I dig through my memories and I remember this was a thing since I was a kid. Like I remember my mom just constantly saying “We love you a lot, do you know that?” and then straight up asking me: “Do you love your mom and dad?” (speaking in 3rd person for some reason) then followed by “Do you love mom or dad more?”… and I remember always just answering that: Yes I love them, and mom more than dad… (I remember that is probably just honestly how I felt, I never lied about it)
I don’t remember dad ever asking this…
Sometimes (when I was younger) mom asked me: “If mom and dad got a divorce, who are you going with?”…
wtf mom
And like sometimes they argue then threaten divorce…
So… mom has higher income so I feel like at the time I just told her I’d go with her solely because of the financial stability… (I mean dad also doesn’t really show affection… 🤷♂️)
(This was many years ago, during my teenage years. The divorce thing never happened, empty threats…)
…
Now as a young adult, I’m dealing with depression and she still says this… and like I feel very awkward when she asks me “Do you love me?”
I do feel an attachment towards her, but idk if you can call it “love” per se.
So sometimes I stay quiet… so it just ended with an awkward silence…
Then mom was like: “Do you you not love me? Do you hate me?”
No wtf mom, that’s not what I meant…
Do parents just do that? Are they seeking validation about their decision to choose to have children?
Cultural Context: My family is ethnically Chinese.
“normal” for what culture?
I mean family culture, not national-culture.
It seems to me that they’re insecure, & committed to using you for their-own validation, & crowbarring you into remaining subjugated to that scam/game/manipulation.
( I had to go no-contact with both parents, for years at a time, for my survival: parental machiavellianism doesn’t have to be conscious machiavellianism. I don’t blame them, but did need to protect my life against their forcing-me-towards-breaking/failing, with all the personal-power I could muster. )
The oversimplification of “the 5 love languages”, the oversimplification being that people are somehow “exclusively 1 XOR another”, instead of being some mixture on a 5-dimension set-of-continuums/spectrums…
It seems your mother’s means of showing-love is verbal, & she felt need to have verbal-expression-of-love for her.
The “5 love languages” thing… when I found-out that some people NEED exchanging-of-things to feel loved, or to express love … WTF??
TOTALLY not the way I’m wired.
Never EVER would have dawned-on-me that some people actually were wired that way.
But… I’ve seen some people I knew who were wired that way!
Diversity-of-wiring’s a thing, right?
So, I think it was you mom being wired for verbal emotional-meaning, AND her trying to manipulate you into being what protected/fed her established-when-she-was-growing-up dysfunction-habit, AND I wouldn’t put 1 single cent on her being “to blame” for it, if she’s never dug into conquering her own unconscious-mind. I think it was probably the result of the growing-up she lived in, just repeating, in variation.
Discard everything I wrote unless something in it is of value for you.
I’ve only experience & what seems to be understanding: I’ve no academic-accreditation, but neither did Socrates, my hero, either.
But if it is of value, then may your life be more-powerfully-awakening/autonomizing, owning your future-karma, more.
_ /\ _