Knowing Your Value
It can be tempting, and indeed entirely involuntary, to assume that if someone is treating your poorly it is because you’ve done something wrong, or, worse, that there is something wrong with you.
How many times do we do this to ourselves? It shows up in our inner dialogue:
They hated my ideas. I'm the worst.
He screamed at me. If I wasn't so mousy I wouldn’t have frustrated him.
She broke up with me — of course she did, she figured out that I’m not worth a damn.
But here’s a wild idea: the way people treat you has nothing whatsoever to do with your value.
Yeah, yeah. Easy to say. Not as easy to believe, much less embody, much less act on, much less live by.
But I’m going to invite you to try something:
Think of a situation where you felt the sting of being rejected, mistreated or ill-used, or you felt responsible for hurting or angering another person. Conjure up this situation in your head and sense into it until you feel those feelings again — it might feel like a dropping in your stomach, a sense of dread, shame and guilt, or the overwhelming desire to sink into the floor and never come back. When the feeling is alive in you, I invite you to stay there for a minute.
Do not comfort yourself, do not explain it away or justify your position. Stay with the feeling. This will not be comfortable, but try. Stay there as long as you can.
You may notice that the feeling is hardly tolerable, and you will likely find your mind frantically seeking a way out. If your mind can label this revolting experience, categorize it, and “solve” it, that makes it manageable right? Well, no, but it gives you something else to think about, and minds love a good distraction.
According to the reactive mind, the solution is to label yourself deficient or lacking in value. It doesn’t make a lot of logical sense to believe that someone else’s behavior assigns you value or takes it away, but our minds do this, and if we look closely at it, we can find out why.
Think of the way we treat children at school — when they are “good” (i.e. sitting still, listening, cute, friendly) we praise and accept them. When they are “bad” (possessive, emotional, overwhelmed) we exclude, shame, and reject them. Essentially we teach kids that if they’re getting good things from the environment, then that means they’re “being good”. And if not, well then they are “being bad.” For a kid, this is about as nuanced an understanding as they are capable of.
Some part of our mind never outgrew this way of thinking, and when we feel rejected, this is the automatic place we go — “Oh no, I am feeling bad and therefore I must be bad.” It’s unconscious and automatic — it’s not like we sit there are say these things to ourselves. Rather we feel, wordlessly, that there is some awful truth to hide, to overcome, or to push away.
But you’re not a child anymore. You can recognize when this feeling of “I’m bad” comes up, and apply some levelheaded logic to it. As an adult you know a few key things that turn the people-give-me-value theory on its head:
Some people mistreat everyone. Whether the people around them are good intentioned, friendly, kind — it doesn’t matter, some people ascribe value to no one at all.
You jive with some people, but not others — there is no apparent explanation. It is impossible to be deemed valuable by everyone.
People have rich inner lives, histories, motivations and conditions that affect they way they behave — 99% of it has nothing to do with you.
Value is not earned.
Read number 4 again.
Your value came from nowhere and can’t be lost. It was not given to you, so it can’t be taken away. It was not earned, nor can it be attained. Your value is simply evident, as true as your existence. It is untainted and irrepressible. It can be felt as a kind of dignity, a solidness, an unassailable beautiful self-authority.
Can you breathe this in? Can you relax the muscles between your eyebrows, let your eyelids hang lower on your eyes, let your gaze soften and just feel into this truth?
This is your natural state — aligned with your inherent worthiness, your value. There never was, nor could there ever be, anything bad or wrong about it.
