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Hello, everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s.
The podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our
20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello, everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast, new listeners,
old listeners, wherever you are in the world.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we, of course, break down the
psychology of our 20s.
One of the things that we tend to worry about more than anything else in our lives and
especially in our 20s is love.
Love is by far the theme that I get the most questions and worries about and a big one
is whether we even have the capacity to love and be loved, whether we are even worthy
of that experience and why does that we feel like why not.
And that is exactly what I want to discuss today and really delve into.
Why is it that we feel so unlovable?
Why is it that we have followed or overwhelmed by these doubts that we will never find anybody
that we will always be alone and that we, you know, even if we do find somebody we will
have to settle with good enough rather than a love that is spectacular and amazing.
It is a real mental present to want something so bad and have this equally strong voice
in your head telling you that you'll never have it or that you don't deserve it.
Not only is this, you know, a really hard battle, especially when the voice is kind of coming
from inside the house, but it's also so much more common than we think.
That is one thing that I can promise you.
There are so many of us, especially in this decade, walking around feeling like love is
not something that we deserve or something that we can have.
In this experience, this mental state has some really striking psychological origins from
childhood to even early romantic experiences or lack that are of in high school in our
teen years pivotal moments of rejection and shame that really cause us to internalize
a lot of comparison and criticism and insecurity.
So understanding where it all began, I think, is the first point for kind of accepting
what we've been through, escaping the maze and then truly feeling like we deserve vibrant
love in our lives.
And I mean truly deserve it.
These origin points of all of our self-doubt and self-believes about why we are in love
able.
They might seem permanent.
It might seem like our kind of destiny, but you can really rediscover or perhaps discover
for the first time all of the things that make you brilliant and all the things that make
you quite honestly a catch and that there are so many people who would be so lucky to
have you in their lives.
And with that you really raise your confidence, you raise your levels of self-love.
And of course you also raise the bar for what you deserve, the standard for who gets to
love you, rather than living in a scarcity state where anyone who comes along and promises
you the bare minimum gets let in.
So that's what we're going to discuss today.
Why do we feel so undeserving of love?
Where does that come from?
And what exactly can we do about it?
How do we heal from the wounds that have created this belief system?
So without further ado, let's get into it.
To be vulnerable for a second, there was a point in my life where I was so desperate
for love and at the same time felt so undeserving of it that anyone who even gave me like the
slightest bit of attention, it felt like they were the one.
It felt like I had met my soulmate and it caused me to end up with a lot of people that
at the end of the day, I never even liked and who were most certainly not worth my time.
And I can recognize that now I can recognize that all of my habits stemmed from how
and worthy of love that I felt.
And these same habits were not only attracting these people to me, but they were also making
it so I kept them in my orbit.
Even when time and time again, they proved to me they did not deserve to be there.
Essentially, this like deeply rooted sense that I was unlovable meant that I had no boundaries
because the boundaries that I should have set were just going to be another reason that
people wouldn't be able to love me. But if I lowered them, more people could be let
in. If I pleased everybody, I could be loved.
And I didn't quite think about why exactly those people wouldn't have been around before
my boundaries were lowered. But again, that is the nature of this really insidious self-believe
system that you are unlovable.
Not only is it that we accept less for ourselves, we also sabotage when we have a really good
thing going on because when you feel unworthy of that kind of affection and kindness being
shout on you, you react from a place of fear.
This experience is so unfamiliar and it feels like it doesn't belong to you. So you find
you know, some kind of way unconsciously to end it before the other person wakes up and
realizes that for themselves.
It's again, a whole labyrinth feeling unworthy of love causes us to miss out on a lot of
opportunities because we close ourselves off. We reject ourselves before we even get to
the start line. And it can also be lonely. In fact, I think that is one of the core pillars
of this experience is that it creates loneliness. It makes us inherently somebody that is isolated
and perhaps living very solitary even when we are surrounded by other people. And it continues
to shape a series of behaviors that sadly keep it that way. So let's talk about why that
is. When we feel unlovable, it's not just that we feel generally undeserving of love,
it often also means that we think there is something about us that makes us a fundamentally
bad person. Or there is something about us that others would look at and immediately
turn away from. You know, this could be some part of our personality that somebody has,
you know, told us isn't attractive or isn't desirable. You know, we're too loud. We're
too much. We're too sensitive. It could be some feature of our body, our weight, our
height, our mental health, believing that no one could love us at our lowest or our
past. Each of us has some insecurity, some secret, something that we think almost brands
us with this big sign that says this one is unlovable. That's really what it feels like.
