Love Life with Matthew Hussey - 232: How To Feel Worthy Of Love

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

What does it mean to truly accept every part of yourself? How do we let go of beating ourselves up for our mistakes and flaws and embrace who we are? There are so many things that can knock us off our path, make us feel shame, and cause us to feel unloveable. In this episode, Matthew explains how to build the foundations of self-compassion and stop basing our worth on the wrong things. ►► Pre-Order My New Book, "Love Life" at → http://www.LoveLifeBook.com ►► Conquer Your Dating Fears and Reinvent Your Approach to Finding Love Again. Watch the Replay to my Event, The Love Life Reset. Find out How at . . . → The Love Life Reset REPLAY 

Hey Hey everybody, welcome back to the Love Life Podcast. Continuing a little trend today of reading some of my newsletters and today's newsletter that I am reading is called How to Believe That We Are Enough. For everyone who's wondering, I've started a new thing in 2024 that I'm really excited about and proud of. It's sort of following the trend of me having written for the last three years, four years for the book.

I didn't want my writing to stop with the completion of the book. So I decided that once a week, I would send out an email to my mailing list, to my private mailing list with a piece of writing from me. And I've called this brand new newsletter I'm doing The Three Relationships because it's designed every week to help people with one of the three relationships that I believe determines the quality of our life, our relationship with other people, our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with life itself. So I believe those are the three relationships

we need to get better at if we are to improve our quality of life, because they're the three relationships we're going to be in till the day we die. We're always going to be in a relationship with other people in some way, even if it's friends, family, people we work with, strangers on the street, we're always going to be in a relationship with ourselves and we are always going to be in a relationship with life. So this week's newsletter is how to believe that we are enough. I'll read it to you now. But if you want to get the next Friday's newsletter, and by the way, it could change for now, it's getting to people on a Friday. But if you get this newsletter written by me every week fresh for you. All right, the three relationships newsletter,

how to believe you are enough. Let's go. What is it about feeling worthy that is so damn difficult? In one way or another, we spend our whole lives trying to feel it. We climb career ladders that might make us feel like we're enough, try to achieve a better body, or chase a person whose love might finally make us feel that we are lovable. Yet, more commonly than not, when we achieve these things, we still don't feel like enough. Some of this unworthiness comes from playing the comparison game. We look at people with more beauty, thinner bodies, bigger bank accounts, funnier jokes, or more interesting lives, and we think we must be deficient in some way for not being able to match up. Some of it comes from being made to feel like love has to come with a catch. Maybe your caregivers taught you that you are

only worthy of love if you got good grades, made everyone happy all the time, or put up with bad or even abusive behavior. Then of course, there's the unworthiness we feel whenever we consider things we've done in life that we're ashamed of. Our mistakes, our regrets, the things we worry would make us entirely unlovable if the world found out about them. What a bunch of unworthy wretches we all are. That almost sounds fun, like we should all be on some sort of pirate ship with a sad face for a flag and a name like the unworthies. But no, we shall not set sail today. How can we tackle these feelings of unworthiness? Let's have a look at some of these unworthy belief systems and how we can start to dismantle them.

Number one, I don't match up. Of course I'm unworthy, we think. I'm not pretty. I'm not interesting. I've wasted half my life. I'm not that smart. I'm overweight. Being impressive or beautiful or having a shiny personality isn't what makes us worthy of love.

Being human is. When I sit on an airplane and look at my fellow passengers, I don't think of them as unworthy of love because of the way they appear. I don't need to learn what their achievements are first or judge them based on how they look without any clothes on. Audrey would never approve of such a system anyway. No, I simply think of them as fellow human beings deserving of love. Why then do we create a different barrier for entry for being worthy of love ourselves? Why would we think of ourselves as being less deserving of love because of our perceived flaws? Remember, there is nothing that makes you inherently less worthy than anyone else. Number two, if I stop showing up in the way I do now, I will be unlovable. Do you feel an urge to over-apologize? Do you

over-explain when you can't do something for someone? Do you over-give or sacrifice your own needs to make others happy? Does the urge to be agreeable at all times in order to be liked feel like a compulsion? So many of us fear that if we were to stop doing these things, we would be unlovable. We adopted these behaviors as a way to feel safe, to feel like we were worthy of love. But this is a story we have told ourselves one that likely started in childhood where we were made to feel like we needed to be a certain way to receive love or attention once we realize this is just a story we can unlearn it we can begin to realize that there are so many different ways of being in this life and how we've been so far certainly isn't the only way to get love.

