Shownotes
What if love was never meant to be earned, just allowed?
In this powerful and tender episode of More Human, More Kind, Heather Hester invites you to examine the stories you carry about love, especially the ones you learned before you even had the words to question them. Through science, psychology, and personal reflection, she explores how childhood attachment patterns shape our adult definitions of love and how to rewrite those stories with compassion, curiosity, and conscious parenting.
Whether you're an LGBTQ+ ally, a parent trying to raise emotionally healthy kids, or someone healing from conditional or weaponized love, this episode is an invitation to stop performing for love and start remembering what real, safe, expansive love actually feels like.
- Understand how your earliest relationships shaped your attachment style and love blueprint
- Learn how to identify the old stories that tell you love requires sacrifice, silence, or suffering
- Get practical tools to begin repairing your relationship with love through journaling, micro-moments of self-compassion, and nervous system care
- Reflect on how to model secure, respectful, and inclusive love for yourself, your children, and the people you care about most
Many of us, especially LGBTQ+ individuals and parents, were taught that love means staying no matter the cost. But love that asks you to disappear isn’t love. It’s survival.
Real love makes room for truth, safety, and freedom and when we unlearn fear-based attachment, we become better allies, better parents, and more whole humans.
Try This Journaling Prompt:
"The future version of me will thank me for..."
or
"I'm learning to speak to myself like..."
Write it. Read it aloud. Let it be your new evidence of love.
Want to Go Deeper?
Join Heather every Friday on Substack for live guided journaling sessions and Q&A: a soft, brave space to reconnect with your heart, especially before the holidays. MoreHumanMoreKind.com
Press play now to begin unlearning fear-based love and to remember what it feels like to be held without condition.
Resource Spotlight
Book: All About Love by bell hooks — foundational wisdom on redefining love as an active choice.
Research: Dr. Kristin Neff, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself (HarperCollins, 2011).
Therapy Resource: Attachment Theory in Practice by Dr. Sue Johnson — how early bonding shapes our adult relationships.
Study: Barbara Fredrickson, “Love 2.0” (University of North Carolina, 2013) — the science of micro-moments of love.
Book: How We Love by Milan & Kay Yerkovich
Podcast Episode: “Healing the Inner Child” – Unlocking Us with Brené Brown
Hi, I’m Heather Hester, and I’m so glad you’re here!
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At the heart of my work is a deep commitment to compassion, authenticity, and transformative allyship, especially for those navigating the complexities of parenting LGBTQ+ kids. Through this podcast, speaking, my writing, and the spaces I create, I help people unlearn bias, embrace their full humanity, and foster courageous, compassionate connection.
If you’re in the thick of parenting, allyship, or pioneering a way to lead with love and kindness, I’m here with true, messy, and heart-warming stories, real tools, and grounding support to help you move from fear to fierce, informed action.
Whether you’re listening in, working with me directly, or quietly taking it all in, I see you. And I’m so glad you’re part of this journey.
More Human. More Kind. formerly Just Breathe: Parenting Your LGBTQ Teen is a safe and supportive podcast and space where a mom and mental health advocate offers guidance on parenting with empathy, inclusion, and open-minded allyship, fostering growth, healing, and empowerment within the LGBTQ community—including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals—while addressing grief, boundaries, education, diversity, human rights, gender identity, sexual orientation, social justice, and the power of human kindness through a lens of ally support and community engagement.
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Transcripts
In this episode, you will be invited to examine how the stories you carry about love affect the way you parent.
Speaker A: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.
Speaker A:I'm Heather Hester.
Speaker A:Let's get started.
Speaker A:In this episode, you'll understand how childhood experiences shaped your definition of love.
Speaker A:You'll begin identifying where old stories about love no longer serve you.
Speaker A:And you'll learn one simple journaling practice to start repairing your relationship with love today.
Speaker A:And be sure to stick around for the unlearn, where we will dismantle one of the most tips damaging myths of all that staying, no matter the cost, is proof of love.
