As I frequently discuss, when you are raised in a negative home, you learn negative ways of viewing the world. One of these negative views includes the idea that you don’t deserve to be happy.
Within that larger category, though, one of the more terrible things that people think is that they don’t deserve to be in a happy marriage, or to be loved emotionally or physically.
In this podcast episode, I talk about why people don’t think they deserve good sex. I discuss how if you are raised to think that you aren’t that important to anyone, it is hard to imagine that you could be deeply loved and that your needs could be met.
When your emotional and/or physical needs aren’t met in childhood, this creates a template of thinking that you are just a person who doesn’t get your needs met ever.
You feel like an outsider looking in at all the happy couples in the world, knowing that being in a happy couple just isn’t something that is “for” you.
But you are, not to be too blunt about it, just plain old wrong. Everyone deserves to be happy, and in this world of almost infinite options, anyone who is genuinely looking for love can find it.
When you are depressed or grow up in a dysfunctional home, your brain lies to you about many things, and the main one is that you are not someone who is like other people. Instead, your brain tells you that you are a misfit and that you are uniquely poorly suited to dealing with people. This isn’t true, but it feels real so you believe that it is.
Working on yourself in therapy can help with your deep self-worth issues, and understand how you built mental models of the world and of people from the relationships that you saw as a child. You can work through your sense of shame or of being inadequate, and engage in new types of thinking. You can also build a mutually respectful and positive alliance with your therapist, which in and of itself can be very healing for people who have never had that type of close relationship.
By the way, a variant of thinking that relationships will all be unhappy is when people feel that all relationships need to have constant conflict. If you were raised in a home with a lot of fighting, you can’t imagine that you could ever be in a peaceful relationship where both partners are trying to compromise and make each other happy.
Instead, you feel that in any relationship, both partners will be looking out for number one competitively or aggressively.
This doesn’t have to be the case. Many people in second marriages have markedly lower conflict levels than in their first marriages, because both people are actively trying to be kind, and have increased self-awareness of their triggers and issues. It can be deeply healing to be in a relationship where you and your partner are both committed to trying to make things go well instead of poorly.
If this post spoke to you, think deeply about how your low self-worth interacts with your belief that you don’t deserve to be happy, or that relationship happiness is just something that is for “other people” but not you. Every single human deserves to be loved, I deeply believe this and it is a worldview that I try to share with my clients.