Loving your parents is one thing. But saying it out loud is another. While more than half of French people are blocked by these words, a family therapist helps us understand where the modesty around “I love you” comes from.
We are not all equal when it comes to “I love you”. Some need to hear it and express it easily, while others are uncomfortable with these emotionally charged words, even when love is definitely present. But one observation is particularly surprising: more than one in two French people (51.4%) admit to having difficulty saying “I love you” to their mother, according to a Pollfish survey for Vistaprint conducted in the run-up to Mother’s Day.
However, if no major trauma punctuated childhood, the family is precisely supposed to be the most secure space of all: parents are, in principle, the people who love us most in the world, unconditionally. So why do we fear expressing our feelings to them? “They know it, so don’t bother saying it” is certainly the reasoning that comes up the most. But this blockage goes much further. Lesly Lapilus Merius, family therapist, helps us decipher this obviously very widespread phenomenon, which prevents us from verbalizing the love we have for our family.
Of course, family dynamics have a big role to play: it all depends on habits, on the place that parents themselves have given to “I love you”. “It is often the family myth that blocks verbalization. For example, in a family from a very patriarchal culture which perceives emotions as a weakness, we will tend to perpetuate this context. This is part of the intergenerational”explains the therapist. But even in a family where parents have often said “I love you” to their children, it can happen that the blockage occurs in adulthood. A vulnerability is then created, perhaps even the fear of a form of childish sentimentality: “There is a kind of fear of ridicule. When you are little, it is perhaps more fluid to say I love you to your mother than when you are 30, when you can feel a little embarrassed”suggests Lesly Lapilus Merius.
Moreover, it is also true in the opposite direction: some parents find it easier to say these words when their children are toddlers, and end up saying it less (or even more at all) when they become adolescents, then adults. Yet, “human beings need security” throughout his life. And if a child does indeed need to grow up in a loving environment, parents also need to “need to be reassured” once their offspring become adults, “and to know that they still exist in the eyes and in the heart of their child”. Hearing “I love you” is also a form of validation, which “comes to say what a parent he was to his child”.
Precisely, still according to the same survey, 42.8% of French people say they regret not having expressed certain things to their mother. A figure which clearly shows that these unspoken words have a real impact, and which recalls the adage we often hear: “Say it before it’s too late”. But for the family therapist, this very telling data is also part of a cultural pattern. “There is a modesty around the transmission of emotion, which is perhaps also linked to the morals of our country. The French are quite well known for that: we have a lot of modesty, we don’t speak very loudly in public, we don’t say what’s wrong… We’re more in a context of performance, a little elitist, and then we sometimes forget to talk about emotions.” Moreover, Lesly Lapilus Merius also makes the link with “the social pressure around Mother’s Day, and all these holidays”where it is the time to prove that we love our parents, and which can also accentuate this blockage.
And if love is obviously not limited to the verbal dimension, it is entirely possible to unblock the situation. For someone who would like to say “I love you” to a family member for the first time after years of silence, Lesly Lapilus Merius advises “the passage through writing”. It can be a letter, a Mother’s Day card or a simple SMS, it doesn’t matter: the writing then becomes “an excellent emotional mediator, which allows you to bypass this inhibition” that we can have orally. “It helps to reduce a little this fear of face-to-face encounters. The goal is not to make big declarations, but to start, it may be enough to go as simple as possible.”