And the saddest part about recognizing that is subsequently recognizing that somebody
else had to teach that to us. No one enters this world inherently hating who they are.
One out there, you know, if we think about this hypothetical, there is somebody out there
who has never been exposed to unkind words, who has never been exposed to social judgments
or media portrayals or unkind statements or bullying or teasing. And they would not
have the insecurities that we have because they inherently have a social origin. It's
the same thing as like someone who has never seen a mirror could never call themselves
ugly. Someone who has never been scolded or shamed or embarrassed or teased about some
aspect of themselves will never learn to hate what makes them them and they will always
feel deserving of love. So, you know, we learn how to love ourselves by how others have
or haven't loved us. That is where this sense of inherent unworthiness typically emerges.
It is learned and therefore it's also taught. So, I think the most obvious source of this
sense that we are unlovable is our childhood and how our caregivers, typically our parents
showed us affection and showed us care. This is where like the whole theory of attachment
style emerges from, you know, the premise being that our initial bond with our parents
goes on to shape all future bonds. And if they showed us unconditional, unquestionable
love, that is what we will seek in the future because that was the example that was set,
that is the norm. But if they were dismissive or emotionally unavailable, if there was
some level of abandonment, if they suffered from something that made it difficult for them
to parent correctly like an addiction or an untreated mental health condition, if they
experienced trauma themselves, you know, that's going to be passed down to us through an
avoidant or anxious attachment style because the way that we were able to bond with them
was in some way disrupted or disturbed. And there have been a lot of recent studies
confirming what I think we already knew, which is that yet again, insecure attached individuals
implicitly often believe that they do not deserve love and it all stems back from these
childhood and early adolescent as well origins. It becomes this very deeply ingrained part
of their belief system. So especially if there is, you know, history of abuse in your childhood
as well, it is difficult to not internalize those experiences as being a reflection of
you that you were a bad kid that you were undeserving. You were inherently unlovable because
as children, we kind of don't have any other way to rationalize those experiences. You've
got to remember here that our brains try really hard to protect the bond that we have
with our caregivers by idolizing them, by creating a fantasy, by almost suppressing
memories of their wrongdoing because as children, we are really, really dependent on them
for everything. So if we truly believed that they were bad people, that they were seriously
trying to hurt us, we would have nowhere else to turn to. So it's a survival mechanism
to idolize our parents to keep coming back to them. Our brains therefore have to turn
to the next logical explanation for what we are experiencing. And the only other person
in this equation is us. And so we must be the problem. We are the issue. And a lot of
times people who have gone through this abuse, did you use that? They must be so unlovable
as to deserve that experience. And as we get older, we know that that is untrue because
all of our rational thinking skills begin to click in because we see that other people
didn't experience what we experienced because we learn what is actually okay, but that
doesn't change what has already been done. It doesn't change that we already have this
belief system based in our experiences that we have to unlearn. So Freud, Sikman Freud,
was someone who was really interested in what kind of behavior this experience creates
for adults. And he observed this unconscious tendency, especially amongst people who
experienced emotional or physical abuse as children called repetition compulsion. So back
when he was studying this in like the 1920s, he noticed that quite a few of his patients
were basically recreating traumatic experiences in new ways, in new scenarios or a new environment.
They were constantly in this process of reliving and repeating what had happened to them.
