Parents are a child’s first everything, and that includes being their primary form of emotional connection and attachment.What is your relationship with your child like? How do you bond with them? Do you routinely hug, kiss or tell your kids that you love them? Do you say thank you, I’m sorry? Do you respect your kids?
The emotional state of a parent directly reflects the emotional state of their kids as adults. This means that since you are the first point of emotional contact in your child’s life, if they feel love from you, they tend to grow into adults who are emotionally available to giving and receiving love and care.
The emotional attachment structure of a person is broadly classified as the following:
Secure
Expressing positive emotion with your kids, i.e., when you very vocal about your love for them, they grow to freely give and receive love instead of thinking they have to do something special to get it
Insecure
In this case, the parent is emotionally unavailable and does not meet their children’s emotional needs, they grow to fear being rejected and is hardly ever sure of their feelings and a lot of times, tends to self sabotage in love.
Anxious
Some people are constantly anxious in regards to their place in people lives. It’s like no matter how much you love and care for them, they are always on edge terrified of when you would stop loving or caring for them.
I can speak from this place of emotional structure because I have lived both sides of the coin. Between a non-existent dad and a mom who believed loving your kid ended in providing the basics of life, I was emotionally bankrupt. For a more significant part of my life, I was basically two people and nothing in between. The first was someone who felt the need to continually try to earn love, which always left me in a place of always putting everyone first. The second was someone who had a difficult time accepting freely given love. Because I always felt the need to please and go the extra mile to be worthy of love, whenever anyone showed me love right off the bat, I hardly ever knew what to do with it. It was either outright rejecting it or self-sabotage.
It took me quite a while to pull myself out from the deep, and it took a lot of hard work do so. I reached out to professionals who helped me a great deal throughout the process. It is not easy to unlearn toxic characters which you have known for most of your life or have molded the person you are today, but trust me when I say it is possible. With God all things are possible. I’m your living proof. I encourage you to take an inward look and examine yourself to see how your emotional health is measuring up. Your kids are depending on you.