What Therapy Taught Me About the Way I Inhabit a Room

The Inner World · Every claim sourced

Not the diagnosis, and not the breakthrough moment television promised. The smaller, stranger thing a good stretch of therapy actually teaches: how to tell tough from love, years after the fact.

By Mariah Mazzo, The Editor

This article reflects editorial research and personal perspective and is not medical or psychological advice. If you are navigating a mental health concern, a licensed therapist can offer guidance suited to your specific situation.

There’s either tough, or there’s love. — Gabor Maté

Not tough love. Not both at once, blended into something that lets a harsh moment pass as care. One or the other. That single distinction is close to the entire argument of what a good stretch of therapy actually teaches: not new coping skills, but the far more uncomfortable ability to go back and sort the moments that were genuinely love from the moments that were control wearing love’s name.

Most of what gets taught about self-awareness comes packaged as advice: set boundaries, communicate needs, know your worth. What rarely gets named is the mechanism underneath the advice — the specific, often invisible rule a person absorbed early enough that it stopped feeling like a rule and started feeling like personality.

Maté’s point isn’t just a clever line; it tracks with decades of developmental research. Psychologist Diana Baumrind’s foundational studies on parenting identified authoritarian caregiving — high control, obedience-focused, often punitive — as producing measurably worse outcomes in children than authoritative caregiving, which combines the same high expectations with real warmth and responsiveness.

The two are not points on the same spectrum, interchangeable depending on how firmly they are delivered. They are separate dimensions entirely: control and warmth, tough and love, measured independently. Decades of follow-up research have found children raised with control but without warmth consistently show lower self-esteem and social competence than children raised with both. The blend the phrase “tough love” implies isn’t a real third category. It is a way of describing control while borrowing love’s credibility.

Psychoanalyst Alice Miller spent much of her career on the mechanism underneath that borrowing. Her work, particularly The Drama of the Gifted Child, describes how a child whose love is made conditional learns to build a false self — a performed version calibrated to whatever earns approval — while the true self, the one with needs and feelings that might not earn approval, goes underground. “Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated,” Miller wrote. That is the quiet cost of growing up sorting tough from love incorrectly. The feelings don’t disappear. They just stop being available to the person having them, until something — often therapy — makes them legible again.

Plenty of people can narrate their own patterns fluently and still repeat them exactly, in what therapists sometimes call intellectualising: understanding a wound articulately enough that the understanding itself becomes a way of avoiding the harder, less articulate work of actually behaving differently. Naming a pattern is necessary. It is not sufficient.

The part almost nobody says out loud

Dear reader, you already know someone who has done this. A friend, a colleague, a sister. Someone who loved hard for years, who showed up early and stayed late and called it devotion, and who was then, without warning that made sense to anyone standing outside of it, left. Not because the love wasn’t real. Because somewhere inside it, unnamed even to the person carrying it, was a quiet transaction: I will keep loving you like this, and in exchange you will not leave.

When the leaving happened anyway, the shock was never really about the leaving. It was about discovering how much of what got called love had actually been fear — holding on that tightly, for that long, dressed up as devotion.

I won’t pretend I’m writing about a stranger. I have lived a version of this closely enough that I am not ready to lay out the specifics here, and I suspect I am one of a very large number of people carrying some version of the same story, not one of a rare few. What I have come back to, every time, is the line this piece opened with. There’s either tough, or there’s love. Not both, blended into something that lets fear pass as devotion. One or the other. Once you can tell them apart, the leaving doesn’t need to make sense anymore. You just get to know, finally, which one you were actually doing.

Once you can tell tough from love, you stop needing to forgive the tough parts by insisting they were secretly love all along. They can just be what they were. That is not a smaller kind of peace. It is the only kind that holds.

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Frequently asked questions

What does therapy actually teach you about self-awareness?

Often not a single breakthrough, but the ability to notice a pattern in real time, as it is happening, instead of only in hindsight.

How do you know if a pattern from therapy is really changing?

Concrete behaviour shifts in the moment, not just insight after the fact. Insight without a change in behaviour is understanding, not change.

Is it normal for therapy insights to take a long time to show up in daily life?

Yes. Patterns formed early tend to be well-practised, so unlearning them is rarely instant even once they are named.

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