I’LL NEVER BE GOOD ENOUGH
to get the love I want

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Posts: “Self-Hate & ACoAs”
•“People should treat me better, but….”

SITE: Restructuring life in recovery

QUOTE: “If you don’t know what you want, you’ll never find it. If you don’t know what you deserve, you’ll always settle for less.”  ~ Rob Liano, Success Coach

DEF. of ‘Deserving’
⚙︎ Receiving something – good or bad – which you’ve earned, based on your actions.  It always carries a sense of balance or justice.
🌹This is why we can not deserve love, because we can not earn it. It is either given freely or not.

REPEAT : “I can not earn love!” – a hard concept fro ACoAs to believe, based on our childhood – since ‘being loved / accepted / approved of’ was conditional. BAD PARENT : “Do what I want, or else.”

1. The PROBLEM of NOT deserving
a. Family
In dysfunctional families ‘deserving’ ONLY refers to earning their acceptance. The adults who raised us did not feel worthy, rigidly held in place by their low self-esteem (S-H), depression & deprivation mentality.
b. ‘Spiritual’
Many religions teach us to feel ashamed, guilty & unworthy. Rigid non-Biblical teachings instill guilt, & control by fear. Anyone from a fundamentalist faith was taught that because we were born in sin “we are not worthy” of God’s love, period.  We are bad, bad, bad! This dogma is used to control & discipline children, & keep the ‘faithful’ in line.

✶ What’s left out of these teaching is the KEY to the message: God has given the world many gifts, first & foremost salvation from eternal separation from Him in the afterlife, in spite of our imperfections  ( John 3:16 & commentary)

The definition of ‘grace’ is unmerited favor – being given what we don’t deserve!
We did not & cannot EARN grace or any of life’s benefits & beauty – they’re simply here for us to enjoy & partake of! Enjoy the lyrics to “Amazing Grace”,  a hymn universally beloved even by the non-religious (“A Bridge to Life“ & Bible verses)

🙆‍♀️ Too many people no longer consciously agree with the concept of original sin, BUT whatever our personal belief is now – as long as we live in deprivation – we’re agreeing with the introjected bad voice that still has us trapped in a culture that has perverted the accurate meaning of spiritual teaching.

🙎🏽‍♀️ Some of us were not raised in any specific faith, so our sense of unworthiness would have mainly developed from unhappy & cruel interactions with parents & community.

2. ACoA DAMAGE
IMP: Parents are either capable or not capable of providing acceptance, love, compassion & validation – which has nothing to do with the personality, behavior, or gender of the child.

AGAIN: Love can not be earned – it’s either given freely or not. And our family did not! We were taught by family & religion to feel UNdeserving of all kinds of good things.
Instead, we believe that :
• asking for what we want & need is ‘selfish, sinful, arrogant, childish’…..
• other people (sometimes siblings) are definitely allowed to have good things – but not us, especially if we were scapegoated in our family
• we don’t even deserve to be alive, which we concluded —
— indirectly by being constantly put down & criticized, or
— directly from the messages about how they felt:  “You’ll be the death of me yet , Why did I have to have a kid like you , I never wanted kids anyway , You’re killing your mother/ father, You ruined my life”….

• ALSO – we’re afraid to improve ourselves & our circumstances – beyond what our parents are or have accomplished, as if it would somehow it will diminish them (show them up).
» That would be breaking our symbiotic bond with them & no longer taking responsibility for their life-choices.
✒︎ Actually, healthy parents (& many immigrants) want the opposite – for their kids to do better than themselves & be the very best they’re capable of!

ACoAs DON’T DESERVE
 the BASICS – TO:
• be ourselves, have clear & strong opinions
• be talented, funny, creative, imaginative, intuitive
• be competent, functional, clever, visible, center stage
• feel safe, respect as a person & for our opinion
• have all of our emotions, without judgement
• have & maintain our boundaries, & say ‘no!’
• shine, get attention, admiration, recognition, complements

NEXT: ‘Deserving’ vs. Having Rights (Part 2)