And it wasn't a mental process. It's that they were there was some unconscious, subconscious
part of them that would enter you know a new relationship and almost always immediately
seek out people who were just like their parents or they would live out their trauma through
this new experience. So the reason why he kind of believed that this happened was because
firstly it was a way to ease the initial emotional trauma by almost getting used to that
trauma again and again and again like when you keep pressing down on a bruise the pain
lessons because we become more tolerable less sensitive to it. But he also believed that
maybe it was because the reason this repetition compulsion was occurring was that it allowed
people to gain mastery over the experience. So if you experienced a difficult childhood
or difficult attachment, this kind of theory says that you go looking for that in every
new person because this is kind of all that you are familiar with. And it may be why
that not only do we feel unworthy of love, but we also become quite cynical about other
ability to give us love because we have never encountered a situation that proves differently
because there is some part of us that I don't like to say is attracted to bad people because
I think that puts a lot of the blame on us, but there is some compulsion that draws us
back to the comfort of what was familiar even if that was terrible. So childhood experiences
are one thing and don't get me wrong, they are probably the biggest contributor to a sense
of feeling unlovable, but there are many people who may look back at their memories and
say, no, you know, everything was so perfect for me. I never wanted for anything physical
or emotional. I had beautiful loving parents, why do I still feel unlovable? And that is
where our teen and adult experiences really come into it. You know, it's not like we're
only influenced by our infancy. We continue to learn and observe and shift change, evolve,
be influenced by experiences and, you know, events way into adulthood. And often I think
that our teenage years are just, if not more, formative for our sense of self-worth
than our childhood. It's really during this developmental stage, this chapter that we
begin to also get a taste for romantic love beyond the familial and platonic love that
we've been used to. It's like, you know, all you turn 13, all your friends turn 13 and suddenly
you want boyfriends and you want girlfriends. And we begin to perceive that our value is
in some way derived from whether other people find us attractive or have a crush on us
or want to date us or want to hold hands with us, want to take us to prom or want to take
us to formal. And, you know, as adults, you might roll your eyes at those moments and think
of them as really childish and really silly. But they're actually really valuable as a way,
you know, they're actually really valuable in creating our romantic social scripts. So
understanding how people relate to each other, understand kind of, it's like love with training
wheels on, you know, that's what teenage romance, especially in early teenagehood, is kind
of like. And if you skip that step, if you've never had it, eventually you start to wonder
why the further along you get. Our teenage years are this chapter of like ultimate insecurity
and comparison and wanting to fit in. So when you feel behind in a certain way, that can
definitely carry with you later into life because it's emotionally significant at the
time. It's also a period in which we are really developing our self-confidence. So even
small minor things can disturb that process. You know, I think I've told you this story
before, but back when I was in high school, I had like one boyfriend and it was like really
near the end, but I spent so much time like watching all my friends get like carried away
in these like young romances and never really having anybody who was attracted to me,
oring to me, or like wanting to be, wanting to date me. And sometimes I wonder whether,
you know, I would have had better standards for myself if I had not felt like I was
pissing out. If I didn't feel quite so desperate, if I didn't feel quite so unworthy based
on those experiences. Essentially, the reason this may contribute to feeling unlovable
is because it actually contributes to an insecurity about our desirability. That's really
the thing about being desired. You can't desire yourself. Somebody else needs to be part
of the picture to confirm that you are indeed somebody that is wanted and likeable and
worthy of their intention. And if that never happens for you, it's hard to feel like you
are actually somebody who is deserving of all those things or who is looked at in that
way. That can create a lack of confidence. And that is, I think, only exacerbated the
older we get. And the further we get into our 20s and beyond without still having those
experiences, you know, everybody around us is having these flings or these love interests
or these big romances. It can really feel like the only question left to ask is what is
wrong with me? What don't I have? Why have I not had this experience? You know, it's
very easy to also overlook the logical explanations as to why not. You just haven't met the right
person. It just wasn't your time. You've been busy with other things. Like those are
all super logical explanations for why this hasn't happened yet. But social comparison
leaves us feeling lacking and therefore drawing the wrong conclusions about our sorrability,
our worthiness and therefore our capacity to receive love. So let's turn to another area
which is the experience that happens when we, you know, do start dating or do get into
relationships and how that can also leave wounds around our, you know, sense of worthiness.
