Conditional Love

What do you do when a parent's love is conditional? When your parents only love you when you fit within their box? I feel like I could blog on this topic for hours, possibly days. A parent has such a huge responsibility in the raising of his/her children, and parents don't have the luxury of an instructional manual coming with their new baby or child. I have yet to find adults who speak highly of their upbringings; rather, it seems that everyone has struggled or currently struggles with their parents or home environment. Parents withhold love from their grown children circumstantially. Parents knew about horrors happening to their children growing up and looked the other direction. Parents verbally and emotionally abused their children in the formative years or even now in adulthood. Parents withhold financial support or love from an adult child because they disagree with the way he/she lives his/her life.

Dealing with toxicity in a parent-child relationship feels devastating. The feeling that your parent disapproves of your choices or way of life can make an adult son/daughter question his/her own morality, even when a just and moral life is being lived. Many layers can complicate these toxic relationships, especially religion and the beliefs, values, and moral code the parents reared the family with. Whether parents are "good" or "bad", I believe most parents do the best they know how. Different humans come from different backgrounds and may have different levels of capability when it comes to parenting. Just because someone's best isn't good enough for us doesn't mean it's not his best. Parents generally want what's best for their kids, even if they aren't terribly effective at making it happen.

It can be hard to step out of bounds from the values and beliefs that one is raised to believe as truth. Our parents raise us to believe that what they tell us is truth. We believe them because they are older, wiser, and in a position of authority. We learn to love our parents first in our lives. We see that they are in a position of power, and we learn we should always respect them and trust them no matter what. We learn that they know what is best for us. Sometimes we learn not to question their decisions or actions, whether they are well-intentioned or deplorable.

What many people fail to realize until they are older is that our parents are human. They are not infallible. They had a job to protect us and keep us safe from harm, but often times parents do this by subduing their children and prohibiting growth. It's not that they prohibit growth on purpose, but we often hear the controlling statement "Do what I say. Sit still. Don't make a sound." versus spending the time to cultivate a mind of intelligence and choice. It comes down to "do-what-I-say-or-else", where fear is the primary motivator and questioning is unacceptable. This is the same kind of fear that some governments, schools, and churches use to subdue members. If people think they have something major to lose by stepping out of bounds, they will stay put in the nice little box that was chosen just for them. If a child (even in adulthood) fears the loss of their parents' love, they might reject becoming the person they want to be in an attempt to maintain their parent's conditional love. The adult child sacrifices their hopes and dreams and lives a life of pain and difficulty to avoid making their parents unhappy. This is selfish on behalf of parents and is just another way to control their child through the avenue of fear. Fear is not love. Children believe they are nothing without their parents, which is not true. Sometimes it is the child who needs to teach his/her parents how to love without conditions or how to love without the "do-what-I-say-or-else" mantra. Children are allowed to flourish in adulthood and become their own people; age is irrelevant. It is the destiny of people to question their upbringing, values, and morality.

Being raised in a certain environment or religion does not lock someone into that environment or belief system forever. We have the right (and should exercise that right) to question and to better ourselves. Without questioning, we become spiritually stagnant. We believe what is handed to us on a platter and don't really see the implications of our belief system on our souls and on the people in the world around us. To question is to annihilate fear and to become our own self, not a self domineered by the voices of our past. There will always be risk in the questioning process. We risk learning more about ourselves and opening ourselves up to a life we never imagined. We risk leading our journey alone if others in our lives are too small-minded to join us (those people usually catch up eventually). We risk finding a path of happiness that far surpasses every other path we've ever been on... in short, we risk truly knowing our hearts.

<3 KMS