Can you list the conditions of the conditional love?

[Depression = 72% of members]

Well it’s the middle of the night and I can’t sleep so I figured what a better time for a little mental exercise?

This was an idea I came up with in therapy the other day when I was talking to my T about the conditions of the conditional love I received from my mother (whom I suspect may have had a lot of N tendencies on top of the BPD) and the way each condition affected me. In order to make things clearer and to get them in order, I made them into a list.

The list I was able to come up with so far:

* Give her attention whenever she wants or needs it

* Stay out of her way whenever she wants or needs it (which was whenever she didn’t need attention herself basically)

* Don’t “step on her“ in any way (i.e. make frantic efforts to ensure her feelings aren’t hurt)

* Never say or do anything that might result in her feeling rejected, threatened, betrayed or jealous (this especially relates to me wanting to make friends or talk about existing friends).

* Don’t take too much from her (to not be a needy burden)

* Be feverishly loyal towards her in every way.

* Be “successful” on an intellectual, academic level but not in a practical sense (like getting a job and becoming independent)

* Remain dependent, infantilized and close.

* Always take her side in whichever imaginary war she currently believed she was in with whomever.

* Play whichever role she currently wants played (baby, protector, surrogate spouse, sounding board, etc’ and also Karpman Triangle roles)

* Make her happy and be good enough (an impossible condition because you can’t take charge of another person’s feelings and because nothing was ever really good enough for her).

* Make her and her needs and feelings the center of my world, while pushing away my own.

* Don’t set up boundaries.

The reason I thought this might make an interesting mental exercise is because I think some of us might later take some of these “rules” and keep on trying to apply them later in life with other people as a way of receiving the same conditional love… or at least as a way of not losing existing love with other people.

They can also affect other aspects of our lives (career choices for example), the way we relate to ourselves or to others in general.

For example, I have a tendency to avoid talking to any of my friends about any of my other friends for fear of making them feel threatened or jealous. I also try my best to not talk too much about my own needs with them for fear that they’ll find it overwhelming or burdensome. I also have a pervasive fear, with the people I’m in any way close to, of “not being good enough”. And the list goes on…

I would like to point out btw that I do believe that there was some level in which my mother did love me unconditionally… but on another level and to a great extent the love she felt towards me and my half siblings seemed very much conditional.

Seeing as a child will do anything to earn their parents love and seeing as rules like these can have a profound effect on such a child later in life, I was thinking it might be helpful to get to know the conditions and spell them out and maybe to also try to make an inventory of “how might these rules be still affecting me to this day?”

What do you guys think? Did you receive conditional love growing up? If so could you name what the conditions were and if/how the still affect you to this day?

[justnothing]

Well it’s the middle of the night and I can’t sleep so I figured what a better time for a little mental exercise?

This was an idea I came up with in therapy the other day when I was talking to my T about the conditions of the conditional love I received from my mother (whom I suspect may have had a lot of N tendencies on top of the BPD) and the way each condition affected me. In order to make things clearer and to get them in order, I made them into a list.

The list I was able to come up with so far:

* Give her attention whenever she wants or needs it

* Stay out of her way whenever she wants or needs it (which was whenever she didn’t need attention herself basically)

* Don’t “step on her“ in any way (i.e. make frantic efforts to ensure her feelings aren’t hurt)

* Never say or do anything that might result in her feeling rejected, threatened, betrayed or jealous (this especially relates to me wanting to make friends or talk about existing friends).

* Don’t take too much from her (to not be a needy burden)

* Be feverishly loyal towards her in every way.

* Be “successful” on an intellectual, academic level but not in a practical sense (like getting a job and becoming independent)

* Remain dependent, infantilized and close.

* Always take her side in whichever imaginary war she currently believed she was in with whomever.

* Play whichever role she currently wants played (baby, protector, surrogate spouse, sounding board, etc’ and also Karpman Triangle roles)

* Make her happy and be good enough (an impossible condition because you can’t take charge of another person’s feelings and because nothing was ever really good enough for her).

* Make her and her needs and feelings the center of my world, while pushing away my own.

* Don’t set up boundaries.

The reason I thought this might make an interesting mental exercise is because I think some of us might later take some of these “rules” and keep on trying to apply them later in life with other people as a way of receiving the same conditional love… or at least as a way of not losing existing love with other people.

They can also affect other aspects of our lives (career choices for example), the way we relate to ourselves or to others in general.

