Often cultivating courage, compassion and connection in order to build worthiness, actually takes enough of a sense of worthiness in the first place. So how can you build worth, if doing so takes a sense of self-worth and self-value that you don’t yet have? Or may not be connected with?
Welcome to the Safe Enough Podcast! This podcast is an exploration of what it means to feel safe enough in order to live the kind of life, or make the kind of changes that transform our lives, into those with all the love, connection, belonging and purpose that we seek and strive for. My name is MacPherson Worobec, founder of the It Begins To Move studio. I am a safety and self-worth recovery partner, and I’m so happy that you’re here.
In this short 2 episode series on self-worth, I’ll be talking about what self-worth actually is, and how to grow it. Self-worth is the foundation that underlies self-esteem, self-confidence, self-compassion, self-care, and ultimately great relationships and feelings of happiness and ease. These are all things that many of us want more of in our lives, but just like trying to build a house without building the foundation first, greater self-worth may be the foundational key to growing all those other wonderful things. This episode will attempt to define what self-worth is, and the next episode, episode #13, will discuss how self-worth builds and grows.
What is that thing, that some folks have more of, and some folks have less of? If we can understand what that thing is, then we can have a much more productive conversation about how to grow and increase that thing, the sense of self-value and self-worth. But we have to know what it is that we’re growing first. And to me, just talking about esteem, doesn’t cut it. That’s not specific enough. And! I absolutely LOVE everything that Brene Brown studies, writes and talks about. To me, her work has been groundbreaking, and thank heavens for it! But her work talks about what’s possible when you have a foundational sense of worthiness. YES to all the things that are possible when you have it! But what IS it, what IS worthiness, and how do you grow it. In her book “The Gifts of Imperfection,” Brene Brown talks about how cultivating courage, compassion and connection are the keys to building more worthiness. Now again, I’d like to say for the record that I love, love, love that book, and all of the other books she’s written, and all of the talks she’s given. However, for folks who are recovering from the after effects of complex and relational trauma, cultivating courage, compassion and connection can be significantly challenging, or near impossible. To say this another way, I think she’s right, but I also think there’s a chicken and egg dilemma at play. Often cultivating courage, compassion and connection in order to build worthiness, actually takes enough of a sense of worthiness in the first place. So how can you build worth, if doing so takes a sense of self-worth and self-value that you don’t yet have? Or may not be connected with? It’s like building your own house, without training as a carpenter, electrician, plumber, excavator, cement worker, general contractor, etc. Sure, you may understand that the kitchen sink needs to be connected to the main sewer line and the main water line, and that when those are hooked up correctly, it will be much easier to cook and wash dishes with fresh running water inside your home kitchen. You might understand all that, but how do you actually make that happen, if you don’t have plumbing training and expertise, or the right tools in your toolbox to begin with? So I started to explore the question of what self-worth is. What is it? How is it defined? What makes it up? As Brene Brown says, “clear is kind.” If you go searching for gold, it’s helpful to know what gold looks like so that you know exactly what you’re looking for, and can recognize it when you find it! If we know what self-worth is, what makes it up, and what factors influence it, then we’ll have a much better idea of how to build, grow and sustain it!
So according to Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “worth” has a multilayered origin. And what I mean by that, is that it has its root in a word, that has its root in a word, that has its root in a word, and so on, a few more levels down. And what I glean from reading the whole entry are a few things that I find really interesting, that I’d like to share with you, and talk about some more. So, firstly, the word “worth” is an adjective. It’s a descriptor. And that’s important because it describes another thing. It’s a quality, it’s not actually a thing itself. Worth is not the thing, it’s the quality of having the thing. And the word that’s most frequently used in the definition of the word “worth,” or its common synonym, is the word “value.” The worth of something is, in essence, the quality of having value. Now, value is a noun. It’s a thing. You can have it or not have it, but worth is the quality of having it, or what it’s like to have a particular kind of value. And I’ll talk more about the interesting nuance of value in a few minutes, but, following the root of the word worth, ultimately ends at this concept of symbolization. Worth symbolizes having this thing that we call the value of something. So if worth is a descriptor or symbolization of value, the question really is: what determines the value of one human life? If humans are not worth dollars, then what is a better measure? Because some folks have lower amounts of self-worth and self-value, and some folks have higher amounts.
