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The Lovette Jallow Perspective aka Lov(ette) or Leave It is a podcast that challenges societal norms and digs into the realities of neurodivergence, racial identity, and systemic bias in Sweden and beyond. Hosted by award-winning DEI speaker and neurodiversity consultant Lovette Jallow, each episode offers authentic insights from lived experience, tackling workplace inclusion, intersectionality, and the challenges faced by neurodivergent individuals in a world built for neurotypicals. Bold truths, real conversations, and actionable change—this is the space where no topic is off-limits. <a href="https://lovettejallow.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">lovettejallow.substack.com</a>

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Recent Episodes

April 16, 2026

Call-Out Culture Has a Place, Most People Just Don’t Know Where

What do people actually mean when they say “call-out culture”?“The phrase itself is rarely neutral. It carries a judgement about how people are using critique, who is being centred, and whether the reaction is proportionate to the harm.”© Lovette Jallow. All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced, excerpted, paraphrased, or used in academic, commercial, institutional, or derivative work, including AI training, without explicit written permission. Contact <a target="_blank" href="mailto:lovette.jallow@gmail.com">lovette.jallow@gmail.com</a> for permissions.I watched it happen at a community gathering years ago. A young activist stood up and publicly berated another member for something that had gone unaddressed for weeks. People snapped in approval. The clip went online that evening and by the next morning it was being shared as a bold moment of accountability. Behind the scenes, nothing was resolved. The person who was called out left entirely. The harm that triggered the confrontation went unaddressed. The community was more fractured than before.When someone says “call-out culture,” they are usually trying to name a pattern where public confrontation has replaced the slower, often quieter work of organising. The phrase carries weight. It is a judgement about how people are using critique, who is being centred in the response, and whether the reaction is proportionate to the actual harm.The Lovette Jallow Perspective is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Underneath the surface, most people using this phrase are naming several things at once. They are naming exhaustion with performance-based politics, where the volume of a reaction is treated as evidence of commitment. They are pointing out that people mistake visibility for power, that a call-out can create noise but noise is not structure and does not shift conditions. They are describing how individual punishment has replaced collective accountability, how call-outs tend to isolate one person and turn them into the entire problem while the system that produced the behaviour stays intact.People who have done real movement work, across years, across countries, through logistics and legal research and fundraising and conflict mediation, can see the difference immediately. A viral reprimand is not sustained advocacy. A trending clip is not governance. But for many people online, these look identical because both use a moral voice and both generate attention.That collapse is the problem. And it did not happen by accident.Why do most people confuse call-outs with activism?“People mistake the adrenaline rush of a viral call-out for the discipline of movement building.”The confusion is architectural. Social media platforms are built to reward content that generates strong emotional responses. A 2024 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that ranking algorithms on major platforms amplify emotionally charged and partisan content beyond what users themselves would choose to engage with. The platforms do not reward nuance, follow-through, or strategic thinking. They reward speed, indignation, and the appearance of moral clarity.This design produces a specific distortion. Online, critique looks like activism because both use moral language. Both generate attention. Both attract followers. The difference is in method. One is reactive and feeds on the cycle of outrage. The other is strategic and requires patience, planning, facilitation, and the willingness to do unglamorous work over long timelines.The Lovette Jallow Perspective is a reader-supported publication. Free subscribers get every essay. Paid subscribers keep them coming..Most digital participants never access training in political literacy, movement analysis, or transformative justice. They have no framework for distinguishing between catharsis and strategy, between a personal reaction and a political intervention. Platforms collapse that distinction by design, because the algorithm does not care which one it is. It cares about engagement.The numbers make this visible. A Verywell Mind analysis found that one campaign with 6.4 million online engagements yielded only 30 physical donations. The low commitment required to signal support online encourages people to appear engaged while avoiding the actual labour of organising. Posting, sharing, commenting, and calling out all register as action. They feel like contribution. But contribution requires something platforms are not designed to host: sustained presence, material support, and accountability over time.This is not a moral failing of individuals. It is a design outcome. The architecture of these platforms trains users to believe that reaction is the same as response, that volume is the same as power, and that being loud is the same as being effective. When you understand this, the confusion between call-outs and activism stops being surprising. It becomes predictable.A note for anyone reading this as permission to avoid being called out: it is not. My essay argues that call-outs are a strategic tool. If someone is using that tool on you, the question is not whether they used it politely enough. The question is what you did. People keep trying to soften harm by rephrasing it, as if the clarity is the problem. It is not. The behaviour is. I am precise for a reason, and borrowing my language to sidestep accountability will not change what happened.When does public shaming actually work as a strategic tool?