I haven't seen any posts in this subforum like that. Can you point me to one?

I disagree that hatred is the way to move on. And in my experience caring about someone else more than you care about yourself is frequently co-dependency, not love. Not true when you have an infant, but other than that. . .

Certainly, if you didn't get love when you were an infant and young child from someone who loved you and put your interest ahead of their own when you needed it . . .that's an enormous loss and deficit and I can certainly understand how difficult it may be to overcome and move on. Maybe you, with your own mother, do need to hate. Maybe forever, maybe just for a while.

But if people never love anything that can't love you back? That's how infants are, they can't love their parents back (at least not when they are first born) and we love them anyway, hopefully. Even imperfect mothers like me.

Really sorry if you didn't get that from your mother, Marmaduke. Sometimes I got it from my mother, sometimes I didn't. I very much got hurt when she didn't and I think that definitely contributed to my difficulties. But after working through the good and the bad, the hurt and the good times, love isn't about thinking someone is wonderful. It's something else . . .that's part of why I like Atypical's questions. Maybe she can see stuff that we can't because we're blinded by ??? Pain???. Like the color-blindness example I wrote about earlier. Don't know what her motivation might be to help, though, other than curiosity.