If you do a Google search for the definition of value, you’ll come up with words like significant, important, beneficial or usefulness. Essentially something is valuable to the degree to which something is useful. Degree of usefulness, I think, is an unhelpful connotation of understanding the value of a human being. If you take this current day definition of value, which is frankly commodified, and apply it to human life, or the understanding of human worth and worthiness, I think you’ll be left with a very limited idea of what someone’s worth means. So as a language person, as someone who thinks that the way we talk about things and the words we use matter, I started digging deeper into the etymology of the word value, the root of its meaning about usefulness. Value comes from the Latin word “valere” which means “to be strong.” “Valere,” comes from the PIE or proto-indo-european base root “wal” or often in western English languages we pronounce “w” like “v”, so we would pronounce the PIE root “val.” And PIE roots, are essentially the most basic forms of a word. Even just one sound or syllable creates the base meaning for other words that are built around that base root. All words build around a common base root, share the same common meaning, but then the rest of the word has slightly different connotations. So the PIE root “wal” or “val” which actually means “strong,” is the base root of words like valid, valiant, valor and prevail. They all have slightly different meanings, but they all share this same basic root meaning. Strong. Now interestingly, the word strong is also an adjective, just like worth. It describes something. It is the quality of having strength, which is a noun. And since worth is a description of something’s value, and the basic root meaning of value is strength, in a sense we can say that worth, is a description or a symbolization of something’s strength. Ok, so I think that’s plenty interesting, but here’s where I think it gets even more interesting. So the word strength comes from the PIE root “strenk” which according to Online Etymology Dictionary, means “tight and narrow” like a string. Like a string that you’re pulling taught, or tight. I never thought of strength like that. I always thought of strength like, big muscles, brute force, can lift or carry heavy things. Or the emotional application of that same principle, which would be like the ability to carry, bear or withstand heavy, or stressful situations without crumbling, without dis-integrating. I had never associated the two concepts of strength and tight or narrow. But when I think of the concept of a person who is narrow and tight, like a string, I think of someone who’s really one-track minded, who has really narrow thinking. Meaning that they’re not flexible in taking on a different perspective. They’re committed to thinking about something in a very particular way, like no matter what info is presented to the contrary. They are the opposite of slack and wobbly in their beliefs. Instead, taught, strong, unwavering. A string is like a line. Like a clothes line or a fishing line. So when I put all that together: taught like a string, narrow as steadfast and unwavering in belief, it actually makes me think of someone holding the line of a particular belief. Sure, strength can mean being able to lift, carry, or bear - both physical and emotional experiences - but Online Etymology Dictionary also lists “fortitude, firmness and moral resistance” in the definition of strength. Oxford Languages, which is a prestigious international dictionary, defines the phrase “holding the line” as “not yielding to the pressure of a difficult situation.” And to me, this phrase fits so well with “fortitude, firmness and moral resistance,” in the definition of strength. Another word for narrow is focused. Like zero’d in. Not wide and sweeping, but very narrow, select and pointed. Focused. Perhaps we can say that strength is the ability to stay unwaveringly focused on something, no matter what else is happening around you. Holding the line. Uncompromising. Unswayed. Resisting any efforts to be convinced otherwise, or thrown off your game. Having unwavering conviction. Never abandoning your belief. It reminds me of resilience in the face of adversity.
