Why your happiness depends on feeling worthy of love

Do you feel worthy of love? Chances are, if you grew up in a dysfunctional home, you will not.

How does this affect you? Well, much of your happiness depends on how worthy of love you feel.

Contrary to popular belief, happiness or joy (or whichever word you use to describe feeling good), is not dependent on circumstances.

Sure, things that happen influence how you feel. That’s why you grieve after a loss and get mad when someone betrays you (for example).

But, you can feel true peace and happiness in spite of what happens to you. And it is largely dependent on how worthy you feel to receive it.

If you grew up without experiencing love, you will not believe you deserve to feel good. That’s why self-help that teaches you how to achieve peace often doesn’t work.

Meditation and mindfulness will help you feel it for a short time. But without worthiness, that peace will be fleeting.

Feeling worthy of peace

Have you had the experience of waiting for the other shoe to drop? That’s when everything is going well but you’re bracing yourself for a disappointment ahead.

This is a trauma response from childhood in which it was dangerous to relax. You had to be on guard for threats, whether real or imagined, so peace felt inaccessible to you.

Now, as an adult, when you feel peace, negative thoughts rush in to disrupt it. Your inner child believes it’s protecting you by bracing you for inevitable disappointment.

You’re choosing survival over happiness because survival trumps everything. Instead of working on strategies to feel at peace, I suggest working on feeling worthy of love.

That’s loving yourself enough to believe you deserve to be happy. You deserve to feel at peace instead of filled with anxiety.

Rather than changing your thoughts (which is a surface-level strategy), work on soothing your frazzled nervous system. Breathe deeply, put a hand on your heart, or give yourself a hug.

Reparent your inner child by giving it the love and attention it never received. Let it know you are grateful for its help in keeping you alive, but you’re an adult now and can manage.

Self-love not tough love

Prioritize your sense of safety, comfort, and pleasure instead of talking yourself out of your thoughts. Loving yourself does not mean scolding or shoulding on yourself.

It means acknowledging that your thoughts come from an inner child doing its best to have your back. Focus on comforting that child instead of making yourself feel foolish for your survival skills.

The way to peace is never through self-shaming. It comes when you treat yourself in ways that indicate you are worthy of love.

This can start with doing things for yourself that you never do because it feels like a waste of time. When you grow up without care, it’s hard to know how to care for yourself.

Make the warm tea. Take a lingering soak in the tub. Buy the expensive chocolate. Light the aromatic candle. Go for a walk in the sun.

These things are not a waste of time. They help you connect with yourself as the source of your own fulfillment and love.

Then you’ll stop reaching outside yourself to get your needs met and begin to meet those needs yourself.

So, when your thoughts wander away from peace you won’t give yourself a pep talk or recite a positive mantra. You’ll know what it takes to help yourself feel better because you’ve practised and now feel worthy of feeling good.