"I don't deserve this?"

Our Perpetual Need for Morality

“I don’t deserve this.”

Or perhaps:

“I deserve this.”

Most of us have said one or the other at some point.

You might think back to a time when you felt shame and found yourself believing that what was happening was somehow justified. That you had made mistakes, or you weren’t a good person, or that life was simply giving you what you deserved.

Equally, you may have found yourself on the other side of the equation.

“I try so hard.” “I eat well.” “I exercise.” “I’m a good person.” “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

Perhaps it was a horrible diagnosis or a betrayal. Could be a breakdown of a relationship or financial hardship. I know I resonate with the latter!

The details of the story change, but the question underneath stays remarkably consistent. We seem to have a deep need to reduce life’s events to morality.

When we say we deserve something, or don’t deserve something, we’re making an assumption. That there is some kind of scorecard. Some force keeping track of our behaviour and handing out rewards and consequences accordingly.

Even those who reject this idea often find themselves caught in a different version of the same search. Some conclude that life is entirely random, a kind of cosmic Russian roulette where events happen without reason or meaning.

I find both positions fascinating, because beneath them sit the same questions.

How safe am I in this world? Can life be trusted? Can I predict what will happen next?

And perhaps that is where our obsession with deserving begins.

Recently I watched a video by Teal Swan, which I’ve linked below. Whether you agree with her or not, it’s worth watching, because it raises a question I’ve found myself sitting with.

The past year has brought its fair share of challenges for me. I’ve experienced financial issues as well as concerning health problems. I’ve had moments where I’ve genuinely wondered what the hell is going on. I found myself unconsciously doing a kind of maths. At times I have caught myself in this bizarre inner dialogue with phrases such as:

I’ve worked hard. I’ve helped a lot of people. I’ve created a huge amount of value. So why does it feel as though life isn’t meeting me halfway?

The question wasn’t quite as conscious as that at first, because it sat underneath my thoughts, humming away in my subconscious mind. There was a sense that something wasn’t adding up.

Then I caught myself.

Because what was I actually assuming?

I was assuming that life operates according to some kind of moral accounting system, where effort and contribution should automatically produce a corresponding outcome. Of course, actions have consequences and what we do matters, but that isn’t quite the same thing as believing there’s a cosmic scorekeeper somewhere deciding what we do and don’t deserve.

This is where I found Teal’s perspective so interesting.

You can approach it through a psychological lens, the nervous system, a spiritual one, or even through the lens of human behaviour. The language changes depending on the framework you’re using, but I suspect many of them are describing the same underlying thing.

The conclusion I came to, or perhaps more accurately the non-conclusion I came to, was that I shouldn’t be looking for a conclusion at all. Of course, I still found myself asking questions. “What energy am I creating from? Am I operating from lack or scarcity? Why am I having these heart symptoms? Is there something I haven’t looked at yet? Something I haven’t addressed?”

But I also became aware of something as I was asking those questions. I didn’t want to turn them into another bloody certainty loop.

I didn’t want my mind to do what it always does, the thing that keeps me in my very own personal hell with fleeting glimpses of false relief. The belief that if I could just understand what was happening with my heart, then everything would be okay. Because that’s the same pattern all over again. It’s just wearing different clothes.

My most common nervous system loop, and I’m happy to admit this publicly, is trying to eliminate uncertainty in order to feel safe.

I want to understand things and connect the dots. I want to know why something is happening and to predict what comes next. On the surface that can look like self-awareness, and yeah, sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s simply my nervous system trying to create certainty, because certainty feels safer than not knowing.

The problem is that life keeps refusing to give me that deal. (Oh, what a lovely mirror.) It is very bloody easy to feel enlightened when everybody around you is behaving exactly how you’d like, your bank account looks healthy and your body is doing what you expect it to do. The real test comes when life refuses to provide answers and you find yourself sitting in the discomfort of not knowing. What a gift! “Nickita needs certainty? Ok, have this mirror. Can you feel safe without it?” Quite funny really.

So rather than trying to solve everything, I found myself doing something quite different. I’ve been watching myself and my perpetual need to find the answer that creates certainty, which creates an illusion of safety. I’ve observed the part of me that believes safety exists somewhere in the future, just beyond the next insight, the next explanation, the next piece of understanding.

