I am working through “worthiness” with my therapist right now. This has been something I have struggled with my entire life. It sounds simple: Just love yourself. Yet self help gurus have sold us thousands and even millions of affirmational books, tapes, podcasts, meditations and other such jargon to help us do just that: love ourselves. It’s a great big part of our economy. Hmmmm…maybe there’s something to that (but more on that later).

A quick snapshot of my growing up years: I adored my father. He was my hero, my role model, and everything I wanted to be like when I grew up. He was an athlete, he was funny, he was kind, and he was very outgoing. It didn’t hurt either that my father was tall, dark, and handsome. Shit, when I was in elementary school, he was the king of the school as the P.E. teacher and only male teacher. Everybody loved him at school, and he was MY dad. So I spent my entire childhood trying to make him proud, trying to measure up, hoping to get his attention. With three siblings and a dad with a ton of sports responsibilities (between coaching, umpiring, refereeing, and playing in his own softball and basketball leagues), I had to carve out my own place somehow within his circle. The best way I knew how was to achieve. I worked hard to get good grades, I hustled on the court to improve my basketball skills, and I decided against pursuing my passion of dance on a more full-time basis in order to spend more time working on my basketball, volleyball, and soccer skills. Sports was the way to my dad’s heart, not dance. I gave him a little piece of my own heart by giving up the dance route in hopes of getting his heart in return.

My form of rebellion in high school consisted of going out for soccer my freshman year instead of track & field, of which my dad coached Varsity. I figured it wasn’t too rebellious because it was still a sport. But at the time our girls soccer team wasn’t very good, and I wanted to win. So I decided track & field would allow me to have control over my own destiny in that regard. I told my dad I would only go out for track if I could run relays only (as my confidence level wasn’t yet great in that sport). He agreed and off I went around the track my sophomore year. Somehow though, my dad convinced me to run the mile towards the end of the year, and I ran a really good time for someone who had never really raced a mile seriously. When junior and senior year rolled around, I was ready to be a miler and made it to state two years in a row. Of course, wanting to make my dad proud, I set a goal to break the Blair High mile record my senior year. Due to some unforeseen circumstances in my senior year, I didn’t meet that goal, and I felt like a failure. Once again, I failed to meet what I thought were my dad’s expectations when, in reality, they were my own. 

I believe wholeheartedly that my feelings of unworthiness are tied to my relationship with my dad. But it took me until this year to truly understand that. I denied it for a long time because I actually carried guilt around the idea of blaming my dad for my feelings of unworthiness. He would do anything for me and was a great dad. The truth is that both things can be true at the same time: Our parents can love us and be willing to do anything for us AND they can also still raise us with unmet needs and feelings that we aren’t good enough. In my dad’s case, I don’t think I always felt seen by him because he simply had too much going on all the time. He did the best he could to show us love and be there for us, but he was too strapped to give us each an adequate amount of attention. My sister and I always had a contentious relationship growing up, and I believe it was because on a subconscious level we were competing for his attention and admiration. 

How children receive love in childhood is extremely important because it determines how we approach love relationships in adulthood. I still have a tendency to need to prove my worth to my love interests instead of believing that I am already worthy and love-able just the way I am. I cringe every time I say that because I don’t like admitting that I have feelings of unworthiness. It makes me feel weak, vulnerable, and icky. In my rational mind I feel I am too enlightened and educated to be carrying around such ridiculous feelings. But those feelings run so deep within us from childhood that it is extremely difficult to expel and unlearn them. On an intellectual level I know I am worthy. I am an intelligent, hardworking, patient, loving, talented, self-actualized person, but no matter how many times I write about it or say it to myself, I still FEEL those wretched unworthy feelings bubble up when life isn’t going my way. And it is in that way that worthiness is extremely complicated.

We have to excavate all the hurts and slights from childhood, dig through all our complicated emotions, and extract out where we were emotionally injured…because we were ALL injured at some point. Nobody has perfect parents. My parents come close, but there were still instances when my emotional needs weren’t met, and I wasn’t feeling seen, heard, or understood. I remember one specific instance in high school when I was taken out of a basketball game by my head coach (my dad was an assistant coach for the team), and he never put me back in. I thought I had done something wrong, but I didn’t know what. So I went home and cried, and cried, and cried…because I thought I had failed and disappointed my dad. He did not understand why I was crying or why I was so upset. To his credit, he did slip a note onto my pillow that night that told me how much he loved me and how proud he was of me. But that was a rarity…although me showing my emotions in that way was also a rarity. Most of the time I bottled up my emotions, put my head down, and just worked harder to be better and gain his approval. The result of this dynamic was that I became a perfectionist. There was no song I identified with more at that time than when the song “Perfect” by Alanis Morrissette came out my senior year. I listened to it a thousand times. That whole album was my anthem album. Every song spoke to my desire to rebel against being perfect, being accomplished, feeling like I would never measure up to my own expectations…and nobody knew I was going through it. 

