Self-Worth
Since 1987 I have focused on addressing dysfunction developed due to past trauma.
My clients’ presenting problems vary - with anxiety, depression, addictions and habits, fears and phobias, obsessive compulsive disorder, and psychosomatic disorders being the most common.
However, regardless of their presenting problems, overwhelmingly their central problem is that they have a negative perspective of themselves and of their place in reality.
They lack self-worth.
But on what basis did they come to this condemning evaluation of themselves?
When I ask them how long they have felt a low sense of self-worth, they usually recognize that it has been present longer than they can remember (and they can usually remember from about age five or six onwards).
I then inquire if they are aware of having done anything particularly terrible prior to age five or six. They typically state that to the best of their knowledge they did not commit any atrocities.
I then ask if they could think of anything that any child under the age of five or six could do to account for such a negative self-concept and they again indicate that they cannot.
At this point I usually advise them that their negative sense of self-worth was acquired and not inherent and that it was virtually always due to a message or messages received from a significant other - almost always from a parent or parents (and/or occasionally some other person).
The nature of the messages that lead to a lack of self-worth are invariably ones that express a fundamental lack of affirmation of the child by the messengers.
So, if a parent or some other significant individual conveys a strong non-affirming message to a very young child, the child virtually always accepts and internalizes this sense of itself - i.e. I am not ok and my very existence is problematic.
The very young child does not typically challenge the low-value label bestowed upon it by the parental or other significant figures.
This is due to the tremendous power differential between the messengers and the child and the child’s profound dependency upon the messengers, as well as the child’s lack of understanding of reality at that early stage of life.
It is as if God has spoken - God has said that I am not ok and thus, by definition, I am worthless and even the validity of my existence is called into serious question.
Sometimes my clients are aware of specific past events that account for such negative messages and sometimes they are not.
Whether or not they have any knowledge of having received such negative messages, I advise them that something definitely happened to explain their lack of self-worth.
I also tell them that receiving strong negative messages at an early stage of life (whether prenatally, at birth, or within the first few years of life) is significantly traumatic and that their ongoing lack of self-worth is the post-traumatic result.
These negative messages may have been transmitted in the form of actions, words, attitudes, or even biochemically (in the case of prenatal trauma - a type of trauma that is very common).
The earlier the negative message the more fundamental the negative sense of self-worth.
The child typically spends its first nine months living within the body of its mother. This is an extremely critical period in terms of the development of existential self-worth.
A fetus growing within a mother who feels wonderful about herself, wonderful about her life, and wonderful about the reality of her pregnancy and all that it implies will be greeted from conception onwards with a warm nurturing embrace, communicating to the fetus that the universe is its proper home into which it is lovingly welcomed - i.e. it will receive the message that it is adored.
This is the ideal healthy scenario that creates an inherent feeling of positive self-worth.
Unfortunately, for a multiplicity of reasons, this rarely takes place.
Instead, virtually everyone’s experience is, to varying degrees, distant from this ideal - leading to corresponding degrees of lack of self-worth.
The lack of the ideal welcoming embrace upon arrival in reality is essentially a message of non-affirmation or rejection.
Non-affirming trauma experienced from birth onwards compounds the adverse effects of prenatal non-affirming trauma, further undermining the child’s self-worth.
With all post-traumatic learned responses there are triggers which connect us emotionally to the original traumatic events. The triggers for feelings of lack of self-worth are almost universally those of rejection/non-affirmation.
Exposure to rejection/non-affirmation triggers later on in life unconsciously take one back to the early trauma from which one’s negative sense of self-worth developed.
Fortunately, it is possible to change the learned emotional responses due to these early traumatic experiences, freeing oneself once and for all from the emotional discomfort and the negative self-concepts related to these events.
Emotional Updating, the unconscious method that I offer my clients, enables this transformation to occur.
By addressing low self-worth at its root cause - by readdressing early rejection experiences - the various related symptoms and associated conditions ultimately resolve.
And, at least as importantly, one has the opportunity to acquire a fundamentally positive feeling about oneself and one’s place in reality.
One becomes inherently comfortable being one’s true self and pursuing one’s self-actualization, while enjoying the sense of feeling at home in the universe.
Despite the trauma that may have previously created a lack of self-worth, this transformation is possible.
The resultant very positive sense of self-worth and the joy that this brings is the foundation of well-being and the greatest possession that life can offer.
- Dr. Peter Hercules