The more I looked at it, the more I realised that safety and certainty are not the same thing. Hold that thought for a moment, because it sits at the heart of everything else I want to explore here.

The World Must Make Sense

If we’re honest, most of us don’t actually want life to be random. We say we do, because we want freedom and adventure. Yet when something painful happens, our minds immediately begin searching for an explanation. Certainty is, after all, a very important human need. Our minds go to:

Why did this happen? What caused it? What did I miss? What should I have done differently?

Some of us search for practical answers. Some search for spiritual ones, like past lives or horoscopes. Others search through childhood, relationships, religion or their energy. The search itself isn’t the interesting part. The interesting part is our need to search. Why is it so difficult for us to simply sit with the possibility that life may not always provide an explanation we can understand? I suspect it comes back to safety.

Imagine a world where bad things happen completely at random. Good people suffer, cruel people prosper, children get sick and kind people are betrayed, with no explanation that satisfies us. Most of us find that deeply uncomfortable.

Now imagine a life where everything happens for a reason, where every outcome can be traced back to a choice, a lesson, a vibration, a karmic debt or a subconscious pattern. Suddenly the world feels far more manageable, doesn’t it? Because if there’s a reason, there’s a rule, and if there’s a rule, there’s something we can do. At least then we have the illusion of control.

I say illusion because life has a habit of humbling us. Every one of us eventually encounters experiences that refuse to fit neatly into our preferred explanation of reality. Experiences that leave us staring at the ceiling at three in the morning wondering what on earth is going on.

Perhaps this is why the question of deserving is so seductive. It offers order and comfort. Without it, our identity begins to fracture. And for a nervous system searching for safety, that can be very difficult to let go of.

God, Karma and Cosmic Scorecards

I don’t think this is exclusive to religion either. In fact, I think almost every belief system can become a version of the same thing. For one person it’s God, for another it’s karma. For others it’s manifestation. Some people look through the lens of “it’s the universe.” Even people who don’t believe in any of those things often end up with their own version of the same question.

Why did this happen?

I wonder whether what we’re actually looking for isn’t an answer at all. I wonder whether we’re looking for someone, or something, to explain life to us like some sort of cosmic parent. Someone who knows why one person gets cancer and another doesn’t. Why one marriage survives and another falls apart. Why one child is born healthy and another isn’t.

It’s comforting to imagine there’s some kind of celestial accountant keeping score and balancing the books, making sure that eventually good people receive good things and bad people receive bad things. I completely understand why we’d want to believe that, because if life works like that, then it becomes predictable and therefore safe. The difficulty comes when life refuses to fit our framework. When we hear of a child’s death, or an abusive person living a long and seemingly happy life, that’s bloody hard to digest and make sense of.

At that point we often start reaching for explanations. It must be karma, or God’s plan, etc etc. Notice what we’re doing here. We’re trying to make life make moral sense.

Does Everything Happen for a Reason?

Whenever this conversation comes up, somebody will inevitably ask, “What about children?”

• What about the child who is abused?

• What about the child born into war?

• What about the child neglected from birth?

Surely they didn’t attract that. No. I don’t believe they did. I don’t believe a child somehow chose abuse because they weren’t vibrating highly enough. That explanation is rank! Children are born into families, cultures and societies. They inherit genetics, epigenetics, nervous systems and ancestral patterns long before they ever begin making conscious choices. They are shaped by collective consciousness just as much as individual experience.

As adults, however, something fascinating starts to happen. Our early experiences become the blueprint through which we make our way in the world. We begin making thousands of tiny decisions without even realising it. We subconsciously ask:

• Who feels safe?

• Who feels exciting?

• Who feels trustworthy?

• What feels normal?

• What feels like love?

Someone looking through a spiritual lens may call this vibration. Through a psychological lens, you may call it attachment. Through neuroscience, you may call it predictive processing. I tend to think they’re all pointing towards the same thing. Our internal world influences the external life we create.

I remember watching an interview with a woman who had endured unimaginable abuse at the hands of her parents. Eventually she escaped, only to find herself in another abusive relationship. People often ask, “Why would someone do that?” The better question is, “Why did that relationship feel familiar?”

