Healing the Chasm of Self Worth
Love, our most basic and fundamental form of nourishment and exchange. And yet, when once so painful, we have an uncanny ability to build bold and swift defenses against it.
Lately I’ve been studying the ways in which the self organizes against receiving nourishment. How it learned, at one time or another, that things such as love, connection, and belonging were not given with care or kindness.
I’ve become fascinated to see how these self organizing behaviors translate across the personal development and business coaching process.
How many of us, in both our work and relationships, discover that we have been conditioned to give past the point of empty, accommodate others to our own detriment, and negate our needs for the sake of appearing independent in the presence of those who count on our boundary-less-ness.
When we start to take a closer look at how we run our energy in relationships, manage our time at work, and regard the give and take of our finances, we find an unassuming link to how we were treated as children. How we learned about love, acceptance, and belonging and how that came through being provided for, emotionally and financially.
How love was expressed to us as children, whether freely given or withheld, offers us a lens through which we see, perceive, and position our worth in the world.
Love being the first currency.
Money being the second.
We might say that the way love was expressed in our family of origin provides a context for how we understand and manage giving and receiving in every other relationship we have.
Whether we accurately remember what it was like as children or not, there is memory there. A somatic imprint. A lesson the body has not learned apart from what was told or shown in earlier years. Taken as truth without question, it remains a dormant pattern, unnoticed, yet impacting the quality of ease and fulfillment in all of our relationships today.
No matter how well we might come to intellectually understand our patterns, we cannot think our way out of them. We cannot cure our wounds around self-worth with mindset alone. At some point along the journey we recognize that the mind, without the agreement of the body (the storehouse of unconscious material and feeling), has a limited effect on the outcome.
We find out that we are actually needed elsewhere, somewhere in the feeling body, to truly get to the root of the issue.
So how do we stay with the feeling body when these things that happened as children are so painful? How do we stay with ourselves when we have no memory at all, but just a feeling that there is a BLOCK unseen. How do we work with what we cannot see and bring the unconscious to the gentle light of our awareness?
Though the process is never linear, there are basic principles that guide the process of discovery and may offer a path of reflection for you. Here are just four of a much larger process that I believe are a necessary part to start a more conscious journey.
First, we are able to admit there is a need. Even if we do not yet know what to do about it. We try to have patience with what is still unknown and acknowledge there is pain here, one delicate enough to throw us off course again and again, until we give it our full attention and care.
Second, we give ourselves permission to have needs. We develop an openness and a willingness to honestly face our feelings, our disappointments, our judgements, and tend to the emotions that stir beneath. In other words become sensitive enough to receive our experience and allow for our needs to met.
Third, we grow in our personal presence. We cultivate a capacity to stay with whatever is arising without getting lost in our story. Even as difficult memories or emotions are revealed we learn to stay with what is here, a little at a time. Strengthening the ability to notice, observe, and witness what is true without getting lost in a flurry of reactions. We remember and remain mindful that we are in process, always.
Fourth, we deepen our current threshold for trust by actively working on the issues at hand in relationship. When the wound is relational we heal it by being in relationship, one in which it is safe to express yourself and all the parts of you that need to be heard. It takes the risk of going through the resistance/fear to get to the feeling. To feel the feelings of the parts left behind. To know them with love and to tend them. To allow yourself to be heard in the company of someone who cares.
When we allow ourselves the support we need we develop the muscle of resourcefulness in relationship. We get a good team of allies - a therapist, a healer, a coach, a mentor - who help guide the process with reflection, honesty, and integrity.
What is extraordinary is that we have the capacity to do this. When given permission, when invited, when supported without pressure, in a space of unconditionality, we can learn to fully liberate ourselves.
It is so freeing to see someone really let go of all that pressure they’ve been holding onto. To truly allow for a RELEASE. To empty from what has been holding them captive and quiet.
These aspects of our experience are not important to analyze or intellectualize, nor are they better understood that way. Rather they are aspects of our human experience that are made for us to feel, to allow, to intuit. Sometimes they do not have or need words at all.
How can we make space for more of these moments? For more audacity to rise to the surface of our interactions. To show us we belong and that we are deserving of the love and life we long for.
True self-worth is a feeling. It’s not a statement or proclamation. It comes from inside yourself.
When you can begin to recognize the parts of yourself that were at one time denied or disregarded and gently bring them back into an inner embrace of self-acceptance, wholeness arises from within. Ease arises in life.
Again and again what I see in my healing and coaching work today is that to truly heal the chasm of self-worth we need to allow for where love was lacking, where love hurt, where love was a disappointment instead of a form of nourishment.
To repair our mind body connection and restore care as a basic value, so that our full unconditional presence can bring about more love and trust rather than doubt and defense.
For healing is not a solitary journey. It is one we find together in relationship.
May you find the fulfillment you long for and the love you are so deserving of.
With warmth & care always,
Andrea