In fact, it might even be a very poor way to get love because it doesn't lead to someone loving us for who we are, but for what we do for them. When we learn to be more of who we really are, we can bring a much more grounded and authentic version of ourselves to the table. The people we attract when we're like this will be the people who truly see us and accept us for who we are. We find our people. Number three, if people knew what I've done, my mistakes, my regrets, they wouldn't love me. This is shame at its best and it feeds off of us locking away the

parts of ourselves we feel make us unworthy or unlovable. The reality is that everybody has their version of this. We've all done things we aren't proud of, but we have to have compassion towards the part of ourselves that was responsible for those actions. It was likely a scared, hurt, or poorly equipped part of ourselves. One that needs to be loved into responding better to life in the future, not shamed into hiding. If we do this, we simply fracture ourselves, fearing that some parts of ourselves are too ugly to be accepted, a key ingredient in feeling unworthy. We are not our mistakes in life, and the side of us responsible for our worst moments, known in some practices as the shadow self, is not something to run away from, but something to love and accept. By loving and accepting that part of ourselves, we can integrate it. And then from a place of total acceptance,

we can do better in the future. Before we go any further guys, and I hope you are enjoying this episode, I want to tell you about an event I have going on on March the 19th called the Love Life Reset. This is a completely free event that I am inviting you to if you want a clean slate in your love life where you can go out there and find love regardless of what has happened already. It doesn't matter if you feel like nothing's been working out for you, if you thought you'd be somewhere different by this point in your life, or if you're coming back out into the dating world, having been

in a long-term relationship or even a marriage for a long time, and you're wondering or even scared about what dating is going to be like for you in this new season of your life. The Love Life Reset is for all of us who want a fresh start and it's happening on March the 19th. The event is completely free as I said and you can become a part of it very easily in the next 20 seconds by going to lovelifetraining.com. You can sign up there and we will send you an exclusive link to join us on March the 19th.

So we'll see you there for the Love Life Reset. lovelifetraining.com is that link. Go sign up now and I'll see you there. All right, on with the episode. Have compassion for who you are. Know that you have always done the best you could, as the version of yourself that you were at the time. You didn't get a choice to choose you or a different human at birth. You've only ever had you to work with, with your brain chemistry,

your upbringing, your challenges, your traumas. So thinking you need to match up to anybody else to be worthy of love is nothing but a bad idea. You are already worthy of love and you need no excuse to give it to yourself. This is what my wife Audrey refers to as making a home within ourselves. Instead of running away from ourselves, we have to make space for ourselves, our whole selves, the light and the dark, and simply resolve to do the best we can with ourselves every day. In the last few years, I've been able to accept and have compassion for parts of myself I had never found compassion for in the past.

It's helped me not to fear the judgment of others in the same way anymore. I came to realize I only feared the judgment of others when I was judging myself. Key takeaways. You don't need to match up with anyone else's attributes to be worthy of love. You are already worthy of love just by being here. You will still be worthy of love even when you drop the behaviors you think you need to keep doing in order to earn love. The love you receive when you're being your authentic self is much more powerful because it will be given to you by people who truly see you and accept you. They will

be your people. The sources of your shame are the doorways to fully accepting yourself. When we accept both the dark and the light in ourselves, we can be vulnerable without the fear of judgment. We don't need someone else's acceptance when we have already given it to ourselves. Our own opinion becomes enough for us. So what about you? In what way do you want to stop trying to earn love in the old ways? It could be choosing not to over-explain yourself the next time you say no to something. It could be resisting the urge to go out of your way to try to solve someone's problem for them, especially if they haven't asked you to. When you do this, sit in the comfort it creates

and remind yourself you are not in danger. You are an adult who knows how to take care of yourself. Create a sense of safety within yourself. Next, think of something you have done in your life that you have shame around. Something you fear to say out loud. Connect with the part of you that was responsible for that thing and know that this part of you is not unlovable. You are not your mistake. You may not be proud of what you did, but the part of you that felt the need to do it is worthy of love and could be welcomed back to you with a sense of compassion. Let me know what you thought of this three relationships newsletter. Remember, I am not reading all of these on the Love Life podcast. I'm just choosing one once in a while to read out loud here. So if you want all of them, if you want the one that I send out every single week

in your inbox, as soon as I've written it, go to the3relationships.com. That's the number three. So the3relationships.com and you can sign up for free to be part of this private newsletter that I'm sending out every week. If you enjoy my writing, this is a really great way to access them for anyone who enjoys reading as their preferred form of learning. I also, at the end of that newsletter, put a couple of links to things that I think you might enjoy, videos, podcasts, even sometimes just stuff me and Audrey use that we really enjoy. I let you know what those things are. So it's a fun thing to be a part of. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Love Life. I'm so happy you're here. And I just want to say everywhere I go, one of you comes up to me and says how much

this is helping you, changing your life, how much you appreciate it, how long you've been following for. And it really, truly gives so much purpose to my life, to Audrey's life, to my brother Stephen's life. It really means so much to us. I know you're out there. I know not all of you comment or leave reviews or send us emails, but I know you're out there and I know you're listening to my voice right now. And I can't tell you how much that means to me. I hope to be on the journey with you for a long, long time yet to come. I'll see you in the next episode.

Be well and love life. Outro Music