One therapy goal that comes up consistently with clients, is a wish for better self-esteem, self-worth, or self-love. The thinking seems to be that this quality needs to be gotten somehow, or more of it needs to be obtained, or built in some way. This thinking makes some sense, there’s a ton of self-help books out there, and positive affirmation cards and what not, telling you that you can ‘get’ more of it by repeating statements 100 times per day, or whatever the latest method is. Most of them are misguided.
Self worth isn’t something you create, acquire or build for yourself. It’s already in you. It’s something you rediscover, after healing the wounds left by inaccurate and misguided messages from others.
When a baby is born, it doesn’t have to do anything to get our love and attention. It does relatively little, yet love and worth is heaped on it in massive doses. This is not culturally dependent either, it’s universal. So cross-culturally, we believe that humans are born with worth. I want to re-emphasise that because it is key.
To be human is to have worth.
All you have to do is be you. You don’t have to achieve, or perform, or be anything in particular. Just be you and you have worth.
So how do some of us end up as adults with so little belief in our worth?
If you had parents that were emotionally abusive, the answer to this question will be blindingly obvious to you. When parents tell us that they wish we were never born, or that we are useless, that they hate us etc. it’s easy to see how our self-worth would take a massive battering. But there are less obvious attacks to our self-worth. Here are some of them:
- Constant criticism
- Lack of attention / neglect
- Never being ‘seen’ or ‘noticed’ by your parents
- Only getting attention when you did the wrong thing
- Being praised for your performance and achievements only
Being praised for performance and achievements only
The last one is very common. Many well-meaning parents praised their kids a lot for the things they performed well at – Well done, you got an A! That’s great, you tried your hardest! Great game today! That drawing is fantastic! You sang brilliantly today! Sounds wonderful? There’s nothing wrong with it in isolation. But what I commonly see in my clinic, is clients who were ‘only’ praised for their performance. So their self-worth becomes tied to ‘what they do’ or ‘what they achieve’. So if they can’t do that thing anymore -say they get fired, become disinterested in their career, or for whatever reason, what they were always praised for isn’t getting them praise or external validation anymore, their feelings of self-value can come into question. Maybe you are one of those people, or have seen those people, where no promotion, qualification, degree or amount of money is ever enough. These are people where their self-worth is tied to what they do, or their achievements. They don’t feel like they are a worthy human until they have achieved that next thing…but that feeling of worth is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, they never get it. They never feel worthy, or enough, no matter how many promotions, qualifications, degrees or amount of money. Universities and the medical world is full of them, I’m sure there are many other industries as well. I used to be one of them.