When you don’t feel worthy of a healthy, available relationship, it’s not unusual to find yourself in unavailable and shady relationships. Believing on some level that you’re not good enough causes emotional unavailability (on your end), so you’re inadvertently drawn to people who are similarly unavailable.
A part of you wants to limit your exposure to situations that will highlight your lack of ‘enoughness’. You also consciously and unconsciously be and do things to influence and control other people’s feelings and behaviour so that you will finally be ‘enough’, aka people pleasing. By trying to prove yourself, you hope it will create a tipping point where you will finally feel ‘enough’ and the other party will change. Or, you figure you’ll feel good enough to be with more available, loving partners.
Feeling unworthy combined with people pleasing means you can’t be yourself. Instead, you try to be what you think the person or situation wants (or certainly what you think will help you get or avoid something). Not being yourself to hide feelings of unworthiness and protect yourself from vulnerability blocks intimacy. And round and round you go.
You are already a lovable and worthy person without having to work yourself to the bone or even do half of the things you do for others. It’s safe to say that you don’t need to be a performing seal in your relationships or contort yourself to fit into other people’s boxes. I’m not saying don’t be good to the people in your life but do it as an extension and expression of being more you, not as a reaction to your fear of displeasing others or fear of, for example, abandonment, failure, rejection, etc.
