Effects Of Early Childhood Love On Adult Life
- What type of love did your parents give you?
- Some types of love are bad!
- Find out how childhood love effects your confidence, self esteem and happiness.
Did your parents ever tell you they loved you? There’s a good chance they did, and it probably came from your mother. Typically, men are less prone to show emotions.
Why? Because their fathers didn’t show emotion! In England this was extremely typical for the now older generation, when emotions were encouraged to be keep inside and not displayed publicly.Â
Unconditional Love
Whilst most people did receive love from their parents, we each received it in different ways. For example, some people were shown love simply for being who they were, regardless of the right or wrong they did.
This is often called unconditional love. It means I love you for you, regardless of anything else.
Conditional Love
The opposite of unconditional love, is conditional love. This kind of love is usually tied to performance. So you are only shown signs of love if you live up to your parents expectations. If you don’t live up to their expectations, then this love is withdrawn.
So unlike unconditional love, conditional love is expressed as “I love you, but only if you do this. If you don’t do it, I don’t love you”.
Of course your parents probably didn’t phrase it like this, but instead expressed it in their actions. So for example, if you got good grades at school your parents showed love towards you. But if you got poor grades, this love was withheld.
Dangers And Benefits Of Conditional Love
One of the reasons conditional love is used so often by parents, is that it is usually seen as the best way to encourage a child to do something.
The effect of conditional love on children usually results in a highly productive and motivated adult later on.
This is because as children they were always trying their hardest to achieve something. Driven by the anticipation of praise, once they had accomplished it.
Whilst this certainly can be a good characteristic to have, the danger lies in the fact that their self esteem is tied to external factors outside of them.
So if they do not do something well, they are often left with low self confidence and self esteem. And as I have discussed before, true self esteem comes from within you, rather than from external factors.
Conditional Vs Unconditional Love
Depending on the type of love you received, this will greatly influence how you later viewed yourself as a teenager and adult.
If you were given unconditional love, then most likely you learnt to accept yourself for who you are, and are happy just being you. You will have a high levels of internally generated self acceptance, self esteem and confidence.
However, if you were given conditional love (the most common type of love given by parents) you are more likely to develop into an adult with lower self worth, feelings of inadequacy and insecurity which then lead to suspicion and jealously.
This is because the underlying message conditional love sends, is that you are not really good enough being who you are.
Interestingly, people who received predominantly conditional love as children, are the most likely to feel uncomfortable about their body and seek plastic surgery to correct any “flaws” they may have.
This feeling of inadequacy is often reinforced by rich and beautiful people they see in films and magazines, who they then compare themselves against.
Although publicly they will still usually display high levels of confidence and self esteem. Especially if they are doing well in their careers or relationships.
Their self confidence and self esteem is therefore externally generated, and as a result become extremely susceptible and fragile people should circumstances in their life suddenly change. In a previous article I called this “fake self esteem“.
If conditional love is what you mainly received as a child, then you would strongly benefit from developing internally generated self esteem. This is done through learning to accept yourself for who you are, rather than what you do or what you possess.
In the next article I will expand on this point, and discuss some other factors which may determine how much you learnt to accept yourself as an adult.
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December 14th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
it is needed simply more frequent to talk about it! maybe world become kinder ?