Our nervous systems don’t automatically seek what’s healthy. They seek what they recognise. An empath who constantly scans other people’s emotions often developed that ability because, as a child, reading adults kept them safe. It was an extraordinary survival adaptation that they now form an identity around. “I’m an empath.” Years later that same person may find themselves repeatedly drawn towards narcissistic personalities, because some part of them is still searching for the love, safety and repair they never received.

Whether you call that energy, vibration, subconscious programming or nervous system conditioning honestly matters less to me than people think. I suspect we’re describing the same landscape using different maps.

The beautiful part is that this isn’t where the story ends.

When people begin recognising those old scripts and grieving what happened, regulating their nervous systems and making different choices, something remarkable happens. The people who once seemed to appear everywhere begin disappearing from their lives. Or perhaps they don’t disappear at all. Perhaps they’re still there, but they no longer feel familiar.

Familiarity is Not the Same as Deserving

This, for me, is where familiarity and deserving part company. They’re often confused with one another, but they’re describing completely different things. Just because something feels familiar doesn’t mean you deserve it. If you grew up in a home where love felt unpredictable, you may find yourself repeatedly choosing unpredictable relationships. If criticism was normal, you may struggle to recognise kindness when it arrives. If you spent your childhood trying to earn love, you’ll probably continue trying to earn it as an adult, until that script becomes conscious.

None of that means you deserve those experiences. It simply means your nervous system has been running outdated software.

I think this is where so many people become stuck. They hear somebody say, “You create your reality,” and immediately interpret that as blame. I don’t hear it that way at all. I hear that we participate in creating our reality, often without realising we’re doing it. We make choices from a subconscious blueprint that was written long before we were old enough to question it.

I’ll give you a couple of examples from my own life, because I think it’s easier to explain this through lived experience than theory.

I’ve recently been having investigations into a heart condition. Years ago, I would have immediately turned that into blame and begun searching for what I did wrong. This must somehow be my fault. That would simply have been another version of the shame loop I’ve spent years trying to untangle.

Today I see it differently.

I see it as data. Of course I’m interested in the physical side. I want the investigations and I need to understand what’s happening biologically. At the same time, I’m also curious about what my body might be communicating. For me, the heart represents love, grief, connection and carrying the weight of other people. My mum also had heart problems, so I find myself wondering what has travelled through the generations. What beliefs have I inherited? What emotions have been carried without being processed? What patterns stop with me?

I don’t think I’ve caused my symptoms. I see my body as part of the conversation, not something happening in isolation.

Money has been another huge teacher for me. I’ve worked incredibly hard over the past few years. If output alone determined income, I’d probably be a millionaire by now. Somewhere along the way I realised I was making the same mistake I’d made with my health. I was looking in the wrong place. The issue wasn’t that I wasn’t working hard enough. It was the energy I was bringing to my work.

I’ve had to face the fact that money and safety became tangled together in my nervous system. When money feels uncertain, my body experiences threat. That’s not a place I want to be making choices from. Certainly not in the work I do. If I tighten and brace, those are rarely the conditions where creativity, connection or opportunity flow.

For me, this is where so much of the conversation around manifestation falls short. We can repeat affirmations all day long, but if our nervous system still believes we are unsafe, our choices will continue to reflect that internal reality. Some people are pushed so far by life that they have no choice but to look within. Others begin doing the inner work first and notice that their external world gradually starts to shift. I don’t think there’s a right way round. One thing that really helped me was asking a different question.

Instead of asking, “How do I get more money?” I started asking, “What does somebody feel like who already experiences abundance? What does their nervous system actually feel like?”

• Do they wake up in a state of threat?

• Do they constantly scan for what’s about to go wrong?

• Do they spend their day trying to control outcomes?

• Or do they move through life with a sense of trust, openness and enoughness?

This is where the more spiritual side of me comes in.

