Let me sit with that for a moment, because what you just said, “unworthy of love and affection,” those are heavy words to carry around.
Here’s what I want you to know first, and I mean this clinically, not just as comfort: that feeling is not the truth about you. It’s a story. A shame story. And it got written on you very, very early.
Here’s how I think about it. We’re all biologically wired, from the moment we arrive in this world, to scan our primary caregivers and ask two questions: Are you there? And am I good enough for you to stay?
When the answer to either of those questions felt uncertain, or worse, felt like “no,” the organism doesn’t conclude “my caregiver has limitations.” It concludes “something is wrong with me.” That’s how shame works. It’s a full-body conviction of unworthiness, and it doesn’t announce itself as a story. It announces itself as the truth.
Now, where a lot of our culture gets this wrong is it says: go work on yourself first. Build your self-esteem in isolation. Love yourself before you can be loved. And I want to push back on that directly, because that hasn’t been my experience in sixteen years of sitting with people in pain.
The notion that you have to love yourself first before you can love or be loved by someone else? It’s not actually how human beings work. When it comes to love, we’re all still babies. We need another person to help us feel our own worth. Self-worth isn’t an individual achievement. It’s an emergent property of safe connection.
What that means for you is this: the unworthiness you feel isn’t a permanent feature of your personality. It’s the wound that formed in the absence of safe, consistent, attuned love. And it can be renegotiated in the presence of it.
The work isn’t to convince yourself you’re worthy through positive self-talk or willpower. The work is to bring that “unlovedness,” that raw, tender, scared part of you, into contact with a safe other. Maybe that’s a therapist. Maybe eventually it’s a partner who can really see you.
And in that witnessing, something shifts. The shame begins to melt, not because someone talked you out of it, but because you experienced the opposite of it.
You weren’t too much. You weren’t not enough. You were just in the wrong room, with people who didn’t have the capacity to show you your own value.
That’s where this work begins.
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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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