My mother hugged me at my college graduation, and I remember it because it was the first time in about ten years. We stood there on the lawn like two people who’d been introduced moments earlier. Her hands landed on my shoulder blades, then lifted. The whole thing lasted maybe two seconds. I thanked her, which is a strange thing to say after a hug, and I’ve been thinking about why I said it ever since.
My parents weren’t cruel. They came to every game, paid for every lesson, kept the fridge full. What they didn’t do was touch us, or say the word love out loud, or sit on the edge of the bed when something was wrong. Affection in our house was a casserole on the counter. You were supposed to understand what it meant.
A lot of people grew up this way, with parents who showed care through money and logistics because that was the only language they’d been handed. The kids of those parents are adults now, and most of them would tell you they turned out fine. They mostly did. But there’s a set of habits that follows them around, and once you know what to look for, they’re hard to miss.
1. They go stiff when someone hugs them
Watch them at a wedding or an airport. Someone comes in for a hug and there’s a half-second delay, a small freeze, before they lift their arms. Their hands land somewhere safe, the upper back usually, and they’re the first to let go.
Nobody taught them how to receive touch, so their body treats it like an unexpected guest. It’s not that they don’t want it. The research suggests the opposite.
Communication professor Kory Floyd at the University of Arizona has spent years studying what he calls affection deprivation, the gap between the touch people want and the touch they get.
In a survey of 509 adults, people who reported more affection deprivation also reported more loneliness, depression, and stress, along with more avoidant attachment and worse general health.
So the person who tenses up in your arms isn’t rejecting you. They’re standing in a doorway they were never shown how to walk through.
2. They show love by doing things instead of saying things
They’ll fix your sink. They’ll drive you to the airport at 4 a.m. They’ll notice your tires look low and fill them without mentioning it. What they will not do, or will do only with visible effort, is tell you they love you.
This is inheritance, not a personality quirk. Their parents loved them in the currency of tasks, so that’s the currency they know how to spend. Ask them if they love their partner and they’ll say “obviously,” a little annoyed, because to them the answer is sitting in the garage with new brake pads.
The partner usually understands. The partner usually also wishes, once in a while, for the words.
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3. They never ask anyone for help
They move apartments alone. They go to the hospital alone. They’ll sit with a problem for three weeks rather than send a text that says “can you come over.”
When comfort was never offered, asking for it stopped being an option and started feeling like an imposition. Somewhere early, these kids learned that need was a thing you handled privately, and the lesson stuck so well it now looks like strength from the outside.
A long-running study tracked 482 people from infancy into their mid-thirties, and those whose mothers showed high affection at eight months old reported less emotional distress as adults. A later letter in the same journal argued the authors overstated what the data could prove, so take it as one piece of evidence rather than a verdict.
Still, the pattern lines up with what you see in real life. The people who weren’t held tend to become the people who hold everything, and hand none of it over.
4. They can’t tell what they’re feeling until it’s already a problem
Someone asks how they’re doing and they say “fine.” They mean it. They have no idea they’ve been clenching their jaw for a week until a tooth cracks.
Psychologist Jonice Webb, who coined the term childhood emotional neglect, describes a wall that kids build between themselves and their feelings when nobody at home responds to those feelings. She writes that the wall isn’t a flaw, it’s something you built as a child because you had to, and the adult version is a hollow, numb feeling people struggle to name.
That’s the person who says “I’m not upset” in a voice that’s clearly upset. They aren’t lying. They just got the information later than everyone else in the room.
5. They don’t trust affection when it finally shows up
A partner tells them they’re wonderful and their first thought is “what do you want.” A friend sends a long, warm text and they wonder what’s wrong. Compliments land like a bill they didn’t expect.
If warmth was rare growing up, the brain files it under unusual, and unusual gets a second look. These adults spend a surprising amount of energy auditing the kindness they receive for hidden terms and conditions.
It makes dating hard.
Being loved out loud is disorienting when you were raised on love in silence, and the person doing the loving can mistake the confusion for coldness.
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6. They overcorrect with their own kids, or they repeat the pattern without noticing
Some of them become the parent who says “I love you” eleven times before school drop-off, who hugs so often the kid squirms away. They are, very consciously, doing the opposite of what was done to them.
Others find themselves standing in the kitchen with a crying eight-year-old, frozen, because nobody ever showed them what to do with that.
They reach for a task. They make a snack. The casserole on the counter, again.
Notre Dame psychologist Darcia Narvaez and colleagues asked more than 600 adults about the physical affection, play, and support they received as children, and found that adults who reported less of this early care had poorer mental health and more distress in social situations, and were less able to take another person’s point of view.
Both versions, the overcorrector and the repeater, are working from the same blank spot. One is trying to fill it and one is standing inside it. Neither chose it.
I called my mother the week after that graduation and told her the hug meant a lot to me. There was a pause long enough that I thought the line had dropped. Then she said she was glad, and asked if I needed money for the move.
I said no. I’ve since learned to say yes sometimes, and to ask for the hug directly, and to stay in it a beat longer than feels natural. The habits don’t vanish. But they’re habits, which means they were learned, which means a person can learn something else on top of them.