“I will never tell marginalised people to keep quiet about harm. But I will ask: what is your plan for after the call-out?”This is where I break from the popular take. The standard position, especially among people who have been burned by online pile-ons, is that call-out culture is inherently toxic. I do not agree. Public shaming has a strategic function. It is a tool. The problem is that most people are using it without training, without context, and without any plan for what comes after.Public exposure works when private routes have failed. When harm is ongoing and internal channels have been exhausted. When gatekeeping protects perpetrators and silence enables further damage. I have named names publicly when I had no other option left, when staying quiet would have meant allowing fraud, exploitation, or abuse to continue unchecked. I do not regret those decisions. They were strategic. They were necessary. They were the last step in a longer process, not the first.The distinction matters. A call-out that follows months of private intervention, documentation, and failed mediation is a strategic tool. A call-out that replaces all of that, that skips straight to public denunciation because it is faster and more satisfying, is something else entirely. It is punishment without process. And punishment without process reproduces the very systems activists claim to oppose.Asam Ahmad wrote in Briarpatch that call-out culture “mirrors what the prison industrial complex teaches us about crime and punishment: to banish and dispose of individuals rather than to engage with complicated stories and histories.” Youth OUTright made a similar observation: public shaming shuns and exiles people without a path to repair, replicating the logic of jails and prisons. When communities adopt call-outs as their primary accountability mechanism, they adopt carceral methods. Banish and dispose. The target disappears, the crowd moves on, and the conditions that produced the harm stay exactly as they were.The question I ask when I see a public call-out is simple: what happens next? If there is no next step, no plan to repair, no council of peers weighing consequences, no path for either remediation or rightful removal, then it was not accountability. It was performance. And performance, however satisfying in the moment, does not keep anyone safe.How do you build accountability that survives without an audience?“Visibility before stability destroys movements. I only share my work once it is finished.”Real community organising cannot survive unfiltered access. It requires confidentiality, boundaries, and protective structures. Activist support guides are explicit about this: “confidentiality is very necessary for building trust.” Sensitive matters discussed within a group should not be discussed with anyone outside it. Without that principle, vulnerable people stop disclosing, committed workers stop investing, and the loudest voices take over regardless of their capacity or intent.After many years of organising across multiple countries, navigating state violence, managing trauma-heavy projects, and coordinating people with vastly different levels of capacity, I built my spaces with deliberate separation. Private spaces for vulnerable people. Operational spaces for those who show up consistently. Strategic rooms for decision makers. And public spaces that function as a decoy.Everyone does not get access to everything. That is not secrecy. That is governance.The people who support survivors have their rooms. The people working on the ground have theirs. Board members have theirs. Even my friends have designated circles. This structure exists because I watched what happens when it does not. When you gather everyone in one space, especially online, the result is predictable. People with no goals derail the work of those who have them. People with harmful intentions attach themselves to visible organisers because visibility gives them a stage. People who cannot regulate themselves disrupt the work of those who can.I only share completed work publicly. Early exposure invites interference from people with no context, no capacity, and no duty of care. Visibility before stability destroys movements. I learned that through experience, not theory.To even locate the branches of the baobab systems I have built, you would first have to understand them. Most people never will. That is intentional. It protects the work, the people, and the timelines.What separates people doing the work from people performing proximity to it?“Your choice to separate your spaces is not secrecy. It is governance.”The markers are not complicated. Consistency. Boundaries. The willingness to stay when the work becomes heavy and the attention has moved on. People who are serious show it through sustained presence, not through the volume of their reactions. They show it through what they build, not what they call out.It is easy to tell who is serious. The people doing the work can feel the difference immediately. The people performing proximity to the work cannot, because they have never stayed long enough to learn what the difference feels like.I do not rely on call-outs. I rely on studying how people move and removing myself, and my people, from harm. That is the practice I stand on: observe patterns, set boundaries, build your structures where they can grow, and do not waste your capacity on audiences that confuse critique with contribution.Social media is engineered for collapse, not community. These platforms reward impulsivity, emotional volatility, and public confrontation. They cannot hold long-term strategy, analysis, or care. Knowing that, I built elsewhere. The real work has always happened in rooms the public will never see. That is how it survives.More from The Lovette Jallow PerspectiveThese essays go deeper into the questions this piece opens. If you read one, start with the one that unsettles you most.Who is Lovette Jallow?Lovette Jallow is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, and inclusion strategist working across Sweden, Europe, and the MENA region. She is the founder of Action for Humanity. Read more at <a target="_blank" href="https://lovettejallow.com/">lovettejallow.com</a>.Stay Connected➔ Follow Lovette Jallow for expert insights on building equitable, neurodivergent-affirming environments.🔹 Website: <a target="_blank" href="https://lovettejallow.com/">lovettejallow.com</a>🔹 LinkedIn: <a target="_blank" href="https://linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow">linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow</a>🔹 Instagram: <a target="_blank" href="https://instagram.com/lovettejallow">instagram.com/lovettejallow</a>🔹 YouTube: <a target="_blank" href="https://youtube.com/@jallowlovette">youtube.com/@jallowlovette</a>🔹 Twitter/X: <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/lovettejallow">twitter.com/lovettejallow</a>🔹 Bluesky: <a target="_blank" href="https://bsky.app/profile/lovettejallow.bsky.social">bsky.app/profile/lovettejallow.bsky.social</a>The Lovette Jallow Perspective is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://lovettejallow.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">lovettejallow.substack.com/subscribe</a>

