Worth Less Than What: The Two-Word Reality Check

In this episode of She Asked: Tools for Practical Hope, Anna McBride sits down with psychotherapist Dawna Daigneault for a deeply insightful conversation on self-worth—what it is, how it’s formed, and why so many of us struggle to feel it.

With over 20 years of clinical experience, Dawna shares her personal story and the moments that shaped her understanding of worth, along with the development of her Worth Conscious Theory—a framework that helps people reconnect to a stable, internal sense of self-worth that isn’t dependent on external validation.

Together, Anna and Dawna explore how early life experiences shape our sense of worth, why self-worth and self-esteem are not the same, and how many of us unknowingly live with a “lost worth story” that influences our relationships, choices, and emotional lives.

This episode is for anyone who has ever felt “not enough,” even after doing the work—and is ready to move from awareness into real, lived change.

In this episode, we cover:
– The difference between self-worth and self-esteem
– How childhood experiences shape your sense of worth
– What a “lost worth story” is and how it develops
– Why self-worth isn’t something you lose—but something you can deny
– Practical ways to begin rebuilding a grounded sense of self

Dawna also shares powerful tools from her work, including how to challenge the belief of being “worthless” and begin reconnecting with your inherent value.

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✨ Learn more about Dawna’s work:
 Website: https://understanding-self-worth.com

 Facebook Group: Understanding Self-Worth

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome back to She Asks Tools for Practical Hope. I'm your host, Anna McBride, and I'm so glad you're here. This is a space where we rewrite the narratives that keep us stuck so we can actually change our lives. Not just understand them, but live differently within them. And if you're someone who's been doing the work, reading, reflecting, becoming more self-aware, but still feel like something isn't fully shifting, this episode is for you. Because today we're talking about something that sits underneath so much of what we experience self-worth. I'm joined today by Donna Deno. Donna is a psychotherapist with over 20 years' experience. She's a mother, partner, and lifelong student of the healing process, both personally and professionally. She's also a co-author of a book on self-worth, which has become a true passion project for her. Over the past decade, Donna has devoted much of her work to understanding human worth, how it's formed, how it gets disrupted, and how we can begin to rebuild it in a way that feels grounded and true. She's developed what's called worth consciousness theory, a framework that helps people reconnect to a more stable internal sense of worth, one that isn't constantly being negotiated from external validation or life circumstances. Donna, I'm really glad you're here. Thank you for joining us on She As.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Thank you for having me. That was a lovely introduction. And as I'm getting to know you, I think that you are also lovely.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Oh, thank you. Very sweet. So, as always on our show, we like to begin with a story. So, Donna, can you take us through your journey both personally and professionally, and how you came to focus so deeply on self-worth?

SPEAKER_01 2:18

I really got into it right around 2011. And I had clients coming in that would talk about not having worth, or feel they would say, I feel unworthy. And my worst cases would say, I feel worthless, which is just heart-wrenching for me to hear, because that the connotation of that is both a helplessness and a hopelessness happening. And so I started thinking about what that is. What am I hearing? How can I look at it differently so I can move into that space and offer something that would make a difference? And so the first thing I did is I wrote an essay called Ribbon of Worth. That was my first effort. And it was about a tapestry that is all the threads of our lives, and that there's this one particular thread, and I called it it's more like a ribbon because it is more highly valued and more noticeable if it's missing. And it's this ribbon of worth, and that it can get pulled through the tapestry effortlessly if we're in the right systems and really enhance the beauty of life, but it can also be pulled away from the other threads of life and it can even fall below our feet, and we can walk on it ourselves. And so I wrote this up and I started handing it out in session to clients and just asking, does this resonate with you? Can you see worth differently? That it's not something that can be taken away from you, but it is something that can be ignored, or it's something that, and this is where my language shifted around this, it can be denied. So it doesn't go anywhere, but it can be denied so effectively that it drops from the rest of our life, and we can even be walking on it and harming ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Wow. I love that idea that it's always there, doesn't go anywhere, yet it can be diminished to such a way that we can walk all over it. Yeah. Because that still keeps giving you agency and that you can bring it back up. That's one yeah. And so you wrote this, you went on to write a book about this topic. So tell us more about that.

