Raise your hand if you’ve ever found yourself feeling that you’re not good enough. Oh, everyone? I thought so.
Low self-worth comes up time and time again in the healing work I do with clients. The way people often try to address that not-good-enough-ness is by chasing external achievements, or reciting affirmations such as ‘I am good enough’ – only to find these measures aren’t as effective as what they might have hoped.
When someone doesn’t feel good enough, they’ll go out into the world, looking for evidence of their worth. They’ll work long hours, for example, take on extracurricular projects and obligations, exhaust themselves trying to get a body like Gigi Hadid and a home that looks like a Vogue Living feature (sound familiar?). They will believe they’re proving their merit to others, ‘earning’ love and approval. But when/if they do get that shiny new job, gorgeous kitchen renovation or washboard abs, it will only ever provide fleeting reassurance and fulfilment. So they’ll fixate on the next achievement. The truth is, our value doesn’t come from what we do, it’s something that’s already within us, an essential component of our souls that can never be diminished or augmented. You have high value because you exist, period. So… how come so many of us don’t really believe that, deep down?
(Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash)
There are a couple of reasons that stand out to me. One is that western society keeps telling us (especially women), through advertising and entertainment products, that we always have to be more than what we are. We have to be thinner, richer, better looking, higher-ranking professionally and more stylish. This is literally why certain economies (I’m looking at you, beauty industry) exist. In addition, many of us have grown up watching our parents struggle with low self-worth – maybe they were workaholics, or constantly seeking the affections of new partners, for example – and subconsciously took on limiting beliefs about what value looks like. (By the way, this isn’t to blame our parents, who were doing the best they could – it’s just about understanding the impact of parental role-modelling; more about that here). And some of us have experienced specific traumas that left us feeling not good enough – eg poverty, bullying, discrimination, redundancy or being dumped for another partner.
But you know what? It doesn’t really matter *why* we don’t feel good enough. What matters is what we do about it. How we free ourselves from the tyranny of constantly chasing our value and never finding it.
(Photo by Jessica Lee Van Goeverden on Scopio)
In my experience, breaking this cycle of trying to prove your worth won’t happen through trying to convince yourself that you are good enough. That just doesn’t work. If you don’t believe you’re good enough, someone could shout ‘you ARE good enough!’ at you until they’re blue in the face – even if you really trust their judgement, this won’t do a thing. That’s because an emotional deficit won’t be swayed by material evidence. Low self-worth doesn’t live in your brain, it lives in your subconscious. And that’s where the healing has to happen.
As an energy healer, my role is to work deep in your energy field to clear out all the wounding and limiting beliefs that are stopping you from remembering something you were born knowing – that you are, actually, good enough just as you are. That you matter, regardless of anything you earn, love or fail at in your lifetime. That it’s safe to be yourself, and that you are not defined by your achievements (or lack thereof). That you have the right to exist, and you are not less than, nor greater than, anyone else on the planet. My job as a healer isn’t to try to persuade you of any of these things, but to shift all of that emotional debris living rent-free in your energy field, blocking you from recognising your intrinsic value. When your energy is holding the vibration of someone who knows their worth, it’s easier to make choices that serve you, bounce back from disappointment, shake off other people’s judgements, commit to audacious goals and restrict how long you let self-doubt (which everyone experiences) limit you.
I know it’s difficult to grasp all this when we are taught that all our beliefs come from our mindset. But if that were true, we could simply change our minds and adopt new beliefs in order to resolve our issues. Has this ever worked for you? It hasn’t worked for me. I have observed that we can’t change our mindset without addressing the limiting beliefs, traumas and wounding lodged in our subconsciousness (or, to use a spiritual term, the energy field). If this resonates for you, you can find out more about my work here.