Our lack of receiving mature love in childhood affects our ability to love maturely as an adult.

If you didn’t receive enough mature love and warmth in childhood, you will continue to crave it throughout your life unless you recognize and properly deal with it. Let’s navigate common relationship pitfalls so keep reading!

Lack Of Mature Love

Mature love is a type of love that is genuine and warm, and is able to provide both proper guidance and security. Most importantly though it is a form of love that is able to meet a child’s emotional needs. 

Unfortunately, many parents are emotionally immature and unable to give their children the love a child craves and needs or they give it in conditional, limited or erratic amounts. 

The child may grow up not understanding why they feel unlovable, unworthy, or not good enough to be loved.  

This may lead to feeling unhappy, depressed and/or longing to be fulfilled by another.  

The child may even believe that their unhappiness is unique to them or because of them.

This unconscious compulsion to get love, from not having received sufficient mature love and warmth in childhood, can continue from generation to generation. Let’s discover how to navigate common relationship pitfalls. Keep reading!

Why We Choose The Wrong Person

When a child grows up in an inconsistent or unloving home, they may unconsciously choose a person to love who has similar negative traits to one or both of their parents. This can be a combination of actual similarities in the other person or projected qualities.  

Projected qualities refer to the tendency for an individual to attribute certain characteristics or traits on to another person that may not actually be present in that other person.  Instead, like a mirror, the other person reflects back one’s own unresolved issues or inner conflicts. 

For example, if you regularly see your partner as needy or demanding, you may not recognize that it is actually you who are needy and demanding.

This can lead to recreating past hurt in current relationships. You might unconsciously choose a person to love who has similar negative traits to one or both of your parents, in an attempt to work through these unresolved needs and inner conflicts.

These unresolved needs and inner conflicts can manifest in the form of unresolved pain or unfulfilled emotional needs, leading to a fear of opening up and to a resistance to ever experiencing love again.

Craving Love

As an adult, you may continue to crave the love you missed in childhood and may struggle with loving maturely in your relationships. 

By becoming aware of the lack of mature love you received in childhood, you can gain insight into the ways in which you have tried to re-create and correct the past in your current adult relationships. 

Knowing this could help you let go of the past, forgive your parents, and start a new, more constructive and mature pattern of behavior that allows you to give and receive love in a more mature way.

This sounds simple enough, but I find that often with clients, they have blind spots to their unconscious needs and drives.

Why People Have Affairs

For instance, I had a client who was having an affair with a woman who turned out to be very similar to his mother who had left his dad when he was a little boy.  

The woman he was having an affair with was very toxic.  She emotionally abused and used him, yet he was still powerfully drawn to her.  

Through our work together, he realized that ever since he was a little boy, he had longed to have his absentee mother’s love and affection.  The woman he was in relationship with had many traits similar to his absentee mother.  

By understanding his craving to get his mother’s love by having an affair with this woman, he was able to let go of his unhealthy attraction to her and to re-engage with his wife.

How To Stop Recreating Past Hurt – Practical Advice

To overcome a fear of loving, it is essential to become aware of these patterns and to take responsibility for your role in regularly recreating them. 

This can be a difficult and painful process as it requires facing past hurts and emotional wounds. But it is necessary process in order to move forward and break the cycle of recreating past hurt in current relationships.

One way to become aware of these patterns is through self-reflection and introspection. This can include journaling, coaching, and other forms of self-exploration that bring greater self-awareness. 

It’s important to learn to identify and acknowledge the emotions and conflicts that drive the re-creation of past hurts and to understand why you are seeking to re-create these patterns in your current relationships.

Developing a Healthy Self-Esteem

One way to help you in overcoming the fear of opening up and of both loving another person and of being loved by another is to learn to develop a healthy self-image and greater self-esteem.

This is a powerful act of self-love and is very transformative.

When you have a positive self-image and high self-esteem, you are less likely to enter into relationships out of a sense of neediness or a lack of self-worth. 

You are more likely to enter into relationships from a place of strength and self-love, rather than from a place of seeking validation or fulfillment from others. When you are able to love, accept, and appreciate yourself, your relationships can transform in all sorts of powerful and positive ways!

Conclusion – Common relationship pitfalls

Holding on to your childhood need for love and affection can lead to difficulties and problems in your adult relationships. When you continue to hunger for the love you missed in childhood it makes you incapable of giving and receiving love maturely. 

The process that I do with clients is to assist them in letting go of their painful past by bringing a loving awareness to it.

I help clients to forgive their parents and their past and then to move forward and build powerful self-love and positive self-esteem.

And I teach my clients how to create mature and healthy relationships with their partners.

This will result in you becoming happier in all your relationships and you will learn to give mature love to others and to receive mature love from others.