Parents’ Love Translates into Present Love
by Jumh Tantri
Counsellor / Parenting Coach / Career Coach
Parents’ Love Translates into Present Love
The way you love today is no accident — it’s rooted in the love you received yesterday. From affection and presence to boundaries and conflict, our earliest experiences with parents shape the blueprint for our romantic relationships. The good news? You can keep what works, let go of what hurts, and write a new love story for yourself. Learn how with Counsellor, Jumh Tantri.
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our earliest relationships — especially with parents or caregivers — shape your attachment style and emotional habits. If you experienced consistent love and safety, you’re more likely to develop trust and healthy intimacy. If you faced neglect, inconsistency, or conditional love, you may face patterns like insecurity or fear of abandonment in adult relationships.
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Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and expanded by Mary Ainsworth, explains how early bonds influence your emotional responses and relationship patterns throughout life. Understanding your attachment style can help you break unhealthy cycles and build healthier, more secure connections.
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The first step is awareness — recognizing how your childhood shaped you. Then, with intentional action such as therapy, journaling, and open conversations with your partner, you can replace harmful habits with healthier ones. Change is possible at any age.
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Expressing emotions openly and constructively
Showing consistent affection and presence
Respecting personal boundaries in relationships
These healthy patterns create a strong foundation for lasting love.
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Yes. Therapy provides a safe space to explore your past, understand your patterns, and develop practical tools for healthier communication, boundaries, and emotional connection. It’s a powerful way to break cycles and heal.
Introduction
The way you love today has roots in your earliest memories. The way we love today — and the way our adult relationships unfold — is deeply rooted in how we experienced childhood love and relationships yesterday. Our earliest relationships, especially with our parents or primary caregivers, form the emotional blueprint from which we later build romantic partnerships. These foundational experiences quietly guide how we give and receive love, handle conflict, and manage emotional intimacy.
The way our parents communicated love — through affection, discipline, words, presence, or absence — becomes the unconscious script that plays out in our adult relationships.
Childhood Love: The First Script We Learn
From the moment we are born, we begin to observe, feel, and absorb the love language of our parents. Whether they were physically affectionate or distant, emotionally available or dismissive, consistent or unpredictable — these dynamics form the bedrock of our attachment style. A child who feels consistently loved and safe tends to grow into an adult capable of healthy intimacy and trust. On the other hand, a child who experiences neglect, criticism, or conditional love may grow into an adult who struggles with insecurity, fear of abandonment, or emotional distance.
Attachment theory, first introduced by John Bowlby and later expanded by Mary Ainsworth, is widely discussed in couples counselling Singapore because it explains that our early attachment experiences often shape how we relate to others throughout life. Securely attached children, who have their emotional and physical needs met reliably, tend to develop healthier adult relationships. Conversely, children with anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachments may repeat those patterns in their romantic lives — unless they take intentional steps to heal and grow.
Awareness: The First Step Toward Transformation
It’s easy to go through life unaware that our frustrations in love may stem from unresolved childhood patterns. Perhaps we find ourselves repeatedly attracted to emotionally unavailable partners, or we become anxious and clingy when someone pulls away. These reactions are rarely random — they are learned responses to the emotional environment we grew up in.
Awareness is the beginning of healing, especially when it comes to breaking unhealthy relationship patterns formed in childhood. Asking reflective questions like:
How did my parents show love to each other and to me?
Was affection expressed through touch, words, gifts, service, or time?
Was I allowed to express emotions freely, or was I shut down or shamed?
Did I feel safe, valued, and understood as a child?
These questions can open doors to deeper understanding. When we begin to trace our relational tendencies back to their roots, we gain the power to change them.
The Good Habits to Keep
Not all childhood experiences are problematic. Many of us were lucky to witness healthy patterns from our parents — healthy relationship habits that deserve to be carried into our adult lives.
Here are some examples of positive relational habits that often stem from healthy parental love:
1. Healthy Emotional Expression
Parents who encouraged open dialogue and modelled emotional regulation teach their children how to express needs without fear. Adults who grew up in such environments tend to handle conflicts constructively and empathize with their partner’s feelings.
What to keep:
Continue practicing emotional honesty and vulnerability. Create space for your partner’s emotions as well as your own.
2. Consistent Affection and Presence
Children who received regular affection — whether through hugs, affirming words, or quality time — learn that love is consistent and safe. This sets the foundation for secure romantic bonds.
What to keep:
Be intentional in expressing affection regularly. Remember, small, consistent gestures often mean more than grand, infrequent ones.
3. Respect for Boundaries
Parents who respected their child’s autonomy teach that love is not control. This translates into adult relationships that balance intimacy with independence.
What to keep:
Maintain mutual respect for each other’s space, decisions, and identity.
The Bad Habits to Cut Off
Just as good habits should be retained, some harmful patterns need to be intentionally broken. The painful truth is that many of us carry forward unhelpful ways of relating that we witnessed in our parents.
1. Conditional Love and People-Pleasing
Some of us learned early on that love had to be earned — through achievements, compliance, or emotional caretaking. As adults, this can manifest as people-pleasing or a fear of being abandoned if we don’t “perform”.
What to cut off:
Let go of the belief that you must earn love. Practice receiving affection without guilt and loving others without expectation of perfection.
2. Avoiding Conflict
In homes where conflict was explosive or avoided altogether, children may learn that expressing needs is dangerous. As adults, they may withdraw emotionally or suppress grievances, leading to resentment.
What to cut off:
Learn to approach conflict as an opportunity for connection, not a threat. Practice expressing your feelings calmly and listening openly.
3. Over-Control or Co-Dependency
Parents who were overly controlling or emotionally dependent on their children can blur healthy boundaries. This may lead to adults who either dominate or lose themselves in their relationships.
What to cut off:
Establish and honor healthy boundaries. Love thrives not in control or enmeshment, but in mutual respect and freedom.
Being Intentional: Love as a Conscious Choice
Breaking old habits and building new ones doesn’t happen passively. It requires conscious, daily effort. The most profound transformation in love comes when we stop being on autopilot and start making intentional choices about how we relate.
Counselling or Therapy
can be a powerful space to explore your childhood and reshape your relational patterns.
Reading and learning
about attachment, emotional intelligence, and healthy communication can equip you with tools to love better.
Journaling
your thoughts and emotional responses helps identify recurring patterns that may need to change.
Talking
with your partner about your family history and love languages builds mutual understanding and empathy.
Intentionality means being awake to your patterns and choosing a different path when needed. It means catching yourself before you shut down, lash out, or withdraw — and instead choosing honesty, compassion, and self-awareness.
Final Thoughts: Love as a Legacy
Our parents’ love — or lack thereof — doesn’t define us forever, but it does give us a starting point. We are all handed a relational script in childhood, but as adults, we get to revise it. The love we grew up with becomes the soil in which our future relationships grow.
With awareness, grace, and intention, we can prune what is harmful and cultivate what is life-giving.
Ultimately, the greatest gift we can give our partners — and our future children — is not perfect love, but intentional love. A love that learns, unlearns, and grows. A love that understands where it came from, and chooses, every day, where it wants to go.
Book a counseling session with me at The Counselling Place Singapore to find forgiveness and closure with what was missing in the childhood interaction with your parents and renew hope in creating new habits through circle of influence by being pro-active and consistent to see your relationship flourish.