Speaker A:Welcome to More Human, More Kind.
Speaker A:I'm Heather Hester.
Speaker A:Today we are exploring how the earliest versions of love we received shaped the ones we know how to give.
Speaker A:And how, with intention and care, we can rewrite that story.
Speaker A:Sometimes the love we were taught to chase isn't the love that helps us grow.
Speaker A:And the moment we stop performing for love, we start remembering how to receive it.
Speaker A:We don't enter adulthood with as blank slates.
Speaker A:When it comes to love, we carry emotional blueprints, usually written long before we had the language to read them.
Speaker A:Maybe you grew up in a home where love meant helping, where your worth was tied to how useful you were.
Speaker A:Maybe love meant silence, keeping the peace, never rocking the boat.
Speaker A:Maybe it meant sacrifice and putting others comfort before your own.
Speaker A:And maybe, if you were lucky, it meant safety and belonging.
Speaker A:Psychologists call this your attachment style, the pattern your nervous system learned to recognize as love.
Speaker A:Dr. Sue Johnson, founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, explains it this way.
Speaker A:From our earliest relationships, we learn whether love is a safe haven or a dangerous place.
Speaker A:When love came with strings attached, whether it was obedience, performance, or perfection, it wired your brain for survival, not connection.
Speaker A:But what if real love doesn't require you to vanish to be worthy?
Speaker A:Our definitions of love aren't just emotional.
Speaker A:They're biological.
Speaker A:Neuroscience tells us that the patterns we formed around love as children, how we were soothed, scolded, or seen, literally shaped our neural pathways for attachment.
Speaker A:Dr. Dan Siegel calls this the window of tolerance.
Speaker A:It's the range where we can safely give and receive love without tipping into anxiety or shutdown.
Speaker A:When love has hurt us, that window narrows.
Speaker A:We either over function to keep people close or withdraw to avoid pain.
Speaker A:But here's the good news.
Speaker A:Love can be relearned.
Speaker A:Every time you offer yourself compassion Instead of criticism, you're widening that window.
Speaker A:Every time you pause before people pleasing, you're teaching your body that love and safety can go exist.
Speaker A:I want to say that again because this means so much to me as well.
Speaker A:Every time you offer yourself compassion instead of criticism, you're widening that window.
Speaker A:Every time you pause before people pleasing, you're teaching your body that love and safety can coexist.
Speaker A:How cool is that?
Speaker A:Bell hooks wrote love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.
Speaker A:Not control, not perfection and not suffering disguised as devotion.
Speaker A:If you can take a moment right now, find a quiet space.
Speaker A:If you can't take that moment right now, it will be bookmarked for you so you can come back later.
Speaker A:Take a breath, close your eyes for a moment, and just let the word love sit in your body.
Speaker A:Now ask yourself, what messages did I grow up hearing about love?
Speaker A:Were they spoken?
Speaker A:Modeled?
Speaker A:Implied?
Speaker A:When have I felt most loved?
Speaker A:And what made that moment feel safe?
Speaker A:Was it words?
Speaker A:Presence?
Speaker A:Honesty?
Speaker A:Touch?
Speaker A:Quiet?
Speaker A:And where does love still feel tangled with guilt or fear?
Speaker A:What do you tell yourself you have to do to keep it?
Speaker A:Pause here.
Speaker A:And if you feel emotion rising, don't worry, there's nothing wrong with you.
Speaker A:You're not broken for needing to relearn love.
Speaker A:You're healing from being taught it conditionally.
Speaker A:Here's the truth most of us were never told.
Speaker A:Love isn't something you earn.
Speaker A:It's something you allow.
Speaker A:You don't have to chase, fix, or prove it.
Speaker A:You just have to stop running from your own enoughness.
Speaker A:Repair doesn't mean rewriting the past.
