Love Boundaries and Manipulation: When Love Is Conditional SelfWork #148
The SelfWork Podcast
Margaret Robinson Rutherford PhD
4.8 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 27 September 2019
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We're talking about love today on SelfWork. Unconditional love often gets the thumbs up as the best or most selfless kind of love to have. Parents certainly want to welcome their children into the world with unconditional love. But there can be a problem when, as an adult, you don't set boundaries at all, and "loving unconditionally" can be manipulated fairly easily.
Then there's conditional love, when love will be withdrawn if certain expectations aren’t followed. The boundaries or expectations themselves are manipulative, but often don't feel like they are. Why? Because they're couched in terms of "closeness" or "loyalty." I'll give several examples of conditional love and you can see if you recognize it in your own life.
So your selfwork today is to look at the boundaries in your own relationships. Are the boundaries clear and respected, or perhaps not so much?
The listener email for today is from someone who defines herself as a "people pleaser" and asks how she can change that particular pattern.
Important Links:
John Amodeo in Psychology Today
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is self-work and I'm Dr. Margaret Rutherford. |
| 0:13.0 | At self-work we'll discuss psychological and emotional issues common in today's world |
| 0:19.0 | and what to do about them. |
| 0:20.0 | I'm Dr. Margaret and self-work is a podcast dedicated to you taking just a few minutes today for your own self-work. |
| 0:29.0 | Hello and welcome to self-work. I'm Dr. Margaret Rutherford. I'm a clinical psychologist out of Fayetteville, Arkansas. |
| 0:35.2 | And I've been podcasting now for about three years wanting to extend the walls of my practice to those of you who might already be interested in psychological |
| 0:44.9 | emotional issues maybe you're even in therapy to those of you have been |
| 0:48.7 | initially diagnosed with anxiety or depression or having relationship problems that are formidable and |
| 0:54.9 | you're looking for answers. And to a third group that may not even darken the door of a therapist |
| 1:00.9 | wouldn't even consider it necessarily, but is just curious enough to listen |
| 1:05.7 | to a podcast. |
| 1:06.7 | So welcome to all three of you. |
| 1:09.5 | This is the second in a series of podcasts that I'm doing about, aspects of depression that I don't think are talked |
| 1:15.1 | about too often. |
| 1:17.4 | In the last episode we talked about beliefs that can lead to incredible loneliness, |
| 1:23.6 | beliefs that you carry around with you and apply to your life that |
| 1:26.8 | are really not rational all the time. |
| 1:30.1 | Today we're talking about both unconditional love, which often gets the thumbs up as the kind of love to have, |
| 1:36.0 | and conditional love, which is typically when you hear a message that love will be withdrawn if certain expectations aren't followed. |
| 1:44.0 | But believe it or not, they can also both be used manipulatively. |
| 1:48.7 | And believe it or not, love that was strong can be used up or altered permanently. It's so tragic when I hear |
| 1:55.3 | this has happened. So let's talk about unconditional love and conditional love and |
... |
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