But the question still remains, if worth is effectively holding the line, what is someone with high self-worth holding the line of? What’s the belief? And here’s the thing. Even though value, as a concept, is not exclusively economic, transactional, or commodified, I think that - at least in developed nations - we tend to think of value in these terms. Like the usefulness of something, or how much money it represents. You know, the more expensive, the better. But thinking this way about the value of human life, is exactly what can lead us to think that different folks can have different levels of value. It’s exactly what can allow us to believe that our value, or our own worth, could be lower, of a lesser amount, than someone else’s….I actually think, that human worth and human value are self-referential. Human value is not commodified, it doesn't refer to an external quantifiable thing, like money. Humans have a different kind of non-commodified, non-transactional value. I think that human worth and value, is a closed loop system. Worth refers to, and symbolizes, having value, which refers back to the sense of worth...which represents having value, which means having the sense of this unwavering quality of value. Value and worth refer to each other, in this closed loop system, because they don’t refer to or symbolize anything outside of the system that defines this kind of human worth and value. They only refer to themselves. Stay with me for a moment, I know this whole self-referential nature of human worth and value can sound like a whole lot of confusing gobbledy gook. This whole closed-loop thing is a mind-bender for me, because logically my mind wants to look for the external reference of value. Our culture, or at least my culture, my US, industrialized, colonizing, capitalist culture, attunes my brain and perception of value of things towards evaluating everything in a system of comparison: is thing A more or less valuable to me than thing B, which then allows that determination to justify my actions and behavior towards both of those things...So this is the context in which we exist as humans. The cultural environment in which humans live and relate to each other, matters. Our words and our language are imbued with conceptual and cultural meaning, and those words and those concepts influence how we think, what we do, and how we feel. In this kind of transactional, capitalist, colonizing, industrialized culture, it’s understandable to approach human worth or human value from this framework. It’s what we’re taught, it’s how other folks interact with us, much of the time, and it's what our institutionalized systems of culture perpetuate. If worth is a descriptor, and describes value, and value is understood as quantifiable, objective, measurable, and perhaps outside of ourselves, then of course we’d think that our worth is earned, gained, collected, lost, spent, spent wisely, spent unwisely, qualified for, and other branches of a money based metaphor. But perhaps, there’s a completely different class of value, that’s only reserved for the value of life. What if it’s neither internal or external, subjective or objective? What if it's not quantifiable? What if it just is...granted. Like a principle of nature. What if self-value means that, if you are born, it’s simply your existence that makes you just as worthy of being alive, and experiencing all the gifts of living, as every other human being? In her book, Daring Greatly, Brene Brown says that "The important thing to know about worthiness is that it doesn't have prerequisites." She’s saying that there’s nothing that you need, in order to EARN worthiness. If you’re alive, then you already have it. Therefore, worth and value become this self-referential loop. You are valuable because you exist. Because you inherently are valuable, then you have the quality of value, you are worthy. You are worthy because you have value, and you have value because you are worthy, and so on. Self-referential. They refer to each other. It’s a closed-loop system. Period. Full stop. And THIS is where I think that self-worth recovery work comes in. Suppose all humans have value, and the same amount of value at that, which means that you have just as much value as anyone else. Suppose that’s just a fact. An unconditional principle of nature. And value is KNOWING that, and I mean knowing that deep down, in the core of yourself, without a shadow of a doubt. And self-worth is having the quality of someone who really knows that they are just as valuable, as every single other person. No more and no less. Self-worth is the living embodiment of the knowing of that principle. Self-worth symbolizes the internalized knowing. This kind of person, a person with high self-worth, is so tight and narrow in this belief. Strong and focused, and unwavering - no matter what information to the contrary is being presented. And this can be particularly important to folks who are recovering their self-worth, or discovering their self-worth for the first time. Folks who aren’t sure if they’re as valuable as any other human, learned that somewhere, or didn’t learn that they have this incredible and amazing and inherent value, in the first place. And that’s what I’ll be talking about in the next episode - why someone might have a sense that they aren’t as valuable, why they might have a sense that they're less valuable than someone else, or why their needs or their safety is less valuable than someone else’s. And how to recover that natural principle of self-value and worth, how to discover it, how to grow it! How to discover or recover your sense of I am absolutely as valuable as all other humans. Your sense of I am so sure that this is true, that I never waver in that belief, even if someone else is trying to CONVINCE me that I am less valuable. Because the more you can hold the line of your inherent value and worth, the easier it is to make deep and meaningful connections with others, the easier it is to recognize your own greatness, and the easier it is to give your amazing gifts to the world and align with your life’s purpose. It is the key to giving and receiving love, and having those incredible connections with yourself, the folks around you, and the whole world we live in. It’s the key to all the things that most of us want more of in our lives. The next episode will talk all about how to grow a sense of self-worth, so don’t forget to subscribe, so that you know exactly when that episode is available. If there’s something about the self-worth recovery journey that resonates with you, you might want to register for the very special upcoming event Experiencing My Self Worth. It’s a free and live event that’s happening soon. If you’d like ot register, you can do so on my website itbeginstomove.com to register. That’s all lower case and the word to, t-o, not the number 2. Itbeginstomove.com to register. I really hope to see you there. And if you find this podcast helpful, please rate it on your listening platform to increase the chance that others can find it too. If there’s any question or topic you’d like to hear me address, leave it in a comment. Take care, kind soul!
