#commitmentissues

Questions you can start to ask yourself to find out if this is you... did your parents yell at each other, curse at each other, or argue growing up?  How often did your parents tell you “I love you”?  Did you genuinely feel loved and valued by your parents?  Or is this something you find yourself still questioning to this very day, deep down?  Are there any emotional hang-ups from your childhood that you still “blame” your parents for?  

This was/is fully me.  I’m attempting to heal from it as we speak.  I have read the book “Toxic Parents”.   I am in therapy (my current therapist is a-ma-zing),  and I have done therapy during different seasons of my life, including the use of EMDR for unusual traumas I experienced in my life.  

My parents rarely said ‘I love you’ to me growing up.   Even if they provided for my survival, one of them was emotionally cold and unavailable.  The other had their own very obvious traumas, was an alcoholic, and had severe anger management issues.  Of course my parents are divorced.  Of course they yelled at each other and cursed any time they argued.  I now realize this is hostile, and not okay to do to your partner.  Nor is it an acceptable emotional environment to raise kids in.    

As a result of my own skewed love blueprint, I literally watched myself push away love at age 34, mind you, after a guy finally said “I love you” to me for the very first time in my life.  Not only does this attest to the fact that I attracted man-child dogs my entire adulthood; but it is worth noting that I couldn’t even bring myself to recognize and trust love, if it was in fact real.  

Mind you, me and this boyfriend did not last.  So was the love real?  I genuinely can’t say, knowing what I know now.  But at the time,  my mind and my emotions would waver as soon as I detected any clues whatsoever suggesting that “I was not being loved enough”-- a distortion and hangup from my own childhood where  my parents did not love me sufficient (for more on this, read “Toxic Parents”.  All parents are doing their absolute best to raise kids. But if your parents were not healed from their own personal toxic bullshit, they raise you with that distortion uncontrollably.  If people are not whole, they will not raise whole children).  

 At age 34, I discovered that I still was not “over” my own childhood hurts.  Which is sad and worth  noting in and of itself.  I clearly was not ready to operate in, let alone sustain an adult relationship if I was not ready and able to leave my own childhood behind.  

In the process of breaking up with this guy, not only did I learn that everything I thought I knew about relationships was very distorted, but I also realized that my model of learning to love was  based on conditional love, which is untrustworthy and breeds insecurity.  My brain was looking for signs to prove to myself that I was unlovable and that this love couldn’t possibly be trustworthy.  “if he loved me, then he would/wouldn’t...” , and “why does this dude even love me?”.  Those are the lies of conditional love.  Let’s not even call it love. Let’s call it “conditional affection and conditional positive regard”. Because it is not love. That’s not how actual love works. 

But if you have a distorted love blueprint, and especially if you have your own inner demons to fight, self-love to realize, and past hurts and hangups you need to let go of and heal from, then you cannot possibly be successful in a lasting, mature, adult relationship. The truth is that all people are imperfect and are always likely to disappoint others at some point.  Couples can, will, and should have disagreements.   There will be problems you face individually and as a couple.  There will be things you have to problem-solve together and work through; or seasons you have to stand by your partner’s side while they slay their own dragons.  A lot of our “lists” of what we think we look for in a partner are full of things that don’t actually matter in a true love relationship.  And we tend to  hold potential matches to an unrealistic, god-like standard.