One of the biggest things that stands in the way of you and the things you want, is the perception of unworthiness. In other words, you not feeling worthy of what you want. And people spend so much time and effort trying to change this by trying to find ways to believe in their own worthiness or prove to themselves that they are worthy, often to no avail. This begs the question, why isn’t it working? The answer is, because unworthiness is actually benefitting them in some way. And unless they understand how, they will make no headway with regards to believing in their own worthiness. Today, let’s look at how your belief in your own unworthiness can serve as a self-preservation strategy, especially a strategy to preserve your relationships. And then, let’s look at how knowing this, can actually make you believe you are worthy.  

To illustrate this point before it is officially made, let’s meet Jaren. Jaren’s business partner swindled him, which led to a business collapse that forced him to sell his house in order to put that capital into the company to save it. This caused huge issues in his marriage, which ultimately led to his wife leaving him, but pulling all the money out of their joint account first. Jaren has been struggling with money. Underpinning his struggle to make money is his feeling that he does not deserve to be wealthy. More than that, he doesn’t deserve to be surrounded in opulence, to have nice things, to feel free to have and do what he wants and to have people supporting his road to success. Jaren has been working on this underlying unworthiness for a while now. He’s done core belief work, he’s been doing affirmations, he has seen a therapist, he did a session with a hypnotherapist, he did past life regression therapy and he leaves subliminal abundance harmonics on when he sleeps at night. But none of this is working for Jaren because all he is consciously aware of is how dedicated he is to being wealthy and as a result, how dedicated he is to feeling worthy. 

Jaren grew up in a home with a disengaged father who was absorbed in his hobby, which was hunting. And a mother who obsessively clipped coupons. She was always after the deal and would not spend money on anything new or full priced. All of Jaren’s clothes and toys came from a second-hand donation store. When he wanted or needed anything, his dad wouldn’t lift a finger and his mom would always get him the cheapest version of it, never the best. At 12 years old, he was expected to work to get the things he wanted. So, he ran a lemonade stand and mowed neighbor’s lawns and mucked horse stalls for a local barn for some money. A couple of times, when Jaren did something that his mother wasn’t happy with, like not returning home from school like he had agreed to, in order to watch his younger brother, or forgetting to do his chores, she would punitively charge him money for it and suddenly, all of what he had saved up for was gone. 

Jaren does not have a good relationship with his parents. He talks to them every now and then, and goes to their house for a bit on Thanksgiving and Christmas. But Jaren does not consciously experience himself as being close to them. What Jaren isn’t aware of, is this: The way he maintains closeness with and loyalty to his parents, is with the belief that he is not worthy of the things he needs and wants. How does this work? As a child, our parents are the god of our world. We are totally dependent on them. And we are desperate for a sense of closeness, love, safety, confluence and alignment with them. Well, if Jaren does deserve to be treated lovingly, to be supported in his desires and needs, to be surrounded in opulence, to have nice things, to feel free to have and do what he wants, to have people who will put effort towards giving him the skills and resources necessary for him to get what he wants and also to provide him with as much of what he needs and wants as possible, and if he does deserve the best. What does that say about his parents and their relationship with Jaren? What does it mean? And more importantly, does it spell closeness, love, safety, confluence and alignment with them? No. Jaren would come to the following conclusion. If he deserves all these things, then his parents are unwilling to put effort into him, they are antagonistic towards his goals and dreams, they do not perceive him as valuable, his father could care less if he has kids, his mom is dedicated to making sure he does not think highly of himself, she is also emotionally and financially abusive, so he isn’t safe with them and he is all alone, despite having a family. This is too threatening to Jaren’s psyche. So, how does Jaren restore this sense of closeness, love, safety, confluence and alignment with them? By telling himself that he does not deserve it. A thought that is now operating in his subconscious, still preserving the relationship with his parents, regardless of the fact that on a conscious level, he would not tell you that he is deeply connected to his parents at all.

So many of the things that set Jaren up for all this crap in his adult life are the result of this belief. First and foremost, this belief puts him outside of the vibrational range of the experience of having what he needs and wants. But second, it causes him to behave in ways that guarantee he will not have the things he needs and wants. Just think about it. If deep down, Jaren believes he does not deserve to be surrounded in opulence, to have nice things, to feel free to have and do what he wants and to have people supporting his road to success, then how does he think? How does he behave? What choices does he make? What actions does he take or fail to take? Just to give you a few examples of thousands, just like his mother, he also can’t bring himself to shop at any other store but the discount store. He chooses paths to making money that require maximum effort on his personal part. He tells himself that he won’t get deals he wants before he goes in for the pitch and as a result, his pitches come across really insecure. He identifies with the people and places that are poor, so that is where he spends most of his time. He gets into relationships with women when they have been damaged and from a rescuer pattern because he doesn’t believe he deserves to have the women he really likes. But they are with him in order to be rescued, not because they adore him as a person and are compatible to him. So, they leave him. 