Even before we get into a relationship with somebody, I think frequently experiencing
rejections can also really damage our self-esteem, especially when they continuously happen. We
do start to reconsider whether the common denominator is us, you know, if this person didn't
text us back after a first date, if, you know, we didn't get as many matches on dating
apps as our friends. If this guy, you know, dumped us after like a couple of weeks of dating,
that can really start to chip away at our self-confidence. I also want to add here that can
also be for friendships as well, you know, if you've had a few friendship breakups, if you've
had a few let downs, a few rejections when it comes to putting yourself out there and
any capacity in trying to make connection, that all comes back to love, right? That all comes
back to feeling desired in a social sense. So it's not just like poor experiences when it comes
to romantic relationships can really blind us to our sense of worthiness, platonic experiences,
familial experiences can also have an impact. And so what that can create in you is that you feel
like the only way to ever have that is to lower your standards, especially when the scarcity effect
begins to, you know, kick in the sense that this thing is so valuable. It is so available to
other people and you don't have it that you're more desperate to find it, the more you value it,
that the scarcity effect is essentially feeling that something is more valuable when it is less
available to you. So the less available love is to you, the more valuable it is, the more you will
do to obtain it, perhaps the lower your standards become, the less you kind of respect other's
ability to respect you. Not every experience with love, whether it is our first or most recent,
is going to be positive, is going to be golden. If there is anything that we have learned so far,
it's that the people we love the most can actually cause us the most harm. And that goes
for our exes, that goes for the people that we fall in love with. A bad partner can leave you feeling
pretty worthless, especially if they've been cruel, especially if they've made you feel like
you demand too much, especially if they've spoken down to you, ignored you, never fully reciprocated,
your intimacy, your love, your generosity, your care. After a while, you change your expectations
around what it actually means to be in love, and what it actually, what you actually deserve.
You know, if this person you trust, obviously care about, still doesn't see, you was worthy of
everything that you give them or everything that you want, who is going to believe that you are,
who is going to give you those things. This is a component of narcissists to abuse as well,
and I don't use that term lightly, but it is a component of it that I often see when people find
themselves in a situation with a partner who belittles them, who wears them down, who gives and takes,
that is so often intentional. Because the poor yourself esteem becomes the less deserving you feel,
the less likely it is that you will believe that you can find somebody better, and the more likely
it is that you will stay. And that gives them control. Your belief that you are unlovable,
that benefits their ego and it benefits their intentions. Again, it also often creates the cycle
of jumping from one terrible relationship to the next, and it all starts with somebody teaching
you that you can't find better. So you accept what you think is normal, which is quite frankly,
horrible, horrible love. I want to be clear, really clear here, crystal clear. None of that is your
fault. None of it. How are you meant to know any better if you have never had an example? How are
you meant to think that you deserve better if your confidence has been destroyed? It's not just
that you feel unworthy of love as a result of these experiences, but also that you perhaps feel shame,
shame around what you've tolerated, shame around the fact that this keeps happening, shame around the
fact that you haven't found the one yet. And I think this all just continues to trigger, you know,
a lack of self-esteem, a sense of unworthiness. And the repetition of this experience and
identical pattern, because there is nothing that is breaking the cycle here. Honestly, it has to
be one of the worst things that you can put another person through is breaking down our most precious
and core belief, which is that we are a lovable creature that we are deserving of love. It's,
you know, so crazy to me that people can do that to other people because every person is genuinely
just so special and unique and deserving. It's like a, it is a basic human need and human right to
be loved and to receive love. So depriving somebody of that or telling them that they aren't worthy of
it is, it's criminal. It's also, I think worth noting that people who are simultaneously struggling
with mental health concerns or conditions like depression, like PTSD, like borderline personality
disorder amongst many others, they're already at an increased risk of feeling unworthy and feeling
worthless and that sense of self-doubt. And so those experiences combined with a traumatic
upbringing, combined with early experiences of rejection and shame, combined with a terrible
experience and a past relationship are just going to make you so much more susceptible to this
false belief system. And I spoke about this in my episode on dating and mental health in our 20s,
but it can be hard to see others valuing you when you're struggling to value yourself as well.
