This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "How to Be an Adult in Relationships" by David Richo. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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How do our parents affect our adult relationships? How can you learn to love in an emotionally mature way?
You’ll need to do some inner work to become someone who can love mindfully—an emotionally mature person. David Richo explains how your parents’ love shaped your ability to love mindfully—and how to mature emotionally by healing any childhood wounds you may have sustained.
Keep reading if you want to know how to learn to love and not let the past affect you.
Where Your Definition of Love Comes From
To understand how to learn to love, you need to know where you got your definition of love from. According to Richo, the love you received from your parents as a child set the stage for your adult love life. If your parents always loved you mindfully, then you’re set to become an emotionally mature adult: someone who knows how to give and receive mindful love. On the other hand, if your parents ever made you feel hurt or underloved, you sustained childhood wounds that can hold you back from becoming emotionally mature.
Richo explains that these childhood wounds can interfere with your ability to love mindfully in adulthood in three ways: You accept inadequate love, you expect your partner to fill a parental role, and/or you’re afraid of intimacy.
2 Ways to Mature Emotionally
Now we’ll look at two ways to mature emotionally so you can learn to love fully.
#1. How to Heal Your Childhood Wounds and Grow Emotionally
Richo says that you can overcome your childhood wounds and reach emotional maturity by learning to mindfully love yourself. Loving yourself leads to maturity because it gives you a strong sense of self-worth and a sense of responsibility for meeting your own needs.
(Shortform note: This process—giving yourself the love your parents couldn’t—is commonly known as reparenting yourself. Reparenting yourself involves, essentially, treating yourself like a parent should treat their child: keeping them safe, loved, and equipped with the skills and support they need to thrive. As you take care of this “inner child,” you’ll heal her wounds—and will stop repeating unhealthy patterns and behaviors that stemmed from an impulse to soothe your inner child’s pain. Instead, you’ll start to make rational, adult decisions that are good for you.)
Richo suggests three key self-love practices that can help you mature: recognizing your inherent lovability, setting healthy boundaries with others, and compassionately validating yourself.
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Here's what you'll find in our full How to Be an Adult in Relationships summary:
- The secret to a long-lasting, loving relationship
- How to overcome emotional wounds that hold you back from loving
- How the Buddhist concept of mindful loving can create a better world
