I need to admit something that’s taken me the better part of six decades to fully understand.

Growing up as the middle child of five in a working-class family in Ohio, love in our house wasn’t the soft, warm thing you see in movies. It was sharp. It came wrapped in corrections, in “you could do better,” in my father coming home from his double shifts at the factory and pointing out the one chore you missed instead of the ten you finished.

And here’s the thing: my parents weren’t cruel people. Not even close. They loved us fiercely. But the way that love was delivered? It got tangled up with criticism so tightly that, for years, I couldn’t tell the two apart.

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. And if you’ve spent your adult life carrying certain quiet habits you can’t quite explain, this might shed some light on where they came from.

Here are seven of them.

1) You apologize for things that aren’t your fault

Someone bumps into you at the grocery store and you say “sorry.” A friend cancels plans and you apologize for being disappointed. Your partner has a rough day and somehow you feel like it’s on you.

Sound about right?

When criticism and love are the same currency growing up, you learn very early that the quickest way to restore peace is to take the blame. It doesn’t matter if you did anything wrong. What matters is that someone seems upset, and your nervous system kicks into gear, telling you to fix it before things get worse.

As a piece in Psychology Today explains, this often traces back to growing up with unpredictable or critical caregivers. You learned that apologizing kept the peace, and that pattern followed you right into adulthood.

I spent 35 years in middle management at an insurance company, and I can tell you I apologized my way through more meetings than I care to count. “Sorry to bother you.” “Sorry, just a thought.” It wasn’t politeness. It was survival on autopilot.

2) Perfectionism runs your life

Here’s a question worth sitting with: do you chase excellence because you genuinely enjoy it, or because you’re terrified of what happens when you fall short?

There’s a difference. And for people who grew up with criticism baked into every act of love, perfectionism isn’t really about high standards. It’s about safety. If you could just get everything right, maybe the criticism would stop. Maybe the love would come without the sting.

Research published in Psychology Today highlights that perfectionism frequently emerges as a coping mechanism rooted in shame from early experiences. When your environment punished mistakes harshly, you learned that being flawless was the only way to feel secure.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I struggled with perfectionism for most of my career. Every report had to be bulletproof. Every email reread four times. It wasn’t until my fifties, after some honest conversations in marriage counseling, that I started to see it for what it was: not discipline, but fear wearing a very convincing disguise.

3) Compliments make you uncomfortable

Someone tells you they admire your work. Instead of saying “thank you,” you immediately list everything that’s wrong with it. Someone says you look great and you deflect with “Oh, this old thing?” or change the subject entirely.

When you grow up hearing criticism more often than praise, genuine compliments feel foreign. Suspicious, even. A part of your brain can’t accept them because they don’t match the internal script you’ve been running since childhood: that you’re not quite enough, that there’s always something to fix.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn to simply say “thank you” and leave it at that. My wife pointed it out to me once after someone at a dinner party complimented a bookshelf I’d built in my workshop. Instead of just accepting the kind words, I launched into a five-minute explanation of every joint that wasn’t perfect. She looked at me afterward and said, “You know, you’re allowed to just enjoy the nice thing someone said.”

That stuck with me.

4) You read the room before you read yourself

Ever walk into a room and immediately scan for tension? Check people’s faces to gauge what kind of mood everyone’s in before you even take your coat off?

Kids who grow up in homes where criticism could come at any moment become incredibly tuned into other people’s emotional states. It’s a skill you developed to protect yourself. If you could read the room fast enough, you could adjust your behavior, shrink yourself, do whatever it took to avoid triggering the next wave of sharp words.

The problem is, this hypervigilance doesn’t switch off when you leave home. It follows you into your workplace, your friendships, your marriage. You become so focused on managing everyone else’s emotions that you lose track of your own.

As clinical psychologist Robert Taibbi writes in Psychology Today, we carry our childhood coping styles into adult relationships. When we feel emotionally triggered, we default to whatever kept us safe as children, even when that approach no longer serves us.

I hid behind what looked like social confidence for decades, but underneath it was a low-grade anxiety I never talked about. It wasn’t until I found meditation through a class at the community center that I started to understand how much energy I was spending monitoring everyone else and how little I was spending on myself.

5) Your feelings stay locked behind closed doors

If criticism was how love was expressed in your house, you probably learned pretty quickly that showing vulnerability was risky. Tears got you told to toughen up. Anger got you told you were overreacting. Sadness was met with impatience.

So you learned to keep it all inside. To present a calm, capable exterior no matter what was going on beneath the surface.

This one hits close to home for me. I grew up in a generation and a household where emotional expression wasn’t exactly encouraged, especially for boys. My father was a good man, a hard worker, but feelings weren’t something we discussed around the dinner table. You kept your head down and you got on with it.

It took me years to unlearn that. Journaling before bed every night has been one of the most valuable habits I’ve picked up. It’s a small thing, just me and a notebook and whatever’s been rattling around in my head. But it’s become a safe place to actually feel things without worrying about how they’ll be received.

6) You struggle to set boundaries

“No” is one of the shortest words in the English language, and for some of us, it’s also the hardest to say.

When love and criticism grew from the same root, saying no felt dangerous. It risked disapproval. It risked the withdrawal of affection. So you said yes. To extra responsibilities. To relationships that drained you. To requests that left you running on empty.

As psychotherapist Kaytee Gillis explains in her work on conditional parental love, when love is withdrawn after mistakes or disagreements, children grow up searching for that love and approval in everything they do. What we didn’t receive from our parents, we try to get from the world around us, often at great personal cost.

I’ve been there. I spent years saying yes to every request at work, every favor from friends, every demand on my time, because some part of me believed that my value depended on being useful. It wasn’t until I had a frank conversation with my wife during a particularly tough stretch in our forties that I realized I was running myself ragged trying to earn something I should have been giving myself all along.

7) You second-guess yourself constantly

You make a decision, then immediately wonder if it was the wrong one. You say something in conversation and replay it in your head for hours afterward. You trust other people’s judgment far more than your own.

This is what happens when the person who was supposed to be your safe harbor was also your harshest critic. Your internal compass gets thrown off. You stop trusting your own instincts because, growing up, those instincts were constantly questioned or corrected.

My mother was a resourceful, loving woman who kept our family afloat on a tight budget. But she also had opinions about everything, and she wasn’t shy about sharing them. I spent a good chunk of my life assuming other people knew better than I did, whether it was my boss, my wife, or even my kids. It was only through years of gradual self-reflection, reading, therapy, and honestly just getting older, that I began to trust myself more.

And trust me, it’s still a work in progress at my age.

Parting thoughts

None of this is about blaming your parents. Most of them were doing their best with what they had, repeating patterns they probably inherited themselves.

But recognizing these habits for what they are? That’s powerful. That’s the first step toward loosening their grip.

The good news is, these patterns aren’t permanent. They were learned, which means they can be unlearned. It takes patience, a bit of honesty, and probably some uncomfortable conversations with yourself. But it’s worth it.

I’m in my sixties now, and I’m still peeling back layers I didn’t know were there. Still catching myself mid-apology for things that aren’t my fault. Still reminding myself that a compliment isn’t a trap.

But every small moment of awareness chips away at the old programming. And that’s enough.

So let me leave you with this: what would it look like to give yourself the kind of love that doesn’t come with conditions attached?