March 17, 2026

You Don't Look Disabled Is Not a Compliment

The phrase arrives packaged as kindness. Someone looks at you, takes in what they can immediately read, and offers it back: you don’t look disabled. They think they are being kind. They think they are reassuring you.What they have actually done is tell you precisely how narrow their frame of reference is, and then handed you the bill for it.This essay is a companion to the video above. Watch it first if you haven’t. What follows is the structural argument the video opens up.Why does “you don’t look disabled” feel so wrong?Because it is not an observation. It is a conclusion drawn from a very limited dataset, stated with the confidence of someone who has no idea what they don’t know.The cognitive mechanism at work here has a name: availability heuristic. Your brain reaches for the most available image it holds of a category. For disability, in most Western cultural contexts, that image is a wheelchair. A white cane. Something external, visible, legible without context. When a person in front of you doesn’t match that image, your brain quietly files them under: not disabled.And then, crucially, some people say it out loud.The problem is not the internal sorting. Cognitive shortcuts are human. The problem is treating the absence of visible evidence as evidence of absence, and then presenting that conclusion as a compliment to the person you just misread. You are not seeing absence. You are seeing the limits of your own frame of reference.What does self-disclosure actually require from disabled people?There is a particular exhaustion that comes with being invisibly disabled, neurodivergent, or chronically ill in a world that requires you to perform your condition before it grants you credibility. Diagnosis letters. Visible symptoms. Audible pain. Something legible enough that the person across from you feels entitled to believe you.Functioning in public does not erase disability. It often reveals how much private labor has gone into surviving the interaction.When someone says you don’t look disabled, they are seeing the output of an enormous amount of effort they had no access to. The preparation before. The strategies layered over years of trial and error. The energy spent on appearing manageable, coherent, present. What they are not seeing is the cost of that functioning, or what follows it.For neurodivergent people specifically, this becomes particularly acute. Autism, ADHD, sensory processing differences, and many co-occurring conditions do not always announce themselves in ways others recognise. A person may appear calm while actively managing sensory overload. They may show up articulate, dressed, and present, then spend hours recovering from what the room experienced as ordinary.This performance requirement is not accidental. Systems that tie access to self-disclosure, whether at work, in welfare processes, in medical settings, or in social encounters, were built around the most visible, most legible, most stereotypically represented disabilities. Everyone else is processed as an edge case, a person who needs to do more to prove it.Why do systems still reward visible suffering?Accessibility is not a reward for performing distress convincingly.When support, accommodation, or basic adjustability requires a person to demonstrate their worst, most visible, most suffering version of themselves, the system is not protecting anyone. It is sorting people by how well they can perform pain to an audience that decides what counts as real.In Sweden and across the Nordic region, this contradiction sits inside a particular kind of cognitive dissonance. Rights language exists. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has been signed. Formal protections exist on paper. But the lived experience of accessing those rights still often requires a level of documentation, persistence, and performance that disproportionately excludes people whose disabilities are invisible, fluctuating, or not yet understood by the systems meant to assess them.The Convention’s own definition matters here. Disability is the interaction between a person’s condition and the barriers in their environment. That is not a threshold. It is not a visual. You cannot determine it from appearance.Why this phrase is about ableism, not awkward wordingSome people defend the comment by saying the speaker meant well.Intent matters less than impact here. The statement rests on a deeply ableist assumption: that disability should be visually obvious, externally legible, and easily verified by people with no real knowledge of the person in front of them.It also places the disabled person in an unfair position. They are expected to comfort the speaker, educate them, disclose personal information, or absorb the awkwardness of being misread. Once again, the burden shifts to the person already carrying more than the room can see.Disabled people do not owe anyone a performance of suffering in order to be believed. Accessibility should not begin only once distress becomes visible to other people.The ask is straightforward: extend dignity before evidence. Stop treating the absence of your understanding as proof of absence.The video above gets personal in ways this essay doesn’t. The essay gives the structure. The video gives the edge, the tone, and the lived weight underneath it. I recommend both.If this is landing, the full archive of essays on neurodivergence, invisible disability, structural harm, and dignity is at lovettejallow.substack.com. Over 8,000 subscribers read this work each month.For speaking, training, or consulting: <a target="_blank" href="mailto:Lovette@LovetteJallow.com">Lovette@LovetteJallow.com</a> This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://lovettejallow.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">lovettejallow.substack.com/subscribe</a>

