Feelings of worth and value are two emotions that I see missing entirely in some people and it is heartbreaking. Why do so many people feel like they are not valuable?
Babies are typically not born with crushed spirits and uncertainty of who they are. Children seem to naturally have a sense of value and worth. And when brought up in a supportive, loving home, these kids grow into self-assured teenagers. Parents, families and teachers demonstrate to children that they have value and worth by the way they nurture, teach, believe in and encourage these little humans.
It seems to be between the ages 5-7, when children go to school that they lose this absolute sense of self and feelings of value and worth. Through their external environment such as uncertainty about classroom hierarchy, being excluded and not understanding a certain subject and, so forth and so forth…children began to think of themselves as good or bad. A more sophisticated wording’ is ‘valuable or not valuable’. The sad part is that it seems like those kids grow into adults that spend the rest of their life trying to prove their value to others.
Ways in which we work diligently to prove our value and worth, is by over achieving, getting stuck on perfection, not being able to relax by doing, doing, doing the list goes on. The puzzle is that these activities in turn perpetuate feelings of low self-worth. For example, if someone is always working to achieve, when they don’t succeed or “fail”, they might become desperate and anxious. They will then try harder to never fail, which is clearly impossible, and experience increased hyper-vigilance against anything going wrong. They will literally guard themselves into deeper anxiety. It’s a never-ending chasing of one’s own tail.
A by-product of this might also be a shutdown of emotions/feelings and possibly other people. Want to know what happens to a person who doesn’t have connection with others? They become further withdrawn, isolated and continue to coast down the mental health slide into a big puddle of depression and other self-destructive beliefs or behaviors including, wait for it… more feelings of lack of worth and value.
So, what can you do to change these thoughts and behavior and reinforce your sense of value and worth? The first thing you can do is begin to change the way you look at yourself. To do this, look into your past and find out when you received the message that you weren’t valuable. With your adult mind, ask yourself if that was true or was it someone else’s version of you? For example, did your friend stop speaking to you in middle school because you really were that intolerable or was it because they were trying to join the popular group? Did your mom really feel ashamed of you when you did something wrong, or was that her own feelings of not being a good parent that were projected onto you? I think you will find that most times, we felt devalued because someone else judged us as such. And maybe we believed them.
The second thing you can do is stop believing the lie. The beauty of having a flexible mind is that you can change the way you think and you can literally stop believing someone else’s version of yourself. You can remind yourself several times a day that you have value and worth and someone else’s judgement has more to do with themselves than it does with you.
I encourage my clients to start and cultivate truths about themselves. You do this by learning about yourself and liking who you are. This is crucial for many reasons, one being that you need to formulate value and worth from your own sense of self and not from the external world. Yes, we are social creatures and we need others, but we cannot rely on how someone feels or thinks about us to know if we are okay. If that is the case, then we are always at the whim of someone else’s emotional state. Rather, we need to nurture and grow our own sense of worthiness and value as an internal state of being.
I also encourage people to be aware of how others, including social media impact you. It is really okay to take a break and shut down those things/people/technology that make you feel bad; even family members or friends.
Your value and worth is your own to claim, so claim it every day. Don’t give it to others to define for you.