“The hardest thing I have to understand is shutting the door from the inside out. It’s hard, especially if you have been betrayed by someone you love because you feel like you have to tell them the pain they are causing, but the peace you seek can only give you.” ~ Bruna Nessif
A photo of my father handing me a tennis trophy has been hanging in my living room for years.
Even now, if I look at it for too long, I can feel the old rush: pride, relief, ownership. For most of my life, that photo proved that my dad loved me.
It took decades to realize that it proved something else.
My father was a companion – charming in public and scary in private. He can lure strangers, friends and relatives to give him money for businesses he has never started and investments he has never made.
At home, the charm is gone.
He is vengeful, violent, and unpredictable. The kind of man that can Beat his child upstairsSmooth his hair again and join the party downstairs with a smile as if he was just walking out to have someone’s drink.
My siblings and I each found our own way to live from him. My brother fought back. My sister is small and sweet.
I became a good child.
I first learned that achievement can buy me a little far from danger. Good grades, awards, obedience, compliance – these have become my armor.
Not because they made me safe. They did not.
But sometimes they make me less of a target.
My father’s love happened and almost always had an audience. In front of others, he became a proud father.
He will call me to hug me, praise me, show me. Even at a young age, I knew something was not going to happen. But when you are hungry, you do not stop criticizing food.
You eat.
One day when I was eight, I was playing tennis and came in second. I remember standing on the stage waiting for the award show when the announcer called my mother to hand over the award.
Then I see movement in the corner of my eye.
My father is pushing my mother back in his chair so he can present the trophy himself. There was a murmur in the crowd. People saw it.
He does not care.
He took to the stage full of pride, full of theatrical love, and in that moment I forgot everything else. I forgot the violence. I forgot the fear. I forgot what he had just done to my mother.
What I feel was chosen.
When he handed me the award in front of everyone, I felt like I almost never felt around him: the whole thing. Important. Love.
I knew him then Conditional love. Children always know more than adults think.
I know I am not loved for who I am. I was loved for doing something that reflected so well on him.
But I do not care.
The feeling is too strong.
That day, without words for it, I did what I think now is the big negotiation of my childhood: I will continue to achieve and in return you will still love me.
It felt fair to me at the time. Bad maybe. But fair.
The photos captured the negotiations perfectly.
For years I have treated it like a floating device. Whenever I felt unworthy, ashamed, or abandoned, I looked at the picture and thought: There. That is true. Whatever he was, all he did was love.
But children from conditional homes become experts in building churches out of debris.
A warm look. A public compliment. A hug. A photo. We keep these remnants because we need them to mean more than they do.
If they do not mean love, what do we live for?
As I got older, this photo did not lose its energy, but it changed under my gaze. Or maybe I have changed and that photo can no longer hide what it always has.
I started looking at the whole scene, not just the parts I needed. My father was hungry to see. My mother was dumped. My face is not safely lit, but with relief.
That is the hardest part to recognize.
What I used to call love was a comforting part that for a bright public time I was not ignored, threatened or used as a witness to the shame of others. What I have left as proof of love is also evidence of hunger.
And hungry kids will call a lot of things love.
When I see that, I can finally name the real value my father is offering. I think this deal is my success in exchange for his love.
His real deal is: make me look good and I will pretend to love you.
That decision is not in childhood. It reached my adult life and explained more than I could have imagined.
I can immediately see how often I chase after the emotions that photos give me. How often have I misunderstood consent for intimacy. I was often drawn to people whose warmth had to be earned.
I confuse loving compliments. I’m confused that it is useful with pricing. I was confused with food waste.
And because of the old pattern, it feels normal.
That’s one of the worst things about childhood illness: what Our injuries soon May feel strange later and acquaintance can be hidden as safe. You find yourself overweight, sacrificing a lot, achieving a lot, still trying to win the love that continues toward the end.
In the long run, I believe that if I succeed enough and achieve enough impressively, the original negotiations will finally come to an end. Someone – my father, a world partner – will look at me and choose me completely.
But that hope is a trap.
It made me work for love instead of getting it. It makes me perform rather than relax. It makes me loyal to the contract I signed with fear.
Treatment began when I stopped asking for the photo to testify on my father’s behalf.
I stopped asking if he loved me.
I began to ask another question, why is it so heavy now?
The answer is simple and destructive. Because there are very few.
That answer changed the way I see myself now.
Over the years, I have felt ashamed that the photo meant so much to me. I think my attachment to it makes me weak, lacking in understanding.
Now I see kids doing what kids do. Create meaning out of any softness available. Try to build yourself from unstable materials because stable stuff is not offered.
That kid does not deserve my contempt. He deserves my sympathy.
That change taught me something I wanted to understand as soon as possible: When you grew up with conditional love, healing was not just about mourning what happened. It also talks about learning how to recognize old bargains when they show up again.
For me, that means paying attention to some questions.
Do I feel I have to impress this person to keep them warm? Do I feel anxious when I do not produce, dislike, or perform? Do I find it very appealing to people who make me strive for approval in such a short time?
Those questions have become a kind of compass.
When the answer is yes, I know I may not be responding right now. I would probably stand on that tennis court again at the age of eight, hoping another trophy would make me fall in love.
When that happened, I tried to pause and do three things.
First, I name what is happening without embarrassment. Not “I go again pitifully.” But “this is an old wound looking for a solution.”
Second, I ask if the connection in front of me feels mutual or practical. Healthy love does not require constant confirmation.
Third, I remind myself that price is not something that others reward me for. Not my father. Not a partner. Not the audience.
The last part still applies.
There is a reason why conditional love forms a deep groove in us. It trains the nervous system to pursue relief and calls it belonging. It teaches us to feel most alive when someone is having a hard time finally reaching out to us.
But peace comes from somewhere else.
It arises from a misunderstanding with chemistry. From no longer calling the sacrifice of mental labor. From not asking for achievements to work for self-worth.
The photo still hangs in my room.
But it hangs there differently now.
It is no longer proof that my father loves me anymore. It is proof that a child can live at an astonishing level and continue to seek love.
It is evidence of the negotiations we made when we were young and fearful and desperate to own. And it reminds me that I do not have to continue to respect those negotiations forever.
I can choose people who do not need me to make them feel bright. I can choose a relationship where I am allowed to be normal, tired, uncertain and still in love.
I can stop the exam.
That was probably the deepest lesson the photo gave me. Not that love got it, but I spent years believing it to be true.
And if you grew up the same way – confused, admiring safety, agreeing to love, acting for value – I hope you ask every relationship that makes you a little lost to choose.
Some negotiations are not worth saving. Especially we created from childhood.