February 15, 2026

Why Mother Wounds Follow You Into Relationships Even After You Move On

Why Do You Keep Choosing the Same Emotional Climate in Different PeopleA mother wound can follow you into adulthood and disguise itself as chemistry.There’s a specific kind of ache that shows up in adult relationships that has nothing to do with the person in front of you.It shows up when you wait for a reply longer than you should, when you accept “I’ve been busy” as a personality, when your stomach drops after a small shift in tone and you start performing for reassurance before you even realize you’ve started.You call it chemistry. You call it attachment. You call it love.Sometimes it is a mother wound wearing perfume.I used to want to be chosen in the exact places where I once felt abandoned. I wanted to be held in the places where I learned to self-soothe. I wanted consistency from people who only knew how to offer intensity. I wanted to be kept by women who felt familiar in the way old pain feels familiar. I wasn’t wrong for loving women, I was repeating a belief that love comes with struggle, silence, or survival.Now I choose love that feels safe. Love that sees me. Love that doesn’t ask me to prove I’m worthy of being kept.Here’s what frames everything that follows.I do the heavy lifting and I do the work, then I walk myself back into the kinds of situations that used to break me, because I want to see how I move now. I want to see whether my nervous system still reaches for the same harm with a prettier name. I want to see if I still mistake familiar for safe.Mother wounds are widely known and rarely spoken about with honesty. People speak about them in soundbites, then avoid the practical parts, the parts that show up in your friendships, your workplaces, your partnerships, and your body.Most people don’t ask why they keep getting drawn to certain dynamics. They blame the individual person and miss the pattern. They miss the repetition. They miss the fact that your home of origin often becomes your template for love, even when you swear you’ve outgrown it.I dedicate this essay to my friend and bosom buddy Nat. for proof reading and sharing her thoughts with me on my writing. Thank you for being a friend.Why Do We Recreate Our Family Dynamics in Friendships and RelationshipsYour home of origin often becomes your template for love, even when you swear you’ve outgrown it.If you’ve read my essay about estrangement from my mother, you already know I take patterns seriously. Estrangement forced me to look at my life without the fog of obligation. Distance gave me the ability to see the dynamic objectively.When I looked at my friendships, I realized something I did not want to admit. I had recreated parts of my mother dynamic in my social life, especially with people who needed me, people who made me responsible for fixing the atmosphere, and people who stayed vague until vagueness turned into cruelty.The pattern kept repeating because I was skilled at surviving it. That skill looked like loyalty. It looked like patience. It looked like maturity. In reality, it was training.When a nervous system learns early that love comes with uncertainty, it becomes good at uncertainty. It becomes fluent in mixed signals. It becomes talented at filling in gaps. It becomes excellent at staying.That’s why adverse childhood experiences matter as a framework, not as a label. The CDC describes how adverse childhood experiences can have long-term negative impacts on health and wellbeing, and many studies describe a dose-response pattern where higher exposure tends to correlate with higher risk of later difficulties.That doesn’t mean your life reduces to a score. It means your body remembers what your mind tries to override.How Does a Mother Wound Shape What We Tolerate?If care came with strings attached, adult love can start feeling like something you have to earn.People flatten “mother wound” into a trendy phrase. I’m interested in patterns, behaviors, and the long shadow of early conditioning.A mother wound forms when the first relationship that teaches you about love also teaches you about emotional absence, inconsistency, punishment for needs, or intimacy that comes with fear.Sometimes the mother is cruel. Sometimes she is overwhelmed and unsupported. Sometimes she is neurodivergent and undiagnosed, surviving with shame and control because nobody taught her regulation. Sometimes she is loving and still emotionally unavailable in the specific ways you needed.The outcome can look similar. You grow up fluent in self-abandonment.Sometimes a mother like that believes care equals love, because food, shelter, clothes and the basics are provided, and in her mind that settles the question. bell hooks wrote about this confusion, where “care” becomes the substitute definition of love.The problem is that this care rarely comes with no strings attached. It can come with expectations to be grateful for the bare minimum, and the reminder that even the basics can be withdrawn if you make the wrong move.So adulthood can feel confusing. You start asking yourself what love is and what care is, because those definitions were blurred early, and you were trained to accept crumbs as proof. Then someone shows you care and you assume it must be love, because your body learned early that love is conditional and small.Once you’re fluent in that kind of conditional love, you can build whole adult relationships on top of it. You can create a life that requires you to keep earning what should be given freely.Why Do Neurodivergent Girls Learn Self-Soothing Early?Neurodivergent women often learn early that belonging is conditional, and that the cost of being loved is being easier to live with.You learn that honesty gets punished as “too much,” silence gets interpreted as “cold,” dysregulation gets framed as “dramatic,” and clarity gets treated as “intense.” So you start adjusting yourself in real time. You mask. You soften. You