Don't believe you're lovable? Read this.

Hi!

If you have read my blog posts about attachment theory, healthy relationships, and doing your personal work to show up as your best self in your community and wondered how you could possibly deserve to be in a loving partnership or be appreciated for who you are, you’re in the right place.

“The proof is in the abandoned, rejected pudding. I am surely only as valuable, lovable, and worthy as others judge me to be. What else could explain their behavior towards me? I see all of these affirming statements across social media and I don’t understand why they don’t speak to me. It’s like they apply to everyone else.”

I received this message from a lovely person recently and it really hit home for me. Seeing statements that tell us to feel worthy when we feel everything but lands us in a lonely place. I’m familiar with that feeling.

Thinking back on my journey with worthiness for this post, I realized that a) it’s not over (is it ever?) and b) it took some very deep moments of questioning and even that rock-bottom feeling before I was able to truly invest in myself and believe in my inherent value as a human being.

Throughout the time I was specifically focused on this personal work, support from my therapist was critical in helping me understand how to shift from needing lots of external validation to feeling confident in my worth and being able to make decisions for myself from a place of integrity. I realized then that I was striving to fill a sense of emptiness with love from other people, but that meant that my wholeness was fleeting because as soon as those people turned away to focus on something or someone else, I felt alone, unseen, and lacking. One of the principles of secure attachment is consistency and reliability and I wanted to provide some of that for myself. I decided that I didn’t want my sense of worth to be based on whether I was receiving positive attention from someone or hustling hard enough to earn their love.

Practicing feeling worthy was really uncomfortable because it didn’t feel true at first—it felt like I was living a lie (and that is just one of the ways that interpersonal trauma continues to harm us—we don’t believe we deserve to feel good). The way I see it now, it wasn’t a lie; it was a bridge that supported me in moving to where I needed to be.

My therapist asked me this question, and I still ask myself (and my therapy clients!) today: what would it be like to act as if you are _____________?

So for our purposes, what would it be like to act *as if* you are worthy of love?

How does a person who is worthy of love show up in relationships?

How does a person who is worthy of love respond when someone disrespects their boundaries or treats them in a way that feels out of alignment?

How does a person who is worthy of love feel in their body?

How do they think and talk about themselves, in their own minds and with others?

What if we learn to understand that people generally do things to others not because the other person is bad or unworthy, but because there is pain and grief and loss and unprocessed emotion that interferes with their ability to communicate effectively? There’s a delicate balance between understanding that someone else’s behavior isn’t about us and taking accountability for the aspects of our personality and attachment behaviors that could be different and more compassionate, clear, and grounded.

And let’s not forget how important modeling is. If we don’t see healthy relationships in our lives, it’s more difficult to create them (but not impossible—I see people do it all the time!). If you didn’t have an example in your life of a person who believed themselves to be worthy, who do you know now? Who might model that for you and give you a beautiful example of self-trust, self-love, and self-worth?

Just because the concept of worthiness doesn’t feel comfortable when you try it on, doesn’t mean it’s not true or it doesn’t apply to you. More than anything, it likely means that you have been through a lot in your time here and you’re operating with an inaccurate and outdated message that says you don’t deserve all the good things. But the truth is that you do. We all do. It may take some work to get closer to believing it’s true, and that’s okay—we are all on that journey together.

Thank you so much for sharing with me and being here.

Warmly,

Elizabeth

P.S. If you are in need of inspiration, I highly recommend listening to anything by the magical India.Arie :)