A few years ago I met a young lady at the Kaduna airport and we got talking. She shared with me a bit of her childhood and was very pained that her parents did not show her LOVE.

She was 26 at the time. She told me her mum told her ‘I love you’ that year for the first time. 

My response to her was kind of queer. I told her my dad and mum died at the age of 82 and 67 respectively in 2009 and I was 39, they never said to me, ‘I love you’ once. I also told her that I was not even considered worthy of my father’s presence for just once as we never sat down for a father and son conversation. I concluded that her experience was far better than mine. I encouraged her to record her mum saying, ‘I love you’ and play it to herself again and again as a necessary therapy for reliving her childhood.

To starve a child of love is to starve him/her AFFECTION and ATTENTION. Love to children means AFFECTION and ATTENTION. I was starved, tied, and beaten.

LOVE is an indispensable need of the soul of the child. It is by the LOVE of the parents that a child is VALIDATED to count himself/her worthy of practicing self-love and love for others and by this the child knows and appreciates the love of God.

When the need is not met in childhood, the child is likely to slave for it for a lifetime. The child will suffer from what Joyce Meyer refers to as APPROVAL ADDICTION. The foundation for the destructive psychological malady of APPROVAL ADDICTION is the child’s feeling of REJECTION.

We need not directly communicate to a child that he/she is REJECTED. The child picks it from the actions and particularly from the omissions of the parents irrespective of the innocence of their intentions.

One of the most painful symptoms of APPROVAL ADDICTION is the self-imposed obligation to be in the good book everybody. To achieve the foregoing, you must please everybody and to please everybody, you must be a Grandmaster in playing to the gallery.

Playing to the gallery, in the words of Erwin McManus, is to live a life of OBLIGATION instead of a life of INTENTION.

This story and the lessons continue next week.

Do have an INSPIRED week