If You Never Felt Loved as a Child, How Do You Love Unconditionally as a Parent?(A Reflection from a Survivor of Silent Gaslighting)

When you've grown up—or lived for decades—inside relationships where love was conditional, confusing, or withheld, becoming a parent can feel like standing at the edge of a cliff with no map, no safety net, and no guide.

I was a victim of silent gaslighting—a kind of emotional abuse that doesn’t leave bruises, but instead erodes your trust in yourself over time. For over 20 years, I lived with someone who never hit me, only threatened once, never screamed, until the end—but who used silence, withdrawal, blame, and control to distort my reality. I lost track of who I was. I learned to second-guess everything. And slowly, I began to believe I didn’t deserve love at all.

So how do you parent after that?

How do you offer unconditional love when the only kind of "love" you've known is transactional, confusing, or controlling?

You begin with the pain.

You begin with the ache in your chest that remembers what it was like to be invisible.

You begin with the parts of you that were silenced, belittled, or overlooked—and you say to yourself, “That will not happen on my watch.”

You begin by becoming the kind of parent you needed.

But it's not perfect. Trauma doesn't just vanish when you have a child—it shows up in how you flinch, in how you fear failing them, in how you question if you're good enough. And sometimes, the fear of repeating history feels paralyzing.

Still—you try.

Because your child becomes the mirror that reflects back your deepest longings. They show you what safety can look like. What laughter sounds like when it isn’t laced with fear. They give you the chance to feel again, sometimes for the first time.

I have caught myself parenting from fear. Overcompensating. Being too permissive or too protective. I’ve had to learn boundaries, to trust my instincts, and to forgive myself for the moments I didn't get it right. But I’ve also discovered that love can be rewritten. That I’m allowed to learn as I go. That I can choose—every single day—to love from a place of truth instead of trauma.

You don’t need to have received unconditional love to be capable of giving it.

You just need to remember what it felt like to go without it.

That ache—that grief—is where your compassion lives.

And when you hold your child with tenderness, when you see them for who they are instead of who someone else wants them to be—you are healing both of you. You are reparenting the silenced child inside yourself while raising a child who will never have to question if they are loved.

You are ending the cycle.

And that, dear survivor, is what unconditional love looks like.