How the Love You Were Taught as a Child Is Shaping the Way You Parent Your LGBTQ Kid Right Now

In this episode, you will be invited to examine how the stories you carry about love affect the way you parent. Welcome to More Human, More Kind, the podcast helping parents of LGBTQ+ kids move from fear to fierce allyship and feel less alone and more informed so you can protect what matters, raise brave kids, and spark collective change. I'm Heather Hester. So let's get started. In this episode, you'll understand how childhood experiences shaped your definition of love. You'll begin unidentifying where old stories about love no longer serve you. And you'll learn one simple journaling practice to start repairing your relationship with love today. And be sure to stick around for the unlearn where we will dismantle one of the most damaging myths of all: that staying, no matter the cost, is proof of love. Welcome to More Human, More Kind. I'm Heather Hester. Today we are exploring how the earliest versions of love we received shaped the ones we know how to give, and how, with intention and care, we can rewrite that story. Sometimes the love we were taught to chase isn't the love that helps us grow. And the moment we stop performing for love, we start remembering how to receive it. We don't enter adulthood with— as blank slates when it comes to love. We carry emotional blueprints, usually written long before we had the language to read them. Maybe you grew up in a home where love meant helping, where your worth was tied to how useful you were. Maybe love meant silence, keeping the peace, never rocking the boat. Maybe it meant sacrifice and putting others' comfort before your own. And maybe, if you were lucky, it meant safety. And belonging. Psychologists call this your attachment style, the pattern your nervous system learned to recognize as love. Dr. Sue Johnson, founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, explains it this way: From our earliest relationships, we learn whether love is a safe haven or a dangerous place. When love came with strings attached, whether it was obedience, performance, or perfection, it wired your brain for survival, not connection. But what if real love doesn't require you to vanish to be worthy? Our definitions of love aren't just emotional, they're biological. Neuroscience tells us that the patterns we formed around love as children, how we were soothed, scolded, or seen, literally shaped our neural pathways for attachment. Dr. Dan Siegel calls this the window of tolerance. It's the range where we can safely give and receive love without tipping into anxiety or shutdown. When love has hurt us, that window narrows. We either over-function to keep people close or withdraw to avoid pain. But here's the good news. Love can be relearned. Every time you offer yourself compassion instead of criticism, You're widening that window. Every time you pause before people pleasing, you're teaching your body that love and safety can go exist. I wanna say that again because this means so much to me as well. Every time you offer yourself compassion instead of criticism, You're widening that window. Every time you pause before people pleasing, you're teaching your body that love and safety can coexist. How cool is that? bell hooks wrote, love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. Not control, not perfection, and not suffering disguised as devotion. If you can take a moment right now, find a quiet space. If you can't take that moment right now, it will be bookmarked for you so you can come back later. Take a breath, close your eyes for a moment, and just let the word love Sit in your body. Now ask yourself, what messages did I grow up hearing about love? Were they spoken, modeled, implied? When have I felt most loved? And what made that moment feel safe? Was it words? Presence, honesty, touch, quiet. And where does love still feel tangled with guilt or fear? What do you tell yourself you have to do to keep it? Pause here. And if you feel emotion rising, don't worry, there's nothing wrong with you. You're not broken for needing to relearn love. You're healing from being taught it conditionally. Here's the truth most of us were never told. Love isn't something you earn. It's something you allow. You don't have to chase, fix, or prove it. You just have to stop running from your own enoughness. Repair doesn't mean rewriting the past. It means updating the story your nervous system is telling you about what love feels like. So here are 3 places you can start. The first is to re-parent yourself. When an old trigger hits, ask, what would I say to my younger self right now? Dr. Kristin Neff's research on self-compassion shows that talking to yourself as you would to a friend decreases shame and builds emotional resilience. Another thing that you can do is To learn secure love through example, surround yourself with relationships that feel safe and reciprocal. This could be friendships, mentors, communities, the people who feel like your people. Our brains are social learners. Watching others give love freely Teaches our system what's possible. And the third thing that you can do is practice micro love moments. These are just 5 to 10-second acts of self or relational kindness. Things such as small moments of caring for your body, drinking water and saying, This is an act of love for myself. It can also be putting your hand on your heart when you're anxious and taking a slow, deep breath. Smiling or giving someone a compliment is telling them, "I see you." Love becomes real again, not in grand gestures, but and these micro acts, these micro moments of truth. Dr. Barbara Fredrickson's work on positivity resonance found that brief mutual moments of warmth create measurable changes in heart rhythm and vagal tone, literally the synchronizing of hearts. That's what repair looks like in real life. Not perfection. Presence. I used to think that love had to be this quote unquote "perfect expression." And to me, that meant being accommodating, always forgiving, and overflowing with lavish praise, even if it didn't feel true. It also meant staying small, quiet, agreeable. But what I've learned through the course of my marriage and being a mom of 4 really extraordinary kids is that real love is messy. Sometimes it looks like boundaries. Actually, A lot of the time it looks like boundaries. Sometimes it sounds like silence while you find your breath again. And sometimes the most loving thing you can do is starting over with yourself. Love and freedom aren't opposites. They're partners. Real love expands everyone it touches. Today's unlearn is about releasing the myth that love always means staying. The story says if you walk away, you didn't love enough, you didn't try to love enough. But staying in harm isn't love, it's survival. What if leaving or healing or changing course was the deepest expression of love because it honors truth? Love doesn't always mean holding on. Sometimes it means creating a space for new beginnings. This week, I want you to write one sentence of love to yourself. That begins with, "The future version of me will thank me for..." fill in the blank. Or, "I'm learning to speak to myself like..." and fill in the blank. And then read it out loud to yourself every single day. Let it become your new evidence of love. Love that is tender, and unconditional. When we repair our relationship with love, we become capable of loving others more honestly, without fear, without performance, and without losing ourselves. Take one last deep breath with me. Love is still worth believing in. Just not the version that breaks you. You learned today how early experiences shaped your understanding of love, how to start repairing what was distorted, and how to recognize that real love doesn't cost you your wholeness. If this reflection resonated with you, join me on Substack every Friday for live guided journaling sessions. And a Q&A. This is a space to reconnect with your heart before the holidays. And remember that new episodes of More Human, More Kind drop every Tuesday and Friday, so make sure you follow and subscribe so you never miss one. Until next time, be gentle with your healing heart. You are not hard to love. You are learning what love actually feels like you are already enough.