Love is supposed to heal, to hold, to free.

But sometimes it's used to control, to shame, to keep us small.

In today's episode, we're talking about what happens when love becomes a weapon and how to recognize the difference between care and control before it cuts too deep.

Welcome to More Human, More Kind, the podcast helping parents of LGBTQ kids move from fear to fierce allyship and feel less alone and more informed so you can protect what matters, raise brave kids, and spark collective change.

I'm Heather Hester.

Let's get started.

In this episode, you'll discover how to recognize when I love you hides control.

You'll learn to identify the subtle language and emotional cues that turn love into leverage and how to set boundaries that honor your dignity.

You'll discover why real love always includes freedom.

We'll unpack the science and the psychology of secure attachment, where respect and autonomy replace fear and compliance.

And you'll discover how to heal your relationship with love itself.

Through reflection and practice, you'll begin to redefine what love feels like when it's safe, steady, and unconditional, both in how you give it and how you receive it.

And be sure to stick around for the unlearn, where I will dismantle one of the biggest myths of all, that tough love always means real love.

Welcome to More Human, More Kind.

I'm Heather Hester, and today we are talking about when love, the word we trust most, becomes something that confuses or manipulates or even harms.

Maybe you felt that tension ache between wanting to be loved and realizing that the love you're receiving has strings attached.

This episode isn't about blaming or shaming.

It's about clarity, seeing the difference between care and control and remembering that real love never demands your silence.

So let's start where all great reckonings begin, with a question.

What is love?

Not the version we perform or the one we were told to earn, but the real thing, the kind that builds instead of breaks, the kind that frees instead of fears.

What does love mean to you?

How do you know someone loves you?

And conversely, when you tell someone you love them, do they feel loved?

Love is powerful, far more powerful than we may realize or understand at any given moment.

It can break us or build us.

It can sustain us or starve us.

It can fill every atom of our body or leave us an empty shell.

Think for a moment back to your family of origin.

What was their definition of love, and how did they give and receive it?

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that love meant obedience or silence.

We may have learned that we needed to act a certain way to be loved.

So how do we recognize when love is being used to control, shame or manipulate?

Weaponized love often sounds soft on the surface, but the impact can be sharp phrases like, if you loved me, you wouldn't do that.

I'm doing this because I love you.

If you loved me, you'd understand.

And one of my favorites, I love you.

But.

Each of these communicates a hidden message.

Love is conditional.

It's a transaction.

Affection in exchange for obedience, approval, or alignment.

You may be wondering why I'm tackling this topic right now.

Moving into the holidays, a time of tradition, joy, family, togetherness.

Lots and lots of togetherness.

That's actually exactly why I'm tackling this very sneaky, manipulative, and deeply hurtful form of love.

I want to share what I've realized and learned over the course of the past few years in the hope that, at the very least, I can help you understand the nuance and see clearly and perhaps even help you avoid unnecessary pain.

Through a series of events in my own life, I've come to recognize versions of love more easily.

I've talked a lot on this show about unconditional love, as well as its opposite, conditional or transactional love.

Those are pretty easy to spot.

Today, though, we're going to talk about weaponized love, which is hard to recognize and even harder to confront.

Not only is it confusing, it can make you feel like you're crazy, which, spoiler alert is exactly what the person offering this flavor of love wants.

It's also called coercive control.

It's essentially a pattern where love or care is used to dominate another person's autonomy.

According to Dr. Evan Stark, coercive love is not always overt abuse.

It's a subtle erosion of freedom disguised as care or protection.

In family systems, it often shows up as gaslighting, which is making someone doubt their own feelings.

For example, statements like, you're too sensitive.

I'm just trying to help.

It can also show up as guilt or pity, manipulation, using shame to enforce compliance.

For example.

Something like, after all I've done for you.

And it can show up as spiritual or moral coercion, suggesting divine or moral superiority.

For example, something like, I just want you to do what's right in God's eyes.

When this kind of love, quote unquote love is used, people, especially kids, internalize confusion.

Am I being cared for or controlled?

If this feels familiar, ask yourself, does this person's quote unquote love make me feel Smaller, guilty, or constantly wrong?

Do I have to hide parts of myself to stay connected?

And do I feel less safe when I express disagreement?

And remember, safety is not just physical.

It is emotional, mental, and spiritual as well.

If love repeatedly costs your authenticity, it's not love.

It's leverage.

The Gottman Institute identifies criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling as love eroding behaviors, warning that many stem from a desire for control rather than genuine connection.

When love is weaponized, whether it is in parenting, in religious settings, or in politics, it becomes a tool of power.

It is so easy to get pulled into the idea, the hope, the desire, that these forms are really love, just perhaps a lesser form.

Weaponized love teaches people, especially kids, that belonging is conditional, that safety has strings attached.

And once you internalize that, you start policing yourself.

You shrink, you apologize for existing.

For LGBTQ youth and really anyone raised under conditional love, the message is devastating.

Who you are is too much for love.

Or worse, who you are is not worthy of being loved.

But here's the twist.

Love that controls isn't stronger.

It's actually weaker because it's terrified of losing power.

So how do we begin to reclaim love?

First, we start by noticing when love feels like fear.

Real love expands you.

False love constricts you, makes you smaller.

Second, practice curiosity over compliance, over just obeying.

Ask, is this love asking me to change who I am or helping me become more of myself?

And third, when you feel that pang of shame or guilt attached to love, pause.

Take that beautiful pause.

Breathe.

That is your signal that something is off.

Pay attention to that feeling.

At its core, real, unconditional love creates space, not submission.

It allows each person to breathe, to evolve, and to freely choose connection.

