I was raised on tough love. It took me decades to call it what it really was

Growing up in the 1960s, there was a phrase that echoed through our household like a mantra: “This hurts me more than it hurts you.”

My father would say it before every lecture, every punishment, every moment when his voice would rise and his disappointment would fill the room like smoke.

He called it tough love. The neighbors called it good parenting. I called it Tuesday.

For the longest time, I bought into it completely. After all, I turned out “fine,” didn’t I? I had a successful career, raised my own children, and managed to navigate life’s challenges with what I thought was resilience.

But somewhere in my sixties, as I watched my grandchildren play in the park with their gentle parents, something began to shift inside me.

What if what I experienced wasn’t love at all?

The realization didn’t come like lightning. It crept in slowly, like water finding cracks in concrete.

I started noticing how I flinched when someone raised their voice, even in excitement. How I automatically assumed disappointment in others’ silence. How I had spent decades trying to earn approval that never seemed to come, no matter how hard I worked or how much I achieved.

As Brené Brown has said, “We can’t selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”

I had become a master at shutting down anything that felt too vulnerable, too raw, too real. The “toughness” I thought was strength was actually a wall I’d built so high, I’d forgotten what was on the other side.

The difference between discipline and emotional neglect

Here’s what I wish someone had told me forty years ago: there’s a world of difference between setting boundaries and withholding affection.

Between teaching consequences and teaching shame. Between preparing a child for life’s challenges and convincing them they’re fundamentally flawed.

Real discipline—the kind that actually shapes character—comes wrapped in warmth. It says, “I love you too much to let you continue this behavior.”

Emotional neglect, dressed up as tough love, says, “You’ve disappointed me, and now you need to earn your way back into my good graces.”

I remember being eight years old, coming home excited about a drawing I’d made in school.

My father barely glanced at it before pointing out that I’d colored outside the lines. “If you’re going to do something, do it right,” he said, not meanly, but matter-of-factly. The drawing went in the trash.

The lesson, as he saw it, was about standards. The lesson I learned was about never being good enough.

Recent research from developmental psychologists shows that children who grow up in emotionally cold environments—even when there’s no outright abuse—often struggle with self-worth and emotional regulation well into adulthood.

They learn to equate love with performance, affection with achievement. They become adults who work themselves to the bone, seeking validation that feels perpetually out of reach.

I can’t tell you I have all the answers, but I’ve learned that what many of us experienced wasn’t character-building—it was character-breaking, followed by a lifetime of trying to piece ourselves back together.

The hardest part of this realization wasn’t the anger. It was the grief.

Grieving for the child who learned to swallow his excitement, who stopped sharing his victories, who grew up believing that emotional needs were weaknesses to be overcome rather than human experiences to be honored.

Learning to call it what it was

Recently, I picked up a book that shifted something fundamental in how I see this whole mess. Rudá Iandê’s “Laughing in the Face of Chaos: A Politically Incorrect Shamanic Guide for Modern Life” landed in my hands at exactly the right moment.

One particular insight stopped me cold: “Most of us don’t even know who we truly are. We wear masks so often, mold ourselves so thoroughly to fit societal expectations, that our real selves become a distant memory.”

Reading those words, I realized I’d been wearing the mask of the “tough love success story” for decades.

The book inspired me to start peeling back layers of conditioning I didn’t even know were there. It helped me understand that what I’d called resilience might have been more like emotional numbing, and what I’d called strength might have been more like survival.

The truth is uncomfortable: emotional neglect often gets praised in our culture.

We celebrate the “strong” kids who don’t cry, who don’t need comfort, who bounce back quickly from disappointment.

We tell ourselves we’re preparing them for a harsh world.

But what we’re really doing is teaching them that their emotional needs don’t matter, that vulnerability is dangerous, that love is conditional.

It took me sixty-some years to find the courage to sit down and listen to that eight-year-old who just wanted someone to celebrate his crooked drawing.

I started noticing patterns everywhere. The way I automatically minimized my own needs in relationships.

How I struggled to accept compliments but could catalog my failures with photographic accuracy. The way I parented my own children—not as harshly as I was raised, but still with that underlying current of “love must be earned.”

What I’ve come to understand is that calling it “tough love” was our family’s way of making sense of something that didn’t feel right but was all we knew.

It was a story that made heroes out of people who were probably doing their best with the emotional tools they’d been given, even when those tools were broken.

I think about my father now, and I can see him more clearly—not as the stern disciplinarian who shaped my character, but as a man who probably never learned how to express affection without conditions attached.

He likely grew up in an even harsher emotional climate and thought he was being progressive by not using his belt as often as his own father had.

The cycle had to stop somewhere. For me, it started stopping when I finally found the words to name what had happened.

Not tough love. Not character building. Emotional neglect wrapped in good intentions.

There’s something profoundly liberating about calling things what they actually are.

It doesn’t erase the past or magically heal old wounds, but it does something equally important: it gives you permission to stop carrying someone else’s definition of love and start discovering your own.

What stories about your childhood are you still telling yourself? Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is to stop calling pain by prettier names.