I used to think that you could love someone unconditionally or conditionally, and I never really thought that you could do both at the same time, but it just occurred to me today that this is indeed not only possible but advisable!

Unconditional love needs no introduction: it’s welcoming someone as they are, fully and deeply. A common attitude is that this is the love of parents for their babies and that’s very much as far as we can find it, but it is perfectly possible to love anyone unconditionally. It is in fact the active ingredient in the most potent forms of therapy! (it is also how coach Joe Hudson makes people cry in a few minutes).

A cynic may say that adult love is not and cannot be like this: you love your friends and spouse for specific traits and if they don’t have or lose those traits, the relationship loses one of its grounds for being. Over time the relationship stabilizes via crystallization but it never becomes unconditional, they may say.

I was first introduced to the concept of conditional love as a good thing in an old book from Erich Fromm: The Art of Loving (1956):

Fatherly love is conditional love. Its principle is "I love you because you fulfill my expectations, because you do your duty, because you are like me." [...]

The infant needs mother's unconditional love and care physiologically as well as psychically. The child, after six, begins to need father's love, his authority and guidance. Mother has the function of making him secure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.[...] . Father's love should be guided by principles and expectations; it should be patient and tolerant, rather than threatening and authoritarian. It should give the growing child an increasing sense of competence and eventually permit him to become his own authority and to dispense with that of father [...]

Furthermore, the mature person loves with both the motherly and the fatherly conscience, in spite of the fact that they seem to contradict each other. If he would only retain his fatherly conscience, he would become harsh and inhuman. If he would only retain his motherly conscience, he would be apt to lose judgment and to hinder himself and others in their development. In this development from mother-centered to fathercentered attachment, and their eventual synthesis, lies the basis for mental health and the achievement of maturity. In the failure of this development lies the basic cause for neurosis.

Some readers may prefer to call "conditional love" something else like "conditional approval of behaviors" but to me that's a watered-down mouthful. The best I can do to convey what I'm pointing at with "conditional love" and why I like those words is a brief vignette:

Father: Son, I'm proud of you. You did well, you worked hard.

Son: [tearing up] thank you dad (hug)

[why does the son cry? he's receiving conditional love. The dad in principle could not have been proud yet he saw the son's work, deemed it valued, and gave it a thumbs up.]

Conditional love is just a reflection of the fact that we have preferences, and that includes parents towards their children, even if they wish they didn’t have such preferences. Parents may wish for their children to not jump on a sofa or to study a certain career or to not eat sweets. If a parent thinks that they are supposed to love their children “only unconditionally” then they won’t be able to authentically be themselves: they’ll be phony parents that pretend that “everything is okay” when deep down they are faking their emotions and preferences.

Seeing that their parents authentically want things from them but hide those wants, children thus learn that “wanting” (particularly from others) is not okay. They may feel fundamentally okay “just being” in the world if they got unconditional love but asking and receiving demands from others, or even having your own strong preferences may feel kind of weird. The extreme case is an adult that drifts through life aimless as an undifferentiated blob of sorts, relatively content, but never really getting anywhere, eventually wondering later in life “what’s the point” or “what is it that I want”.

The other failure mode (lacking unconditional love) but having plenty of conditional love is perhaps more visible: someone that works hard, achieves a lot but always feels empty and dead on the inside. They too will wonder later in life “what’s the point” or “what is it that I really want", noticing that satisfying their strong and clear wants too is never enough.

A way to think of parental praise is thinking of the parent as the wiser embodiment of an ideal the child aspires to be, co-created between parent and child. In that case “I’m proud of you” is validation from an ideal endorsed by the child, deemed as a superior judge of the child’s own ideals than the child themselves. Eventually children can internalize this and grow up as healthy adults that can self-author their values and set their own goals, but they have to start somewhere! And copying their parents is a fine starting point. This is no different from the relation between client and therapist or student and teacher, only that the parent-child relation is nonconsensual (we don't choose our parents).

Lastly, one practical implication for therapy that this concept has is that the most powerful intervention for attachment disturbances, the Ideal Parent Figure (IPF) Protocol, is incomplete: it asks the patient to imagine an infinitely loving parent that has no agenda of their own. This is indeed a really good unconditional love generator, but there is nothing in it that will build conditional love.

The Ideal Parent is never in conflict with the child, the protocol never exposes the client to a healthy “No” from the parent. I’ve done the IPF protocol more than 21 times and it does work as intensely as advertised, but it does not work for everything: Someone was slightly angry at me and I froze and I thought: “okay could we use the IPF for this”... and I came up with the idea of adding a parent that sees you doing various things that a child might want to do (like jumping on the sofa) and from a place of loving but firm presence, stop you from doing the things the parent wants you to stop doing.

This works well because in the visualization you get to choose whatever is it that you want to be stopped from doing: you are endorsing your own limits. Real life parents will have to bear the anger of their children for restricting them in ways they may not yet understand. Thus, the enlightened but still individual parent (as opposed to the deity-like IPF) seems like a healthier model for interiorizing healthy parental relationships.

Schema therapy does have this concept build in as one of their domains, the Impaired Limits domain, which include the issues of entitlement/grandiosity and lack of self-control. Here I did a quick LLM-powered try to what an IPF-flavored meditation to address this schema would look like.

Imagine themselves as a child wanting something — to keep playing, to grab something, to skip a chore, to win — and the ideal parents saying no, or "not yet," or "first this, then that." The crucial details to evoke: the parents' faces stay warm while they hold the line; they aren't angry, anxious, or punitive; they don't lecture; they tolerate the child's frustration without withdrawing love and without giving in. Then — and this is the therapeutic payload — guide attention to what happens after: the frustration crests, passes, and the child discovers they survived it, the parents are still there, still warm, and something in the child settles. For Insufficient Self-Control, you can extend this into a scene of the parents sitting alongside the child through a boring or effortful task, lending their calm, celebrating completion. For Entitlement, a scene where the parents lovingly insist on reciprocity — waiting a turn, considering a sibling's feelings — while communicating that the child is loved as an ordinary member of the family, not for being special.

One could apply these insights as needed for other Schemas, or simply take the general idea (the "good enough parent") and apply it to your particular case.

Thanks to Kristin Ellis for feedback.