Is Tough Love Good?

There's no such thing as tough love. Quite often I hear the expression, I use tough love. My parents use tough love on me. So what does that mean? The worst case scenario is yelling, screaming, hitting, punishing your child. Tough love could also be interpreted as I just withdraw privileges. Is tough love a good thing? A lot of people have said, well, this tough love that my parents showed me, I toughened me up. Well, the world's going to do that. But if you're getting beaten up inside your own home, there's no safe haven. Every child needs a safe place. Without that safe place, the world never feels like it lets up. There's a constant foot on their throat. So let's use the extreme example of somebody who was maybe beaten. That was their parents term for tough love. What's going to happen to them as an adult? Sometimes people learn from that that they don't want to do what their parents did and they go the opposite direction. But a lot of times what happens is you can't get away from the way your parents treated you. So then they start doing the same thing with their child. So when people say to me, well tell me why tough love isn't. And I say, why do you think you need to use it? You've got a five year old child, that child is interpreting their world through your actions. What are they learning is that the world is going to hurt me. They don't need to have that. That's going to affect them for the rest of their life. I see it all the time. People come in who had tough love given to them and it's showing up in their mental and physical health as an adult.