S1 EP18 – Defining Your Own Self-Worth
Episode Summary
Do you feel a deep inner sense of self-worth, or are you anxiously dependent on others approval and validation for your sense of worth? You CAN heal the anxiety that comes from defining your self-worth externally. It is not as hard as you may think to define your own worth, but most people go about it the wrong way.
Transcript
Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the inner bonding pod guest. I want it talk today about how you define your own self worth. This is such a big and important issue in, in how you feel about yourself and your relationships and how your life goes. So think about this. Do you define your worth externally through other’s approval of, of how you look and how you perform?
Do, do you define your, your worth by your weight or your hair or your money or your job or your car, your clothes, your house, your partner, your children, or the people that, you know, do they define yourself for us? We all have of an ego wounded self that we developed as we were growing up as part of our survival. And this part of us is always externally defined when we’re operating from our ego wound itself, we’re constantly trying to look right and perform right in order to get others, to like us and to love us and to approve, Oh gosh, wounded part of us feels worthy only when receiving validation and attention and approval from others.
Now, of course, this creates a lot of anxiety. We tend to feel unsafe when our whole sense of self worth hinges upon having control over getting other people’s approval. We may even feel panicked when we fear making mistakes and running the risk of disapproval and perhaps even rejection. We may find ourselves judging ourselves in order to get ourselves to look right or do things right.
I remember when I finally connected all the anxiety that I had with the judgments myself judgments, because I was always trying to do things right, because my worth was determined by whether or not others liked me. The wound has helped believes we can have control over how others see us and feel about us. So according to the wound itself, if somebody doesn’t like us, it must be our fault. We say to ourselves, did I say something wrong?
What did I do wrong? I used to say that to myself all the time, believing it was my fault, gave my wound itself a sense of power and control because the belief was if, if it was my fault that someone didn’t like me or rejected me, then I just had to figure out how to do it. Right? And then I could have control over how others felt about me and how others treated me. And of course over, I came to see what a huge, false belief this was.
All it does was creating anxiety for me. But you see, in order to have control over others, we have to believe in our core shame, which means that we’re intrinsically bad or wrong or unimportant or defective. It comes from that false belief. That core shame comes from the pause from the false belief that we learned as we were little that there’s, that we’re flawed, that we’re unimportant, that we’re unworthy. We’re inadequate as little children when we didn’t get the love we needed.
We, we may have concluded. In fact, most of us concluded that it was our fault. And we did that for very good reason, because if we recognize that our parents were unable to love us in the way that we needed to be loved, we might not have survived. If we had recognized her parents woundedness and limitations, we would have felt so overwhelmingly help us over getting the love that we needed.
So instead, most of us chose to try to have control over, getting the love we needed and over avoiding the rejection or abuse that we feared. And the only way we could feel this sense of control was to believe that their behavior was our fault because there was something wrong with us. So we concluded that since their lack of love was our fault, we must have been somehow defective. We needed to believe in our own inherent effectiveness in order to feel a sense of control over our parents or other caregivers behavior.
Now, the problem today is that we forgot that we actually were the ones who chose to believe in our core shame. And so many of us now operate out of our core shame as if it’s who we are. When we believe we’re inherently defective, then we have to hide our real self or true, beautiful soul essence, and try to become what we think we need to be in order to be acceptable.
The wound itself takes over and loses touch with our core soul essence, which is of course, who we really are. We’re then stuck defining ourselves through our looks and our performance. And we’re stuck suffering the anxiety that comes from being so vulnerable to others, disapproval or rejection. So I hope for you, it’s time to start to define yourself worth through the eyes of your higher self, your higher guidance.
When we’re open to learning about love and truth. One of the things we can tap into is who we really are. We don’t know this through our mind’s eyes, through the eyes of our wound itself, because as I said, there’s so many false beliefs. We can only know who we really are through the eyes of truth, the eyes of spirit, the eyes of our higher self.
When we look at ourselves and see ourselves through the eyes of truth, we can begin to move beyond defining ourself worth externally, and we can learn to see who we truly are internally. Think for a moment about what you really value in others. Do you value a fancy car over their kindness and their caring? If you had a choice between two friends, one who was maybe better looking or richer, but who was closed and sometimes mean, and maybe unavailable and the other who maybe wasn’t as, as good looking, or maybe it wasn’t as rich, but was open and loving and compliant.
