Dear Aunty - Breaking the pattern
WRITTEN BY Charmaine Carraway
Dear Aunty
I grew up in a single-parent household, watching my mother carry more weight than one person should. She worked tirelessly to provide for me and my baby brother, and because of that, I had to grow up fast.
I never had that steady presence of a father to tell me I was enough, to affirm me, to model what love from a man should look like. Because of that, I went searching for it. I gave my love away too easily, thinking if I could just be enough for someone, they wouldn’t leave. But they always did.
Over the years, I’ve cycled through relationship after relationship—pointless, draining, and rooted in me trying to fill a hole that love from within could’ve healed. These relationships have taught me hard lessons, but if I’m honest, some of those lessons I never needed to learn if I had known how to love myself first.
Now I’m a mother of two, and though I’ve found someone who feels like love, something in me keeps whispering that it won’t last. I keep wondering if I’m repeating old patterns. I know it’s generational, and I want to do it differently, but I don’t know how.
Aunty, how do I learn to love differently when I was never shown how?
Aunty Charmaine’s Response
Sweetheart, first let me say this: you are not broken. You are just someone who learned to survive before you ever got the chance to simply be loved.
When love is absent in our formative years, the heart goes searching. It doesn’t wait. It reaches out, hoping someone—anyone—will place worth where there was once silence. That’s not weakness, baby. That’s survival. But survival patterns were never meant to be the blueprint for love.
You’ve been choosing from a place of lack—hoping someone will prove you’re lovable, rather than choosing from a place of fullness, where you already know you are. And that shift, beloved, begins with slowing down and getting honest about what you truly want—not just from love, but from yourself.
Here’s what I want you to understand: the love you were missing was not just a father’s love—it was your own. When we’ve never been taught how to love ourselves, we try to outsource it. We give, and give, and give—thinking one day someone will see the real us and finally stay. But real love, the kind that lasts, can’t see you clearly if you don’t see you clearly first.
Doing it differently starts with choosing you as the foundation, not the afterthought.
It means:
🍃 Pause before attaching. Ask, “Am I choosing this from wholeness or from emptiness?”
🍃 Break the urgency. Love that is rushed is often rooted in fear. Real love takes its time.
🍃 Parent the child in you. Speak the words you needed to hear: “You are enough. You are safe. You don’t have to perform to be loved.”
🍃 Set standards, not tests. Standards are rooted in self-respect; tests are rooted in fear of being hurt.
And most of all—stop punishing yourself for what you were never taught. You are not behind. You are not too damaged. You are simply learning how to love with eyes wide open, and that takes courage.
You are already breaking the cycle by asking these questions. Now, give your children the gift of watching their mother love herself boldly, without apology. That is the legacy that rewrites everything.
Collective Soul Tribe Lesson
Soul Tribe, how many of us have gone looking for love in places that could never hold it? How many of us have mistaken attention for affection, chaos for passion, or survival for connection?
This story is not just hers—it’s ours too.
Generational cycles don’t end because someone tells us to do better. They end when someone chooses to see their patterns with clear eyes and say, “This ends with me.” That’s the sacred work of healing—loving yourself enough to stop repeating pain dressed up as love.
We must teach our spirits what real love feels like: calm, steady, consistent, rooted in truth. Not loud. Not urgent. Not conditional.
When you stop choosing from emptiness and start choosing from fullness, everything shifts.
Mantra
So Hum
I am That, I am whole
Repeat this 7 times in the morning and 7 times at night. Let it remind you that you are already complete.
Speak this 3 times in the mirror every morning and every night until your spirit believes it as truth.
Affirmation
“I choose love that honors me because I honor myself first.”
NAVIGATION
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