Ok, so here is the take away for you. People, being an intensely social species (even if they spend a great deal of energy trying to deny it) preserve their relationships by telling themselves that they are not worthy of what is in their best interests (this includes what they want and need). People run the risk of doing this with anyone they are desperate for closeness, love, safety confluence and alignment with. And this is especially a thing that people do to preserve their relationship with their family of origin. And it is even more something that people do if they were raised in families and cultures that revolve around the idea of life operating according to deserving in and of itself. This is basically the idea that you have to do something or have and show qualities that qualify you as worthy of some reward. Or to the opposite, that you do something or have and show qualities that qualify you as worthy of punishment. So, you bring unwanted things upon yourself. This is the basis of many religions. The problem is, the ideology of deserving can cover all manner of sins so to speak. For example, all you need to do in order to get someone to get on a rat wheel of doing what serves you, is to make the other person believe they don’t deserve what they want from you yet.. nope not yet… nope not yet… try harder… Give a crumb, better yet, create an intermittent reinforcement pattern. And all someone needs to do to justify their abusive behavior or to continue to not have to step up or put energy into in a relationship, is to convince the other person (maybe even themselves) that they don’t deserve it. 

And to go one layer deeper, people use deserving and underserving to maintain a sense of empowerment in order to blunt the experience of being victimized. Especially feelings like being powerless and hopeless and in despair. Anyone who has worked with survivors of severe abuse, like the complex trauma of living in an incestuous home or domestic violence or sex trafficking will tell you that the hardest thing of all to get survivors to let go of, is the idea that they deserved it in some way. It’s something their psyche holds onto like a child clutching onto a teddy bear, while watching a horror film in the middle of a hurricane. Why? Because if they believe they deserve it, they can feel some sense of empowerment. Deserving it means you have a hand in something. It means maybe you have a bit of power in the situation because you had a role in bringing something about. And this means maybe you have some power regarding it not happening. What would happen and what would need to be faced and felt if you didn’t? And to the opposite of this, just like in our example with Jaren, you don’t have to face all the horrors of what it would mean if it happened and you didn’t deserve it. Worse, if what you deserved was all the things you were desperate for instead of what happened. 

Many people have linked the idea of law of attraction with deserving. And just like that, your spiritual beliefs are serving your belief that you don’t deserve something that you want or you deserve something you are experiencing that is unwanted. As if the law of attraction is just the latest tool for some force that is keeping tabs on us to judge us, and then delivering us our experiences as either some sort of punishment or reward. The reality is that the law of mirroring (what many people call the law of attraction) is not about deserving. It is far more impartial than this human socialization concept of reward and punishment. What if the things you are experiencing are not happening because you deserve it or don’t deserve it. At the same time, what if the things you are experiencing definitely change if you believe you deserve it or don’t deserve it? Why? Because beliefs dictate all subsequent thoughts, words, behaviors, choices and actions. And because the belief either way radiates out as a specific energy signature that attracts people, places, things, circumstances and situations that match that energy signature. It is a very neutral design. You can think of it just like an input-output of a computer program. It is simply mirrored back to us. The problem is, what is being reflected back to us, is not always obvious. But the most important point is that “unwanted manifestations” are not any sort of punishment for something you did wrong or something you deserved because shame on you, you were thinking 'negative' thoughts. The word 'attract' can have this negative connotation of ‘you brought it on yourself’ or ‘you had it coming’ and so you deserve it. The idea of manifestations in a person’s life being some sort of punishment or reward, especially a punishment or reward for your mindset or state of alignment, is one of the biggest fallacies in the spiritual field. 

Also, a person’s vibration is the compilation of so, so many things. People greatly oversimplify it. It is far more complicated than thinking positive thoughts manifests positive experiences and thinking negative thoughts manifests negative experiences. The reality is, worthiness has nothing to do with anything. And this scares us. You can see this in situations where any of us would clearly judge a person as bad and therefore not worthy of the abundance they have or that they deserve something bad to happen to them for what they did and yet, no such thing happens to them. You can clearly see this in situations where any of us would clearly say that a person is good and therefore worthy of wonderful things happening to them, and yet, bad things happen to them. And so, life is not based on deserving, even though human society has introduced this concept and has made a great many things about it. You could be a very good person and have a horrible back story of neglect and as a result, believe that you are alone and can’t rely on people and as result, end up in a situation where everyone abandons you. And you aren’t bad or doing something wrong for holding onto that belief. Nor is what is happening, a punishment for something you may have done in your childhood or in a past life. You may suffer and sacrifice in all kinds of ways, believing that it will lead to a reward (especially if you are doing so to be good) only to find that all this lines you up with is more circumstances that require sacrifice and suffering constantly to get to an ever-receding horizon line. It is also important to remember that the role that something you want is playing in your life, may not be the role it is playing in someone else’s life. So, we may assume pleasure or pain or desire or aversion where it would exist for us, but does not necessarily exist for them.

Back to the main point of this episode. Unworthiness acts like a cover for a negative loyalty pattern with the people you care about. It can easily cover over the fact that someone in your life did not act in a way that is in alignment with what you are worthy of, because it served them not to for some reason. Keep in mind that this could be happening right now in present time with someone in your life. Be brave enough to imagine that you were and are worthy of whatever it is you need and want, and then ask yourself the question: If this were true, what would it mean about this person or that person and our relationship (especially in your childhood, but also today). This will cause you to withdraw your investment out of the relationship preservation strategy of unworthiness. And from there, it will be far easier to change your belief in your own worthiness. You will be able to sense that you deserve what you have and want. But this is still to operate within the idea of worth and deserving. If you want to take it one step further, you can dispose of your idea of worth and deserving and with it, your idea of punishment and reward. Just be aware that for most humans alive today, this paradigm is so deeply engrained that there will be several layers of it to recon with. 

Ultimately, believing in your own unworthiness as a strategy to maintain your relationship with someone, lines you up with the opposite of your needs and desires, as well as a bad relationship. Which is why now is the time to let go of that belief.