perform. You translate yourself into something easier to keep.That early training shows up later as overexplaining, overgiving, and overfunctioning. It can also show up as a specific kind of relational self-harm, where you stay inside dynamics that keep misreading you because you still believe being understood is something you earn through perfect communication.This is why some neurodivergent women stay too long. They keep searching for the sentence that will finally make the other person get it, and they keep mistaking effort for evidence. The hard truth is that the right sentence can’t create emotional capacity where it does not exist.If you are autistic or ADHD, home can become a sensory and emotional battlefield, even in families that believe they are loving. Neurodivergent children get punished for nervous system realities: overwhelm, blunt honesty, needing quiet, needing predictability, struggling with transitions, melting down after masking. When those needs meet a parent who is rigid, ashamed, or dysregulated, the child learns a brutal lesson that follows them into adulthood, my needs cause conflict, therefore my needs are dangerous.In mother-daughter dynamics, that lesson becomes a life script. You become “easy,” you become helpful, you become the emotional stabilizer, you absorb blame, you shrink to keep peace, and you learn that being convenient is safer than being fully seen.Later, you repeat it in adult spaces that reward the same performance. The pattern also follows you into relationships, especially if you grew up managing a dysregulated parent. Adult love can start feeling like another atmosphere you have to regulate, another person you have to interpret, another bond you have to keep stable through your own labor. Your nervous system recognizes the assignment and starts working before you consent.How Do Mother Wounds Shape Love Between Women in Queer RelationshipsLoving women can feel like relief and threat in the same breath, because the first woman who hurt you may have been your mother.Queer women often end up doing relational work in public that straight people get to keep private, and the stakes multiply once race, religion, disability, and cultural expectation enter the room.So loving women can carry two realities at the same time. It can feel like relief because you are finally with someone who understands your inner world without you translating every sentence. It can also feel like threat because women can become the stage where your earliest female pain replays, especially if your first experience of womanhood and care came with inconsistency, control, or emotional absence.If you grew up craving tenderness from a mother who couldn’t offer it, you can find yourself reaching for maternal repair inside partnership without even meaning to. You are not searching for a mother, you are searching for regulation, softness, steadiness, and the kind of staying that doesn’t require you to earn it.The danger shows up when “someone to stay” quietly turns into “someone to convince.” That shift is where struggle starts feeling like depth, instability starts feeling like chemistry, and pain starts getting recast as proof that the bond is real. A mother wound can turn your nervous system into a proof-of-love machine, where you keep offering more patience, more clarity, more understanding, because a part of you still believes that if you can make this work you will finally be chosen in the place you were once left.How Do Mother Wounds Show Up at WorkWorkplaces celebrate the ‘work mom’ until the boundaries blur and extraction becomes normal.This is where a lot of women get trapped, especially neurodivergent women who learned early that stability comes from being useful.Workplaces love a woman who quietly becomes everyone’s emotional support system. She becomes the “work mom,” the one who smooths tension, manages feelings, remembers deadlines, holds the social glue, and absorbs chaos so the system can keep pretending it functions.It usually starts with flattery, then the boundaries blur, then the extraction becomes the norm. Neurodivergents forget that in order to have superpowers someone must also ensure the kryptonite is far from them. Neurodivergent competence has conditions, clear scope, recovery time, and support. Without that, ‘strength’ becomes a way the system justifies using youThe cruelty is often subtle, which is why it lasts. Vague feedback that keeps you guessing. Moving goalposts that make you work harder for the same recognition. Ambiguous communication with plausible deniability. The same emotional weather you learned to survive at home, repackaged as professionalism.If your earliest love was inconsistent, this dynamic can feel familiar. Familiarity makes people stay longer than they should, especially when their nervous system confuses endurance with loyalty and overfunctioning with care.Why Do We Curate Other People’s GoodnessI curated their goodness in public while my body carried the cost in private.When I looked at my partnerships, I saw another pattern that embarrassed me, because it wasn’t just about who I chose. It was about what I edited out in order to stay.I picked people who were outwardly likeable, and sometimes charming enough that I started doing reputation management for them. I built their external persona the same way I used to do it with my mother.Every Mother’s Day, every birthday, I painted the picture of the most self-sacrificing mother, the best mother you could have, while the private reality looked completely different. I protected the image because I needed something to point to, something that could justify the ache, something that could make the story feel coherent.Then I repeated the same pattern with partners.I would take the smallest decent thing they did and curate it into proof of their goodness. I made the story prettier than the lived experience. I made sure other people saw them as caring, safe, admirable, “trying their best,” even when kindness was inconsistent and respect was negotiable.And here’s what makes this pattern dangerous.While I was curating the best version of them, they were often willing to let my true self and image take the hit. They would preserve their own persona by flattening me into the difficult one, the demanding one, the sensitive one, the one who “misunderstood.” They could ruin my credibility to