Who would you pick? Whenever I’ve asked people this, this question, only one person ever said, Oh, I would pick the meaner one if they were rich and good looking. And of course that was their wound itself speaking. But for most of us, we value honesty and kindness, generosity, compassion, understanding, empathy, humor, acceptance. And so on. Many of us rarely define our own self-worth by these qualities.
And that’s the problem Finding your own surf self-worth internally means opening to learning about your true soul self. Try to imagine who you were before your wound itself took over. Were you loving and caring? Were you fun, alive, creative, sensitive, passionate. If you had you as a child, what would you value in that child?
Would the child be worthy in your eyes only if he or she performed right or looked right? Or would you see inside to who this child really is in our relationships? When we make another person responsible for defining ourself worth, we will then try to control that person, how that person feels about this creates many problems in our relationship.
Since we’re trying to get love rather than share love. It’s only when we accept the responsibility of defining our own self worth and learn to be loving to ourselves, that we will have love to share with others. We all want to feel good about ourselves, but many of us go about this in ways, as I said, that will never create a deep sense of self worth. External things. Accomplishments approval can bring about a momentary, good feeling, but none of them actually creates a very deep and abiding sense of self worth.
So self-worth results from two things regarding your inner relationship with yourself. It’s about how you see yourself and how you treat yourself. I’m going to tell you about Richard. A client of mine. Richard is a very successful businessman. He’s wealthy lives in a big house, has expensive cars, a lovely wife and three children. But Richard consulted with me because of his low self worth.
And he was confused. He was perplexed that he continued to feel so inadequate in spite of all he had achieved and all that he had as we worked together with inner bonding, it became apparent that no matter what the outer truth was, Richard continued to see himself as the inadequate child that his father told him. He was his inner dialogue was often self critical just as his father had been with him.
And not only did Richard constantly judge himself as his father did, he treated himself as his father had treated him, ignoring him his feelings and needs. And so Richard was always looking to others for the love and the attention and the approval that he didn’t receive from his father and was not now giving to himself. Instead of being a loving parent to the child inside him, he was a harsh and inattentive inner parent until he started to practice inner bonding and learned how to love himself.
Jackie was another client of mine. She’s a very successful actress, yet fame and fortune is not given her a deep sense of self worth. No matter how many people told her how beautiful and talented she is, she still felt inadequate and insecure most of the time. And this is because like Richard, on the inner level, Jackie was constantly telling herself she wasn’t good enough.
She was telling her, so she was dumb and stupid. How could I have made that stupid remark? How could I have acted? So stupidly what’s wrong with me?
Mirroring her mother’s own self judgements and her judgements toward Jackie. She was constantly putting herself down. When Jackie learned through her inner bonding practice to see herself through the eyes of truth, which was through the eyes of her higher self, rather than the eyes of judgment, which was the eyes of her wound itself. She finally started to feel adequate and worthy. It might make it easier to see how you create your own high or aloof or low sense of self worth.
If you think of your feeling self as a child inside your inner child, no matter how much you achieve or how much approval you get from others. If you’re treating your inner child badly, abandoning yourself, by ignoring your feelings, judging yourself, turning to various addictions, to numb your feelings out, or making others responsible for your sense of worth. You’re going to continue to feel inadequate. You’re going to feel flawed. If you continue to see yourself through the distorted eyes of your parents, your siblings, your peers, or teachers, and continue to treat yourself in the unloving ways they treated you, or the ways they treated themselves, you’re going to continue to experience low self worth.
But if you open to seeing the truth of who you really are, a beautiful divine soul, who just wants to share love, and then you treat yourself as you would treat anyone who you loved and saw as a beautiful divine zone, you’re going to start to feel high, self worth. When you consistently practice inner bonding and learn to take loving actions on your own behalf, you’re going to feel valuable and valued rather than inadequate.
