By: Camden Baucke MS LLP
The winter holidays are synonymous with gift giving.
While it can be part of the magic, it can also be a source of distress and distrust.
Gift giving is considered a love language – but this label can be a mask for emotional bribery.
To get to the heart of it, we need to understand the purpose of gift giving and where it can go awry.
If you distrust a gift, it might be worth asking why.
The Issue with Love Languages
I understand the sentiment of “love languages“, but they sure can make a messy situation worse.
Essentially, identifying with a love language means there is a specific type of action that you appreciate most.
For example, many people identify with the love language of “word of affirmation“. This is not too problematic, because someone might just appreciate one expression of love over another.
However, the idea of love languages can be highly problematic:
1 – Limiting Yourself
When you limit the love you receive to just one love language, you might be cutting off ways people can love you – just because you only believe you best receive love another way. It can be disparaging for others, shutting down other’s best attempts to love you. It also shuts yourself down, because you might be receiving a fraction of the love shown to you.
For example, if someone’s love language is “quality time“, and their partner must work long hours, this might be problematic. Their partner, who truly cares, tries to love them with short and intense physical touch, but this is loving them in a way other than their love language – dismissing a type of love they were freely given for the kind they didn’t get.
2 – Who’s Love Language is It?
Communication is complicated because it involves two or more people. When you have people speaking to each other in love languages, who’s preference determines the conversation? Is a love language something you send or you receive? If we limit the love we give to the language we know best, it might not match what someone needs.
For example, if someone’s love language is “acts of service“, they might try to gift their work to someone who’s love language is “words of affirmation“. It’s problematic because the giver’s love language doesn’t match the receiver’s love language. This doesn’t mean they’re not being kind, it’s just not fitting the love language of the other person. Who needs to expand their perspective? The person who narrowly receives love, or the person who parochially gives it?
3 – Learning Love from Bad Places
While you can find online questionnaires everywhere, you won’t find any tried and true psychometric tests to scientifically assess love language. Sure, you have an internal compass, and there’s nothing wrong with listening to it. However, life often throws wrenches into the mix – it affects how we feel and how we expect to be loved. If you had a difficult past that told you that a certain type of love language is acceptable and not others, it’s healthiest to learn how to be loved in ways that trauma might have told you were dangerous.
For example, someone might grow up in a family that was cold, affectionless, disparaging, distant, and unhelpful, but they threw a big Christmas every year with loads of gifts. When you have an experience like this, you learn that a love language is not just a preference, but a normalcy. A normalcy that’s 364 days a year of abuse and neglect, all for one day of love through a language determined by the giver.
Unfortunately, I’ve treated many people on accounts of growing up in those types of homes. Recovering from those homes means inviting new types of love languages into your life rather than narrowing it to the emotional bribes every December.
The Issues With Gift Giving
If a family emphasizes gift giving, but no other love languages, there’s a good chance it’s a dysfunctional, materialistic, and vain environment.
I say possibly, because I can’t speak for every home out there with plenty of gifts for the holidays.
The issue isn’t with just this one love language, it’s with all the other forms of love that are missing – especially in homes with children.
Children need physical touch like hugs and snuggles – this has been a psychological fact for decades now.
Children need words of affirmation, which help build their confidence as their brain is molding their identity.
Children need acts of service, as their whole life depends on the acts of service their caregivers can give.
Children need positive quality time and attention from their parents to establish secure attachment – another psychological fact.
Ironically, gifts aren’t exactly on the list of needs for children, but everything else is – and there are individual consequences for withholding them.
If a house is full of gifts, but absent of every other type of love, those gifts might not actually be gifts. They might be emotional bribes to forget harmful behavior.
What Really is a Gift?
The concept of gifts can vary by circumstance and culture, but they can be generally described as:
Gifts are given, which means they exchange hands – property you own is given to someone else to own. If your gift is an act, it is a service that starts with you, and ends with benefitting the receiver.
Gifts can be magical things if given with respect. They can be something we enjoy without having to earn it, fulfilling the purpose of a gift.
A true gift comes with the freedom to do whatever you would like with it.
However, what if you give a gift with strings attached? What if you have to earn your gifts by being “appreciative enough” or by holding onto it and letting the giver know you still have it?
I hate to break it to you, that’s no longer a gift – it’s a transaction.
What is an Emotional Bribe?
An emotional bribe is a gift you must earn retroactively.
It’s no longer a true gift because you have to pay for it, just after you receive it. What does the giver of an emotional bribe receive in return? Control.
A bribe is defined as:
Valuables given to corrupt someone’s behavior, especially their performance
For example, imagine giving a building contractor $50 for the holidays as a gift. That counts as a gift, as long as it ends there. That is, unless you give the contractor the money and tell them:
“just make sure you finish the project by the end of the week or else I’ll take that back“.
Then, it’s an emotional bribe for the purpose of getting a return – a finished project.
Because an emotional bribe places you in debt, the gift never truly ever changes hands.
For example, if you receive a tennis racket on the eighth day of Hanukah, but you must use it every day to earn it, the racket truly isn’t yours. When and how much you use it is still being determined by the person who gave it.
What’s an emotional bribe in a dysfunctional family?
A parent might claim their love language is gift giving, but they might just be trying to persuade their children with emotional bribes.
A bargaining chip to escape responsibility for their actions – to keep their children from holding them accountable for harassment or neglect.
I want you to imagine a set of parents who are chronically mean to their daughter. They are usually negative, disrespectful, and negligent dictators, but one day a year they use gifts to bribe their daughter into forgetting their misdeeds. 364 days are filled with criticism and contempt, followed by one day with presents stacked underneath the tree. It feels nice to actually be loved for a minute. However, there’s a wariness that accompanies that holiday cheer. A cautiousness that a day full of presents is meant to eliminate a year full of harm and ensure another year of painful compliance.
Gifts don’t come with pressure – only emotional bribes do. You don’t have to thank someone enough, use a gift often enough, or be grateful enough to earn what should have already been given with no strings attached.
A gift with strings attached is no gift at all.
Spot the Difference
A gift is something you don’t have to earn before or after receiving.
If a gift is posed as an emotional bribe, you get to decide what you do with it.
Emotional bribes DO NOT rid someone of harmful habits or previous wrongs & they DO NOT give someone the right to control you – even if that is their intent.
If you are the giver, remember that your gift exchanges hands and becomes the other person’s property – it is not an extension of you, it is theirs.
Also, PLEASE don’t forget that it’s a privilege to give.
When I worked in community mental health with people suffering from severe conditions (schizophrenia for example), many kind folks were eager to give without the means to.
In the most impoverished homes, I was eagerly offered sodas, candy, and cigarettes – these were true gifts.
So while you determine what is truly a gift and what is an emotional bribe, remember your own privilege of giving.
Reflections 
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