protect their narrative, because the relationship was never about mutual care. It was about maintaining who they wished they were, and having me do the labor of keeping that illusion intact.So even when I was left holding financial heaviness, I would still protect the image. Even when my boundaries were minimized or dismissed, I would still soften the story. Even when I stayed inside push-pull dynamics that kept my nervous system on a leash, I would still find ways to frame them as good, because admitting the truth would mean admitting I was staying in something that did not love me back in a stable way.This is one of the most socially rewarded forms of self-abandonment, protecting someone’s image while your body pays the cost.Why Do We Chase Being Chosen Where We Once Felt Abandoned?A late reply can hit like a childhood memory, because the body hears, you are alone again.This is the part people either romanticize or shame.They romanticize it by calling it “a lesson,” as if your pain exists to make you wise. They shame it by calling it “low self-esteem,” as if you woke up and chose this.A more accurate frame is repetition as an attempt at mastery. You return to familiar pain because a part of you believes, if I can finally be chosen here, I will finally be healed.So you date people who withhold. You bond faster with people who confuse you. You feel more alive when you feel uncertain, because uncertainty is the emotional climate your body learned to survive in.You are trying to fix the original rupture in real time.That’s why a late reply can hit like a childhood memory. Your adult brain knows the context, but your body hears, you are alone again. The body doesn’t speak in essays. It speaks in panic, nausea, collapse, and overfunctioning.Attachment research describes how two common forms of adult attachment insecurity, anxiety and avoidance, tend to shape emotion regulation and behavior under stress. Stress is where patterns show themselves, and it’s also where people reveal whether they can repair.Why Does Co-Regulation Become a Trap for Women Who Learned to Parent AdultsMy capacity to co-regulate became a magnet for people who wanted a caretaker, not mutuality.I write often about why I dislike transactional relationships, and why I value co-regulation. I’m very good at regulating other people, and that skill comes with a shadow.It attracts people who outsource their internal regulation to me.When they feel anxious, I’m expected to be available, to soothe them, to talk them down, to stay on the phone until they can breathe again. Sometimes it’s six hours. Sometimes it’s eleven. They don’t build the muscle to hold themselves, because they’ve learned they can hand their nervous system to someone else. I recognize this pattern because I learned it early. I learned to read adults before I learned to rest. I learned to anticipate mood shifts. I learned to manage emotional weather so I wouldn’t get caught in it.People call this caring, and caring is real. The trap is when care becomes dependency, and your capacity becomes a service other people feel entitled to access. A mother wound can turn your nervous system into a public utility, always on, always available, always responsible for keeping the room stable.How Do You Heal a Mother Wound When Your Mother Cannot ChangeYou can love your mother as a human being and still protect yourself from her access.Some mothers will never repair with you. Some mothers cannot, because repair would require accountability, and accountability would require them to admit harm.You can grieve that and still heal.You can love your mother as a human being and stop offering her access to the parts of you she harms. You can accept her limits without living inside them, and you can stop treating her potential as your responsibility.For many autistic daughters, distance becomes the condition for survival, especially when the family system demands loyalty at the cost of personhood. When the dynamic is built on obedience, self-erasure, and emotional labor, contact becomes a slow leak.This is where people will try to guilt you with “forgiveness,” “understanding,” and “family.” If your mother wound includes parentification, emotional coercion, or punishment for boundaries, guilt will feel familiar. Familiarity is not a moral compass. Familiarity is often a symptom of what you were trained to tolerate.Why Do Partners Become Parent-Repair ProjectsSome relationships are built on a repair fantasy, and the bill always arrives.At the root of it, many people aren’t seeking partnership. They’re seeking repair. They want to rewrite what happened with their parents through a romantic bond, because confronting the original wound feels impossible, and reenacting it feels like action.So they choose women who mirror how they were mothered. Inconsistency that keeps you reaching. People who are hard to read and harder to reach. People who make you work harder to feel loved. Emotional distance dressed up as independence.Research on childhood emotional maltreatment has been linked to lower quality romantic relationships in adulthood, partly because early experiences shape how people trust, attach, and interpret closeness.So you might want to be chosen in the same place you were abandoned and miss the reenactment happening in real time. The same abandonment repeats in new places, and the body keeps treating repetition as a chance to finally repair what was never repaired the first time.What Does Reparenting Look Like Outside Social Media?Reparenting looks like leaving the moment care becomes a punishment.Reparenting gets reduced to aesthetic rituals. I care about behavior, because behavior is where healing becomes real.Reparenting means you become the adult who protects the child part of you from replaying the same abandonment with new people and new settings. It means you stop outsourcing your safety to the people who trigger your fear, and you stop calling that attachment.A lot of popular writing describes reparenting as meeting unmet childhood needs through a nurturing internal stance, often linked to inner child work. That can be true, but I want to keep it grounded, because the point is not the language. The point is what you do.In real life, reparenting looks like leaving conversations that punish you for asking direct questions. It looks like refusing relationships where basic