Some of the loving actions you might take might be things like speaking up for yourself with others and telling your truth without blaming or judging. When you’re in conflict situations, you’d be taking care of your body through eating well, getting enough, exercise enough, sleep lovingly, managing your stress. You’d create a balance between work and play between rest and creative time. You treat yourself and others with respect and with compassion rather than with judgment
Would attend to your own feelings rather than ignoring your feelings and needs. You take time to pray, to meditate and practice inner bonding. You choose to notice your thoughts and practice in herself, discipline regarding your thoughts. You would be choosing gratitude throughout the day day. So moment by moment,
In order to feel high, self worth, you need to be taking loving action on your own behalf, based on what is loving to you in that moment, what is in your highest good? And in order to do this, you need to be devoted to seeing yourself through the eyes of your higher self, rather than through the eyes of your ego wound itself. You’re not going to take loving action when you don’t think you’re worth it, you need to tune into the wisdom of your higher self in order to know what loving action is towards yourself and others in any given moment, your inner child will not know that he or she is important to you.
If you do not take loving action on your own behalf, When taking loving actions on your own behalf, replaces your inattentive and judgmental behavior towards yourself. You’re going to discover that you feel a deep, deep sense of self worth. Simply put high self worth is the result of loving yourself rather than of abandoning yourself. Now, we all need validation from the time we’re born.
We need validation. Loving parents offer consistent validation to their children, validating their feelings or perceptions, their gifts and talents, their particular forms of intelligence, their interests, their kindness, their caring and intuition. You’re very fortunate. If you receive this kind of validation from your parents, if your parents also validated their own feelings, their own perceptions, then you’re extremely fortunate. As you likely learned to do this for your, for yourself, from their role modeling.
But if your parents did not validate you or themselves, then the chances are that. Not only do you not know how to do this for yourself, but you don’t even know that it’s your responsibility to validate yourself. Since I received very little validation as I was growing up and I never saw my parents validate themselves, I had no idea how to do this, or even that it was possible to validate myself. Now, I know that self validation is not only possible, but absolutely necessary to feel happy, inwardly, peaceful, secure, worthy, and have loving relationships with others.
In order to begin to validate yourself, you need to start to notice two things. You need to start to notice how much you judge yourself rather than values, rather than valuing yourself. And you need to start to notice your feelings, your inner knowing, as well as your acts of kindness to others and consciously value them judging. Yeah,
Yourself is the opposite of valuing yourself. And it creates so much inner pain and insecurity. Self judgment, as I’ve said, is a form of control to get yourself to do things right, so that others will validate you and approve of you. But as much as you may succeed in getting others to approve of you, as long as you’re judging yourself, you’re going to continue to feel badly about yourself. No matter how many people love you, you’re going to continue to have low self worth.
As long as you continue to abandon yourself. It’s important to know that all your feelings are informational. Letting you know that when you’re abandoning yourself with yourself judgments and your different addictions, and when others are being uncaring towards you and disconnected from you, as you learn to attend to your feelings and validate the information they’re giving you, you’re going to start to feel that deeper sense of self worth.
As you learn to trust your inner knowing rather than make others, your authority for what’s right or wrong for you, you’re going to start to feel more inwardly powerful when you choose to be kind to yourself and to others and devalue yourself for your kindness. You’re going to find yourself feeling really happy with yourself. If you had an actual child and you wanted to raise that child to feel very secure, very loved and valued, how would you treat that child?
How do you wish you had been treated as a child? This is how you need to treat yourself now. So this is how you need to treat your own inner child. If you want to become a self loving and self validating person. And of course you need to take loving actions on your own behalf. You’re going to discover, feeling yourself better and better about yourself and needing less and less approval from others. As you take these steps towards loving yourself, the more you practice inner bonding, the more you’re going to start to see the beautiful intrinsic qualities, the wonderful gifts that we all have.
You’ll be able to those gifts through the eyes of your higher self gifts, like generosity, honesty, caring, creativity, vitality, joy, a great laugh sense of humor. So many wonderful things that you likely have inside of you that you need to learn to value and to validate. So I want to encourage all of you.
If you, if you’re not practicing in her body, if you haven’t learned it, go to inner bonding.ca.com. Take our free seven day course, read the many articles on the site, tap into the free help that we offer you and perhaps join inner bonding village to get support for your process and take the many courses that we offer on September 9th. My love yourself course is coming up and I teach that fairly often.
So I really want to encourage you to do whatever you can to learn, to love yourself. You can also take my courses at any time. They don’t include my help on the forum or in the coaching calls. And I offer in my 30 day courses, but you can take them on your own and then you can upgrade if you want to take them again with my personal help. There’s so much on the website that will help you learn to see and validate and love yourself and define your own self worth, which I tell you changes everything in life for the better sending you all love
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