I happen to believe there is one mind expressing itself through billions of individual people. That doesn’t mean I think we all have to believe the same thing. It’s simply the framework that helps me make sense of the world. So instead of trying to “attract” abundance, I began practising what it felt like to be someone who no longer experienced money as a threat. Almost like a method actor preparing for a role, I started embodying the person I wanted to become. This isn’t fake-it-till-you-make-it bullshit, pretending I already had millions in the bank. I mean becoming familiar with the internal state of someone whose nervous system wasn’t constantly bracing for the worst. For me, that’s where change begins.

Whether you see that as changing your vibration, rewiring your nervous system, updating subconscious beliefs or embodying a different identity doesn’t really matter to me. I suspect we’re describing the same process through different languages.

I’m simply sharing the way I’ve come to understand my own life. It may or may not resonate. Either way, I hope it invites curiosity rather than self-blame. The beautiful thing is that once you begin to recognise those blueprints, you also begin making different choices.

The Hidden Question Beneath “I Don’t Deserve This”

The more I’ve sat with this, the more I’ve realised that “I don’t deserve this” is rarely the real statement to focus on. I think it’s the socially acceptable version of a much more vulnerable question. Am I safe?

• If life can hand me illness despite looking after myself, am I safe?

• If someone I love can leave me despite everything I gave, am I safe?

• If I can lose money after working as hard as I have, am I safe?

The mind immediately starts trying to answer those questions, because it wants certainty and needs to know what to do so this never happens again.

That’s where the bargaining with life begins.

• Maybe I need to heal more.

• Maybe I need to think more positively.

• Maybe I need to work harder.

• Maybe I need to pray more.

• Maybe I need to manifest differently.

• Maybe I need to find the lesson.

I’ve done every one of those things at some point. The irony is that I wasn’t really looking for healing. I was looking for certainty. I believed that if I could finally understand everything, life would stop surprising me and I’d finally feel safe. I even trained as a profiler to understand this more! But when it comes to nervous system safety, all that understanding won’t protect me if I’m only learning to remove uncertainty. That’s my same old nervous system loop at play.

What has changed for me is my relationship with uncertainty itself. I still ask questions and explore emotional patterns. I still wonder what my body is communicating and what my relationships are reflecting back to me, and I still believe our inner world shapes the lives we experience. The difference is that I’m no longer trying to use those things as insurance against life.

Life will continue to surprise me, and people will continue to make choices I don’t understand. I’m sure my body will continue to communicate with me, and money will ebb and flow. The invitation, at least for me, has been learning to find safety in myself rather than trying to extract it from certainty. Perhaps that’s what healing has always been. Not the end of uncertainty, but a bigger capacity to meet it. Who knows.

What If Life Isn’t a Reward and Punishment System?

So where do I personally arrive after all of this?

I don’t believe life is a reward and punishment system. I don’t believe there’s a man sitting on a cloud deciding who gets cancer, who wins the lottery or whose marriage survives. When I use the word God, I’m talking about something very different. I think there is one consciousness expressing itself through billions of human beings. Imagine the human race as one body. You and I aren’t separate from it any more than one cell is separate from your heart or your lungs.

I lost my mum to cancer. I want to be careful here, because none of what follows is about blame. I don’t believe she caused her illness, and I don’t believe anyone causes theirs. What I can see now, with the benefit of time, is the state she was so often operating from. A state of bracing, of threat, of carrying far more than one body was ever built to hold. I recognise it because I’ve lived in it too.

There’s something in the biology I find hard to look away from. A cell doesn’t exist in isolation. It responds to the field it sits in, to the signals and the energy of the whole system it belongs to, right down to a level we’re only beginning to understand through quantum physics. When cells stop reading the wider body and start behaving as though only their own survival matters, the whole organism suffers. That’s one of the hallmarks of cancer. Cells that have stopped cooperating.

I hold that as a metaphor, and only ever for myself. What if we do something similar at the level of consciousness? What if a great deal of human suffering grows from the same root, the belief that we are separate, each of us multiplying our own survival at the expense of the body we belong to?

This is the same thing I’ve been describing the whole way through, only at a different scale. At the level of the nervous system, threat makes us brace, defend and contract. At the level of consciousness, separation does exactly that. When I believe I’m separate, judgement becomes easy. Competition becomes normal. Fear makes sense. I defend myself against “them” because I’ve forgotten that, at the deepest level, there is no them.

