Why we can't stop longing for our parents’ approval (and how to finally get it)

The main character of the movie All of Us Strangers is a man in his late thirties, maybe early forties who, by his own account, has never been in love and who still struggles with the death of his parents.

The film is a heartbreaking study of loneliness and self-acceptance where the audience stands witness as the main protagonist goes back to the image of his mother and father, longing for their approval, and dealing with the pain of losing them at an early age.

Arguably, this is not most people’s experience in its specifics. How many people do you know who lost both their parents in an accident? But the need for the approval and love of our parents is universal. This is not rocket science: when we come to this world, we are extremely vulnerable and we crave safety. That’s the most basic instinct. We are biologically wired to establish a strong bond with those closest to us so that they care for us and protect us.

We need their love and care to survive. It’s not a ‘nice to have’ feature, it is quite literally an existential requirement.

When we don’t get it, we are in existential terror.

And this feeling of existential terror, that’s trauma. As children, we don’t have the cognitive or indeed linguistic skills to describe what we are experiencing, but that feeling of terror nestles in our bodies and subconscious. What often happens in the early trauma situation is that the mind of a child comes up with some coping mechanisms to survive in the given hostile environment.

Your father is volatile? Then you better learn early on that suppressing your own needs to accommodate for his mood swings will lead to some temporary peace.  Your mother is neglectful? Better accept that there is no love available to you, so you can move through the next day. Because the reality – the fact that your dad is unstable or that the love and protection of your own mother is not available because she does not know how to love you, or worse, she simply does not love you – is so enormous and so painful that a child’s brain and heart would explode if they let themselves to accept it.

We learn these mechanisms and patterns early on. We lodge them deep in the subconscious. They are cemented there and fortified with every decision and every action we take.

There are many behavioral experiments showing how we filter for what we’re looking for. In other words, if we are told to look for anything blue in the room, we’ll be clocking all the blue items, disregarding anything that isn’t that particular color. Similarly, if we believe that we have no power and our needs do not matter, we will perceive all interactions as further proof that this is true. Our behavior is dictated by our beliefs and our actions reinforce those beliefs. The more we see the blue in the room or the more we believe that we don’t deserve love, the more we act in that way and the harder it is for anything else to appear as an alternative.

Without some form of intervention – whether that’s through therapy, a psychedelic trip, a life-altering event, or anything else that will make us question and change that original belief, it is very hard to overcome the patterns formed early in childhood.

In other words, if we don’t address the (often unhelpful) beliefs we formed as children, we will continue to act upon them in adulthood.

That sounds logical, right? We should address the feelings of abandonment, or inadequacy, or fear that we developed when we were children. We should deal with it when we grow up. But when exactly is this reckoning supposed to happen?

Maddeningly, we do naturally outgrow certain ideas and beliefs that we held so dear when we were kids. We figure them out and logically abandon them as irrational or childish.

At some point, we realize that Santa isn’t real, that the Easter Bunny is a scam, and that our parents are also struggling to figure things out. We learn to accept that the heartache of our first love will pass eventually, that some friends will not stick around even though back in middle school we would swear we would be best friends forever.

And because we are naturally outgrowing these ideas and childhood beliefs, we are expecting to also outgrow the very personal, very existential beliefs like ‘I am damaged and I don’t deserve love’ or ‘there’s something wrong with me’ or ‘my needs are less important than the needs of everybody else’.

But we cannot live freely if we are stuck in the patterns we formed as children. The movie I referenced at the beginning, All of Us Strangers, shows a grown man who got through university, got a job, and now has enough money to move into a fancy apartment building. From the outside, he’s doing quite well. If we only look at the external features, it’s easy to imagine him in a committed relationship, loving his life, progressing professionally. Instead, he’s desperately trapped in the dynamics of his childhood. He’s unable to open up and let love in. He wants to commit to another person but feels like he can’t because he’s still caught in the emotional patterns of a 12-year-old boy. He doesn’t permit himself to be who he is because he’s worried that his parents will not love him if he’s honest with them about who he is.

We, the audience, are transfixed not only because we sense the main character’s vulnerability and emotional fragility but because the movie touches upon something so universal. Here is a grown man who should be a full adult, clear in his understanding of who he is. And yet, he can’t connect with another person in the present time until he deals with the patterns formed in the past. The longing for parental love is fundamental and primal. And when we don’t have it, the void is unbearable. It haunts us in obvious or latent ways but it’s there like a gaping wound. We must close it.

This is paramount. It’s not about dealing with the past because it’s there to be dealt with. Or because we are some OCD completists and need to check off that box. We must address the past if there remains any open wound because otherwise, we can’t access joy and love. And that is a terrible, double loss: of the life we could have had in the past and the one we are denying ourselves now.

The most critical piece in this equation of unfulfilled need is the understanding that when you are an adult, you do not need your parents to be the ones actually giving the approval or love or acceptance to you. Once you identify that this (need for love when you were a child) is something you need, you can step in as an adult and give the love and acceptance to yourself. Once you realize that you have been modifying your behavior for most of your life in order to get what you didn’t have as a child - be it your parents' love or acceptance or anything else - you can give it all to yourself.

In my RTNC practice, these are usually the most beautiful and most moving breakthroughs. The client recognizes what they long for and because now they are adults, they are able to give this love and acceptance to themselves.

As grown-ups, we can close the open loop. We can step in and help the inner child. We do not need the parents to ‘get it’ or to apologize or to do anything. Sure, some people are lucky and their parents at some point admit wrongdoing or some past misunderstanding and tragic misconceptions get explained. There might be closure.

But the majority of people do not get such a rare opportunity. What I know from my practice is that we are our own most powerful healers if only we let our bodies and subconscious be part of the healing process.