I know this lady from a small town, who started to date a wealthy gentleman from the big city. Unfortunately the small town girl (who was extremely beautiful) grew up in a family where everything was in perpetual crisis. Every conversation around the home for her entire life was about picking up smokes at the corner store, drinking, child protective services, lawyers, divorce, domestic assaults, bars, bar fights, TV shows, movies, tattoos, piercings, drugs, firings, swearing, theft etc etc. It wasn’t that her family was directly involved in each activity but these were the hot topics in the home.

Then we have this very successful boyfriend bring this lady over to his family’s luxury compound (on a private lake) for dinner, in the big city. Guess what happened? Her normal collides head on with his normal and the psychic game of “do I deserve something different than my normal?” starts a war inside her head. She instantly tries to bring her normal into the dinner party by getting too drunk and starts conversations similar to what she’s been exposed to her entire life. Things don’t go so good as she actively starts to destroy “the good” coming into her life. On a psychological level…….what happened here?

Our subconscious mind digests all our experiences over our entire life time to establish what’s called “the acceptable chaos level“. This is the level that manifests in every decision we make throughout our entire life. Our external environment must always match our acceptable chaos level, or we start to modify our behavior to make that happen. If something good comes along that’s greater than we think we deserve subconsciously (because it’s not in line with our acceptable chaos level) we actually modify our behavior to destroy the good, until it comes down to something we’re familiar with. If something bad comes along that is lower than what we think we deserve subconsciously, we either try to make the bad thing better or reject it outright and walk away. If something equals what we think we deserve, the attraction is strong instantly, even if it’s completely illogical.

I remember going to a party with friends and lets just say one of my friends (who is a lady) grew up in a CHAOTIC home. Her acceptable chaos level is extremely high. She was used to extreme chaos. That’s her normal. What she tolerates is insane, to someone like myself. Regardless, we all carry this programming. There were amazing men at the party, whom she talked to, but at the end of the night she appeared to have fallen in love with a recovering drug addict from a local half way house, who of course would only bring the chaos she was used to, into her life. That’s how acceptable chaos levels work. You always match the chaos of your external world with the preexisting chaos in your mind, set into you by your childhood experiences. You always seek your normal…..until you become aware of what’s happening and then try to break the cycle.

This “acceptable chaos level” can also be called “what we think we deserve“. We often let the sum of our parent’s behaviors set our “deserve level” so we never insult them by becoming more than them. This way the child ego believes our parents will always love us because we don’t threaten them on any level. Developing personal expectations and “deserve levels” above the net sum of our childhood experiences is hard. Actually manifesting “higher standards” than our parents is often harder. The moral of this story is simple. If you find yourself destroying good things in your life or always lowering your life expectations, (dating losers, treating yourself like shit, never pursuing your dreams, always taking a back seat to everyone else, always aiming low, turning away from something good just because it’s new or something you’ve never experienced before) it’s most likely because of a low level of “deserve” your accumulated childhood experiences set into your belief systems. What we have in our lives is a mirror reflection of what we believe we deserve. If someone wants to change what they have in their life, they simply need to increase what they believe they deserve…..in a moral way of course. Look over your habits, see if they always match a predetermined chaos levels set by your childhood experience and then change that level. Change what you believe you deserve. It’s that simple.