Name: The Conditions of Love
Uploaded: 2025-07-26T17:57:36.000Z
Duration: 3 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When looking at the odder aspects of other people's and our own behaviour, there is one simple-sounding question we should always keep close to the front of our minds.

What did you need to do in your family of origin in order to get noticed, cared for and loved?

Adverbs of manner

In other words, what conditions of love did you grow up with and might you still, by extension, unconsciously therefore be operating under?

Because it can take our deep minds a very long time indeed to recognise that they are no longer subject to a parental rule.

What someone devotes extraordinary energy to now is likely to be an adult version of more or less what they once had to do to secure the affection we all need not to perish as infants.

There are parents who demand that their offsprings succeed and just as often but more covertly, there are parents who require them to fail.

There are parents who need their children to look conspicuously attractive and others, tragically, who are sexually so uncontained that their children are incentivised to put on weight or damage their bodies in order to repel the danger of incestuous advances.

The questions, what conditions of love did you grow up under, what did you need to do to get noticed, are, as we can see, of particular use when we try to assess behaviours that, from the angle of our flourishing, make no sense at all.

Why does someone exhaust themselves earning gargantuan sums of money they will never be able to spend?

Why would someone blow up one relationship after another?

Why would someone be sexually seductive with everyone they encounter?

Why can someone never find a way to be serious or appropriately authentic?

The answers always lie in the secret complex bargains that certain families have made with their offspring.

Stay loyal to me or I won't be able to endure my loneliness.

Accept my sexual advances or be denied my care.

Protect me from my depression or I may end up taking my life.

These melancholy analyses open up the way to a liberation from our patterns.

Once we can see that we are only, in effect, continuing to do what was once forced out of us in order to exist, we will also be in a position to break free from our manacles.

We will be able to feel sadness for our younger selves but also recognise that we are no longer operating under the narrow rules of the early years.

We can seek out attention and care for what is in line with our true needs.

The privilege of adulthood is to be able to find our way to our own, less distorted and less cruel conditions of love.