Name: Your Two Options in Love After a Bad Childhood
Uploaded: 2025-12-07T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 3 min 28 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...

Modal verbs - B1

Adverbs of degree

The easiest way to assess what once went on is to reflect on how you feel about yourself now.

The clearest sign of having had a miserable start is a deep self-hatred.

You think you're ugly, you can't bear to look in mirrors.

You never want to upset anyone and suspect everyone hates you.

You feel unacceptable and weird and just in multiple non-specific ways.

Behind such feelings there will have been the normal villains.

A critical and unloving mother or father, some violence and unpredictability, huge preference for a sibling.

There are only so many ways these sorts of wounds form.

Here, after the normal awful adolescence, eating disorders, cutting, alienation, drink, etc.

Firstly, to fall in love with cruel, dead, distant, possibly violent, intermittent, unavailable people.

You can fall in love with people who are married to someone else or who don't call you,

who make you feel inadequate and unseen and constantly alarmed and unsure.

You can love people who think you're unlovable.

Or else you can love people who really like you, who think you're attractive and sweet and clever.

And you can feel powerfully ill around them.

You can become an expert in identifying what's wrong with them.

They're not clever enough, they're weird, they've got no options.

You criticise their taste in shoes, the shape of their mouth, a comment they made at a party.

You become as critical of them as your parents were once critical of you.

How could someone who liked you be anything other than a loser?

by going slightly cold or flirting with strangers, you know well enough how to detonate trust conclusively.

This rigmarole can go on for most of your life.

Unavailable, cruel people and sickeningly available ones.

And in the in between times, devastating loneliness.

You can be sure this sort of thing went on in Renaissance Florence and Ming Dynasty Beijing.

To understand what's going on and to share it with someone who is kind and perceptive

and who might have problems of their own and a good therapist

To meet someone who threatens to make us feel sick with their sweetness,

then, to explain to them what we understand of our problem.

Rather than pretending that we are healthy and can bear their kindness without difficulty,

we may be able to tell them, I want so much to be normal, I want so much to tolerate kindness.

I turn against it and the person giving it to me.

But I don't want to be like this anymore.

I'm tired of sabotaging relationships and turning away good people.

Please help me to bear the anxiety of being cared for.

Please help me to absorb the love I crave.

If the person doesn't immediately run away,

if they can see the decency behind the shame and the tenderness behind the neurosis,

if they can partly understand our problem from the inside, or we will be making momentous progress.

We won't be healed yet, but at least we'll know how ill we are, and

we'll have found a way to hint at the scale of our terrors of kindness.