It has helped me in the past to swap the word "love" with "attention". Any attention from someone we need/want is "good", even if it is negative? We have to survive, it is perhaps the primary need. Infants die if they are not handled but those that are handled "roughly" or inconsistently do not die? If all that is known, surrounds us, is negative, that's all we have to work with, all our brain knows. Attention = attention; mother abuse = attention; abuse self = attention (when there is no mother).

As we grow up we have to learn to self-soothe, put ourselves to sleep without the attention of others. Some parents can't stand the child crying so the child never learns to be alone and take care of themselves in that way, doesn't separate from their parents in that way; I have a good friend who got divorced, largely because his child was sleeping in her parents' bed too long which caused problems for the parents. If all that is around us to learn from is negative, we have to learn that negative, that becomes our only material with which to work?

We are are the right size, it's the pants that don't fit; our parents had problems and we inherited them in a sense, but with our own personal twists. Hand-me-down love and comfort that isn't because that's not what was handed down.