The Exploited Child

Love that only works in service of a parent’s wound

We like to believe in that parents are selfless givers of love and children as blessed recipients. The reality is, children are often drafted, silently and without choice, into tending their parents’ pain.

For many, the only love we received was love in service of the parent’s unresolved wounds. Love that wasn’t about who we were, but about what they could extract from us to soothe themselves.

Love came with an invisible footnote: as long as you don’t threaten my fragile system. You can be expressive, but not more expressive than Dad. You can be needy, but only in ways Mom can tolerate. You can shine, but never so brightly that it exposes the cracks in your parents’ own unlived lives.

Love was never about you being celebrated; it was about the relief you could bring to their wounds. You weren’t truly attuned to — you were used. Not always in some monstrous, villainous way, but in the quiet, ordinary way that passes intergenerational trauma along. This is the pattern and this is how it happens.

The result? We are severed from our own spontaneous reality. From our entire sense of self.

You didn’t learn I am because I am. You learned I am because you see me.