Separating Self-Worth From Self-Esteem

SPEAKER_01 4:55

Oh, yes. I'll be honest. I wrote an app that came out in 2020, and it didn't do very well because it was boring. But what it did is I would sit on the floor in my living room and I would have these eight and a half by 11 pieces of paper that I got from our printer, I'm just pulling out of the printer drawer around the pack. And I would write this would lead to that, and I'd have these arrows. And so I was creating the pathways of if you feel disrespected, it goes this way. If you still, if you have a lack of awareness, you actually go down this path. And so I created all these pants that lead to self-worth. But it was too technical, it was too much having a therapist in your head. But the work was wonderful. And because I mapped all of that out, it was just weeks and weeks of mapping these pathways out where my clients start and feel less than worthy and how to get them and work with the unique parts of self-worth that were missing that I could move them towards feeling worthy. And I wrote a little companion workbook to that. Again, none of this did well, but it was wonderful preparatory work. I was in the stuff I love to think about and talk about. And I was committed to finding a way to talk about this with my clients that again would make the difference they needed. Because the models that I'd been trained in, they would point to worth. Um, they would reference it. I started going over to half-price books and picking up old copies of books I'd read in school that were referenced in school, like in those mega textbooks, because I knew Carl Rogers talked about worth. So I would go, I and I could have gone to the library. I love the library, and I just want to say support our libraries, but I wanted to write in them. I wanted to get in and make them mine. And so I would go over to half-price books and I would find Carl Rogers and Maslow and Frankel and Jung, and I would find these different masters, and I would just start looking. Where do they talk about worth? And so as I was pulling theory forward and seeing overlap in theory, some of it was counter to. I found that fascinating as well, because I we had talked, you and I had talked earlier, that a lot of people think self-worth and self-esteem are the same thing. And some of these theories put them together and talk about them the same way that they both go up and down. And I kept saying, I don't believe that's true. I know self-esteem goes up and down, and that actually makes sense to me that we can't like everything about ourselves, and that's okay. That's actually healthy. But that when we do like things about ourselves and we hold those things, our esteem goes up, but our worth is separate and would inform that self-esteem, but doesn't have to go up and down.

SPEAKER_00 8:13

Okay. As you were gathering this app, I think it's funny. There's a there this truly means there's an app for everything, right? Or that was the intention to create that. And at the time that you were creating this app and gathering information about self-worth, did you know that you were going to be writing a book about it?

Small Denials That Shape Us

SPEAKER_01 8:37

No. No, I knew I was gonna work on this till I solved a problem. I didn't know how I was gonna solve it. I didn't know if I was gonna find a solution, but I was driven to understand it just because I knew the power of feeling a denial of self-worth in any system. It can happen anywhere. I remember I was at I went to a fifth grade camp, and there was a girl that I was friends with that her mother ran the dance program, and I was in it. But because her mom was really well known, she was really well known. And I remember we were getting our names were being put on these little, I think they were called Bunsen burners. You'd make your own. And she suggested, I want to be called, and it was some really cool name. And the counselor who was putting her through, the camp counselor knew her and knew her mom, and put the name she wanted on her can. This, which was this was a big deal, right? Getting like a nickname at Camp. And then so I saw her make a suggestion for a cool name, and I thought, oh, I get to do that too. And so it was my turn next. And I said, How about? And again, I don't remember what I suggested. I just thought it sounded cool, and she did the opposite on my can. And I just felt all the air come out of my sails. Okay, I didn't understand why that happened, I didn't understand why within seconds one person got the thing that they wanted, and the next person was denied the thing she wanted. And this doesn't hurt anybody. And it wasn't a name that was like, I'm the queen of the camp and lord over everyone. It wasn't a ridiculous thing, and so that was one of those moments from my past where I felt treated differently, such a small moment with such a big impact.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

And in a sense, I can hear, I can even see that little girl, that camp, that fifth grade camp, which is such a tender time in development, right? In terms of our esteem, our worth in society, in that system, anyway. And I think it's I could see the fragility of that, and how when something is denied that was so easily given to someone else, I could see how that comparison and it can be diminishing of self-worth. So take us back a little bit further, because that was fifth grade version of you. Was there a younger version of you in which self-worth, now that you're looking back through a therapist's eyes, was really being challenged?

