When "I Love You, Mom" Is Difficult To Say: Five Healthy Tips

Although we often expect a mother's love to be unconditional, we may not always receive it. There can be many types of dysfunctional parent-child relationships, including dismissive, controlling, unavailable, enmeshed, and self-involved relationships, among others. These dysfunctional relationships can have negative impacts on children, including decreased self-esteem, difficulty forming healthy attachments, issues with trust and conflict, and an increased risk of depression. If you’ve experienced a dysfunctional parent-child relationship and are wondering, “Why can’t I say ‘I love you’ to my mom?” it may help to love yourself, avoid taking your parent’s actions personally, work on healing, be realistic and patient, and know that expressing your love for your parent does not give them the license to act as they please. In addition, online therapy may help you cope with any challenging emotions and work toward healing your relationship with your parent.

When parent-child relationships aren’t what you expected

In general, we expect that our parents, including our mom and dad, will love us unconditionally. However, just because someone is a parent doesn’t mean they will necessarily live up to this ingrained expectation. In fact, it’s not unusual for the people who are closest to us, like our family, to cause us the most pain. Parents often love as best as they can, but sometimes even the best mom or dad can fall short.

If that’s been the case in your relationship with your parents, it may be very difficult to say “I love you” to them. You may find that expressing love in this way can feel awkward, especially if the relationship typically lacks affection. However, it’s important to know that there does not have to be shame in that.

In real life, here’s what that might look like:

• You and your parent have a dysfunctional and hurtful relationship (we’ll cover examples of dysfunctional relationships next), or
• You and your parent have unresolved issues.

When you acknowledge the reality of your relationship, you may be able to take steps to heal yourself. Then, you may also be able to reconcile and rebuild the relationship you have with your parent, if that’s something you’d like to do.

Understanding the dynamic of your relationship can help you to figure out why it’s difficult to feel love for your parent as well as why it’s difficult to express your feelings for them. Author Peg Streep, who writes about parent-child relationships, outlines eight different types of dysfunctional relationships.

Streep's eight prototypes

Dismissive

The dismissive parent can make you feel unheard and unimportant, even on special occasions like Mother's Day. It may seem as if when you’re talking, they don’t hear a word you say. Sometimes, this dismissal can become rejection, which can create even more pain and tension. It can be challenging to cope with the feeling of rejection.

Often, to win the parent’s approval (which is code for love and attention), children will demand that their parents love them or try to fix the problem by overachieving. They may assume that by doing their best in school and in other situations, they may begin to matter in their parents’ eyes.

Controlling

Controlling parents, even those with the best intentions like a loving mom, may micromanage, indicating that they do not respect their child's emotions, thoughts, or actions. This can cause a daughter or son to feel unstable, helpless, and inadequate, despite their strong mother's wishes for their well-being. An individual with a controlling parent may fear doing anything for themselves, especially when trying something new for the first time. It can be common for parents to be controlling toward their first-born child in some cases, as they may view it as a form of defense.

Unavailable

As Streep writes, “Children are hardwired to rely on their parents thanks to evolution.” While an unavailable parent isn’t necessarily a mean individual, they can cause significant damage to their children. When a child feels that certain people (i.e., their parents) don’t care about them, they may believe that it’s not possible for anybody to love them.

What happens when parents are emotionally and physically unavailable? It can leave children hungry for loving attention and sometimes make them needy and desperate for it. They may seek the true love they’re craving from friends and other adults in their lives.

Enmeshed

The dismissive parent typically places a lot of distance between themself and their child. But in enmeshed relationships, there may be little to no boundaries, and the identities of both the parent and the child can become blurred. Unfortunately for the child, their own identity can all but disappear in the image of their parent. They may never feel heard, and when they talk to their parent, it can seem as if they are entirely responsible for managing their parent’s emotions at all moments of the day.

Combative

While combative parents might sound noisy and disruptive, the truth is that their behaviors are usually kept hidden from the public eye and may only take place within the boundary of the family’s house. Often employing emotional and verbal abuse, combative parents can be jealous of and competitive with their children, along with being highly critical of them. 

Unreliable

When children don’t know what to expect from their parents, they may have what Streep refers to as an unreliable parent. This can go on to influence how they approach all relationships and interactions – with a wary and guarded stance. They can be a bit overly cautious when opening up to new people.

Self-involved

The self-involved parent generally treats their relationship with their child as more of a political game in which they use their child to make themself look good and help them feel better about themself.

Role reversal

This may be the most uncommon of dysfunctional parent-child relationships, but it can still occur. This can happen when the child takes on the role of parent and vice versa.

Unfortunately, this can occur at a very young age for some people. If parents experience mental illness, substance abuse, or other issues, role reversal can occur and rob the child of their childhood or teenage years. What’s more, it can prevent the child from ever having a loving and attentive parent.

Negative impacts of dysfunctional parent-child relationships

As you read through the eight types of parent-child dysfunctional relationships, it’s clear to see that they can cause a lot of pain to the child.

A brief overview of some of the negative impacts can help you understand why it’s often difficult to say “I love you” to parents when their love was absent or limited. Even hearing or writing the words “I love you” may bring up a variety of challenging emotions.

Decreased self-love and self-confidence

Children who feel unloved may have a hard time with self-love, self-confidence, and self-esteem, never believing they’re good enough, smart enough, or beautiful enough for themselves or others.

These children may not see themselves accurately. They might believe that they always fall short. This can lead to self-destructive behaviors, including eating disorders, as this 2005 study shows.

