Succession is incredible. Clearly made by people with deep, personal experience of abuse. And no patience for the pathways of excess. One of the few current shows I've truly enjoyed.
"Ken, he loves the broken you. That's what he loves."
I remember my mom explaining to a very young me that my dad yelled at me because he loved me. That they hit me because they loved me. This scene drilled directly into a sparking nerve. Shitty people will make you go a long way to defend them because you're afraid of what will happen if you don't.
My parents only loved the broken me. To appease them, to earn their love, I broke and stayed broken for many years. I've had to do so, so much to recover myself, and I'm nowhere near healed. I still live every day remembering what it was like to not be broken in these particular ways.
It's of the utmost importance that you believe yourself about yourself, with all the work that entails. I think to myself a lot lately, "I don't even know who I am." I walk around doing the things I've learned to do, can enjoy myself in honest-feeling ways, but when I look for my identity... it isn't there. Like I'm in orbit around myself, describing the terrain from outside the atmosphere. I used to know what it was like to be me, to want the things I wanted, to feel strongly that certain things mattered to me. I'm mostly not sure about any of those things now. And it takes a lot of patience and pain to try to reconnect the sparking nerves, on top of everything else.
Let's try our best to only have right kind of love expressions.