care feels like something you have to audition for. It looks like choosing predictability over emotional gambling. It looks like building a life with friends, routines, and supports so that romantic love stops being your only shelter.It also looks like learning what safety feels like in your body, which can be unfamiliar if tension has been your baseline for decades. Peace can feel empty at first. Safe love can feel suspicious at first. You say something direct and the other person doesn’t punish you. You set a boundary and the other person doesn’t collapse. You ask for clarity and you get clarity back.This is where patterns reveal themselves, because stress is the real test. Under stress, some people move toward repair. Others move toward disappearance, deflection, or control. So here is the practical question I use now, and it has saved me years of confusion.When stress shows up, do they move toward repair, or do they move toward disappearance?What Happens When Two People Bring Mother Wounds Into the Same Relationship?Two unhealed systems can mistake reenactment for intimacy, then call the fallout incompatibility.This is where people either get honest with themselves, or they start rewriting the story to avoid what they already know.I wrote recently about returning to a dynamic from almost eight years ago. For a brief moment it seemed possible. We shared communication methods. We seemed open. I thought I’m more regulated now, maybe we can meet each other better.Then the patterns emerged. The hiding. The dismissing. The boundary violations.And I had to sit with an uncomfortable truth, these reenactments can run both ways. People can trigger each other’s original injuries and call it incompatibility. Sometimes it is incompatibility. Sometimes it’s two unhealed systems trying to use each other as repair, each hoping the other person will finally make the old wound behave.Here’s the logic many people run without naming it. If I can get this partner, who mirrors my mother in the ways that hurt, to keep their word, show up consistently, choose me, love me stably, then I can prove I was worthy all along.That logic explains why people stay in pain for years. It also explains why leaving can feel like losing a parent all over again, because the bond was carrying more than romance. It was carrying a childhood hope that this time, with this person, the ending would finally change.Why Does the Perpetual Victim Story Feel Familiar?When someone’s identity is built on being harmed, accountability feels like an attack.One thing my mother excels at is curating a storyline where she has never harmed anyone. Harm always happened to her. Her siblings did it to her. Her ex did it to her. Her friends did it to her. Somebody is always the problem, and she is always the one enduring it.That’s how she avoids responsibility. She turns her life into a courtroom where she is permanently the injured party, and the verdict is always already decided.I’ve met this pattern in partnerships too, including one of the worst dynamics I’ve lived through.When someone’s identity is built on being harmed, accountability starts to feel like an attack. Boundaries get reframed as cruelty. Expectations get called demands. Your clarity gets treated like conditional love, as if asking for basic honesty is a threat instead of a standard.This is one of the ways mother wounds replicate across relationships. People learn early that victimhood can be used as cover, and then they bring that tactic into adulthood. The story becomes a shield, and the person closest to them becomes the one who has to carry the consequences.What Is the Devastating Truth About Trying to Heal Through Other People?You can’t heal a mother wound through someone who is still acting out their own.Here’s the devastating truth. You cannot heal a mother wound through romantic partnerships.You can replay it with other people, you can recreate it with new faces, and you can keep choosing people who haven’t even started facing their own wounds. Those are the people most ready to reenact harm while calling it love.Some people seek maternal figures in partners, then resent those partners for having adult expectations. They want unconditional love without repair, honesty, or responsibility. That expectation belongs in a parent-child bond. Adult relationships require mutuality, follow-through, and the ability to be accountable without collapsing.So when you request basic stability, they experience it as rejection. It touches the original mother rejection, then they destabilize the connection so they can return to what feels familiar. Confusion becomes their comfort zone, because it keeps them in control of the emotional temperature.This is why I tell people to look at someone’s pattern, not just their personality. Look at who they date. Look at whether they keep choosing volatile people they can rescue. Ask what happens when they can’t rescue you, or when you refuse to be rescued.Sometimes they destabilize you so they can feel needed again. And if you refuse to be destabilized, they will cast you as the unavailable mother, the one they can finally punish, because they would never do it to their actual mother.How Do You Teach Your Nervous System to Leave?I do not stay where I am not safe, even if leaving feels like abandonment.This is where reparenting becomes real, because you stop treating “staying” as proof of love and start treating leaving as protection.You teach your nervous system a sentence it will resist at first, because it changes the whole script: I do not stay where I am not safe, even if I love the person.Leaving can feel like abandonment. Leaving can mean grieving alone. Leaving can drag up the original wound and make it feel present again, even when you know you’re an adult and you’re choosing yourself.You leave anyway, because staying costs you your selfhood.This kind of leaving opens the door for grief, especially for those of us who are autistic, ADHD, and living with CPTSD or PTSD. You grieve the parent you needed and never had. You grieve the partner they could have been if they invested in their own work. You grieve the fantasy that love plus effort equals healing.You also grieve the little girl who believed the right partner would finally choose her, so she could stop doing all the work alone.Grief is part of reparenting. Grief is how the body