“One of the hardest things I’ve had to understand is that closure comes from within. It’s especially hard when you’ve been betrayed by someone you love, because you feel like you need to let them know the pain they’ve caused, but only you can give them the peace you’re looking for.” ~Bruna Nessif
A photo of my father presenting a tennis trophy has hung in my living room for years.
Even now, if I stare too long, I feel the old rush: pride, relief, belonging. For most of my life, this photo served as proof that my father loved me.
It took me decades to understand that it proved something else.
My father was a con man—charming in public, terrifying in private. He was able to get strangers, friends and relatives to give him money for businesses he never started and investments he never made.
Cottage cheese was the charm at home.
He was vindictive, violent and unpredictable. The kind of person who can do it he beat his children upstairsslick your hair back and rejoin the party downstairs grinning as if you’ve only stepped out to refresh someone’s drink.
My siblings and I both found ways to survive him. My brother shot back. My sister stayed small and sweet.
I became the good kid.
I learned early on that achievements can take you a little further from danger. Good grades, trophies, obedience, compliance – these became my armor.
Not because they brought me to safety. They didn’t.
But sometimes I’m less likely to be the target.
My father’s affection appeared in a flash, and almost always accompanied by an audience. In front of others, he turned into a proud, loving father.
He invited me over, hugged me, praised me, introduced me. Even as a child I knew something was wrong with him. But when you’re hungry, you don’t stop criticizing the food.
Eat.
One day when I was eight years old, I was playing in a tennis tournament and I got second place. I remember standing on the stage waiting for the trophy presentation when the announcer called my mother to give me the award.
Then I saw movement in the corner of my eye.
My father pushed my mother back to her seat to present the trophy himself. There was a murmur in the crowd. People saw it.
He didn’t care.
He stepped out onto the stage full of pride and theatrical love, and at that moment I forgot everything else. I forgot the violence. I forgot the fear. I forgot what he just did to my mother.
Everything I felt was chosen.
When he handed me that trophy in front of everyone, I felt something I almost never felt around him: whole. Important. Beloved.
I knew his even then love was conditional. Children always know more than adults think.
I knew they didn’t love me for who I was. They loved me for doing something that reflected him well.
But I didn’t care.
The feeling was too strong.
On that day, without words, I made what I now consider to be the great bargain of my childhood: I will continue to mature, and in return you will continue to love me.
It seemed fair to me then. Rough, maybe. But it’s fair.
The photo captured this deal perfectly.
For years I treated it like a flotation device. Every time I felt unworthy, ashamed, or abandoned, I looked at that picture and thought: There. This was real. Whatever else he was, whatever else he did, was love.
But children from foster homes become experts at building cathedrals from scraps.
A warm look. A public praise. A hug. A photograph. We keep these scraps because they should mean more than they do.
If they don’t mean love, then what exactly did we survive for?
As I get older, the photo has not lost its power, but it has changed under my gaze. Or maybe I had changed and the photograph could no longer hide what it had always contained.
I began to see the whole scene, not just the necessary part. My father’s hunger to be seen. My mother was pushed aside. My own face glowed not with security, but with relief.
This was the hardest thing to admit.
What I once called love was partly a relief that I wasn’t ignored, threatened, or used as a witness to someone else’s humiliation during any shining public moment. What I valued as evidence of love was also evidence of hunger.
And hungry children will call many things love.
After seeing this, I was finally able to name the real deal my dad was offering. I thought the business was my success in exchange for his love.
In fact, his deal was: look good and I’ll pretend to love you.
This recognition did not remain in childhood. He reached into my adult life and explained more than I wanted.
I suddenly saw how often I chased the feeling the photograph gave me. How often have I mistaken approval for intimacy. How often I was attracted to people whose warmth had to be earned.
I confused admiration with love. I confused utility with value. I mixed the scraps with the food.
And since the pattern was old, it looked normal.
This is one of the cruelest things about childhood conditioning: we it injures us early later, it may feel strangely familiar, and may disguise the familiarity as safety. You find yourself overachieving, overselling, overachieving and still trying to win a love that keeps moving the finish line.
For a long time I believed that if I was successful enough, effective enough, impressive enough, the original bargain would finally pay off. Someone – my father, my partner, the world – would look at me and choose me completely.
But this hope was a trap.
I continued to work for love instead of receiving it. Instead of resting, I performed. This stayed true to a contract I signed with trepidation.
The healing began when I stopped asking that photo to testify on my father’s behalf.
I stopped asking: Did he love me?
I began to ask another question: Why did this moment carry so much weight?
The answer was simple and overwhelming. Because there was very little else.
That answer changed the way I see myself now.
For years I was ashamed that the photograph meant so much to me. I thought that clinging to it made me weak, needy, gullible.
Now I see a child doing what children do. Making sense out of the tenderness that was available. I am trying to build my own from unstable materials, because there were no stable ones on offer.
That child does not deserve my contempt. He deserves my sympathy.
This shift taught me something I wish I had understood sooner: when you grow up in conditional love, healing isn’t just about grieving what happened. It’s also about learning to recognize the old deal when it reappears.
To me, that means paying attention to a few questions.
Do I feel like I have to impress this person to keep them hot? Do I feel anxious when I’m not producing, being attractive, or performing? Am I deeply attracted to people who make me work hard for small moments of approval?
These questions became a sort of compass.
If the answer is yes, I know that I may not be responding to the present moment at all. I might be standing on that tennis stage again at age eight, hoping that another trophy will finally make me lovable.
When this happens, I try to take a break and do three things.
First, without being ashamed, I will name what is happening. Not: “Again, I’m pathetic.” But: “It’s an old wound that’s looking for a solution.”
Second, I ask whether the relationship before me is mutual or performance. Healthy love does not require constant reassurance.
Third, I remind myself that value is not something that another person awards me. Not my father. Not a partner. Not an audience.
This last part still requires practice.
There’s a reason why conditional love creates such deep furrows in us. It trains the nervous system to chase relief and call it belonging. It teaches us to feel most alive when someone in a difficult situation finally softens towards us.
But peace comes from somewhere else.
It comes from no longer confusing uncertainty with chemistry. From no longer calling emotional labor devotion. From no longer asking for performance for the work of self-esteem.
The photo still hangs in my living room.
But now it hangs there differently.
This is no longer proof that my father loved me. It’s proof that a child can survive on incredibly little and still reach for love.
It’s a testament to the bargains we make when we’re young, scared, and desperate for debt. And it reminds me that I don’t have to honor these deals forever.
I can choose people who don’t need me to shine to feel shiny. I can choose relationships where I am allowed to be ordinary, tired, insecure and still loved.
I can stop listening.
This may be the most profound lesson photography has taught me. It’s not that love is earned, it’s that for years I believed it was.
And if you grew up the same way—mistaking praise for security, approval for love, achievement for value—I hope you question any relationship that makes you disappear a little bit to be chosen.
Some deals are not worth keeping. Especially the ones we made as kids.