The Grief Behind Father Absence

SPEAKER_01 11:39

Yes, yeah, and I think what I want to say here as a segue is I've known both. I have had my worth affirmed. So my grandmother only affirmed my worth my whole life.

SPEAKER_02 11:58

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 11:59

So being around her was wonderful. And I guess I want to give this positive story and then I'll tell a worse denying story. When we'd go visit her, and she would get the brush out and brush my hair. I had long, fine hair, and she would sit and she'd say, We need to brush it a hundred times to make it look like silk. And she would sit and just brush. What a nurturing act. It was connected, it was simple, it was invested. It was just about her seeing me and giving me something she believed in. She was a hairdresser. So she cared about hair and just this very simple gift of you matter. So that was most of my interactions with her were like that.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Okay.

unknown 12:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

Yeah. Plus, she was a grandparent. So the she didn't have to reprimand me. She didn't have to parent me. So how wonderful that we have people in our life that get to mostly just love us. We're lucky if that's the case. So that's my what I think that's the initiation of the story of me knowing what having my worth affirmed felt like. And then the other story, which I feel like became a much more severe narrative for me than I understood until I was about 17. And I was with my mom watching a made-for-tv movie one evening. So the movie was just a simple concept. It was set back at a time when social services were really starting to be available in bigger cities. And of course, the goal was to help families that were struggling. And there was a man who his wife was out of the hall and he had these boys, and he would have to go to work every day. And so they'd have to get themselves to school, come home, and do a certain amount of self-care at home. And person in social services discovered this. And while the father was away, she came in and removed every one of those boys into state care. And he loved these boys and was doing the best he could do to raise them. But I think the most important thing for me watching that was he was fully dedicated to being a good father to the best of his ability. So then he spends the rest of the time trying to get them back. And you see the challenges he faces because there wasn't good record keeping at the time. He had lost his rights based on what was allowable in that state at that time. And so by the end of the movie, it's taken years and years for him to get every one of those boys back. So I started to cry when he got the very last son back, who had been, and then the cry turned into sobbing. And then it was a kind of sobbing I had never experienced in my life that there was lack of understanding of what was generating this immense grieving that I was experiencing. It was like a lifetime of grieving at the end of a movie. And I was just a teenager, so you don't expect a teenager to feel that bad about a movie. And I didn't immediately tether it to what I saw in the show. And my mom became very concerned. She said, What's going on with you? She knew this was not common and probably not good for me, that this was indicative of something much more horrible than what we had just viewed. And it was. So it took me a while to unpack it. I kept thinking back to the movie, and why did I have such a horrible reaction, a deeply felt pain at the end of that movie? And I finally realized there was a little girl inside of me that was wondering where my dad had been all that time.

SPEAKER_00 16:32

Because your parents were divorced. Your parents were divorced, right? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

Yeah, yeah. My biological father left while my mom was pregnant with me.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Yeah. And she had remarried. So I had somebody that was there and providing, and I had younger siblings. So I had a lot of normalcy, but I didn't know that my inner child was watching every father and daughter that she saw. And she would question in her head, where's mine? Why isn't he calling? Does he know where I am? Does he want to know where I am? Like, why doesn't he want to be in my life? These were just piling up in my head. But then I'd I don't know, Donna, do you want to make chocolate chip cookies? I would shift to chocolate chip cookies, which I still love. Or it would be time to do homework. So I'd shift to homework, or a friend would call. So I could shift out of that questioning. But then when I saw the evidence that a dad could do anything, they say move heaven or hell to go get those people back in his life. That to me was so destructive.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

Wow. Yeah. I think you know what's interesting to me listening to you share, thank you for sharing that, those parts of your personal journey, it certainly helps me understand what really draw drew you to want to explore self-worth later. So when after you went through these experiences, did you you were 17 when you watched that movie? You were in fifth grade when you had that experience at camp, and then even younger, when you had the lovely connection with your grandmother. When did you know that self-worth was going to be something that you wanted to better understand and heal or help people heal from?

