There’s a particular kind of childhood that doesn’t get named very often. The household where one parent was distant and emotionally unavailable, and the other was overwhelming and emotionally everywhere. You grew up trying to learn what love was from both of them at once.
Both of them loved you. Most of these parents did. The problem wasn’t a lack of love. The problem was that the two versions on offer were so different from each other that you ended up without a clear template for what love is supposed to look like coming back at you.
This isn’t a niche experience. Talk to enough adults about how their parents handled affection and you’ll find this combination shows up constantly. The withholding father and the flooding mother. Or the smothering father and the unreachable mother. The proportions change. The pattern doesn’t.
And it does something specific to how you end up doing relationships.
Two opposite languages, one household
One parent gave you love in a register you could barely register as love. They worked, they provided, they were there in the house, but they didn’t say the words, didn’t hug, didn’t ask how you were. You knew, somewhere, that you mattered to them. You also knew you couldn’t actually feel it most of the time.
The other parent gave you love in a register that was hard to live inside. They told you they loved you constantly. They wanted to know everything. They cried when you cried, sometimes harder than you cried. They were always there, often more there than you wanted them to be. Love from them came with a kind of weight, and pulling away from it felt like rejecting them, so you mostly didn’t pull away.
This is, in attachment-theory terms, a recipe for what the research calls inconsistent or incongruent caregiving. The classic research on attachment, going back to John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the 1960s and 1970s, focused mostly on consistency within a single caregiver. But the basic insight scales up. When a child can’t reliably predict what response their reaching out for connection is going to produce, they learn to relate to closeness as something uncertain. The mental model of “what happens when I want love” stops being stable.
In a household with one withholding parent and one flooding parent, you don’t have one inconsistent caregiver. You have two consistent ones, each consistent in opposite directions. Which is its own kind of inconsistency, just at the household level.
What this does to the adult
Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver’s foundational 1987 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Romantic Love Conceptualized as an Attachment Process, argued something that has held up across decades of follow-up research. The way adults experience romantic love is shaped, in significant ways, by the attachment patterns they learned in childhood. Not deterministically. Not without exceptions. But shaped.
Children who grew up with consistently responsive parents tend, on average, to expect that closeness will be reliable, and that asking for what they need will go reasonably well. Children who grew up with inconsistent caregiving tend to expect the opposite, and they organize their adult relationships accordingly.
For adults who grew up between a withholding parent and a flooding parent, this often shows up as a very particular oscillation.
With one kind of partner, you barely ask for anything. You’re so used to one parent’s emotional absence that distance feels familiar, almost normal. A partner who isn’t quite reaching for you doesn’t ring alarm bells. It rings recognition. You stay in the relationship longer than you should, asking for less than you need, because the emotional baseline feels right.
With another kind of partner, you tolerate too much. The intensity, the demands, the boundary-blurring, the inability to be alone in your own head. You’re used to it. One of your parents trained you, with the best of intentions, to read love as something heavy and inescapable. So when someone shows up with that kind of weight, you don’t flinch. You just absorb it.
Some adults move through both patterns at different points. Some have one big relationship that runs aground on the cold-distance side and the next one on the smothering side. Some find themselves cycling within a single relationship.
The cleanest way to describe what’s underneath this is Bowlby’s idea of an internal working model. Children develop, over years of small experiences, a mental template for what relationships are. The template has two parts. What can I expect from people who are supposed to love me, and what kind of person am I in a relationship with them? Children raised between two opposite parental styles often end up with a template that’s internally divided. The two halves don’t agree with each other. So when you walk into a new relationship as an adult, you have, in effect, two competing scripts running at once. Neither of them is the steady, calibrated thing that secure attachment looks like.
What love is supposed to feel like, and why you can’t tell
One of the harder parts of this inheritance is that you genuinely don’t know what good looks like.
If you grew up with consistently warm and appropriately respectful parents, you have a working baseline. Love, in your head, looks like a particular kind of present, attentive, not-overwhelming way of being with another person. When you encounter that in adulthood, you recognize it.
If you grew up between the two extremes, your baseline is harder to find. The steady, present, not-too-much, not-too-little version of love can feel, to you, like nothing at all. It doesn’t pattern-match to either of the templates you were raised on. So you walk past it. Or you mistake it for boredom. Or you assume the person doesn’t really love you, because they’re not doing either of the things you were taught love looks like.
This is one of the most disorienting parts of the pattern, and it’s one that takes a lot of years of relationships to even notice. The version of love your nervous system is calibrated to detect is often not the version that’s actually good for you.
Diana Baumrind’s foundational research on parenting styles, beginning in the 1960s and extended across decades of follow-up work, has consistently pointed at a particular combination as the one associated with the best outcomes for children. Warmth combined with appropriate structure. Not warmth-without-limits. Not limits-without-warmth. The middle thing. The children who get the middle thing tend, on average, to develop the kind of stable internal sense of self that makes secure adult relationships easier to recognize and easier to stay inside.
The middle thing was probably the thing your household didn’t have. Either parent, in isolation, might have been capable of giving it. The two of them, as a unit, weren’t able to produce it together.
A note about your parents, while we’re here
It would be easy to read this and conclude that one or both of your parents was emotionally damaged or broken or unworthy. That’s not, in most cases, what was happening.
The parent who couldn’t show love often came from a household where showing love wasn’t done. They were operating with a vocabulary they had inherited, and they were, in their own way, doing their best. The parent who showed too much was often compensating, consciously or unconsciously, for that absence. They were trying to make up the deficit, and the love they poured in was real, even if the amount was hard to live inside.
Both of them, in most cases, loved you. Both of them, in most cases, were doing the best they could with the emotional equipment they had been given. This doesn’t make the inheritance less real for you. But it might change what you do with it.
What can shift, and how slowly
One of the more hopeful findings in the adult attachment research is that internal working models are not fixed. They’re sticky, but not fixed. Adults can develop what attachment researchers call “earned security,” a more stable, secure attachment style that develops in adulthood through good relationships, therapy, reflection, and time.
The first step, in most accounts, is recognizing the pattern. Recognizing that the version of love you’re calibrated to detect is not the only version of love. Recognizing that the steady, present, not-too-much version is also love, even if it doesn’t trigger any of the alarms your childhood trained you to listen for.
The second step is, usually, slower. It’s learning to recognize it in real time. Letting yourself stay in relationships that feel oddly quiet. Letting yourself notice when an attention pattern that feels familiar might actually be the old script running, rather than the present-day reality.
This is the work many adults find themselves doing somewhere in their thirties and forties, often without realizing that’s what they’re doing. Untangling what love is from what they were taught love is. Letting the calmer, smaller, more workable version of it count as the real thing.
If you grew up between two extremes, you didn’t get the template. That’s a real thing to have missed. But you can build it. Not from your parents, who didn’t have it to give. From yourself, slowly, in the relationships you’re choosing now.
That’s a quieter inheritance. It’s also the one that actually works.
