Wow. I really don’t like this question. The level of my dislike of this question is above 9000. This is because the answer is “no,” and that makes it seem as if I’m more traumatized/anxious than I actually am. Instead of you know, simply being just enough anxious and traumatized that I have never really “felt loved.”
(Okay, that still sounds terrible.)
In most of my previous experiences “love” has been entirely conditional. You have to act normal, you have to be quiet, you have avoid making people angry. You have to get good grades. You have to do a thousand different things to be “loved” and the goal post is going to keep moving and you will never catch up. This was…stressful. Particularly because if I could do anything really well, it was “fail to be normal.” It is impossible to meet the criteria of “normal” if your parents potentially have undiagnosed disabilities and have no more of a concept of “normal” than you do. For them a great deal of “normal” behavior was “lie about what’s going on until you maybe believe it.”
(And again, this makes it sound more terrible than it was. Though it was pretty crappy. My parents were dysfunctional, my dad was self medicating my mom played horrible “practical jokes,” that were kind of horrifying. She also has depressive fits. Dad has full on anxiety meltdowns that were often physically violent. There was physical and emotional abuse only according to them there’s no such thing as “emotional” or “physical” abuse.)
So yeah, ask me about love and you are actually going to hear about my kinda dysfunctional family. Who I have mostly been no-contact with since roughly 2018 except for my brother and sister. See, my parents have claimed they love me and are “proud” of me the few times they have tried to get back in contact with me. I fail to be convinced they are actually telling the truth because the things they’ve said to me and the things they’ve said about me and the things they’ve called me in the past do not match up with their claims of actually caring about me.
(I swear if anyone accuses me of trauma dumping I will literally scream. This was my normal as a kid and I am still affected by it decades later, but this was my normal.)
The idea of being loved sounds pretty great. There are a lot of people I’ve cared about, but the feeling didn’t seem to go both ways. There’s a certain problem with maybe being a little too intense and a little “too much,” that seems to come with developmental disabilities like Autism and ADHD. This can be off putting.(I have experienced this on both sides.) It can apparently be genuinely upsetting as I have been verbally attacked by people who got nervous because I was always looking in their direction when they moved. Or because I was apparently blinking to frequently. (If you’re out there, person whose name I don’t remember, I still don’t accept your apology.)
The idea of being loved would probably have to involve “tolerates tendency to take forever to do something because there are somehow a ridiculous number of things that need to happen before thing can be done.” It would also have to involve “can ignore/tolerate verbal tics and any weird motions or gestures and eye contact weirdness.” It would have to involve “does not try to ‘manage’ me or otherwise make me a ‘project.’”
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