When you love someone, whether it's a partner, a child, a parent, a friend, you're saying, I see your autonomy as sacred.

That's what distinguishes attachment from possession.

Neuroscience and attachment research, back this up and you know that I love it.

When there is science and research to support, we are talking about Dr. Sue Johnson and Dr. Dan Siegel.

Both emphasize that secure love rests on three pillars.

The first is emotional safety.

No fear of rejection or punishment.

The second pillar is mutual respect.

You are seen and valued as a separate being, as a human being.

And the third pillar is choice.

Connection is voluntary, not coerced.

When fear enters the equation, the brain's amygdala activates.

This is the same threat response triggered by physical danger.

That means even if words say love, your body hears danger.

And it may even react physically with sudden sweating or rapid heartbeat or heightened senses.

If love requires fear to maintain it, it's not love.

So how do we begin to repair our relationship with love, both in giving and receiving it?

Many of us carry love trauma, which is the residue of being loved in ways that hurt.

Repairing your relationship with love means reclaiming your internal definition of what love feels like, not just what it should look like.

When we've experienced conditional love, we often repeat those same conditions.

Inwardly, I'll rest when I've earned it.

I'll forgive myself when I'm a better person.

Dr. Kristin Neff's research on self compassion shows that true healing begins when we replace self criticism with self kindness.

You can't rebuild love on top of shame.

You have to first stop wounding yourself in the name of improvement.

Here are four steps that you can take.

First, reclaim your definitions.

Write out what love means to you right now, not what you were taught.

For example, it could be something like Love means I have the space to grow or Love means curiosity.

Second, notice your reflexes.

When you say I'm doing this because I love them, pause and ask yourself, is this an act about their freedom or my fear?

Step three is to practice micro self love.

What does that mean?

It means each time you choose rest over guilt, honesty over pretending, or or compassion over performance, you repair a strand of love's original design.

And step four is to seek secure examples.

Surround yourself with all types of relationships, friendships, communities, and even media that model love rooted and respect.

Your nervous system learns and heals through repetition and safe exposure.

Dr. Gabor Mate emphasizes that love is not just an emotion, it is an attachment that shapes the nervous system, and healing requires new experiences of safe connection.

When we start seeing love as freedom with care rather than control with comfort, everything shifts.

We can begin to parent differently by listening before correcting.

We can partner differently by respecting difference without fear.

We can begin to speak differently by letting love sound like curiosity, not coercion.

As I was creating this episode, a number of ways that this type of weaponized love might appear over the holidays came up and.

I thought it would be really, really great to actually put it into actual writing instead of speaking it.

So in the next newsletter there will be a section that goes a little bit more into detail of what ways weaponized love might appear for you over the holidays and specific ways that you can handle it.

So stay tuned and keep your eyes open for that.

I chose this topic today with the hope that the awareness and knowledge would help you go into the holidays more well prepared and there is a much more personal reason as well.

A few months ago, while I was visiting some family, I allowed myself to be baited into a discussion.

I knew better than to enter, but alas, I did.

Of the several people involved, one happened to be a person who should have had my back.

And yet, while the manipulative twisting of words and just the outright cruelty of the conversation increased, this person just sat there, not saying a word.

It was only once the two of us were alone that they began hugging me and.

Telling me over and over how much they loved me and how much I meant to them.

And if you've ever been in a situation like that, you know how not only uncomfortable that is, but how confusing it is, because in that moment kept thinking, where was this 30 minutes ago?

And why.

Why have you never shown up, essentially?

And, and I say this because this, this has been the norm for most of my life.

But it was only in that moment that I recognized exactly what it had all meant.

It had been so confusing for so long, especially as a child.

And it all just kind of hit me at once.

And even though I was completely heartbroken, not just by, again, that treatment in a moment, but by this realization.

I was also able to understand the reality of this relationship and these relationships with ridiculous clarity.

And so when this person sent a text a few weeks later that said, because I love you, please listen to this tribute, I was able to hone in on the way love was weaponized in this instance much more quickly than ever before.

Understanding that love can be used to hurt could reasonably lead to shutting out all love.

But I think it's so much more fulfilling to embrace that magical holding the tension of the opposites.

Love can be both beautiful and dangerous.

Real love doesn't need a disclaimer.

It holds.

It doesn't hold hostage.

Today's Unlearn is about one of the most dangerous myths that we're taught, that tough love is always the highest form of love.

The story goes, if it hurts, it must mean that they care.

But pain isn't proof of love.

It's proof of power imbalance.

What if love wasn't about toughness at all?

What if it was about truth, honesty, accountability and tenderness?

Real love is strong enough to be soft.

This week, I want you to notice one place where you've confused control for care.

Instead of saying, I'm only doing this because I love you, try asking, what would love do here if it weren't afraid?

When we unlearn fear based love, we make space for love that frees instead of binds.

Love that makes us more human and more kind.

Today we peel back the layers of what love really means, how it can heal and how it can hurt.

You've learned how to recognize when affection becomes control and how to rebuild your own definition of love.

And how to practice giving and receiving it with freedom instead of fear.

Remember, love that requires you to disappear isn't love.

It's leverage.

Real love expands.

It breathes.

It gives you room to become more of yourself, not less.

Thank you so much for spending time with me today.

New episodes of More Human, More Kind drop every Tuesday and Friday, so make sure you follow and subscribe wherever you listen.

And if you're ready to release fear, shame and outdated patterns in your own life, I'm accepting a few private clients right now.

You can learn more at morehumanmorekind.

Com.

Until next time, be gentle, be curious, and be kind, starting with yourself.

Sam.