Personal Worth

[MajestyJo]

PERSONAL WORTH:

No matter how intelligent, attractive, or talented you may be - to the degree you doubt your worthiness you tend to sabotage your recovery efforts and undermine your relationships. Life is full of gifts and opportunities; you will open to receive and enjoy them to the degree that you begin to appreciate your innate worth, and to offer to yourself the same compassion and respect that you would give to others. Discovering your worth sets your spirit free.

Many factors shape our lives, including beliefs, support systems, motivation, relationships, family dynamics, fate, karma. But the central premise is that our sense of self-worth is the single most important determinant of the health, abundance, and joy we allow into our lives. Discovering your Worth is no more or less important than other potentials but only when you recognize your personal worth will you be open to other life potentials. Discovering your worth provides a foundation from which to build, one potential at a time, a new way of life. Finding your worth is the first step in creating enlightenment and enhancing your recovery work.

At its core, your level of self-worth is your answer to a single internal question: "How deserving am I?" Or, to put it more directly as it pertains to your daily life: "How good can I stand it today?" If you observe your life very closely, you will discover that you don't necessarily get what you deserve. Your addictions or life problems has not diminished your worth as a person. Only to the degree that you appreciate your innate human worthiness will your subconscious mind open up to life's gifts. Sucess involves talent, effort, and creativity, but first of all, it requires a willingness to receive. Do you feel worthy of being well? When a window of opportunity appears, do you pull down the shade? Each of us has a specific degree of pleasure that feels right and appropriate. If that level is exceeded it makes us anxious. Many recovering people fear success because they do not feel worthy.

Because many people assume that self-esteem and self-worth mean the same thing, it seems important for me to note the distinction between the two. Self-worth (associated with self-respect) refers to your overall sense of value, worth, goodness, and deservedness. Your sense of worth can change over time based upon your actions. For example, my sense of self-worth has increased over time as I gradually learned to be a responsible person, loving father, a good friend and partner, my work as a therapist, and whatever minor assistance I bring to Dynamics Of Recovery or other services that I become involved in.

Self-esteem (associated with self-confidence) refers to liking or feeling good about yourself, your appearance, or your abilities. Your sense of self-esteem may change moment to moment, based on appearance, ability or situation. For example, as a clinical therapist I feel high self-esteem (confidence) in therapeutic situations, but less self-esteem at parties or social gatherings.

The central theme of this lesson/posting is that you "subconsciously" choose or attract into your life those people and experiences you believe you deserve! In everyday life pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional - a by-product of poor choices. Get it? Want to argue the point? Your sense of worth or deserving shapes your life by creating tendencies. If you feel unworthy and undeserving, you tend to make destructive or limiting choices. Do you see why this is the first lesson?

At each and every crossroads you are free to choose the high road - by being kind to others, working hard, finding supportive partners, and following good role models. Or you may choose the low road - by burning your bridges, practicing addictive behaviors, or choosing destructive relationships. Your sense of self-worth tends to influence whether you choose to learn easy lessons or difficult ones, to strive or to struggle, to cave in to difficulties or rise above them. Such choices determine your educational and income level, your health habits - even your longevity. Those of us with a strong sense of self-worth are less likely to get caught up in self-destructive habits with addictions or other abberant behaviors..

There is a danger of studying self-worth from a distance - exploring the issue the way some people explore a territory from an airconditioned bus. Keeping a safe distance is more comfortable but far less useful than feeling its impact on your life right now. Remember that your sense of self-worth - of deservedness - is related to your perception of your relative goodness.

Self-worth is not a thing; it is a perception. The first step is to realize that you are not alone. We have all made mistakes as part of our life and growth. We have all said, thought, felt, and done things we regret. Our worth is not dependent upon being perfect. If we can stop judging our mistakes so harshly, we can also stop ourselves from reactively engaging in the negative behaviors.

The second realization is that no matter what your behavior, you have done the best you could every day of your life. You may not agree with this. So before we tackle that question, consider this principle in relation to your parents or other caregivers: Whether they were kind or abusive, they were doing the best they knew how in light of their own limitations, wounds, beliefs, fears, values, and anxieties. Their best may have been wonderful, or terrible, or somewhere in between. In the same way, even though you have certainly fallen short of your ideal many times and made mistakes, you have also done the very best you were capable of at the time.

Most of us have replayed in our minds an incident we wish we could do over. Maybe we could have done better on a job interview, an exam, or a performance. You cannot change past mistakes, but you can avoid repeating them. The past no longer exists except as a set of memories and impressions you keep alive in the present. By focusing on doing what you can do now - by reviewing your mistakes with eyes of compassion and asking for forgiveness - you do much to heal your fragmented sense of worth.

Trust the process. The next time you feel that something good can't last, remind yourself that evolution moves in an upward spiral and that life can, and usually does, get better over time. You live and learn, stumble and fall, fail and grow, expand, and progress.

Courage is not the towering oak that sees storms come and go; it is the fragile blossom that opens in the snow.

-Alice Mackenzie Swaim

Originally posted at Dynamics of Recovery and taken from my group Star Choices

My score card read zero and I had no self-esteem at all. Every time I picked up some person, place or thing to make me feel better, I gave away a piece of me and there wasn't muchof me left.

The program helped patch me up and put me back together again and made me whole. I took a program for people with self-esteem. I quit after a few weeks because I realized that the people there were I had been and the 12 Step program was already helping me, and I just had to continue doing what I was doing. I was a work in progress.