Growing Up Where Love Was Conditional

Growing Up Where Love Was Conditional is a first-person narrative about a woman raised in a white evangelical environment where affection was quietly exchanged for obedience, purity, and emotional restraint. Told from inside her lived experience, the episode traces how silence became her primary survival skill long before she understood it as a choice. Praise arrives through compliance, correction through withdrawal, and love through being “easy.” As she matures, she begins to see how her quiet protected systems rather than people—and how staying trusted required staying silent. The story does not offer resolution or rebellion, only the lingering cost of being loved for who she was willing to erase.