It can be a really hard mindset to navigate wanting love, but also feeling like you'll be
a burden if you accept it into your life. There are so many different factors that contribute to
this feeling of what feels like inherent unworthiness. So what do we do about it? How can we re-learn
self-love beyond the basics of self-care and self-acceptance, but like truly re-learn at the core
of ourselves in our very, the fiber of our being, what we are entitled to and how to raise our
standards and how to actually attract good, deep, meaningful love into our lives. So we're going
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That's KNIX.com. If there is one thing that I believe passionately, it's that self-love is not
always romantic. It is really tough sometimes, undoing an entire belief system, even if you didn't
create it in the first place. It is hard to be vulnerable and it is hard to be soft after so many years
of being strong and hard and resilient, of trying so hard to convince yourself that you don't
need love, that you're better off alone, that you don't care. But I saw this amazing TikTok the
other day from this woman saying, I know that I'm deserving of love because I love myself and I was
once my own worst enemy. I hated myself more than anybody else in the world and if that person can
still learn to love me, I am sure that somebody else can as well. And that is exactly the attitude
that we want to be taking as cliche as it sounds, feeling worthy of love really does start with you.
And it also starts with realizing that it's not just about having your basic needs met.
It's about actually finding love that is enriching and rewarding and generous and being open to
receiving that. Not just believing that you would like it but being open to seeing somebody offering
that to you and thinking that is for me. And it begins with kind of showing that love to ourselves and
setting an example, not just for others but for us, that this is what we deserve. There is no love
that is off limits to us because we have already shown ourselves the highest form of appreciation and
compassion, the highest form of intimacy and connection. So if somebody cannot meet that stand
that we are showing ourselves, are they really worth it? I know that sounds like big words. How do
we actually get there? Firstly, I think it's important to love yourself where you are at,
even if it's not where you want to be. It is a lot easier to say, yeah, I'll start dating you
again or I'll be worthy of love when I fix this, when I'm better at that, when I have this thing,
when I've lost that weight, but that attaches our value and our worthiness to some kind of
weird milestone to success and something, to output, to productivity, to self-improvement,
which is not the case. Our love is inherent. We don't need to change for it. It also means that,
you know, like I just said, we still believe that love is conditional on something else happening
first rather than just the fact that you are an amazing, cool person as you are right now.
That obviously doesn't mean that you can't be committed to self-improvement or you can't want to
change something about yourself, but it's important to think about whether you're doing it for you
or for somebody else. A relationship, love, that is not a reward for working on yourself. Period. I
understand wanting to be in the right headspace for a relationship if you've just been broken up
with or if you do really want to undo some of those negative beliefs, but I want you to be honest
with yourself. Are you waiting because you're not ready for love or because you still don't feel like
you deserve it or because you are scared of what you might find or not find and what that might
confirm about you? This is where we need to work on the second of our new and improved beliefs.
How others treat you and their impression of your desirability or your worthiness is a reflection
of them, not you. I like to think about this as if we are a piece of art. Somebody is going to look
at you to look at you the artwork and you just might not be their type or their taste. That's
okay. They are allowed to have preferences, but somebody else might come along and look at you and
be like, you the artwork and just it will change their life. Nothing has spoken to their soul more.
Nothing is better in their eyes. The thing to realize is that the art hasn't changed though.
When you go to a museum, it's not like they switch out the paintings based on the preferences of
the viewers. The art just continues to exist. The thing that changes is people and is how people
treat the art and their perception of its beauty and its worthiness. That is you. You are the art.
It doesn't matter. The art does not change. The beauty of the art does not change based on who
was viewing it. The worthiness of the art does not change. It's still in the museum. That doesn't
change based on whether someone sees the technique that it took or sees the effort that it took or
sees the colors and the texture and all the beauty behind it that somebody does not. I think when we
detach those two things, our worthiness and other people's opinions, those two things are separate.
