What to Do When You Feel You Don't Deserve Love

The Feeling and The Fact

The feeling that you don't deserve love is powerful. It can feel like a fundamental truth about yourself. Like a law of physics. But it's not. It's a thought. And thoughts, even the most convincing ones, are not the same as reality.

The first step in dealing with this feeling is to see it for what it is. It's a signal from your brain. It's not a verdict delivered by the universe. A fire alarm is a signal. It tells you there might be a fire. It doesn't mean the whole building is guaranteed to burn down. Sometimes the alarm is triggered by smoke from burnt toast. Your job isn't to believe the alarm without question. It's to go and check for a fire.

Where the Signal Comes From

This feeling is often a protective mechanism. Somewhere in your past, being open and receiving affection might have led to pain. Or maybe you grew up believing that love was conditional, something you had to earn through achievement. Your brain learned a lesson. It decided that believing you are unworthy is safer than risking disappointment again.

So now, when someone offers you genuine affection, the alarm goes off. It screams "danger" because it's trying to protect you from potential hurt based on old data. It’s a ghost in the machine. A piece of old software running on a new operating system. The software isn't bad. It's just outdated. It's trying to solve a problem that may no longer exist.

From Fighting to Observing

You cannot win a head on fight with a feeling like this. Arguing with yourself that you do deserve love is like shouting at the fire alarm to be quiet. It doesn't work and it's exhausting.

A better approach is to become an observer. To get curious about the feeling. Instead of getting tangled up in it, you can step back and look at it.

When does it show up? What does it physically feel like in your body? What are the exact words it uses in your head?

Speaking these thoughts out loud is a surprisingly effective way to observe them. When a thought is only in your head, it feels like an inseparable part of you. But when you hear it spoken in your own voice, it becomes an object. Something separate from you. You can examine it. You can see how it sounds. Often, you'll find it sounds less like an absolute truth and more like a scared story.

Collecting New Data

Your brain is running on old data that says you're unlovable. To update that software, you need new data. You need small, verifiable proofs that contradict the old belief.

You don't start by trying to accept a grand declaration of love. That's too much. The alarm will be too loud. You start with something small.

Can you accept a compliment without immediately dismissing it? When someone says they like your shirt, try just saying "thank you" and nothing else. See what happens.

Can you let someone hold a door for you? Can you accept a friend's offer to buy you coffee? These are tiny transactions of kindness. Each one is a piece of data. Each one is a small experiment. The hypothesis is "I am unworthy of this kindness." The experiment is to accept it and observe the outcome. The outcome is almost always neutral or positive. The world doesn't end. The other person doesn't suddenly realize their mistake.

Slowly, you start to accumulate evidence. This new evidence doesn't necessarily silence the old feeling. But it creates a new voice, a new perspective. It gives you something to hold onto when the alarm starts ringing.

Love is an Action

We tend to think of love as a state of being or a reward. Something you get for being worthy. But it might be more useful to think of receiving love as a skill.

Like any skill, it feels awkward at first. If you've never learned to ride a bike, your first attempts will be wobbly. You will feel clumsy and unnatural. That's normal. The same is true for accepting affection when you're not used to it. It can feel uncomfortable and foreign. You might feel an urge to push it away because the discomfort is so strong.

The key is to treat it like practice. You are practicing the skill of receiving. You are building a new muscle. Each time you let a small moment of kindness in, you're doing one more repetition. It gets easier over time. The wobbling stops. Eventually, it starts to feel natural.

The feeling of being undeserving is a heavy weight. But it's not a permanent part of you. It's an old habit of thought. And habits can be changed, not by force, but by gentle, persistent observation and the slow accumulation of new evidence. You just have to be willing to run the experiments.

Try thinking about this for yourself using the prompt below.