Have you ever found yourself thinking, “If they really knew me, they probably wouldn’t love me,” or “I don’t want to be too much”? Maybe you tell yourself it’s easier to keep the peace, or you worry that if you say no, someone will be disappointed in you.
Or maybe you don’t have any of those thoughts. You just notice that you’re always the one doing more, giving more, or making sure everyone else is happy. Somewhere along the way, you may have learned that love is something you have to earn. And you may not even realize you believe that. It’s just how you’ve learned to be in relationships.
Where Does the Belief That Love Has to Be Earned Come From?
One of the questions I might ask you in therapy is, “When did you learn that you had to do something to deserve love?”
Maybe you grew up in a family where you got a lot of attention when you accomplished something. Maybe your feelings were criticized or dismissed, so you learned to keep them to yourself. Maybe you were the responsible child, the one who didn’t cause problems or the one everyone else depended on.
And maybe you had a pretty good childhood. You love your parents, you know they loved you, and you can’t point to anything particularly terrible that happened. That doesn’t mean you didn’t develop beliefs about what you needed to do to be loved.
Children are constantly making sense of the world around them. If a parent is upset, a child might conclude, “I must be doing something wrong.” If a parent is emotionally unavailable, the child might decide, “I need to be really good so they’ll love me.” If there’s a lot of conflict in the house, the child might learn, “It’s my job to make sure nobody gets upset.”
Nobody necessarily sat you down and taught you these things. Your brain figured them out based on what was happening around you. And those beliefs can follow you into adulthood, long after the circumstances that created them have changed.
How Does This Show Up in Adult Relationships?
Maybe you have a hard time saying no. You know you’re allowed to say no, but when you actually do it, you feel guilty for hours. Or maybe you’re constantly apologizing, even when you haven’t done anything wrong. You find yourself taking responsibility for other people’s feelings, trying to anticipate what they need, or working really hard to make sure nobody is disappointed in you.
You might notice that when your partner is in a bad mood, you immediately start wondering what you did wrong. Or when someone seems distant, your brain starts looking for ways to fix whatever you think happened.
What’s frustrating is that you may already understand this about yourself. You might even know exactly where it came from. You’ve read the books, listened to the podcasts, maybe even talked about it in therapy. You know intellectually that you’re not responsible for everyone else’s happiness.
But you still feel responsible.
That’s because understanding something intellectually doesn’t automatically change what your brain has learned to believe. These patterns can also affect your relationship, influencing how you communicate, handle disagreements, and respond to your partner’s needs. If you’re finding that these dynamics continue to create tension, couples therapy can help you and your partner better understand these patterns and work toward healthier ways of relating to each other.
How Parts Work Helps Us Understand These Patterns
One of the ways I work with clients is through Parts Work. The basic idea is that we all have different parts of ourselves, and sometimes those parts have very different ideas about what we should do.
For example, one part of you might know perfectly well that you’re allowed to say no. You’re an adult. You have responsibilities, limitations, and your own needs. But another part of you might be absolutely convinced that saying no is dangerous.
So instead of trying to convince that second part that it’s wrong, I want to understand why it believes what it believes.
I might ask, “What would happen if someone were disappointed in you?” And you might say, “Well, they’d be upset.” Okay, but what would be so bad about that? What does that part of you believe would happen next?
Sometimes we discover that a part of you believes someone will leave, or stop loving you, or that you’ll be completely alone. Sometimes it believes that if someone is upset with you, that means you’re a bad person.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Because there’s always a reason a part of you does what it does.
If you learned at six years old that keeping Mom happy was the best way to maintain your connection with her, it makes sense that a part of you would continue trying to keep people happy. That part learned something important at six, and it may still be operating according to those same rules at 46.
Your brain doesn’t necessarily know that the rules have changed. That’s part of what we’re trying to help it understand.
You Can Care About Someone Without Being Responsible for Their Feelings
I use an analogy with clients that I call the bubble analogy. Imagine that we’re all walking around inside our own unpoppable soap bubbles. Every time we interact with another person, our bubbles bump up against each other.
Now imagine your partner comes home in a terrible mood. Their bubble bumps into yours, and you immediately feel uncomfortable. Maybe you start trying to cheer them up, figure out what’s wrong, or wonder whether you’ve done something to upset them.
But here’s the question I want you to ask yourself: Whose bubble is this?
Your partner’s bad mood is happening inside their bubble. You can care about them. You can ask if they want to talk. You can offer support. But you don’t have to take responsibility for changing how they feel.
The same is true when your friend is disappointed in a decision you’ve made, or your mother doesn’t like something you’ve said. Their feelings belong to them. That doesn’t mean you don’t care, and it certainly doesn’t mean you can behave however you want without considering other people. It means you can care about someone without making their emotional experience your responsibility.
For someone who learned early in life that keeping other people happy was necessary, this can be a difficult distinction. You might understand it perfectly well as you’re reading this, but the next time someone is upset with you, that familiar feeling of guilt or responsibility shows up anyway.
And that’s the part we need to understand.
You Don’t Have to Keep Earning Love
I could tell you that you’re worthy of love just because you exist, and that you don’t have to prove anything to anyone. But if a part of you has spent decades believing otherwise, hearing those words probably isn’t going to change very much.
I’d rather help you understand why you came to believe that love had to be earned in the first place.
What happened in your life that taught you that being helpful, agreeable, successful, or easy to get along with was necessary to be loved? What does that part believe would happen if you stopped trying so hard? And does it know that you’re not that little kid anymore?
These aren’t questions most people think to ask themselves. But when we start understanding the beliefs that have been driving your behavior, we have an opportunity to do something different.
Instead of forcing yourself to set a boundary while feeling terrible about it, you might eventually be able to set that boundary without the guilt. Instead of automatically taking responsibility for someone’s disappointment, you might recognize that their feelings belong to them and not feel compelled to fix them.
That’s the kind of lasting change I’m interested in.
Therapy Can Help You Understand Yourself Differently
If you’ve spent much of your life feeling like you have to earn love, there’s a reason. The goal isn’t to criticize yourself for doing it or to force yourself to behave differently. It’s to understand what you’ve been doing, why you’ve been doing it, and what the different parts of you believe would happen if you stopped.
In individual therapy, we’ll look at the different parts of you that are involved in these patterns. I’ll ask questions, share what I’m noticing, and help you make sense of things that may not have made sense before.
I offer individual therapy for men and women age 30+ in Norwood, Massachusetts, as well as online therapy throughout Massachusetts and New York. If you’re tired of understanding your patterns but still finding yourself repeating them, we can talk about what working together might look like.