Difficulty forming healthy attachments

Children often want, but don’t get enough of, their parent’s love and attention. As a result, they tend to become people-pleasers and pushovers who have a difficult time saying no and setting boundaries. Research has found that unhealthy parent-child relationship patterns can make it difficult for adult children to form secure attachments later in life.

Trust and conflict issues from a young age

Children who feel unloved may also have trust issues and tend to think that relationships are unreliable. Although these children often want love, they don’t want to get hurt anymore, so they may unconsciously avoid love and commitment in healthy relationships. This can make it even more difficult for them to receive the love and attention they may desperately need. In addition, they may struggle with conflict resolution because of the unhealthy patterns they learned as a child.

Depression

Finally, children who feel unloved can present with more depressive symptoms than those from healthy parent-child relationships.

Tips for when it's challenging to say "I love you" to a parent

When a child has a dysfunctional relationship with a parent, it may not be a surprise that it’s hard for them to say “I love you.” In fact, their emotions may be far from loving. They may wrestle with many negative emotions, such as confusion, anger, resentment, bitterness, and others.

Just the thought of saying “I love you” to parents can stir up a powerful emotional response. If that’s the case, there are things you can do for yourself that may help.

However, it’s important to note that the goal of these healthy tips is not to coax you into saying these three words. Rather, the ideal outcome from these five healthy tips would be to support yourself and your healing process.

Give yourself lots of love

Daughters and sons who experience a difficult relationship with their mothers or fathers may have difficulty with many things, including self-love. Perhaps one reason why it's so hard for them to give themselves love is that they're still waiting to receive it from their dear mom or dad.

Even though society generally expects parents, like the best mother, to love and care for their children, the truth is that they can fall short. If that's been your experience with parental love, that doesn't mean you are unworthy of love.

Still, it may help you to realize that you don't need to rely on anyone, even your moms or dads, for love. In fact, you can give yourself love. By practicing simple self-care rituals, seeking professional help, or taking care of yourself in even the smallest of ways, you may start to feel whole and worthy. It can be very empowering to give yourself the gift of love.

Don’t take it personally

When someone, even your mom or dad, treats you badly, it can be natural to take offense and feel bad about it. But what would happen if you didn't take your parent's bad behavior personally, like a strong mother might do? Consider that the way you handled a difficult interaction with your parent the last time does not need to be the way you continue to handle conflicts with them in the future.

You might be reeling in your seat as you hear this. Still, it may be enlightening to realize that many people make unconscious decisions to keep pain in their lives because they don't know how to live any other way.

Your parent may have been (or may still be) one of the eight prototypes we mentioned earlier in the article. But that may be simply because they are in so much pain themself. Realizing that they might be deeply wounded could help explain – but not excuse – their actions. What's more, this can make their actions a reflection of their pain and not a reaction to your worth and value.

Work on healing

This tip may stir up strong feelings, and that's understandable. After all, your mom or dad may be the one who should be expected to work on themselves and change. But the truth is, you generally can't force anyone, even your mother or father, to change, nor can you change anyone.

What you may be able to change, though, is yourself. This doesn't mean you have to deny what happened with your parent, resort to love you mom quotes or tell them you love mom if it doesn't feel true and genuine.

It does mean that you can start to heal yourself and change your mindset, especially when it comes to your self-perception and your relationship with your parent.

Be realistic and patient about saying those three words

Do you have an idea of how you'd like your current mother daughter or parent child relationship to look? Depending on your past, along with the type of dysfunctional relationship you have or had with your mom, dad, or mum, it can be important to remain realistic.

However, this shouldn't be confused with being pessimistic. The truth is, healing can take time, and nothing good usually comes from rushing important projects, especially something like healing a relationship with your parent.

You may wish to begin by getting clear on what you want and then deciding how realistic it is while remaining prepared for your relationship goals to take some time, even when saying "thank you mom" seems difficult.

Know that saying “I love you” does not give your parents carte blanche

Are you afraid that by telling your parents you love them, you’ll make yourself vulnerable and get hurt all over again? If so, remember that this expression of love is not the same as:

• Letting them be a part of all aspects of your life
• Being their best friend
• Giving them more opportunities to hurt you again

You can love someone and still have boundaries. This doesn’t necessarily make you mean; it can make you a self-respecting person who sets guidelines, showing people how to behave and interact with you. It can be a way to treat yourself with respect and to help others do the same.

You can say “I love you” to your parent, but that doesn’t mean you have to intimate details or important aspects of your life with them if you’re not ready to.

Will your parent hurt you again? It may be possible, as we typically cannot control other people. But with boundaries, you can decide how to act in those situations, and your parent may not be surprised by your actions because you laid them out in the boundaries beforehand. What’s more, you can also limit opportunities for further abuse and pain.

In an ideal world, we might all have a wonderful relationship with our parents. For some people, this may not be the case, and they must come to terms with dysfunctional parent-child relationships.

If it’s difficult for you to love your parent, try to remember to be kind, compassionate, and patient with yourself. It can be the best way to begin healing.

Online therapy may help you heal

As discussed above, experiencing a dysfunctional relationship with a parent can have lasting harmful effects, such as an increased risk of depression and trouble forming healthy attachments. If you’re experiencing any of these issues, therapy may be a helpful option for you. You may feel uncomfortable visiting a therapist’s office in person, and that’s where online therapy can be beneficial, as you may attend sessions with a licensed therapist from anywhere with an internet connection.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT, is commonly used to help alleviate symptoms of depression and help with other mental health issues. It generally works by aiming to change thought patterns, which can then change emotions and behaviors. According to this study, online CBT can be as effective as traditional in-person CBT.