SPEAKER_01 18:39

Yeah. Probably not until my 30s. Okay. After all of that happened in my teens, again, it took me a while to put the parts of my story together to understand that I felt that I wasn't worth his time or his love or his effort. And then part of me believed that. And so I have this little bit of evidence that maybe I'm not worthy, which is so many of the people I work with. It has shocked me as a clinician to discover these gaps of understanding of self as worthy, that when we drift into them and our sense of self, they hold us and they make us afraid and they make us reactive and they make us hide.

Faith As Guardrail And As Harm

SPEAKER_00 19:53

Yeah, I can so relate to that. I certainly never understood until my for myself, until recently, just how affected I was by these experiences in my life where the young version of me was having a hard time being able to understand why my parents were a certain way, why I came from a large family, why certain members of the family seemed to get more, or my mother was really doing service a lot in the world. And so it was like I there was one version of her that the world got to see, and then there was the version that we had at home. And the young version of me created the story of my worth based on this other person's behavior. And I think I, in an earlier conversation with you, had mentioned that some of your clients that had spiritual connection had a different understanding or maybe less gap or something of understanding about self-worth than the people who were more secular. Can you speak a little bit about that? How that was experienced?

SPEAKER_01 21:09

So I immediately go to the reality I've seen in the people I work with that for some it's less, but actually for some it's more. And so for those where the gap is less, they've been told that their worth comes from a higher power, that there's a source greater than them. Oftentimes it's a creator of them. There are, say, verses that they've learned in childhood about God seeing the worth of a soul and making human beings, and so putting a certain amount of worth into something that God has made. And so people that really buy into that and believe that can be a guardrail, that can be a safe place in. Your mind to get back to and say, if a higher power is the creator of me in any way, then I must be worth something. It's very comforting to think. The really big negative from that thinking is that when you've been told that, but then the practices and the system you're in, whether it's in your family or in a larger organization like a church or a community, then I think of the scarlet letter almost immediately, like that community had a way of disavowing just a few people of their worth without really learning the whole story. So the person didn't matter, only the perception of the person mattered. And that's, I think that's where we make a huge mistake as human beings. Let's just lean into this idea of being spiritual beings. And if that's true, and if there is a higher power that's been involved in our development at all, our creation at all, then if that's true, why are we not treating each other better?

SPEAKER_00 23:12

Yeah, it's a really good question, right? Yeah. I think we do forget, we forget that we're all come from the same source. And and I was thinking as you were sharing that before you asked the question, that so much of what is gapped is the way we do disconnect or not or connect within our societal system, right? Within our political system. There's so many stories in of today of people who are diminished, disenfranchised, disavowed because their skin color is different than whoever is talking. So yeah, so that's referred to, if I'm saying hearing it, the lost worth story, right? Yeah, a lost worth story.

SPEAKER_01 24:06

And even though I don't believe worth can be lost, if a person does, that's the scariest story that they write and keep in their head. Oftentimes it's been written for us before we even know who we are.

SPEAKER_00 24:22

Yeah, we inherit these this worth story. Yeah.

How Worth Forms In Attachment

SPEAKER_01 24:26

Yeah. We talk about in one part in the book. Because I when I get into a subject, I want to understand all facets. And so I was like, okay, how does this start? Where is this start? Where does worth start? And it's a concept. So if we step away from like a deity endowing us with words, which I love. I'm like, please be true. But if we step away from that and we deal with just the physiological, psychological reality of being a human being, what we see, especially in attachment theory, is that from the first year of life, we have signals going off inside of us. And those signals are wiring the brain and the body to trust each other. So when a baby is born, their tummy rumbles and they cry. And so when the tummy rumbles, the brain is picking up a signal from the tummy, and then it signals the mouth to make a sound. And then this really cool thing happens with attachment. If a caregiver knows to investigate that, to learn what's true for that person, they will try several things to quell that cry. They'll pick the baby up, they'll bounce the baby. So they'll try comfort. If that doesn't work, they'll check the diaper, a different kind of comfort, but still comfort. And then they might, oh, are you hungry again? They'll try feeding you. And so then what the brain and the baby learns is that when I signal with my mouth about what's happening to my tummy, somebody picks up on that signal and responds, which is where trust is born. That is where trust is born. And that's Ericsson's psychosocial model. The first year of life is trust versus mistrust. What if worth is born there as well? Because what we talk about is when that signal is responded to, how is it responded to? In Romania, the awful stories and in China, the awful stories of not having enough help in the orphanages. And the babies are hungry and they have enough bottles. So they have resources in food, and they take them and they put a bottle in the hands of each baby. But the baby's farthest away from the nursing station, when their bottle falls out of their hands, that is the end of their feeding. And nobody is there to pick that bottle up and help them get that need met. That's a life need. We look at Maslow's life needs. That life need has to be met. Food, shelter, safety has to be met. But when a self-worth need, so we've coined this phrase, when a self-worth need is not met, and a life worth need is met, you start learning you're not worthy really early.

