MemphisCounselor

In a previous post, I mentioned the analogy of the teacup, which is made of porcelain (fact), and which I think is very beautiful (opinion).  You may think it is ugly.  Porcelain is an attribute of the teacup, but beauty is not.  It is an attribute of my, and your, evaluative thinking.  So it is with self-worth.  You are worth what you decide you are worth.

It should be noted too that other’s evaluations of us are usually connected with what they want from us.  As such, evaluations of our worth are used to manipulate us.  Sometimes, this is to our benefit, and sometimes not, but it is usually for the benefit of the manipulator.

If self-actualization is the highest good of mental health, then it is critical that we observe and follow the path that our core self desires.  We cannot do that by chasing the approval of others.  We must instead, be quiet and listen to the voice within us that is truly our own.  By doing so, concepts of “worth” disappear, as they are just an illusory measure from the outside world.  I believe that this describes the reason that clients often describe feeling empty, worthless, and also not knowing who they are.  We have been programmed to be what others want us to be and have lost touch with our self.

Another way of viewing the concept of worth is as the wrong measure for humans.  Our society is so obsessed with attaching a value or other measure to everything that we do not stop to consider that it does not apply to humans.  If you have a pet, what are they worth?  Often clients will answer “priceless” to that question, while feeling “worthless” themselves.  Perhaps it is like asking “how many quarts is that couch?” or “what sound is that beam of light making?” – we are trying to apply the wrong measure for the context.

At the end of the day, of course, all of these intellectualizations are for naught.  That is because the problem is not a logical one, but a feeling one.  As such, allowing the feeling in, exploring it in depth for its origins, describing its qualities, focusing on its position in the body, understanding what it is trying to motivate us to do – - may well do more good than logical discussion.

“Self” is a word that we use pretty loosely day to day.  Acceptance and Commitment Therapy has a tripartite conceptualization of self.  The one that fits best with the way we tend to use the word is “self-concept.”  These are the labels that we put on ourselves, such as intelligent, an engineer, mother, lazy, bipolar, Democrat, Catholic, victim, middle-class, etc.  They are the way we view ourselves, and perhaps as others view us.  These become part of our identity.  However, they constrain us unnecessarily, as they do not really describe who we are at our core.

Self-as-container implies that we have parts.  Some of these parts are people with whom we have had close relationships, such as our parents, siblings, and close friends.  They may also be partial representations of people who have abused us emotionally, physically, or sexually.  We may even have parts from earlier times in our lives, such as a child part.  We may have critical parts or fearful parts.  Hopefully, our healthy adult part is in charge most of the time, but if we notice, some of these other parts come to the fore at certain times.

Most important for optimum mental health is our observer self.  This is the aspect of self that lets us notice our own thoughts,emotions, sensations, and behavior and to make meaning.  Development of this part increases our awareness or consciousness about our selves.  This is the self that has been with us always, before we had the parts in our container self or the labels that make up our self-concept.  Quiet attention to our observer self can accelerate our mental and spiritual growth.  Some would say that this core self, which cannot be touched or described, also contains our connection to a higher power, shared consciousness, and so forth.

Understanding this view of the self helps us have a different perspective on our worth as well.  More on this later.

Problems with emotional regulation are at the core of problems associated with complex post traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD).  This is the main symptom that differentiates these sufferers from those with PTSD.  The former have typically suffered long-lasting or multiple traumas.

Another cause of emotional dysregulation is the combination of a sensitive temperament combined with an invalidating environment during childhood.  The genetic part is just a predisposition. With caregivers that allow for the sensitivity of the child and who validate the child’s thoughts and feelings, emotional regulation will develop normally.  Without this healthy environment, emotional dysregulation (the inability to regulate ones own emotions) can occur.

Often this unhealthy environment produces a great amount of shame in the child.  Shame is defined as feeling bad about who we are, not what we have done (guilt).  Overwhelming shame is at the core of much distress and mental illness.

Part of the healing of shame is to understand its origins and to reconsider the shaming messages that were given to us at a young age.  This attacks the logical part, but is not nearly enough because the shame is a felt sense; an emotion that occurs well before conscious thought kicks in.  Typically, the person will avoid situations that are likely to trigger the shameful feelings.  At times, this may be a smart move, but a pattern of avoidance will result in the shame never healing and perhaps growing.  The avoidance of shame constrains the sufferer’s life and can lead to an overall sense of worthlessness.

Shame and avoidance of it also results in what is known as a shame spiral.  With alcoholics, the spiral starts with some trigger that causes the person to feel shame.  So they drink to feel better.  On sobering up, they feel ashamed for drinking again, and the spiral continues.  This same spiral can be seen with other avoidance behaviors including overeating, blaming, aggressive behavior, etc.

