What could be more painful than feeling like you don’t deserve love?

Unfortunately, this seems to be a very common experience.

[FYI, I’m doing a drop-in class next week on this topic you can check out here]

It’s an extremely pervasive idea that love, romance, even general happiness is something that we need to earn. Idea is not really the right word for it, perhaps “ingrained belief.”

I know it has been deeply embedded in me.

I know I see it everywhere in our culture.

It’s in the very fabric of social media, of the “hustle grindset” and much more.

It’s even embedded into a lot of inner work, personal development, and spirituality (even a lot of the stuff that claims to not do this… as some of the presenters or teachers are not in tune with their own trying to prove something or gain followers through their teaching.)

Of course not every motivation comes from this place, but more than I would have imagined gets filtered through this matrix of trying to earn love and approval.

Like Water to a Fish

I’m not sure when I started to perceive things this way. This perception that 95% of what I was doing was trying to prove I was good enough, then subsequently seeing that “code” in all sorts of behaviors and circumstances around me.

I know it has made me a lot more compassionate towards a lot of situations and behavior that I may have previously judged.

I know a lot of the inner work I did early on had to do with the subject of dating, women, relationships, and a huge undercurrent was me trying to eventually become cool, smooth, unattached, zen-like but also successful enough to finally have arrived at a place where I would be desirable.

I remember how painful parts of that journey were. Many parts of it.

Being married now, and seeing what that actually looks and feels like, it’s just so different than how I thought the world worked. What I thought mattered in a relationship and how I needed to be… as in, anything other than myself.

It’s taken a lot of close looking at that energy, those parts within myself to feel like they still need to prove and achieve in order to be deserving of love, if not deserving to even be on this planet.

Working with This

Telling yourself that you are worthy, telling yourself you don’t need to prove that, while that could serve some function, it’s unlikely to cut it here.

Most of us have countless experiences from a young age that reinforce the idea that we need to be good, be successful, be smart, get good grades, be good at sports, be a good dancer, who knows what else in order to belong to the family.

Or in order to fit in at school.

Or in order to not get beat up at school or somewhere else.

Or to not get hit by your own parents or worse.

There’s a lot of stuff here.

Acknowledging how ingrained tends to be, and working with that energy directly is where it’s at, in my opinion.

Bringing into consciousness and working through those places where this belief was embedded and reinforced can get you tremendous mileage.

You can look through my intro series to inner work on YouTube, the self-judgment inner workout also on YouTube, or “You’re Not a Repair Project” to give some context and set the stage for working with deeper aspects like this. Along with EFT tapping and other processes on my channel.

If you want to dive specifically into this quality of deserving love, I’ll be doing a drop in class next Thursday on this subject. Drop-in classes are a chance to do focused processing together on a particular theme, with an emphasis on being a repeatable tool you can use over and over again to address the deeper issue.

You can check out the “deserving of love” drop in class here, if that sounds good to you.

Remember, you’re not a repair project, and you don’t need to fix yourself in order to deserve love!