SPEAKER_00 27:36

Wow. But when both met powerful when you think about it, because as you mentioned, it is inherited generally. And they are having to attend to babies' needs, and probably basing it through the lens of their experiences that they had, and which would lead to quick overwhelm and or an inability to attend or notice or even acknowledge the need versus what which was never talked about worth. That's not something that I grew up even thinking about or considering until now. It seems like it is so important. However, as you said, what if it's formulated in that first year of life?

SPEAKER_01 28:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:31

Makes it even harder to go back and heal, I imagine.

SPEAKER_01 28:35

Yeah. It becomes the new normal. So I love Stephen Hayes. He's the creator of Act, which is acceptance and commitment theory. I love his adjustment to a phrase. He took practice makes perfect and he made it so therapeutic. He says, No, because perfect isn't good for us. Practice makes permanent.

SPEAKER_00 28:57

Ooh. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Because what we do on a regular basis creates our reality.

SPEAKER_01 29:05

It does.

SPEAKER_00 29:06

And if we're telling ourselves the story that I'm not worthy, that's going to be what we live.

SPEAKER_01 29:14

It it is. And there are degrees. I was fortunate that I had my worth affirmed. And by more than one person, there is research that shows if you just have one person who sees you, one person who cares about your experience in the world, it makes a huge difference. And I believe that's about self-worth needs. Not that we need to go too deep in this, but we talk about quadrants. And the quadrant that I mentioned is when life needs are met, that self-worth needs are not met. That's quadrant three. But below that is quadrant one, where life needs are not met and self-worth needs are not met. And Gabor Mate went out in Vancouver and looked with that population. He talks about it in his book, it's the uh in the realm of hungry ghosts is that book.

SPEAKER_00 30:09

Yeah. And when self-worth needs and um life needs aren't met, then I think according to him, that's where the child becomes predisposed to addiction and other challenges in life. And it's quite interesting. So you noticed in your clients this difference between those that had a connection with a higher power and felt able to stay connected to their self-worth, more so than those that either did not have a belief in a higher power or weren't given enough information or enough connection with someone that validated their worth that they struggled more with that. And what I'm wondering is when you saw that difference between the two, what did that inform you as a therapist to be able to do to help them shift or change?

SPEAKER_01 31:18

The first thing that I started to realize is why are we not that kind of person for other people? If they need something that's unseen and really unknown, so it's hoped for, it's believed in, you can have faith in it, which is again beautiful, but it's way out there, right? So it's gotta be so far from us. Why? Why is one of the greatest sources of feeling worthy so placed so far away from us? And I think it's because the people around us don't know how to validate it on a consistent basis. And so I thought, Donna, be one of those sources for every person that comes and sits with you. Do you honor their worth while they're in your presence? I was like, I can, I want to, and that started to matter to me because I do have so many people that have either left their family or left their church community because they felt abused or were abused, I shouldn't just say felt, or were actually abused, but it doesn't mean that they didn't want something supportive of their sense of self on a universal level. This is where Frankel talks about a life rich with meaning and his ability to transcend the concentration camp he was in. I I loved his book, Man Search for Meaning. I read it several times. It's a hard read. I don't recommend it to everyone. It can trigger trauma. But he he when he got through all of that, and what I believe the existential psychologists and philosophers were focused on doing is how do we not repeat this horrific scene ever again? This horrific event in human experience. And a lot of the people in those concentration camps were wondering where God was. And again, it's man's inhumanity to man, like how are we embodying something greater or more beautiful or more sustaining? How are we not trying to pull that? I'm gonna say essence into self to flood life with more meaning for everyone.