We are better able to pull from the things. We know to be true about us, rather than others
impressions of those things. You are still kind, creative, intelligent, attractive, funny,
dedicated, inspiring, motivated, and good friend. You are still all number of qualities despite
or because of somebody else's recognition. That does not change. So the second kind of step to
this is noticing when you start also to put words in the mouths of people who have never spoken
them. If someone doesn't message you back after a second date or a first date, you might assume
that it's because they thought you were boring or too sensitive or too loud or because you want
what they're expecting. We typically put words in other people's mouths and did they say that?
No, they didn't. We are applying our own false beliefs onto a puppet. We are projecting our
assumptions onto somebody who didn't text you back because they are emotionally lazy, who maybe
got busy. It's not that we're finding excuses for them. It's that we're actually just not assuming.
We are just letting them exist and we are letting ourselves exist and we are recognizing that
how they feel about us really doesn't say anything about us. I think that applies to a number
of scenarios where we tend to implant our past experiences onto a new situation that really isn't
the same or we look for the most available explanation which for us is that we're unlovable
but just because that's the most available explanation doesn't mean that it is true. Often, again,
this is all deriving from a false belief, not from fact. I think that that can become harder when
you know as we spoke about before they do tell us especially when it comes to an ex or a partner
who was emotionally close to us and hurt us. It's really hard to not take those things incredibly
personally and carry them with us with the rest of our life. But again, an opinion, a judgment,
a cruelty is not fact. It will never be. That can be hard to recover from but the secret lies
in concentrating and borrowing down into what you know is true about yourself and your self-worth,
the part of you that stays stable regardless of others. One way I really bolstered my own sense
of worthiness in the face of these experiences was by choosing to almost like have a bit of a
love affair with myself. Now, I've spoken about this before but if you want to fall back in love
with yourself and read this cover how amazing you are and really begin to defeat those debilitating
core beliefs, why not date yourself for a while and I mean date yourself. I'm talking dinners,
I'm talking flowers, quality time, compliments, weekend trips away, you really need to romance yourself.
This may sound odd, it might sound a little bit silly but again, set the example that perhaps
hasn't been set for you. Set the standard that people need to live up to because if they can't
show you the love that you show yourself which is honestly the bare minimum, are you letting
them in just because you don't think you can do better or are you letting them in because they
are actually worthy of everything that you have to offer. Finally, I recommend therapy all the time
on this podcast because it is just genuinely so important and it does work especially for a sense
of unworthiness and you know especially knowing that that is really rooted in childhood and past
trauma and experiences, it is so valuable to wrap your head around your response to what you have
been through and how that has created your belief system and how that has created your sense of
self worth. And you know, I wouldn't talk about it so much unless it worked and it's worked for me
and so many other people that I know especially in this case dynamic interpersonal therapy which
really focuses on how dysfunctional beliefs beliefs are based on relationships and how that impacts
our mood but also dialectical behavior therapy talking it through, getting to the root of your
emotions and where they came from, where they were born from. One final reminder for you.
The last thing that determines your worthiness particularly for love is others. They may receive it
and appreciate it but they should never have the power to influence it. Anybody would be lucky to have
you. You are absolutely gorgeous and beautiful or handsome like no one is noticing the things that
you dislike about yourself more than you. You show so much care and kindness I am sure to your
friends and to strangers and to your family. You deserve the love that you show others to be
directed towards yourself and nothing less. So I am sending so much love and that is a love that
you deserve not a love that you had to earn. I think that you are incredible for being committed
to yourself and committed to healing and committed to thriving and finding a real deep compassion
for yourself. So thank you so much for listening. I really hope that you got something out of this.
I hope you learnt something about yourself, about your circumstances, about your thoughts
and that if you didn't learn something at least this was a bit of a pep talk and it made you feel
a little bit better about your life. Make sure that you are following along on Spotify or Apple
podcasts so that you never miss a new episode and if you did enjoy this episode please feel
free to give us five stars wherever you're listening right now. If you have an episode suggestion,
a topic suggestion for me and you want to hear about the psychology of this topic or about
something to do without 20s please feel free to DM me at that psychology podcast I would love to
hear from you and as always stay safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself and we will talk soon.
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