Shame plays a particularly insidious role in preventing its own healing in therapy.   Effective therapy involves confronting our painful past and our vulnerable present.  Doing so often triggers shameful feelings originating in our past.  To avoid these negative feelings, many people do not come to therapy and others drop out.  Because the shameful feeling is so painful, the person cannot begin to address it with their therapist.  If the person is courageous enough to come to therapy and stick it out, he will be asked to be willing to feel the shame, to explore it and learn that it is not as scary as it says it is.  To break it down into its component sensations.  To recognize its urge to action.  The thoughts that go with it will be recognized as just thoughts, not facts.  The client will often fall back on the defense (avoidant behavior) of choice, creating barriers to healing.  The result can be frustrating for the client and the therapist.   The therapist’s job is to continually bring the client back to having (vs. buying into) the thoughts and having the feelings (vs. buying into their scary message).   The client will be asked to be willing to have these thoughts and feelings in order to remove the constraints from her life and to move her life in valued directions.

I.  Consideration of suicide – the ultimate defense against feelings of worthlessness.

•     Humans are the only animals that kill themselves.
•     Suicide usually occurs in response to negative states of mind (guilt, anxiety, loss, worthlessness, inadequacy, or blame)
•     Animals change their behavior to avoid negative consequences and to have more positive consequences. They do this based on their PAST experience.
•     In the case of suicide, humans have never experienced whether the consequences of death are positive or negative.
•     Instead, suicide has a “verbal” purpose, “If I am dead, then X.” X may be anything from “no more pain”, “going to heaven”, “others being punished”, “insurance payments”, etc. It can be shown that all of this is a verbal formulation which animals are incapable of.
•     Therefore, suicide is rule-governed behavior, where the rules exist as a combination of our ability to be verbal and the verbal rules (beliefs) taught to us by our culture (p. 48).

II.  Having a belief “I am worthless” is the same as having a rule to that effect. However, normally, a rule can be compared to experience, and if the rule is not working for us, we can choose not to follow the rule. In this case, the truth of the rule is in the evaluations produced by the person with the rule; evaluations of events around them. Since they own the rule, it colors their evaluations, therefore artificially reinforcing the rule. This is called a strange loop.  For example, praise from others will be interpreted as having been manipulated, as the other person not being very smart, as having once again fooled other people, etc. (P. 33).

III.  A large part of our brain is made up of association networks, explaining why we remember parts of names, incidents, etc. and then manage to recall the whole thing by piecing together a few associations. Once something goes into the associational network, it does not come out. It may be harder to access, but it is still there. Subsequently, other things get associated to it and serve as reminders or triggers of that memory. For example, telling someone to remember the number 867 and then asking them to not think about it or forget it is giving them an impossible task. In order to not think about it, they have to think about it. Based on this, one can see how negative messages given to us by others stick in our minds, and get triggered by seemingly unrelated events. If we have been given the message that we have no worth (and that message is given to children in a myriad of ways) that sense of being worthless can be triggered by events many years later where the connection is no longer apparent. The trick is to understand that the message “I am worthless” is not different from the remembered number 867; it has no inherent meaning (P. 128).

IV.  The idea that we call “self” in everyday language is really “self-concept”; all the ideas we have about ourselves and the labels we and others have put on ourselves. Our core self is not that conceptualized self. It is instead a core that is indescribable and ineffable; one could say in the same sense that God is indescribable and ineffable. There is no good or bad to it. The self simply IS. When we idenitfy ourselves with these labels, which can be positive or negative, we are mixing up who we are with a lot of language that has been used to explain our actions  by others and ourselves. When these come from others, they are often in the service of getting us to continue or discontinue a behavior. They may or may not be true about our overall patterns of behavior, which were learned. Most of the time they are gross generalizations of how we behave. We often internalize these labels as being true, especially when they were given to us by powerful people (parents, older kids, teachers, etc.) when we were young.  

In any case, they do not describe our SELF, but the describer’s perception or concept of who we are. Therefore, even our own evaluations are stories or concepts about who we are. They do not describe our SELF because that is indescribable. We can CHOOSE the stories we tell about ourselves, even to ourselves. We can examine the evidence to tell the most accurate and helpful story possible. But even then, we are giving a healthier conception of our self. It is like looking at a map. The map is a description of the territory and is accurate to a greater or lesser degree. But it is NOT the territory. And our self-concept is not our self. Regardless of our self-concept, our self IS what it IS. Worth is a concept that does not apply to it, just as the concept of smell does not apply to a symphony (P. 150)

This is the sense in which Buddhism refers to our life as “an illusion”. So much of what we believe as true is like this; learned rules, descriptions, evaluations, judgements that are not accurate and certainly not helpful. The Buddhist answer to this is awareness of the illusion, and letting go of these as we notice them. Even positive illusions are still illusions, and can melt away in the blink of an eye.

V.  The story of the bad cup – If I have a ceramic cup and I think it is beautiful but you think it is ugly, and we are the only two people in the world, what is it really? What if I drop dead? What if you drop dead? What if we both do?

The cup is ceramic, no matter what. But it is beautiful only in my mind. Beauty is an attribute of my evaluation, not of the cup (P. 169).