SPEAKER_00 33:58

Yeah, and in a sense, building it more within ourselves, right?

SPEAKER_01 34:02

Yeah. So it's not so far away.

Becoming The One Who Sees People

SPEAKER_00 34:05

Yeah, bring it closer to you, bring it closer to you. By we I hear a phrase in rooms that I'm in that says, let it begin with me. And when we begin to do the thing that we want to have more of, it attracts it to us. Now I want to talk about you the worth conscious theory. All right. Okay. So could you talk about that a little bit in as simple terms as you can so that our listeners can understand better how to apply it or what it means?

SPEAKER_01 34:37

That was just another thing that developed through sitting with clients. One way that feeling a level of unworthiness shows up is self-consciousness. And that's a term that's been around my whole life. So you can become self-conscious, but it's not a good thing. And as I was looking at what is consciousness, and it's uh an awareness of awareness that has workable pieces, so we can personalize it, and that's where feeling happens. And so I was like, okay, if consciousness is that, that's really good. So self-consciousness is bad. How did the combination of those two things become such a bad experience? And it's being conscious of judgments and denied self-worth and cruelty and unfairness and all the ways human beings move against each other and deciding that's what you get. That's your life experience, right? And so little children will immediately start saying, I could have done that different if I had been nicer, if I'd been quieter. So we learn how to fawn in childhood. Some of us, so the actually all the defenses show up fight, flight, freeze, fawn. And then another one that they're talking about nowadays is flop, which is total dorsal collapse. Oh, okay. Yeah. So yeah, that's in some of the trauma training that I've done over the last couple of years. I'm hearing the term flop showing up more consistently. And fawning is a really dysfunctional version of pleasing, but it's a way to stay out of trouble or it's a way to not be a problem. So you're not being yourself and you're not feeling worthy because the condition is don't be a problem.

Worth Conscious Theory Made Simple

SPEAKER_00 36:30

Yeah. I find it interesting that self-consciousness, which is was a label that created through in the societal system and a patriarchal, in a sense, because at least at the time that I recall it being really prevalent, it was it was a time when children were meant to be seen and not heard, and that if the respect to an elder was commanded, demanded, and that you were girls were considered pleasing if they were quiet and uh followed the lead of the patriarchy. And I think it's interesting that that's when that label came about. When really, when you break it down, as you said, you have the self, which is all of us, the individual, and then you have consciousness, which is universal, you know, and I think like it's just almost getting the universal to the personal level, which is a good thing, and but you you mentioned in terms of acquired worth. So acquired worth is what we take on, correct?

SPEAKER_01 37:51

Acquired values, values, okay acquired values, there's inherent values and acquired values, good memory.

SPEAKER_00 37:59

Okay. Explain the difference between the two.

SPEAKER_01 38:03

So again, this was just another facet that I started noticing was problematic. And the first thing I started thinking about listening to clients is that there was like a civil war inside of them, like this internal civil war. And I was like, what are those opposing pieces inside of them? And I started calling them competing values. And then as I started looking at those competing values, I started realizing the fight was between values that were inherent to that person that take time to learn. Like you don't have a set of values at birth.

SPEAKER_00 38:41

Right.

SPEAKER_01 38:41

You're learning that your tummy can tell your brain, and your brain can tell your mouth, and your mouth can tell your character. That's what's happening early. And then eventually you learn the word no right age two, usually, right? So some more communication happens, but like you don't get your inherent values right away. They come over the length of those developmental stages. So we paired developing the inherent self-worth needs and the inherent self-worth values over the birth to probably in your 20s is when you have a full sense of self. They say empathy doesn't fully develop until age 18. And I promise you, empathy and worth are connected.

SPEAKER_00 39:34

Okay. Wow. So inherent takes a quite a few years to develop.

SPEAKER_01 39:40

And it's just about self.

