Living in doubt of your self-worth can cause a lot of pain. You may find it hard to speak up, to express your needs, or make it difficult to expect them to be met. There can be a weight in your heart, telling you nobody really likes you, or that people will one day figure out the truth: that there’s something very wrong with you.
Let me make it clear: your worth is immutable. You have worth because you exist, as simple as that. I’d love working with you to help you believe this for yourself.
The origins of your sense of worth
The way I see it, you learned to gauge your worth from messages you received from the world. It may have been caregivers, or society/culture, or their spiritual beliefs (for those who hold a spiritual practice or were raised within one). We all receive messages about the right way to be in the world. Sometimes, these messages seem like rules about who we are supposed to be. At times, they appear as rules that, if you break, will lead to abandonment and isolation. Later, the experiences you had in your life may have reinforced this idea, over and over again; a sort of mirror showing you a distorted reflection of how lacking you are. Given enough time, this view of yourself as reflected by the world is internalised. It becomes your truth.
The above may then weigh you down; become a barrier to having the life you long for. In the end, because the need to belong is so important to us, we’re willing to do most anything to guarantee we’ll keep the relationships we have. So you may carry on, holding this feeling within you like a hole in our heart.
Healing the wound
As always in my work, the first step is focusing on figuring out how to get a handle on managing your experience; what kind of strategies work to help you regulate the intensity of what you’re feeling and self-soothe. Then, we can create a place safe enough to challenge the messages you’ve received, and to create new experiences that reflect back your new truth: that you have inherent worth, imperfections and all.