Our Ability to Create Genuine Human Connection is a Result of Childhood Experience

The following is adapted from Secret Pandemic by Simone Heng.

Singapore was always termed “home” in our family. When I was about eleven, I did a migrant’s writing course with my mom, and I wrote a piece where I, too, called Singapore home, not computing that these were simply my parents’ words, like an echo I was programmed to repeat. It wasn’t “home” to me. I had never lived there except for three years as a baby. I remembered nothing of it.

Singapore was painted as a food-filled, fast-paced haven in my parents’ nostalgia. Perth, by my reality, was dull in comparison, filled with trips to Sunday church and Saturdays in Chinese class. One day, when I was twelve and feeling brave, I asked my mother, “If Singapore was so wonderful, why did you leave?”

Like most migrant parents, Asian or otherwise, my mother said, “Because we wanted a better life for you children.” And then she added, “In Singapore, when we left, all children had to take their father’s race’s language as their assessed second language at school. You children would have to speak and write Mandarin, and your father only speaks dialects and Malay. I don’t speak Mandarin, so you would never make it. You would have never been able to compete. We wanted you to have a chance to get into university.”

This exchange made me feel like I owed my mother the entire act of migration to a place she would rather not be. This deep sense of owing our parents is steeped in a Singaporean upbringing. We carry not only the pressure of academic performance but also the pressure of having been given life.

It’s the stuff of Asian American stand-up comedy but underneath the laughs is the profound understanding that you cannot MESS UP. MESSING UP is not an option, ever. And it’s this pressure that started my disconnection because I was no longer connecting to my family as a child or as a human. I was connecting as a vehicle for either success or shame for myself and the whole family. This is where relational loneliness can begin for many, feeling a sense of disconnection and a lack of acceptance within your own home.

I equated this feeling of not completely belonging and not being good enough with unlovability. The way my mother parented was to give me almost enough love as to motivate me to do better. My counselor calls it 80 percent love. The thrilling 100 percent love would be doled out sparingly based on outstanding performance as a tool to affirm. This communicated to me from a very young age that love and affection existed but were being withheld. I eventually made the connection as a child that love for me was conditional and paid only upon suffocating obedience and achievement.

I still have moments now where I have to catch the way I talk to myself and my partner in the same “tough love” tone that my mother spoke to me. There is a part of all of us that is in automation loving others the way we were loved.

In his book with Oprah, What Happened to You?, Dr. Bruce D. Perry sums up this idea that our ability to create healthy and genuine human connection in our lives is the direct result of the human connection we received as a child: “The attentive, loving behaviors [of caregivers] grow the neural networks that allow us to feel love, and then act in loving ways towards others. If you are loved, you learn to love.”

The quest for my mother’s love and our eventual forgiveness has been the true love story of my life. And maybe for many children, Asians in particular, the thirst for approval, validation, and love from our parents follows us for years and years and years.

Our brains are biologically affected by how we were treated and loved as young children. How we make meaning of relationships becomes wired by these early experiences, and it stays with us for the rest of our lives.

It was not until I had the vernacular to say my childhood was traumatic, it was not until the dust of where I came from settled, it was not until I healed after arduous hours in therapy and study that I was truly able to be a decent human connector.

I of course still fail at it at times, but I am always improving. Looking my childhood in the face, calling out the truth of what it was, I was then able to forgive my mother comprehensively and be at peace with my childhood.

For more advice on creating genuine human connections, you can find Secret Pandemic on Amazon.

Simone Heng is a human connection specialist and former international broadcaster for Virgin Radio Dubai, HBO Asia, and CNBC, among others. With over fifteen years of experience around the world as a communicator on-air, on stage, and one-on-one, connection has always been her life’s work. As a speaker, Simone inspires people to connect in a world thirsty for connection. She has spoken to thousands and often for Fortune 500 organizations. Her clients include Google, Bytedance, Salesforce, SAP, L’Oréal, TEDx, The United Nations, and many more. Simone and her work have been featured on CNN and in Vogue, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar, among others.