SPEAKER_00 39:42

It's about self. Okay. So it's understanding who the self is in these different settings, systems, right? Um, and so it's almost like this version of us at all these stages is accounting for worth based on the connection and if our needs are being met, if our if we're feeling validated or connected, but so interesting to me how this can unfold and how powerful I'm a mother, and as are you, and it's like we play such a powerful role in the development of worth for our children. So it's really interesting. And so now, what I want to ask you is for those listeners that may be listening and feeling like their worth is constantly shifting based on relationships or success, where should they even begin to better understand worth or what they can do about it?

SPEAKER_01 40:51

So we have a Facebook group called Understanding Self-Worth. It's based on material from the book. The book is geared towards mental health professionals. And what I would recommend is if anybody decides to get the book, please have a mental health professional that you're working with to help you unpack the things that are going to come up. This is not a book you read and say, oh, I feel better immediately. It's a book that you read and in a paragraph and maybe the second or third chapter, you go, oh, that triggered something. I have some something to work on right there. And so we talk about the pillars of self-worth, and that if the foundation is self-worth as a birthright, you get it just because you exist, then these pillars can be built on that solid foundation, awareness of that worth, respect for that worth, esteem in that worth, and then confidence in that worth. And that if we are given an optimal situation growing up, we get to build those pillars. And eventually in young adulthood, we put a capstone on it that's called realized self-worth. I know who I am, I'm true to myself, I know my inherent values, and I know which acquired values from the system I can keep and the ones that don't that work for me because they move against my inherent values.

SPEAKER_00 42:25

Okay. So for anyone who's listening that feels like they're not there, right? That they want to heal some of these maybe earlier life situations or relationships where they were either lost their worth or never really had it identified as something that they could heal from. What can we offer them as a other than the Facebook that they can maybe do for themselves?

Why Affirmations Fail For Worth

SPEAKER_01 42:56

Okay. It is not repeating, I am worthy over and over again. It's not. I've had clients come in who have tried to do little positive affirmations and they're like, I don't know why these don't work. And then they feel more helpless. So it's more about questioning. And I invite clients to question the rhetoric that's rolling around in their head. And one of my favorite techniques to do in the office, and this is one of the earliest techniques I do, is I take the word worthless, I write it out on a dry erase board, by the way. Be careful doing this. You've got to have a client that trusts you because when I hold that up, the other person immediately starts crying.

SPEAKER_00 43:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 43:45

Because they're afraid it's true.

SPEAKER_00 43:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:48

When you have a lost word story, you're afraid that word means you.

SPEAKER_02 43:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:54

And so I'll hold it up and then I will patiently wait with them as they move. Through the emotion that fear creates. And again, I don't do this in a first session. We have a relationship. And then I take my dry erase marker and I draw a line down the middle of the word, separating worth from less. And I say, worth less than what? And that's the first question.

SPEAKER_00 44:20

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 44:21

Worth less than what? Yeah. Another person? No. Respect? No. Worth less than kindness? No. They can't say yes to any of the things running around in their head they thought they were worth less than because those things had been denied and consistently. And sometimes, like sometimes I'm with a client who's in my age range in their 50s. And they've been living with this psychological pain all that time. And when I start deconstructing the concept, yeah, they're like, no. And then they'll say, because I don't believe that about anybody. And I'll say, ah.

SPEAKER_02 45:03

Yeah.

The Worth Less Than What Exercise

SPEAKER_01 45:04

So you're not worth less than any of the things running around in your head. And that's the starting point.

SPEAKER_00 45:10

Wow. I love that. Curiosity. So really turn go going back to your childhood, regaining that wonderful tool that we all were born with, also, but we sometimes leave behind as a way to break apart these rhetoric, as you said, that's inside our heads. Wow, that's so great. So I think so many people have an understanding of what worth is as a concept, as a just something that's thrown around a lot, but they don't actually feel it. How why is there a gap between that understanding and the feeling of it?

SPEAKER_01 45:53

We have to be true to ourselves. So one of the big concepts in worth conscious theory is that lived truth and self-worth belong together and need to be congruent.

SPEAKER_00 46:08

Okay. So if you're not living the way you believe to be worth, that's a problem. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:16

It's more if I'm patient with someone who's hurting me and they're saying hurtful things and it hurts me. So I can think of a few times this happened in high school and I don't say what's true for me. Hey, can you like not talk to me like that? I didn't know how to say that, by the way. I didn't know how to say that in high school. But hey, can you not talk to me or hey, I don't want to stay for this conversation. If I'm not true to what I need in a moment, okay, my self-worth is being denied by me.

