Believe You Are Worthy of All That Is Good and Seek to Experience It

“You always seek to experience what you believe about yourself.”

Howard Falco, I AM

Codependent behavior is an excellent example of how people subconsciously seek to experience what they believe about themselves. It’s well understood that the source of codependency, or any addictive behavior, is poor self-love/self-esteem. People who believe they are worthless or less-than will always seek to experience and validate their worthlessness or their feelings of inadequacy.  And as Howard Falco points out in I AM, they will seek to fulfill their beliefs about themselves in every facet of their lives; be it love, career, personal, etc.

The vast majority of people suffering from codependency are starved for affection and intimacy. They don’t believe they’re worthy of love, however, and so they are willing to settle for whatever or whoever comes along. A codependent may be attracted to an attractive healthy person, but they will dismiss the possibility that this person could ever be interested in them. The codependent will project this belief onto the person that they are really attracted to—and maybe perfect for—and the object of their affection will project their (the codependent’s) feelings right back to them. The healthy person will inform the codependent through body language and a lack of respect that they are not interested in someone who obviously feels badly about themselves.

This leaves the codependent looking for a partner that he/she believes is beneath them; someone that he/she would actually be “good enough” to be in a relationship with; someone that he/she could fix or make-over to be acceptable. The codependent then targets partners who are toxic—usually other addicts or people with victim mentalities-- and who are just as anxious to be in a relationship. For both persons, the need to be in a relationship is stronger than the need to be in a healthy or fulfilling relationship with the right person.

No relationship between two persons who think poorly of themselves is ever going to flourish or be fulfilling. Because both parties subconsciously seek to experience what they believe about themselves (that they aren’t worthy of a relationship), the relationship is doomed to fail before it begins. As soon as the relationship ends, however, the codependent will take some time to lick his/her wounds and then repeat the same pattern of behavior all over again. He/she will seek to experience a relationship that validates the belief that he/she is unworthy. And this will continue to happen until the codependent’s belief about him/herself changes to a positive belief.

This same pattern of behavior applies to career choices as well. Someone came to see me recently who had just quit his job. He had a long pattern of behavior of getting frustrated at work and eventually resigning. What he came to discover as we talked was that he had a belief about himself that caused this pattern of behavior. That belief he held was “I’m not worthy of a job that challenges me and fulfills my desires.” Because of this belief, he always accepted the first job offer that came his way, even when he knew that the job was really beneath him and his abilities. Why would he do this? Because he had an anxious fear that if he said “no,” he’d never find another job—and, after all, he really wasn’t good enough for any job that he really wanted.

I pointed out to him that people who feel good about themselves don’t apply for or accept jobs that they know are beneath their talents. And they don’t accept the first job that’s offered to them unless they are fairly certain that it’s truly the right fit for them. He then understood that he needed to work on changing his beliefs about himself if he was ever going to break out of the pattern of accepting jobs that weren’t right for him.

I believe all of our patterns of behavior are based on what we believe about ourselves and how we then feel about who we are. As long as we are holding on to a bad belief about ourselves, we will seek to experience and validate that very belief. So the only way to break our self-destructive patterns of behavior is to get to the root of our self-beliefs, to challenge them and to adopt new positive, self-fulfilling beliefs about ourselves. It will take time—a lot of time—but it’s worth it once we decide we’re worth it; and that it’s more important to have a good relationship than it is to have a bad one. Or once we decide it’s better to have a fulfilling job rather than just having the first job that comes along.

Change your negative self-beliefs into positive self-beliefs, seek to experience the positive benefits of these new beliefs and allow your soul to shine!