from what he was doing. So nowadays, he has a picture that’s very rosy of how he treated me, and he doesn’t remember that stuff.
And part of a big, big, big problem that happened in my adult relationship with my dad is that when I started becoming aware of what he did to me, when I started breaking my dissociation and reconnecting with who I really am and how I felt, and what it felt like back then to be treated as an object, I felt anger. I felt upset. I felt hurt. I felt betrayed. I felt really, really unhappy about that.
I brought it up with him. At first, I brought it up gently, sort of like, “Is that what really happened?” Oh, and what I discovered, even bringing it up gently, he very much resisted it. “That is not what happened. No, no, no, no. I was a great dad. I was a wonderful dad.” And he got really angry at me, and it was like, “Whoa.” Well, what happened is that confirmed for me, “Ah, right, as a little child, I couldn’t actually say you’re not treating me fairly.” I had even less power as a child. As an adult, at least I had a lot of independence. I didn’t depend on him for money. I didn’t really depend on him so much for love. I still wanted his love because everybody, I think, wants their parents to love them.
But when he started treating me that way, it reminded me of what I went through as a little child. What if, and I probably at first was like, “Why are you treating me badly?” When I was a little child, and he really shot me down hard, and I learned, “Ooh, I can’t go there.” But as an adult, I realized, you know, I can’t go there. I can first go there in my relationship with myself, in my memories, and I can confront my dad in my own mind and say, “You know, that wasn’t right.” But I did go back to him. I did go back, and I really talked about it a lot, and I brought it up with him, and I wrote it down and I said, “No, no, this is actually what you did, and this is how it made me feel, and I didn’t like it.” And you know what? He really didn’t like that.
And then I learned again in a much more present-day powerful way, and when I was much more conscious and aware, because I could see it then, “Ah, when I don’t live up to his expectations and I don’t hold the same memories that he holds about my childhood, that most important time in my life, and I don’t idealize him in the way that he idealizes himself, then he really doesn’t love me.” And he actually despises me. He hates me. And I saw that in his face, and I was like, “This man really, really strongly doesn’t love me.” And it was very painful.
There’s been a lot of awful consequences for me for having confronted my parents, confronting my dad in this specific case as an adult. A lot of terrible rejection. So yeah, I’ve broken away from my family, but in a way, long before that, my family broke away from me. They broke away from who I really was by treating me like an object, by not loving me, by not loving me unconditionally.
So again, I have taken a lot of the responsibility on myself. I broke away from my family, but did I reject my family, or did they reject me a lot, lot earlier? And I came back to accept myself and start to love myself more and say, “You know, no, no, I actually demand that I live around people and spend my really most intimate time around people who actually really respect me, just at a basic level, who have good boundaries and don’t try to harm me.” So I feel like that’s fair.
This has been my path, loving myself more and more unconditionally. And I think that through this process of healing my traumas, healing those painful ancient wounds of becoming less powerless in my life, less helpless, less emotionally overwhelmed, less traumatized, I have been loving myself much more unconditionally. That is without any conditions. And through that, becoming much more able to love other people, nurture other people, care about other people in an actually really unconditional way.
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