SPEAKER_00 46:49

Yeah, that's often the worst crime, isn't it? What we just deny ourselves because that affirms it to that self inside all of us that's waiting for us to live like we know to be true. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So when we're out of alignment, we're not gonna feel the worth if we don't speak up for what we need or what we're worthy.

SPEAKER_01 47:19

Yeah, if we're not telling the truth about ourselves to ourselves, that's where it starts. It's not that everybody needs to know everything about you, that it's impossible, and sometimes it's not safe. But do I tell myself the truth about myself to myself? I do. I didn't. There was a time I didn't, and there was a time I didn't know how to.

New Tools, Resources, And Closing

SPEAKER_00 47:40

Yeah, it's it is true. I think what's wonderful is that we're all capable of an expanded self-awareness and even an expanded self-worth experience, and it does begin with telling the truth and speaking up to yourself in a kinder, more gentler way as well in interactions. Oh wow, this is so incredible! So you mentioned your first attempt at an app, and I know that you have since been working on another one. Why don't you tell our listeners about that?

SPEAKER_01 48:19

Yeah, so there is an app called Worth Conscious Coach that's in development. It is for clients. Uh, so we would hope that people using it would have a professional that they're working with, just someone that they can be accountable to. It could be a life coach, it can be a therapist, or if they have a nurse practitioner that's been trained in some behavioral help, we would invite them to use it and it's going to help them become more worth conscious because that's the antidote to being self-conscious. And back to my what I was explaining earlier, in my field, I had learned there was self-conscious or neutral, self-conscious or not. And that's not very attractive, self-conscious or not. And I was like, what song would we ever hear? What would we call this? And I was like, I don't want to be self-conscious, but could I be worse conscious? Oh, I yes, and that sounds delightful.

SPEAKER_00 49:24

Like, yeah. And so this tool, once it's launched, will help people to apply practices and unpack that theory and put it to work in their life. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 49:38

Yes, it makes the theory more practical, something easy to use on a daily basis, and it helps it become more personal because there are things for the user of the app to include that's just about them and what they need.

SPEAKER_00 49:56

Okay, that's fantastic. That would definitely mean that there's an app out there for everything. So you'll have to make sure you let us know when that is launched. And since this has been such a lively conversation and we've gone in lots of different directions, please, I want to thank you for that meaningful conversation. How can our listeners find you and find out more about this work?

SPEAKER_01 50:23

Uh so I think the easiest way to find me is the website, which is understandingselfworth.com. And there's a hyphen between self and worth. So understandingselfworth.com. And there are resources there for professionals, and there's a page for individuals.

unknown 50:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 50:41

And then again, our Facebook page. It again, it's geared towards material in the book, which is more theoretical and about the healing process. And yet, I don't want to discourage anyone from seeing if it's useful to them. This is an inclusive model. Like when I'm asked about, you mentioned earlier, the disparities and the mistreatment of whole segments of people for over centuries of time. I look at it's inclusive because I can't think of anybody I would leave out.

SPEAKER_00 51:17

Fantastic. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:19

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:20

We're all worthy of well of high self-worth.

SPEAKER_01 51:24

Yeah. And so the name of the book is Understanding Self-Worth, Guide to Worth Conscious Theory and Psychotherapeutic Practice.

SPEAKER_00 51:35

Fantastic. Wow. That's so great. And we'll make sure we put that information in the show notes for our listeners. Again, I want to thank you for joining us on She Ask. This has been such a meaningful conversation to me. And I'm so happy you were able to be here, Donna. Thank you. To my listeners, if this episode resonated with you, I encourage you to share it with someone who might need to hear this today. And if you're ready to do this work more deeply, this is exactly the kind of work that I do as a coach. I support women through transformational changes by better understanding what lies behind that narrative. Moving from awareness to real lived change. And you can find more details about the coaching in the show notes. This has been She Asked Tools for Practical Hope. I am your host, Anna McBride. Thank you for being here, and until soon, be well.