RE: bode

While I don't like a lot about my upbringing, my parents did shower me with love

And what you're saying doesn't negate what I've said. I'm trying to rationalize why parental love is so powerful, and the closest I've gotten is through the vicariousness

I wouldn't know because I'm not a parent, but word is that parents constantly project themselves onto their kids in uncountable ways. I'm thinking that the love parents have for their kids is not unlike love they would have for themselves, if only they could. It's hard, almost impossible, to express unadulterated love for oneself, but perhaps kids are what bring it out

I come to these ideas because of how deep the vicariousness of parenting runs. It's almost as if when most people have kids, their own lives are put on the back burner for their new "proxy-self progeny"


It irks me when I'm told things about how you can't know the deepest love until you have a kid, because I don't want to have kids. So I'm left to try to figure out how true it is and why it may be true because then I can come to a more informed decision. It could be that I realize that they're right and it's not possible to love like you could a child, or maybe the truth is that people just naturally don't do what it takes to love themselves enough that the only time they feel the deep love is with a kid

Or it could be something else entirely. But I do think the self-projection thing is a very important aspect of why there is so much love from parent to child