How Your Childhood Affects Your Love Styles.
#3 Their praise and approval.
Our childhood experiences make up the foundation of who we are, our attitudes, and our beliefs. One of the most profound ways our childhood can impact our lives is through our love styles. A person’s love style is defined as a specific pattern of behavior related to how they receive and express love and it is largely modeled after a relationship with our parents. According to researchers, there are five different love styles: the controller, the pleaser, the facilitator, the avoided, and the victim. So, here are six ways our parents affect our love styles.
1) The attention they give us.
It’s no secret that having parents who constantly fail to give us the attention we need, can leave a lot of damaging effects on a person’s self-esteem. Whether it’s because your parents walked out on you, separated or prioritized their careers over their families, it made you feel like no one was really there for you growing up. This forced you to mature too early and learn to take care of yourself at a young age and as a result, it left you with an overwhelming fear of helplessness that drives your need to be in control of everything all the time, including your relationships. Known as “the controller,” people who adopt this particular love style are often assertive, rigid, and headstrong. Their parent’s lack of attention has made it difficult for them to rely on others, ask for help, and relinquish their control.
2) The freedom they allow us.
According to Eric Erickson’s famous Psychosocial Theory of Development, when our parents act too controlling and overprotective of us, it cultivates feelings of shame, self-doubt, and helplessness that many of us will struggle to overcome even as you grow older. So, when your parents are too strict with your freedom and don’t give much of a say in your life, it can lead you to become too compliant and passive in your relationships. And while many people will no doubt appreciate this kind of agreeableness at first, over time they may grow frustrated with your lack of decisiveness, autonomy, and initiative that makes partners feel as if you are not exerting as much effort into making the relationship work as they are.
3) Their praise and approval.
Were your parents overly critical with you and hard to please, did you get the sense that they only loved you when you succeeded and were angry with you when you failed? Children who are pressured into meeting their parent’s expectations just to have their emotional needs met, tend to develop a compulsive need to please other people as well. A love style known, fittingly enough, as “the pleaser.” Those who tried hard to win their parent’s approval when they were younger, usually end up with a neurotic need for praise and validation. They are likely to turn into pushovers who have trouble saying no, always put other people first and avoid conflict even at their own expense. They have a fear of letting people down and tend to struggle with feelings of insecurity and inadequacy.
4) Their consistency and dependability.
Do you often feel alone and misunderstood by those around you? Do you yearn for emotional connection only to be let down by the people you love? This is what happens when you grow up with unpredictable parents. They’re unstable, unreliable, and inconsistent with their care and affection. They say they love you and that they would be there for you, but they’ve just broken one promise too many for you to ever really trust them again and because your emotional needs are never consistently met, it left you with deep-seated feelings of abandonment that make you sensitive to rejection. You may have a love style called “the facilitator.” “The facilitator” is romantic and idealistic but often to a fault. They have difficulty maintaining intimate relationships because they tend to idealize the people they love and hold them to incredibly high standards. They ask too much from their partners and don’t give them any room for mistakes, because they learn from a young age how painful it is to be let down by the people you love.
5) Their attitude towards emotions.
Next is “the avoider,” a love style characterized by inhibited emotions, a strong need for independence, and a fear of intimacy. People who adopt this love style, most likely had parents who neglected their emotional needs and discouraged the expression of their feelings. Whether it was because they didn’t know how to deal with them or wrongly believe that repressing your emotions would make them go away, your parents raised you to believe that being too emotional was a sign of weakness and that it’s wrong for you to need people and seek comfort from them. As such you became more self-serious, detached from your feelings, and struggled to open up, even to the person you love the most in the world.
6) Adverse childhood experiences.
Finally, but perhaps most importantly, experiencing a traumatic event at a young age, especially by the hands of your own parents, can significantly affect the way you view and approach your adult relationships. “The victim” love style is the result of growing up in a chaotic home environment or living with an angry or violent parent. These negative early experiences have made you hesitant to trust and even more hesitant to love. You may struggle with feelings of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem because of how you were treated: meek, docile, and emotionally damaged. People like this are just constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop because pain and confusion are all they’ve ever known.
Do any of these points describe your parents? Which love style do you relate to the most? Let me know.