VI.  Values are beliefs that are strongly held by a person and that act as principles in helping them make decisions across a variety of settings. Values are choices, pure and simple. Another person may not agree with your values, but there is no argument that will stand against your values, because they are purely choices. No reasons are required. They are foundational and therefore they are flawless because they are raw material – your pure choices.

It can be helpful to identify your values and to see them as a positive, flawless part of your self-concept. If you find a flaw in your values, and only you can, you will automatically adapt your values, because your real value helped you find the flaw. Our understanding of our values may not completely match our true values until we do significant work. For example, I may choose a value because it is prized in society, but my behavior may not reflect that value. To be rigorously honest, I need to reassess that value and possibly replace it in my value list with one that is more accurately depicted by my actions. Regardless of that, we all have a solid bedrock of chosen values that we can look at as a positive foundation for our self-concept (P. 222).

VII.  We analyze ourselves and find ourselves wanting. So we try harder, and then feel like that is not good enough. The cycle continues without end because we see the problem as behavior when it is really thinking and an internalized “felt sense” that was taught to us..

What if our acceptability is more like a choice, with no reasons given. Not a product of analysis. That you can choose to be OK without having to earn it. Then that critic inside our head talking about our worth is just that; not a fact, because the fact of our OK’ness has been decided by choice. What will you choose? (P. 263).

For some, this question may seem ridiculous. For others, it may be the most fundamental question of all.

For children who were loved and valued without condition, having worth is as natural as breathing.  These children learn that it is ok to be themselves.

For children who were shown love and value only when they behaved a certain way, worth is tied to behavior or doing.  These children learn that they are ok when they please the powerful people around them.

Article I of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, in part: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

In the Christian tradition, we are either inherently worthy because we are made in God’s image or we are inherently bad, but capable of being made worthy through God’s grace.

In therapy, we like to ask clients, “What is the worth of a baby?” or “What is the worth of your pet?” Clients often can define the worth of these as beyond measure, but consider themselves worthless. This implies that it is something inherent in the thing that makes it worthwhile, but the truth is that it is in the value of the observer only. Dogs and babies are never ugly to their owners/mothers.

Do we measure worth by ability, contribution, achievement, productivity, or even potential? Obviously, in our society, we try to do that.

But if worth is based on something you DO, what if nobody notices?

Our pet meets none of the above criteria. Our pet gains our love by being cute at first, and then retains it because of the love they give us in return. It becomes a positive spiral; a mutual relationship of caring.

So the observer of worth measures worth with a somewhat selfish eye – what is that person/thing worth to me? When your boss defines your performance in a performance review, she is measuring your worth, but only in one context and from her perspective. Another boss in the same job would definitely give you a different review, because the review depends on the values of the reviewer, no matter how objective we try to make the criteria.

We see this in the example of the parents whose love is conditioned on certain behavior of the child.  The child’s behavior must meet the parent’s needs to be a good-enough parent in the eyes of others, to not be embarassed in public, and so forth.  Of course, the parent behaves in this way because their own worth is based on what others think . . . so the problem is passed from generation to generation.

Worth is a cultural creation; the concept itself is a creation of society. In some cultures, people who hear voices others do not hear are labeled Shaman and revered. In ours, they are labled Schizophrenic and medicated. Their worth is great in the former culture and nothing in the latter.

The very concept of trying to determine the worth of a human is dangerous. It underlies racism, eugenics, and genocide; the very behaviors by which we define Evil.

The very concept is also oxymoronic in that it implies an omniscient knowledge of worth and a simplistic willingness to reduce the complexity of a human being to one of two values.

So to attempt to define our worth by the opinions of others is a fool’s errand. Yet to say we have inherent worth feels wrong for many of us. That is because we have been taught, from the beginning, to value our doing and not our being.  This is a product of our parenting, but also of  western culture; especially American culture.

An alternative explanation, one of many possibilities, would be to say that everyone has a worthy core; thus the easy-to-swallow idea that all babies are worthy.  However, through the process of life, we take on beliefs and behaviors that help us cope with the travails of living, and these make up the person that the world sees and judges.  Sometimes these shells are ugly and troublesome, but they have gotten us through, so we hang onto them.  But they are NOT who we are at our core.  Those who see through the shell, know who we really are, sometimes better than we do ourselves. 

Our challenge is not to live up to the universal declaration that we have dignity and worth; there is nothing to be done.  We simply need to recognize this truth, treat ourselves as if it is true; and then treat others likewise.  We need to experiment with dropping our false layers, so that we can experience our true selves.  We have to re-parent ourselves by honoring that true part and placing ourselves around others who will honor our Self, weeding from our lives those who can only accept our false parts.

We particularly need to break the intergenerational cycle; by treating our children as lovable, accepted, and cared for;  just as they are.

Beliefs are choices, sometimes conscious, but often unconscious.  For those of us who struggle with worth, a conscious choice must be made.  Will we buy into the beliefs of America, or Marketing, or Religion, or our boss, or our spouse, or our friend; with all the contradictions, dangers, and mixed motives described above; or will we choose to believe in the inherent worth of all humans, including ourselves? 

Might we even extend that belief to all living things?