The Shift: I am Beloved (just) because I AM!

From: I must be perceived as perfect in order to be loved.

Setting the stage: We’d been married 10 years. In the last five of those years, we welcomed our third and fourth children into our world, while building three houses and moving three times. These house projects functioned as second jobs for my husband, who already worked full time elsewhere. I stayed home, keeping our household humming and homeschooling our children.

And now, living in the latest house we’d built, we were financially stressed. We already checked all the boxes on the how-to-save money lists: don’t eat out, cook from scratch, eat your leftovers, buy second-hand, never-pay-full-price-for-anything, etc, etc, etc. And yet, we fell further behind each month, and I prayed urgently for solutions. Desperate for relief, I began tutoring online in the evenings.

Additionally, while I felt I had a good marriage, the demands of four young children and my household left me feeling like my husband was just one more person with needs that required my attention—needs I rarely felt like meeting.

I can’t recall the name of the book that changed everything. And, when I first began reading and implementing its message, I didn’t recognize it as the answer I had been praying for. I certainly couldn’t have predicted its profound results.

The book introduced me to a revolutionary concept: our beliefs form the foundation from which we create our entire lives. Whatever you believe about any aspect of existence—your self, money, relationships, life itself—causes you to make choices that inevitably confirm those beliefs. Like a dentist’s ultraviolet light hardening a filling, the results of our choices “prove” that what we believe is true. Each confirming experience passes that light over the belief again, cementing it deeper into our reality.

Following the book’s guidance, I looked inward to identify my most fundamental truth—the bottom belief from which all my actions grew. What emerged surprised me: “I must be perceived as perfect in order to be loved.”

Examining the origins of this belief, I understood that while my parents never explicitly stated this requirement, I had deduced it based on their parenting style—what earned their approval or disapproval. Our religious community reinforced it further: God only loves and approves of perfection.

Continued reflection illuminated how profoundly this belief affected me. Under its influence, I lived in constant fear that loved ones might discover my imperfections! I didn’t need to be perfect for myself, but for my husband, for others, for God—all to secure love. The concept of being loved simply for being myself was foreign territory.

Fortunately, the book offered more than just a diagnosis—it provided a solution called the “tapping technique”, now widely recognized as EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique). This approach uses the body’s meridian system, similar to acupuncture, by tapping twelve different points while repeating the belief you wish to release. Then, you choose a new belief to install, repeating it as you tap each of those same points again.

I began the process, tapping away, “I must be perceived as perfect, in order to be loved” and replacing it with like, “I am loved because I am (I exist).”

The results were immediate and astonishing! Our intimate life transformed as though someone had flipped a switch. Let me be very clear: my husband knew nothing about the technique I had performed, and I couldn’t have anticipated how the results would manifest because I wasn’t even thinking about that aspect of our relationship when I thought about what belief to change in the process. Overnight, literally, I went from viewing intimacy as just another demand for my attention to experiencing desire like I hadn’t felt before. Ever. For an entire week. Twenty years later, I’ve never again felt the reluctance that I had become my norm before The Shift.

What happened? Without the exhausting need to hide behind a facade of perfection and the constant fear of exposure, I could—for the first time—receive my husband’s love as my authentic self, not as the person I thought he expected me to be. For the first time, I believed in my own innate lovability rather than believing I was only loved for the perfection I projected. The liberation from fear was profound.

Having proven the efficacy of the tapping technique so profoundly, my husband and I, together, applied it to our financial situation, and that’s a story for another day.