Oh, come here. Come here for a second.
What you just said to me, “I don’t deserve my partner’s love,” I want you to know that is one of the most important things a person can say out loud. Not because it’s true. It isn’t. But because it tells me exactly where you are, and I know this place very well.
In my work, I call it the bottom of the well.
Picture this. You’re down there, at the very bottom, and the walls are cold and dark, and the story playing on repeat in your head is something like, “I’m so worthless. I’m so powerless. I don’t even deserve for them to be here for me.” That’s the bottom of the well. And here’s what I want you to know: that feeling, as awful and as real as it is, is not the truth of who you are. It is a wound. It is an old, old wound that got reactivated, probably right in the center of the most important relationship in your life.
And here’s the thing that nobody tells you. That wound, that shame story, that “I’m not enough, I don’t deserve this,” it lives at the very bottom of what I call the C-Curve. It’s the deepest layer. It’s what I call the shame story, and it usually sounds like, “I’m too much,” or “I’m not enough,” or in your case, “I don’t deserve this love at all.” It’s the place where sadness and your oldest attachment wound mix together into what I can only describe as a shame cocktail. And it is brutal.
But here’s what 20 years of sitting with people in this exact place has taught me. The way out of the bottom of the well is not to climb out alone. It is not to build your self-esteem in isolation, do the work by yourself, get your act together, and then come back to love once you’re fixed. That is not how this works. Your nervous system cannot learn that you are acceptable in a vacuum. It learns it through connection.
The healing happens when you reach your hand out from the bottom of that well, when you let your partner actually see you in this place, when you risk saying something like, “I’m scared you’ll eventually figure out I’m not worth staying for. Would you please not give up on me even though I fail sometimes?” And then, if your partner takes your hand, if they choose you in that moment, your nervous system finally, finally gets to register something new. Something it has been waiting to feel maybe your whole life. That you are acceptable. That you are enough. That their love is not a mistake.
That is what I call the missing experience. And it is genuinely one of the most powerful things I get to witness in my clinical work.
So I want to ask you something gently. Have you let your partner actually see this part of you? Or are you carrying this feeling alone, protecting them from it, maybe even pushing them away a little because some part of you is waiting for them to confirm the fear? Because often, and I say this with so much compassion, the people who feel most undeserving of love are the ones who have learned to hide the most tender parts of themselves. And their partner is left on the outside, not knowing how to reach them.
You are not undeserving. You are scared. And those are very different things.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: How Shame Destroys Relationships
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