Self-Worth: What Is Not Valued Is Easily Abandoned

When my daughter was born, the first hope I journaled for her was about self-worth. I hope that she trusts that her self-worth is inherent and not earned. This was the inspiration for the first story for my daughter called “Roger the Squirrel and the Ancient Oak Tree”.

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When self-worth becomes conditional

To write the story, I had to examine my own self-worth, where life has tested me, and where I’m still learning. First, I needed to get clear on what self-worth meant to me.

Self-worth is a deep knowing that we matter without the need for external validation such as achievement, approval, praise, status, intelligence, beauty, and productivity. Imagine you put aside your various roles and responsibilities in your life, your job title, and other status symbols.

What remains?

I believe many parents want their children to know they are worthy and many of us understand self-worth on an intellectual level. Fewer of us live as though it is true.

Part of the reason is that self-worth isn’t merely something we believe; it is something we experience in our bodies. I’ve come to believe that our relationship to self-worth is shaped early in life, reinforced by experience, ingrained as habit, and often mistaken for personality.

When you receive criticism, feedback, or praise, how does it land in your body? Noticing the sensations in our bodies can give us clues to our relationship to self-worth.

Earlier today I was in the kitchen cooking spinach for my weaning baby. I snapped at my mother-in-law for trying to teach me how to boil spinach. Underneath my split-second spinach-fuelled rage was the feeling of incompetence and not being trusted. A reminder that my relationship with self-worth is always a work in progress.

I notice that when our sense of worth becomes conditional, we start changing our size in relationship to other people. We can become smaller or bigger in order to feel safe, accepted or enough. Forgetting our self-worth doesn’t always look like low confidence or self-esteem. I’ve learned for myself that it can also look like relentless striving.

There have been moments when I have made myself bigger and smaller when my self-worth was uncertain. When we make ourselves smaller, we may experience self-doubt, take up less space, withdraw, avoid attention, concede, people-please, or self-censor. When we make ourselves bigger, we can be excessively driven, performative, perfectionist, controlling, competitive, or highly dependent on recognition. Both are organised around the same question: Am I enough?

Trading ourselves for belonging

None of the above qualities are inherently bad or always connected to self-worth. But they can give us clues to patterns of behaviour and an opportunity to change how we respond. Life happens to us and we draw conclusions about ourselves from it. Eventually that adaptation can become part of our identity.

What is not valued is easily abandoned. When we do not trust our self-worth, we begin trading ourselves for belonging. I’ll be who you need me to be. I’ll achieve enough to deserve my place. I’ll tolerate this treatment. I’ll hide parts of myself which I fear you may reject. I’ll abandon myself before you can abandon me.

True belonging is not meant to cost ourselves. We do not need to work hard at being worthy to belong. We belong because we are here. Therefore, our worth is not for sale.

Remembering what was never lost

My work on self-worth has reminded me that children not only learn self-worth from how we speak to them as parents but also how we speak to ourselves as adults. How mistakes are repaired. How emotions are held. How success is celebrated and how failures are handled. Creating a story for my daughter about self-worth requires me to take stock of how I speak to myself. Not once. Always.

Self-worth doesn’t make us feel good about ourselves all the time. It gives us somewhere to stand when life becomes challenging. Instead of asking ‘what’s wrong with me?’, we can ask ‘what is happening here?’. Rather than saying ‘was I good or bad and what does that say about me?’ we can move toward ‘what happened? What did my action create? What can I learn?’ Instead of abandoning ourselves in difficult moments, we become more capable of remaining in relationship with ourselves. From that place, we have more possibilities.

I believe that self-worth is not about thinking more highly of ourselves. It is understanding how our worth has become tangled with all the ways we’ve become conditioned to measure ourselves. In the moments when I forget my self-worth, I reach for something in life that reminds me I’m part of it and life is within me. Holding onto the dignity of life itself helps me remember the dignity within myself.

Our self-worth can be forgotten, but never lost. Forgetting is part of life. I’m learning that my role as a parent is to help my child and myself in the remembering. The real gift is learning how to do that together.