The Belief I Didn’t Know I Was Living By

It’s interesting how sometimes the deepest realisations don’t come from planning, analysing, or thinking our way through something.

They come when we’re relaxed. When our guard is down. When something quietly surfaces and we suddenly see the crux of a pattern we’ve lived with our whole lives without ever knowing its origin, or even questioning it.

For me, it was the statement: “My love language is gift giving.”

It has taken the passing of my mother, over a year ago now for me to truly understand what that sentence meant, and how profoundly it shaped my life. Until then, I didn’t question it. I didn’t realise it wasn’t a preference or a personality trait. It was a survival adaptation.

If you’re my friend, you’ll already know this about me. For all my years of marriage, I complained, resented, and genuinely could not understand why the person who loves me who knows me, who knows my love language never made the effort to plan birthdays or mark them meaningfully. I understand some of his reasons. I really do. But every year, I hoped it would be different.

And every year, I felt the same loss, the same disappointment, the same emotional reaction that felt far bigger than the moment itself.

I’m sharing this vulnerably because what I came to understand might shed light on your own journey, why gift giving is held so tightly for you, or perhaps help you understand a family member who is like me. It may show how beliefs shape us in ways we could never possibly imagine.

Two years ago, I turned 50. I never had a 40th. Ten years earlier, I gave my husband the task: “You have ten years to plan.” Then the year before: “You have this year to plan.” When December came, I spent every day of the school holidays planning, cooking, and baking for my own birthday. What I received was a homemade card with 50 cents inside because the coin was minted in the year I was born.

I’m not a coin collector.

Something in me gave up after that. Not dramatically just quietly. I still didn’t understand the depth of the defeat I felt, or why it landed so heavily in my body. I just knew something hurt more than it should.

And then… my mum died.

I’ve written before about the two years we weren’t speaking. The week before she passed, I sent her a voice recording. A few hours before she died, my brother FaceTimed me. I saw her frail body on the screen. I said goodbye, out of respect, and so I would carry no regrets.

Two years earlier, when doctors thought she had six weeks to live, she asked me to be her executor. I said no. At the time, we weren’t really in relationship, and it didn’t feel right. I remember saying I wanted to be left absolutely nothing. I didn’t want to feel like a user. I didn’t want it to look like I only wanted her money. My brother said, “Think about your children.”

It wasn’t until she died that everything shifted.

When she passed and I discovered that, alongside my siblings, I had inherited her house, I felt confused. But something deeper happened too something somatic, something cellular. I realised something I had never been able to name.

My mother was not maternal. She was not nurturing. But she was generous.

After my dad died, as a single mum no matter how poor we were, she bought gifts. Not just any gifts. She got you what you wanted. Looking back, I can see it clearly now: this was how she showed love. It was her language.

And for me to reject that inheritance would have been to reject the only way she knew how to love.

A few blogs ago, I wrote about “the necklace.” The one thing I desperately wanted to inherit. The one my brother also wanted. The one my sister received. It was the thing my mum loved most. She guarded it above almost everything even, at times, above her children’s wellbeing. I truly believed she might want to be buried with it.

And here I am now ten days out from my birthday.

There’s been some conversation this year about what I want to do. But I’m not excited like I used to be. It no longer carries the urgency or emotional charge it once did.

Today, I finally understood why.

I said the words out loud, and in that moment, what had been unconscious became conscious.

I know I gift give to my family because it’s how love was modelled to me. I know I over-gift to my children because, without me, they wouldn’t receive. I also know how deeply grateful I am for the two women my children’s adopted aunties who show up year after year for them. They have filled a void I once felt solely responsible to carry.

But it went deeper than that.

I realised I no longer feel the same need because I feel content.

I said to my husband:

“If my mum modelled love through gift giving, and you didn’t give me gifts… it meant I believed I wasn’t loved.”

Of course, I was loved. I know that now. But my subconscious didn’t speak in logic or reassurance it spoke in pattern, belief, and generational conditioning. My nervous system interpreted absence through an old lens, one shaped long before this relationship. What I was reacting to wasn’t the present moment, but a story my body had learned to tell itself about love, safety, and worth.

And there it was.

Love, to me, had to be tangible to be real. If love could be seen, held, or given then it existed.

If I give enough, I won’t be abandoned.

Love became conditional. Earned. Secured through generosity. Gifts became relational insurance.

This is how women show love.

Intergenerational modelling especially in families where survival, provision, and appearances mattered more than emotional processing.

And on the receiving end:

If they didn’t get me something, I wasn’t important enough.

Absence of gift equalled absence of love.

This was the safest way I knew how to feel loved.

It wasn’t until I said to Matt: “All I ever learned was that love came in the form of a transaction, a gift.”

And suddenly, “my love language is gift giving” was no longer a choice I made.

It was never a choice.

It was a belief, shaped by patterns of behaviour, intergenerational trauma, and a deep, embodied fear of not being loved.

When we bring these patterns into awareness, they loosen. What once lived in the body as urgency can soften into choice.

This is how cycles begin to break not through rejection of the past, but through compassion for the ways love was learned.

What I carried made sense. And now, I get to choose what love feels like going forward.