For example, I have a tendency to avoid talking to any of my friends about any of my other friends for fear of making them feel threatened or jealous. I also try my best to not talk too much about my own needs with them for fear that they’ll find it overwhelming or burdensome. I also have a pervasive fear, with the people I’m in any way close to, of “not being good enough”. And the list goes on…

I would like to point out btw that I do believe that there was some level in which my mother did love me unconditionally… but on another level and to a great extent the love she felt towards me and my half siblings seemed very much conditional.

Seeing as a child will do anything to earn their parents love and seeing as rules like these can have a profound effect on such a child later in life, I was thinking it might be helpful to get to know the conditions and spell them out and maybe to also try to make an inventory of “how might these rules be still affecting me to this day?”

What do you guys think? Did you receive conditional love growing up? If so could you name what the conditions were and if/how the still affect you to this day?

[Turkish]

I still have trouble being criticized. Not constructive criticism at all, but my reaction to negative attacks isn't wisemind at all. Concordantly, I don't take compliments well either. I ignore them, dismiss them, or react sarcastically. "You're a good father." "I'm just doing what I'm supposed to do," as one example.

I think it is an unhealthy emotional coping mechanism growing up being split so often. My mother could be very loving... .when she wasn't yelling at or smacking me (or as a teen occasionaly throwing things).

I never think I processed it as logically as you did. I withdrew or ignored, and as a defense, rejected both praise and criticism. I learned to trust that neither was "the truth." How else could a kid deal with:

"Everybody thinks you are so great, but they don't know the real Turkish like I do!" Or:

"Sometimes I wish I'd never adopted you!" I remember thinking, "you and me both lady!"

So I think I even distrusted my own view of myself. It took me many years to work through it a lot, but then I ended up with uBPDx who also split me. My dysfunctional coping mechanisms once again manifested themselves, resulting in my contribution to the end of our r/s.

Though everyone here is self-aware enough to realize that perhaps our core selves were damaged or not fully free or independent (we found our ways here, after all, even the lurkers), how do we progress? The thing I hate is that I almost feel comfortable stuck near the last stages of recovery, as if I recovered, I'd lose a part of myself.

I know this is cheesy, but Kirk's short dialog in ST:V (which I watched the summer I graduated high school) resonated with me:

You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away! I need my pain!

I used to think that was awesome, but I'm not sure now. Dysfunctional family dynamics seem to spawn from one generation to the next. If I can't fully heal, then I intend to stop it here.

I really don't know if I can accept unconditional love from a peer, but I'm trying my best to not pressure my children to become the proxy parent for the "good parent" Little Turkish still longs for. I think that may be what gets us into "trouble" regarding life choices: the search for answers to who we are, due to the past trauma of being enmeshed with parents who abdicated their responsibility to do so for themselves.

[justnothing]

Though everyone here is self-aware enough to realize that perhaps our core selves were damaged or not fully free or independent (we found our ways here, after all, even the lurkers), how do we progress? The thing I hate is that I almost feel comfortable stuck near the last stages of recovery, as if I recovered, I'd lose a part of myself.

Well we do tend to change when recovering but change doesn’t necessarily have to mean losing parts of ourselves but rather changing the attitudes and internal messages that those parts use.

It might help to try to think about what function a certain internal message plays or is meant to play in your life (all our dysfunctions are there to do “what’s good for us” even if they’re totally misguided about how to it correctly) and then try to think what other message could be used instead. Then try to teach that part of you about how and why adapting the new attitude will be an improvement (it might start arguing back about how “that’s not safe” or whatnot, so try to think of arguments as to why it is and calmly explain it the way an adult would explain to a child about why he doesn’t have to be afraid of a scary new change).

So, in other words, don’t think of it as losing an old you or old part of you but of gaining a new you, with a new perspective that’ll enable you new opportunities in life that you’ve never had before.

Mind you, all that being said, I still haven’t figured out myself how to accept unconditional love. I’ve only recently learned to accept that there are people in my environment that like me. I’ve been trying to examine the messages I send myself whenever someone appears to want to get close though. At least one of them runs along the lines of “but I won’t be able to live up to whatever you want from me” and at least another is fear… and I think both come from simply not being able to believe that that person doesn’t have conditions to their affection and from expecting betrayal at some point or another. When faced with a known devil you at least know where you stand and have all these coping mechanisms in place for them, with the unknown devil it’s scary as it is but even worse when you’re expected to just put away your old coping mechanisms! (Mind you, the answer might simply be developing new coping mechanisms that are more suitable for use with healthy people… like healthy boundaries for example… and then having faith that it’s OK and safe to use them with trustworthy people).