Love, Value + Usability
Because I lean toward psychological masochism (don’t ask) I find myself digging in the graveyard of my subconscious recreationally. I found something I’d like to unpack and share. Pardon my dust.
Our unconscious beliefs + observations about life can be unearthed with language that reads like a mental instruction. Take the concept of affirmations for example. These are mental instructions you are attempting to train yourself to believe. You can reverse engineer your current belief system using what I call “negative affirmations” to identify what you already unconsciously believe.
I identified a line of code in my system that revealed an over-coupling between love and value that I believe many in the collective share. Namely, a submerged linkage between deserving love and contributing value.
We are told love is unconditional + value is conditional.
But we are taught by experience:
You get love when you behave well.
You are treated as valuable when you produce or perform.
If you do not produce or perform you are rejected.
If you are inconvenient or disruptive, love is withdrawn.
So unconsciously, we learn:
Love = Value = Contribution = Deservedness
I’m not certain yet what love is but considering that every aspect of our human experience improves when we are loved well, I suppose it’s a birth right or whatever.
In contrast, I see value as what someone brings into a system (energy, skill, perspective, labor, etc.)
They are not actually linked. So why do many of us unconsciously believe “If I do not add value, I will not receive love.”
Have you been taught to confuse love with being useful to a system?
This program of thinking runs behavior like people pleasing, hyper-independence, martyrdom, and more.
Contributing is powerful but being valuable to a system is not the same as being valued as a self.
If this thought pattern is relevant for you. My question is, who planted the idea in your mind? What is making it grow?
Like most things, I believe this traces back to patriarchy, capitalism, and colonization. At some point, we devalued the simple act of being and overvalued production and service. Survival meant conforming to these imbalanced systems—and in many ways, it still does. This conditioning is rooted so deeply in our collective psyche. In the process, we lost sight of what love truly is, forgot our innate worth as human beings, and began striving to feel it again through performance and contribution. I love that you’ve brought this forward. Thank you for sharing!
I am finding that a lot of that seed is from childhood experiences with people with adults a varying emotional bandwidths. Love is unconditional and should be given freely.But somehow we put conditions on it, as we grow up....