Why tough love is best

Become an Insider. Enter Email Address. Facebook Pinterest Twitter Youtube Instagram. Tags: Relationship Tips. Loading More Posts Featured Collection. In a healthy relationship, love should come across as unconditional.

And excessive tough love can make love seem unconditional, which is very unhealthy in the long run. Making your partner feel that they have to be a certain way to feel loved by you is not a healthy way to go about in a relationship.

Apart from the shame, guilt, and humiliation, tough love can also increase stress for the person receiving it. And too much stress or anxiety in a relationship can push a person to adopt unhealthy coping mechanisms like drugs, alcohol, etc. Most importantly, excessive tough love showcases poor empathy! No relationship is perfect, but what makes it worth it is when both the partners work on it. Understanding what is promoting a healthy growth to your relationship and what is making it worse is important.

Unfortunately, though, their underlying feelings will not go away. Forced into silence, the person may begin to express themselves subtly over time, and eventually explode in anger or frustration. Denies opportunity for personal growth. Whether or not our infraction was intentional, it's natural to want to avoid the discomfort of shame or embarrassment when we are called out.

We want to defend ourselves because we feel that our public image has been tarnished or our deficiencies exposed. However difficult it is to accept, though, such information may be worth listening to. We need better awareness to interrupt unskillful patterns and improve our behavior in the future.

Next time, try to accept responsibility for your actions—and the guilt or distress that may ensue. Erodes intimacy. Couples often find themselves arguing over topics like money, sex, kids, and in-laws—but these subjects tend to be cover-ups of deeper issues such as power, control, respect, trust, freedom, and acceptance. On the other hand, children who aren't given this type of approach can struggle greatly, and all of these benefits seem to occur no matter what type of income or social upbringing the child had to go alongside it.

Tough love tends to show children how to improve their self-esteem, but it also teaches them to respect authority and to respect the rules. They learn how to regulate their wants and needs, understand that they must treat others more respectfully, and accept that they won't always get what they want.

With this type of parenting, the parent is required to be more present and more involved with the child; however, they must be able to ignore or refuse to pester and immediately respond to negative behaviors. They must also be constantly able to reinforce and uphold rules and punishments in a fairway. So, if this is such a great approach to what is there to detract away from it?

What exactly is there that says it's not such a good idea or that we should stay away from it? The truth is there's not much that we can say negative about tough love in parenting. The important thing is to make sure that you're doing it for yourself and that you're careful about externalizing that tough love approach.

Some different camps and programs are designed to offer tough love to children who get into trouble, and that's not where you want your child to end up. These types of facilities are the sort of over-the-top approach that we've mentioned before and can sometimes devolve into something that's even harmful to your child. Things like socialization are crucial to the development, and these facilities often employ isolation as a method of punishment. Corporal punishments have very negative research, yet in some facilities, these also may be used on your child.

By keeping your child out of a facility that employs tough love and in your home where you are in control of it, you'll both be off to a better start. There are pros and cons to tough love. There are situations where one may be better than the other. In making the hard decision about whether to use tough love, it may be helpful to learn about an alternative intervention called "love first. Love first is an intervention technique that Debra and Jeff Jay in developed.

In this situation, a team works together to gently help people see that they need help and try to gain their cooperation to enter a therapeutic program. This type of program works well for people dealing with alcoholism or substance abuse. The way it works is a concerned loved one gathers a team of at least three members together, but not more than seven.

The team usually consists of the people who are the closest to the person needing help. Some teams find it helpful to acquire the assistance of a professional interventionist to lead the team and guide the process to success. The team meets several times to formulate a loving plan that will hopefully result in the person wanting change.

Each member of the intervention team is asked to write an intervention letter. To be effective, intervention letters have the following four parts:.