Love Bombing vs. Love

And how to help your kids know the difference

I recently asked on twitter what it feels like to be love bombed vs. real, healthy, genuine love. Growing up evangelical, I know what it’s like to be love bombed and to love bomb others. We were trained, or “shaped in community,” to love lavishly and care for others. And not just for one another, but also, perhaps even more so, for the “lost.” We learned to love bomb those who don’t yet know Jesus, so that they would be drawn by our Christian love to convert. 

After years of loving on others, at my school, in church, and on the mission field, I began deconstructing and realized with a haunting realization that I never learned to love myself. That my theology which compelled me to love others was rooted in self denial. As I began the deep work of unlearning that toxicity, I began to see that loving others for the purpose of evangelizing, however subtle and deeply embedded in our evangelical psyche, was just that: loving with an agenda. It is not true and it is not healthy.

I thought the people who love bombed me loved me for real, and I think many of them thought they did too. The Great Commandment is to love others like yourselves. Ironically, the Christians who preached this to me didn’t know how to love themselves and when they loved others like themselves, they were projecting a twisted form of love, one that is based in self-hate. 

But having moved beyond that world of conditional love, I’ve found a healthier form of love–when the person who loves me also has a robust sense of their own worth. There is a sense of relaxing in the presence of someone like this–like you know their love is born out of excess, of genuine, enthusiastic consent, like they actually, simply, want to love you.

Revolutionary. 

It’s a green flag when someone loves you like that. Healthy love is not actually unconditional. There is one condition: that you love them back in the way that they deserve to be loved, with respect and dignity. You’ll notice love bombers are oftentimes martyrs, they will do anything to please you. Healthy love demands reciprocity. When the people who love me demand I love them well, that I love them the way they feel loved, it makes me a better person and allows me to connect with them in a way that’s deeply genuine. It’s taken me a long time to learn to receive this gift but now I see it.

And boy do I want my kids to figure this out sooner than I did. I want them to love and to be loved, not unconditionally, but to love others the way they love themselves, which is pretty damn well. I want them to spot the red flags of unconditional love bombing, and the green flags of people who love them out of excess, from a well boundaried self. Because I know, if someone loves themselves well, they’ll be able to love my kids well.

And here comes the hard pill to swallow. If I want my kids to be someone who enters relationships with people with good boundaries? Drumroll ~~ I will need to be the one who has good boundaries with the way that I love them.

I need to normalize a green flag relationship.

I need to not be a martyr, to love myself, to show them how to treat me well.

Hoo boy, that is the work, isn’t it? 

Together,

Cindy

p.s. To join us in this work of healing from religious trauma and doing better by our kids, check out my PART membership.