Speaker A:It means updating the story your nervous system is telling you about what love feels like.
Speaker A:So here are three places you can start.
Speaker A:The first is to reparent yourself when an old trigger hits ask what would I say to my younger self right now?
Speaker A:Dr. Kristin Neff's research on self compassion shows that talking to yourself as you would to a friend decreases shame and builds emotional resilience.
Speaker A:Another thing that you can do is to learn secure love through example.
Speaker A:Surround yourself with relationships that feel safe and reciprocal.
Speaker A:This could be friendships, mentors, communities, the people who feel like your people.
Speaker A:Our brains are social learners.
Speaker A:Watching others give love freely teaches our system what's possible.
Speaker A:And the third thing that you can do is practice micro love moments.
Speaker A:These are just 5 to 10 second acts of self or relational kindness.
Speaker A:Things such as small moments of caring for your body, drinking water and saying, this is an act of love for myself.
Speaker A:It can also be putting your hand on your heart when you're anxious and taking a slow, deep breath.
Speaker A:Smiling or giving someone a compliment is telling them, I see you.
Speaker A:Love becomes real again.
Speaker A:Not in grand gestures, but.
Speaker A:And these micro acts, these micro moments of truth.
Speaker A:Dr. Barbara Fredrickson's work on positivity resonance found that brief, mutual moments of warmth create measurable changes in heart rhythm and vagal tone, literally the synchronizing of hearts.
Speaker A:That's what repair looks like in real life.
Speaker A:Not perfection, presence.
Speaker A:I used to think that love had to be this quote, unquote perfect expression.
Speaker A:And to me, that meant being accommodating, always forgiving and overflowing with lavish praise, even if it didn't feel true.
Speaker A:It also meant staying small, quiet, agreeable.
Speaker A:But what I've learned through the course of my marriage and being a mom of four really extraordinary kids is that real love is messy.
Speaker A:Sometimes it looks like boundaries.
Speaker A:Actually, a lot of the time it looks like boundaries.
Speaker A:Sometimes it sounds like silence while you find your breath again.
Speaker A:And sometimes the most loving thing you can do is starting over with yourself.
Speaker A:Love and freedom aren't opposites.
Speaker A:They're partners.
Speaker A:Real love expands everyone it touches.
Speaker A:Today's Unlearn is about releasing the myth that love always means staying.
Speaker A:The story says if you walk away, you didn't love enough.
Speaker A:You didn't try to love enough.
Speaker A:But staying in harm isn't love.
Speaker A:It's survival.
Speaker A:What if leaving or healing or changing course was the deepest expression of love because it honors truth?
Speaker A:Love doesn't always mean holding on.
Speaker A:Sometimes it means creating a space for new beginnings.
Speaker A:This week, I want you to write one sentence of love to yourself that begins with the future version of me will thank me for fill in the blank, or I'm learning to speak to myself like and fill in the blank, and then read it out loud to yourself every single day.
Speaker A:Let it become your new evidence of love.
Speaker A:Love that is tender and unconditional.
Speaker A:When we repair our relationship with love, we become capable of loving others more honestly, without fear, without performance, and without losing ourselves.
Speaker A:Take one last deep breath with me.
Speaker A:Love is still worth believing in, just not the version that breaks you.
Speaker A:You learn today how early experiences shaped your understanding of love, how to start repairing what was distorted, and how to recognize that real love doesn't cost you your wholeness.
Speaker A:If this reflection resonated with you, join me on Substack every Friday for live guided journaling sessions and a Q and A.
Speaker A:This is a space to reconnect with your heart for the holidays and remember that new episodes of More Human, More kind dropped every Tuesday and Friday.
Speaker A:So make sure you follow and subscribe so you never miss one.
Speaker A:Until next time.
Speaker A:Be gentle with your healing heart.
Speaker A:You are not hard to love.
Speaker A:You are learning what love actually means.
Speaker A:Feels like you are already enough.