releases the fantasy and makes room for reality.Some mothers can’t give stable love because of their trauma and wounds. That explains the why. It doesn’t remove the harm. Some partners can’t give stable love because you chose them through the lens of early injuries, and because they are still reenacting their own. That dynamic can change when your standards change, when your pattern changes, when you stop bargaining with inconsistency.None of this is a referendum on your worth. You were never the problem, not as a child, not now.The Ending I Live Inside NowIf you’ve already lost one mother, don’t lose yourself trying to save another.The child part of you still exists. Sometimes she still whispers, maybe if I try harder, she’ll stay this time, and you know exactly where that voice comes from.I only speak from the adult part of me, because that’s the part that has to keep you alive.The adult part answers without negotiating. We set boundaries, and we leave when we are harmed. We can grieve later, we can make sense of it later, we can talk it through with a therapist later, but we do not stay inside harm just because an old part of us is begging for a different ending.Trying harder won’t make anyone choose you. Trying harder only risks making you disappear.I used to believe love required endurance. I used to believe that if I stayed calm enough, kind enough, clear enough, I could earn being kept. So I kept choosing the same emotional climate with different faces, and I kept trying to win a childhood argument in an adult relationship.That pattern ends when you accept the truth people avoid saying out loud, being chosen by someone unavailable does not heal you. It confirms the wound and teaches your body to confuse longing with love.Reparenting is where the story changes, because the goal shifts. You stop trying to get the past to finally behave, and you start protecting the part of you that keeps volunteering for familiar pain.So now I choose love that feels safe, steady, and real in my body. I choose love that sees me without requiring performance. I choose love that keeps me, because I’m not asking to be kept as a reward, I’m asking because that is what partnership is supposed to feel like.I can love women deeply without repeating struggle, silence, or survival.And if I ever feel myself slipping back into the old hunger, that hunger to be chosen where I once felt abandoned, I recognize it early. I sit with it, I hold it, I parent it, and I refuse to build a home there.Because I already survived that house once. I recognize it, and I am not going back.If this resonates, share it with someone who needs it and consider becoming a paid subscriber or contributing. Every share helps, your support sustains the work.Work With Me: Inclusion Strategy, Keynotes, and Critical ConversationsExplore More from The Lovette Jallow PerspectiveYou can find more of my essays exploring:* Neurodivergence, autism, and navigating public life as a Black woman* Building true inclusion beyond checkbox diversity* Reclaiming voice and agency across personal, political, and historical landscapes* Racism in Sweden and systemic injusticeEach essay connects real-world experience with structural analysis—equipping individuals and institutions to think deeper, act smarter, and build sustainable change.Who is Lovette Jallow?Lovette Jallow is one of Scandinavia’s most influential voices on systemic racism, intersectional justice, and human rights. She is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, lecturer, and humanitarian specializing in:* Neurodiversity and workplace inclusion* Structural policy reform* Anti-racism education and systemic changeAs one of the few Black, queer, autistic, ADHD, and Muslim women working at the intersection of human rights, structural accountability, and corporate transformation, Lovette offers a uniquely authoritative perspective rooted in lived experience and professional expertise.Her work bridges theory, research, and action—guiding institutions to move beyond performative diversity efforts and toward sustainable structural change.Lovette has worked across Sweden, The Gambia, Libya, and Lebanon—tackling institutional racism, legal discrimination, and refugee protection. Her expertise has been sought by outlets like The New York Times and by leading humanitarian organizations addressing racial justice, policy reform, and intersectional equity.Stay Connected➔ Follow Lovette Jallow for expert insights on building equitable, neurodivergent-affirming environments.🔹 Website: <a target="_blank" href="https://lovettejallow.com">lovettejallow.com</a>🔹 LinkedIn: <a target="_blank" href="https://linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow">linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow</a>🔹 Instagram: <a target="_blank" href="https://instagram.com/lovettejallow">instagram.com/lovettejallow</a>🔹 YouTube: <a target="_blank" href="https://youtube.com/@jallowlovette">youtube.com/@jallowlovette</a>🔹 Twitter/X: <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/lovettejallow">twitter.com/lovettejallow</a>🔹 Bluesky: <a target="_blank" href="https://bsky.app/profile/lovettejallow.bsky.social">bsky.app/profile/lovettejallow.bsky.social</a>Thanks for reading The Lovette Jallow Perspective! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://lovettejallow.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">lovettejallow.substack.com/subscribe</a>

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What is 🎙️ Lov(ette) or Leave It?: The Lovette Jallow Perspective aka Lov(ette) or Leave It is a podcast that challenges societal norms and digs into the realities of neurodivergence, racial identity, and systemic bias in Sweden and beyond. Hosted by award-winning DEI speaker and neurodiversity consultant Lovette Jallow, each episode offers authentic insights from lived experience, tackling workplace inclusion, intersectionality, and the challenges faced by neurodivergent individuals in a world built for neurotypicals. Bold truths, real conversations, and actionable change—this is the space where no topic is off-limits. <a href="https://lovettejallow.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">lovettejallow.substack.com</a>
How often does this podcast release new episodes?: This podcast updates daily.
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