Un-Believe-Able

It is Thursday evening and he is coming at eight. You have tidied the living room, and then tidied it again. You typed a message, ‘Looking forward to tonight!’, deleted the exclamation mark because it looked too eager, put it back because without it you sounded cold, and in the end you sent nothing at all.

At ten to eight you change your top for the second time.

Over dinner he tells a story about his brother, and you laugh a moment before the punchline, because you can see it coming and you want him to know you are paying attention. When he goes quiet for a moment, your mind starts running. Was it the thing I said about work? Did I talk too much? Somewhere between the main course and the dishes, you agree to a weekend you do not really want, because saying no felt like a risk.

When the door closes behind him, you sit down on the sofa and notice how tired you are. Not the good kind of tired. The kind you feel after a long day of being assessed.

Nobody would call that evening a date. It was an interview. And the strange thing is that he probably never asked you a single question. You were the one conducting it, on both sides of the table, with the same question running underneath: am I good enough to be kept?

If you recognised even one moment of that evening, stay with me. You are in very good company.

The sentence underneath

Most of us would never say it out loud. We would never write it in a journal either. But you can see it in what we do: the extra effort, the never asking for too much, the careful bookkeeping of who texted last. Underneath sits a sentence our book Love & Relationships names word for word: ‘Love must be earned.’

It has a few cousins. ‘I must be perfect to receive love.’ ‘If I stop giving, they will leave.’ ‘The harder I work for love, the more valuable it becomes.’ Different words, same contract: love is a salary, and you are always on probation.

Where it comes from

Beliefs like this are rarely chosen. They are absorbed, often long before the age of seven, when a child is busy working out one thing above all: what do I have to do to stay close to the people I need?

Perhaps praise came when you were helpful, quiet or clever, and attention went elsewhere when you were simply you. Perhaps you watched a parent give and give and call it love. Perhaps love in your house came with moods, and you learned to read the weather before you walked in. None of this needs a villain. A child draws a conclusion, and the conclusion becomes the operating system.

Then the brain does what brains do. It works like a prediction machine: it looks for evidence of what it already believes and quietly files away the rest. So the partner who is easy and kind can feel ‘a bit boring’, while the one who keeps you guessing feels like chemistry. Our book tells the story of Maria, who turned down every steady man and fell for every unavailable one, because somewhere inside her ran the sentence: ‘It means nothing if I do not fight for it.’ The fight felt like love. Calm felt like nothing.

The taboo nobody mentions

Here is the uncomfortable part. Earning love has a hidden reward, and that is why we hold on to it so tightly.

As long as you are working for love, you feel in control. If it goes wrong, at least you know what to do: try harder. Receiving love freely is far more frightening, because you cannot do anything to deserve it, which also means you cannot do anything to keep it. That is a lot of trust for a nervous system that learned love was conditional.

And so some of us, if we are truthful, prefer the interview. It is exhausting, but it is familiar.

The same belief rarely stays in the bedroom, by the way. It turns up at work (‘I have to prove myself before I can ask for more’) and in friendships (‘I am the one who always organises everything’). Underneath all of them sits the question of worth, which is exactly where our first book, I, The Number I, begins.

Rewriting the sentence

Changing a belief starts with writing a sentence your subconscious can actually take in. That is harder than it sounds, because our first instinct is usually to argue with the old one.

✗ ‘I do not have to earn love.’ Your subconscious skips the ‘not’ and hears: earn love.
✗ ‘Everyone adores me.’ Too big. Something in you rolls its eyes.
✓ I AM WORTHY of love simply for being who I am.

Two more pairs, straight from our book:

• ‘I feel I need to earn love.’ → I RECEIVE love as freely as I give it.
• ‘The harder I work for love, the more valuable it becomes.’ → MY LOVE deepens when it feels steady and reliable.

Notice the first word of each new sentence. I AM WORTHY, I RECEIVE, MY LOVE. They answer the old fear directly. And notice how you respond when you read them. A little relief? A small ‘yes, but…’? Both are useful information.

What you can do today

Say the first new sentence out loud, once, slowly. Then notice where in your body you feel it, and what your mind says straight afterwards. If something protests, that protest is the old sentence defending its job.

This is where most people stop, and it is why so many good insights fade by Friday. Finding and rewriting a belief are steps one and two of our method. Steps three and four make it last: you test whether the new sentence is actually present in your system, and then you transform it at subconscious level. You learn to test in our Self-Muscle-Testing course and to transform in our Transformation course, at home and at your own pace.

Love was never a position you had to apply for. You were never on probation. The only thing that needs to change is the sentence that told you so.

Do the free love test: two minutes, and you find out which love belief is quietly running your relationships.

Where to go from here

• Free love test, or the book Love & Relationships (€8), full of beliefs about love that are already rewritten for you.
• Course 1: Self-Muscle-Testing, to find out which beliefs are actually active in you.
• The Starter Package: both courses, an e-book, the community and lifetime access.

Read next: Are Your Subconscious Beliefs Secretly Controlling You?