Perhaps what we’re witnessing collectively is a kind of spiritual dis-ease. I deliberately separate that word, because I think it points to something important. As long as I experience myself as fundamentally separate from everyone else, I’ll continue making choices from that state. Those choices ripple into my family, my community and the wider world.

Healing, then, is about remembering relationship. I think consciousness comes to know itself through experience. You cannot understand courage without fear, or appreciate peace without first knowing conflict, or value forgiveness until you’ve felt hurt. We learn through relationship, and through what appears to be separation, even though I don’t believe separation is ultimately real.

From that perspective, I don’t think life is happening to us. I think life is expressing itself through us. The work is to create a clear channel, which means understanding ourselves deeply enough to let go of the identity that has kept us safe.

Where we sometimes lose our way is in stopping too soon. We read books about manifestation or the law of attraction and conclude that all we have to do is think differently and life will magically reorganise itself around us. I think there’s truth in those ideas, and I also think they’re incomplete.

If your nervous system still believes the world is dangerous, your body will keep making choices from that place no matter how many affirmations you repeat. Your conscious mind might be saying, “I am abundant,” while your body braces for disaster. Your mind might say, “I deserve love,” while your nervous system still mistakes inconsistency for intimacy. Until those two begin speaking the same language, we keep recreating familiar experiences.

This is also why I don’t believe we change the world by endlessly trying to fix what’s happening outside ourselves. Of course we should challenge injustice, protect children and stand up against harm. And lasting change has to begin within. Every generation passes something on to the next, whether that’s love, fear, regulation, anxiety or unconscious patterns. Children are shaped by the emotional world they inherit long before they can consciously choose anything for themselves.

The question I keep coming back to isn’t, “What’s wrong with them?” It’s, “Where am I still unconscious?”

• Where am I still judging?

• Where am I still reactive?

• Where am I still operating from fear instead of awareness?

Because I think there are different levels of human awareness, five to be precise, and every decision we make comes through the level we’re currently living from.

1. At the earliest level we experience life through separation. Everyone else looks broken, threatening or wrong. We compare ourselves constantly, defend our position, react quickly and feel as though the world is happening against us. There’s very little awareness that our own perception is shaping our experience.

2. As awareness grows, judgement begins to soften. We still notice differences, but curiosity starts replacing certainty. We become less interested in proving we’re right and more interested in understanding.

3. Then comes the ability to observe. We begin seeing people as they are, rather than as personal attacks. Emotional reactions slow down. We step back before responding. We recognise behaviour without immediately attaching a story to it.

4. As consciousness continues expanding, empathy follows. We begin seeing the history behind people’s behaviour. We understand that every action has a context. Compassion becomes less something we try to practise and more a natural consequence of understanding.

5. Eventually we arrive somewhere much harder to put into words. We begin seeing other people as reflections. Their behaviour still has consequences and boundaries still matter, but the illusion of complete separation starts dissolving. We recognise ourselves in one another. The world stops feeling like a battle between us and them, and starts feeling like one mind expressing itself through many different lives.

This doesn’t mean becoming passive or excusing harmful behaviour. Fuck that! It means recognising that every judgement we cling to keeps us locked into the very separation we long to escape.

For me, this is where spirituality, psychology, neuroscience and quantum thinking begin to meet. They’re all pointing towards the same invitation. Become more aware.

Because the more awareness we bring to our own lives, the different the choices we make. Those choices influence our relationships, our families, our communities and ultimately the collective field we’re all contributing to.

That’s the world I want to help build.

Share Your Thoughts

I don’t expect everyone to agree with this perspective, and that’s perfectly okay. My hope isn’t that you adopt my beliefs. I just hope that the next time you hear yourself saying, “I don’t deserve this,” you pause for a moment. Ask yourself whether you’re looking for an explanation, or whether you’re looking for safety. Because they’re rarely the same thing.

Notice the stories your mind creates and where judgement appears. Notice where certainty feels essential. You might discover that the greatest freedom isn’t found in finally understanding why everything happens. It might be found in meeting life with a little more awareness and a little less fear. Please share your observations in the comments. We all learn from one another, and I value your input.

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