Today is an important article for many in this community because after abuse you may feel your self-worth has been seriously compromised.
Self-worth is difficult to define, other than a feeling of “worthiness”. Worthiness cannot be durably created by outside things such as a new hair-do, achieving a particular goal or award, or receiving a compliment. This may help prop up your self-esteem from time to time, but self-worth goes much deeper.
Self-worth is the deservedness and capacity to generate and receive a life that grants you value. Such as having relationships that add to your soul’s truth, life and goals rather than subtract from them. Also, having the confidence to expand, grow, succeed and break out of old comfort zones into new territories whilst being solid enough to exhibit kindness, honesty, transparency and humility, as well as displaying morality, courage and strength.
Before, during and after toxic relationships, the topic of self-worth requires addressing if we don’t wish to stay limited, traumatised and stuck in patterns of living without our true potential gifts.
Today, I’d love you to hold my hand as we take this self-worth journey together.
Self-Value and Being Valued
The first ‘self-worth’ topic I want to discuss is anchoring into the necessary self-value to be valued by others.
Even when dealing with good people, they are not mind readers. They don’t know your likes, dislikes and preferences unless you speak up and express them. This may be difficult for you if you feel sensitive to other people’s energies and unsure of your own.
If your childhood caregivers were uninterested in your needs, wants and preferences, you may have struggled to identify those things for yourself, much less ask for them. Or when you tried to, you may have experienced feelings of rejection, humiliation or being dismissed. You could have decided from an early age not to share your needs and look after them yourself. Possibly when you did accept support from others, the consequences suffered were being manipulated for another person’s agendas.
The sad truth is many empaths, even before suffering narcissistic abuse, have a suppressed ‘self’ unable to express needs healthily because of the fears of CRAP (Criticism, Rejection, Abandonment or Punishment.)
If this is you (and understandably so) in a relationship with anyone at all, they can’t see ‘you’ to serve and love ‘you’.
Who are you? Who is there to love?
No-body. Because you don’t share who you are.
It seems you are not valued, but there is no ‘you’ to be seen as valued. Bonding hormones are released within those who serve others. It creates oxytocin, fondness, connection and love. You deny people this ability to connect with you if you don’t allow them to ‘see’ you, ‘know’ you, meet your needs, and serve you.
Now let’s take this up a notch with toxic people. They absolutely don’t value you. They have no interest in ‘you’. They don’t care about your feelings or who you are as a blood, flesh, soulful human being.
Their only interest in you is what they can get from you. Ego gratification, money, sex, stuff. Not only are you not valued, you are objectified – the ‘thing’ that delivers what the narcissist seeks. You are de-valued and de-humanised.
After this level of relationship abuse, you absolutely feel more worthless than ever.
But please take heart because this is an incredible opportunity to heal these old core wounds that have been on repeat in your life. Then you can rise above feeling like your self-worth is dependent on others.
To be recognised, you must first ‘see’ yourself. To be met, you have to show and share yourself. Prioritising the healing and development of your self-worth is vital to be able to do this.
For many of us who have experienced narcissistic relationships, valuing ourselves was always something we needed to look at and heal. I hope what I have shared with you above helps bring some awareness to you about this. There is more to come below.
This is a powerful mantra to help you anchor self-value into your Being:
“I can live aligned with my values. By sharing my values and preferences, I invite collaboration, love and trust with others.”
If you are a NARP Member, I suggest using the Goal Setting Module with this statement:
“I can take up space and express my needs, wants and preferences to create partnership, collaboration, success and expansion. It is now safe to be myself.”
Boundaries – Self-Worth in Action
Ultimately, self-worth and feeling worthy of all the good stuff in life cannot be achieved by yourself.
At first, after suffering from toxic abuse, it’s vital to self-partner, go within and heal. This alone time is powerful and essential. Even after this hiatus, you may like your own company, yet you will notice your soul is calling for ‘more’. More connection, expansion and experiences with life and others. Of course, this can be terrifying, but it is vital for self-worth. Self-worth won’t stand the test of time in solitude.
Connection with life and others is essential for creating greater love, expansion and success than can be achieved alone. To suppress this truth diminishes your self-worth. Communion and connection are synonymous with self-worth and CAN be navigated safely.
This is where healthy boundaries come into play.
What is key to understand is that self-worth is never defined by what other people are or are not being in response to you. Self-worth comes from your ability to interact with people, no matter ‘who’ they are being.
Let me explain …
If you try to interact with people in a way that will hopefully make them ‘pleasant’ to be around, that means telling people what they want to hear and shying away from necessary honest conversations. Trying to avoid uncomfortable feelings in this way eventually destroys your self-worth. People say, “I don’t want to hurt their feelings”. But if they are honest with themselves, they really don’t want to hurt their own.
There is a good reason the expression “the truth sets you free” exists. Authentic friends, partners, colleagues and family members speak up if they love themselves and therefore have the capacity to love others. They offer opportunities for greater understanding, collaboration, growth and improved connection – rather than saying nothing and causing disconnection just to save their potentially uncomfortable feelings.
These are the people who have real and solid relationships. They magnetise other people who wish to be honest with each other. Transparency is not a weakness that leaves people susceptible to others. It offers protection. It is a great strength. Most of all, it creates a true connection – with self, others and life. The very juice of self-worth.
The tendency to not speak up and have difficult conversations with people is programmed into us from a very early age. When enmeshed in toxic relationships, despite our initial intuitive fears, we kept the peace, hoped for the best and told ourselves stories to justify and explain away the personal violations we started to receive.
By the time you spoke up and thought you were laying boundaries, you may not have yet realised the power of a true boundary. We believed it was about calling out bad behaviour, making someone else see what they were doing wrong, holding them accountable, and making them change.
Which usually went very badly. On this incorrect boundary crusade of trying to control another’s character and choices, we only became more out of control.
You never had the power to change another – only yourself. The real boundary is anchoring into your self-worth, stating your values and chosen life truths, and then observing whether or not people meet you there and let them go if they don’t.
A true boundary is not reliant on someone else – who certainly may never accept your boundary – getting it. It only requires you to get it – which potentially you always can, if embodied in your self-worth.
A great mantra for this is:
“By knowing and stating my truth, I conjoin with those who share these values and detach from those who don’t. You either are or are not my reality.”
If you are a member of the Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Program (NARP), this goal set is powerful:
“I express my values calmly and clearly. Those who agree are those I journey through life with. Those who don’t simply are not my people.”
In Conclusion
If you lack self-worth, it is such a painful and precarious position to be in because another person can easily take away their love and affection, leaving you feeling like you have nothing left to go on with or maybe even live for.
Before healing these unconscious underlying programs and beliefs, we can live in constant fear of love being taken away in any relationship, because of not yet knowing how to grant it back to ourselves. This leaves you believing you are unworthy of everything you desire, especially being seen, heard, held and loved.
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