The belief that we’re undeserving of pleasure hides inside productivity obsession, self-sacrifice dressed up as love and in the creeping guilt that follows any moment of genuine enjoyment. It sounds like “I’ll relax when I’ve done enough” or “I shouldn’t be so selfish” or “other people have it worse.” It becomes so woven into someone’s normal that they don’t recognise it as a belief at all. They think it’s just how they are.
It isn’t. It’s something they learned.
Most of us absorbed early messages about what our needs were worth. Maybe pleasure in your home was treated as frivolous, something for people who had already finished everything on the list (a list that, of course, never actually ended). Maybe warmth and care were conditional, offered as reward for behaviour rather than given freely, and someone who was supposed to love you without conditions taught you, that conditions always applied.
Others learned that wanting things made them demanding, difficult or too much. A fair few learned that the safest way to be loved was to want as little as possible, to take up almost no space, and to keep their needs very small.
Those lessons don’t disappear when you grow up. They settle into the nervous system and shape how you move through intimacy, through rest, through anything that asks you to receive rather than give.
Pleasure isn’t a reward and it’s not something you earn through suffering enough, working hard enough, or proving yourself sufficiently selfless. It’s one of the most basic expressions of being alive in a body, and you were born already deserving it.
The work, if there is work to do, isn’t about adding anything to yourself. It’s about slowly, carefully unlearning the idea that there was ever a condition in the first place.
You don’t need to justify wanting to feel good.
Evie Elysian · Melbourne Independent Escort
