Re-shaping self-worth: commitment and practice

Editor’s note: Jan is a longtime Planet Waves reader and psychologist who is offering this feature to answer one reader letter per week. If you have a question you would like answered and explored in this forum, please email her at Drjanseward [at] gmail.com. Please note, depending on volume of emails, not all letters may be featured. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We’re really excited to see what our readers come up with! — amanda

Hi Dr. Seward,

I have just read and reflected on your wise and insightful answer to the question you received last week. I am someone who is blessed and grateful to have ‘woken up’ and I am in the process of developing a new sense of self and whole new life — all of this in mid life when most people seem to be ’settling in’. I feel like I am newly awakened to all the possibilities and potential the universe has to offer.

It has been an exciting and joyful discovery yet I am struggling with an issue that I hope you can help me with. In this new phase of my life, I have made a complete change, leaving a successful career of many years to become a graduate student to pursue a degree in something I feel passionate about.

I have completed my first year and I’ve received consistent validation and affirmation from my colleagues, professors, friends and family. I have never had a second thought or regret and know without reservation that I am doing what I am ‘supposed’ to be doing. However, I often find myself feeling surprised by all of the validation, affirmation and encouragement that is coming my way.

Why is it that I (along with many other people I know) struggle with feelings of inadequacy and unworthiness? Why is that even when one is doing good things and doing them well, it’s hard to really integrate that firm belief into one’s being? In other words, ‘own it’?

In your answer from last week, you speak of sense of self — are we who we think we are or how others see us? It was interesting to contemplate this, and led to my question. I appreciate any wisdom or insight you can offer me.

I suppose my question can be further clarified: Why is it that so many of us find it difficult to see the ‘positive’ in us that others see so clearly?

Thank you again.

Blessings and peace,
Debbie

Dear Debbie,

Many blessing to you as well, and thank you for your beautifully-expressed question. Your thoughts are the thoughts of many, and your question expresses the experience of so many others.

Our sense of adequacy and self-worth develops early, in the presence of our first caregivers — usually our parents, or parent surrogates. Later, we consolidate how we feel about ourselves, our self-esteem, through the eyes of and experiences with those others who begin to stand in for our parents — teachers, clergy, physicians and the like. In later life, we tend to choose partners who reinforce all the early learning or ‘messaging’ we got about our value or our worth.

Psychological research has shown that it is impossible to develop a sense of adequacy and self-worth, or self-love, without being shown that we are valued in the eyes of others. We learn how to value ourselves by the way that others value us — the way we are held, gazed at, spoken to, interacted with. And we also learn to value ourselves through a process of identification with our caregivers — by seeing how they are valued. And these early messages are very, very hard to contradict.

For so many of us, our early environments were incapable of mirroring or reflecting to us our value and our worth. We may have had mothers who had low self-worth themselves, perhaps because of their own depression or involvement in relationships that were devaluing. Earlier generations were also raised in a society of rigid standards and pressures to conform, which were filtered down through child-rearing. Most of us born before 1970 were raised in environments of strict religious and moral prohibitions resulting in strong feelings of guilt over self-expression, normal sexual exploration, and emotional development. Many of us were forced to choose our own integrity at the expense of parental and societal approval, leading to a fracturing of our sense of integrity and the ability to be ‘authentic’. And many of us had the additional challenge of being raised in environments of narcissism, with caregivers who were unable to see us as individuals, separate from their own projections and desires for us to fulfill their needs and expectations. (Alice Miller writes beautifully about this in her classic text The Drama of the Gifted Child.)

When we have internalized a sense of unworthiness, of never being able to satisfy the needs or expectations of the people we love, we carry these feelings inside of us as ‘facts’ — our mind doesn’t know the difference. Therefore, no matter what we accomplish or achieve, and no matter who tells us otherwise, we will always believe that those earliest messages are the truth about who we are.

Put a little differently, adequate self-esteem depends on the clear reflections and mirroring of the significant others in our lives, but all too often their vision is cloudy and they project onto us their deepest fears, unresolved anger, hopes, and unrealized dreams — obscuring a view of us that is true to who we actually are — our unique and individual selves. Later in life, others see us in more clear or pure ways, unobscured by their own needs and confusions. They see our beauty, our talent, our worth. Yet we still experience ourselves through the eyes of those earlier caregivers, now called “introjects,” and no matter what the external world shows us, our felt reality corresponds to the pictures we see inside.

Current brain science shows that, once formed, these early patterns get canalized — locked in — making feedback loops difficult to interrupt. We literally can’t see what we don’t have neural pathways for. So repairing our self-worth requires new vision, literally seeing ourselves through new eyes, in order to craft a realistic narrative for who we really are.

This process of re-learning takes deep commitment and dedication. Like learning anything new, especially when we’re older, re-shaping our sense of self-worth requires practice and many, many opportunities to repeat a new pattern. First comes awareness of the negative introjects or beliefs, and then a commitment to rejecting and refuting these beliefs is required. For so many of us, this means actively replacing the old messages with new and more realistic ones, as well as actively interrupting the negative beliefs when they rise up. Practicing simple affirmations like ‘I am worthy’ or ‘I am powerful’ have been shown to re-route neural circuits and create positive feedback loops and the secretion of anti-stress hormones in the brain. Self-love really feels good — and enables us to receive more love from others, which then creates more self-love, which then invites more love, and so on and so on and shooby dooby dooby (now I’m really dating myself!) — but you get the picture. And the ‘picture’ can be a beautiful, loving and realistic new vision of your own, true, beautiful self in all its magnificence.

Thank you again for your question, Debbie. I wish you many blessings!

Jan