To this day I have sought to be accomplished in my life. The tricky thing about adulthood is that there are thousands of definitions of “accomplished” and I had no idea what that actually meant for me. I put really high, too high, expectations on myself and then felt that I continued to fail. I was extremely confused and unhappy in my twenties. I got married when I was 21, mistake number one. Very few people can find their true selves in the middle of a marriage in their early twenties. I floundered a lot to find my place in the world and to understand what my passions were. I face-planted at age 25 when I separated from my then husband the first time and moved back home. At that time I dove into therapy, self-help books, and writing. I fell into writing out of complete necessity. The only way I knew how to process my emotions was to write them down somewhere, to physically get them out of my brain and body. Writing truly saved me…and it has been my tool towards climbing back up the mountain of despair into those elusive clouds of worthiness. 

I think there is a bigger story here though because society, media, and general expectations show us how we are failing daily. For women specifically, we are coerced to buy that anti–aging, wrinkle cream, take those magic pills for weight loss, have that baby before we are “geriatric” age, and do all the things that give us worth: go to the gym, join the PTA, volunteer for that cause, and buy the nice house and car in the right school district. We are smacked with expectations at every turn, and most of the time, it is in service of the economy….capitalism. Our Capitalist society breeds unworthiness…as we run on the treadmill of keeping up with the Joneses and generally “killing it” while trying to have it all. I got off that treadmill a long time ago, but I still compare myself to others. It’s impossible not to at times. I have worked hard to create this small wonderful little life that I can be proud of…and overall, I am really happy. I am so content where I am…and yet, when it comes to my love life, I am stuck. The monster of unworthiness rears its ugly head, and I have constant battles to fight it back into submission.

My therapist says I need to take a step back and truly work on that…but, I have tried working on that for a long time, and I truly don’t know how. I guess it is why I am still in therapy and the reason I am writing about it now. There is still a little child part inside me that is trying to guard my emotions and protect me from being hurt and disappointed by love. That protection is felt as tightness in my stomach, and it shows itself through the same mechanism I used to find worthiness with my father. I seek opportunities to achieve and to accomplish. If I do the good, difficult deeds, he (the guy of the moment) will notice and then I will be worthy of his love. I have never been good at sitting in my pain and allowing it to come up to the surface. Most of us aren’t. We all find coping mechanisms to cover it up and tamp it down. Nobody wants to feel pain. But I need to acknowledge that I have residual pain from childhood as it relates to my dad, and as an adult it has actually manifested in other ways with my dad.

My dad and I have drifted apart in some ways because we have very different politics and ways of looking at the world. I believe it is partially generational and partly his inability to navigate the current technological and information landscape as it has rapidly changed, leaving older folks behind who have not kept up with it. The other dynamic at play is that my dad is getting older. I noticed his decline about 4 or 5 years ago when he tried to help me replace my roof. Without going into detail, I ended up having to call a roofing company to finish after two days because it was too much for my dad to handle at the age of 70, and I couldn’t finish it by myself. I realized then that my dad isn’t going to be around forever and it scared me. I began distancing myself from him and calling on other friends for help with things around my house. What I didn’t take into account is that “acts of service” is my dad’s love language. So I think by not depending on him for everything has made him feel more distant from me as well. So we haven’t been super close in recent years, and we tend to get into contentious conversations easily over politics and the state of our world. There are a lot of layers at play with my father, but my point is that my childhood wounds can’t heal until I heal my relationship with my dad now. But even then, I still have to confront my relationship with myself. That’s the truly hard part.

Worthiness is not a simple concept. I think everyone struggles with this on some level. Mine manifests mostly around romantic relationships. I struggle with intimacy and vulnerability around love relationships, and I pick emotionally unavailable men because dating them feels like it felt in childhood trying to gain my father’s attention…my father who wasn’t always emotionally or physically available to me. In a weird way it feels comfortable and safe even though it is dysfunctional. It isn’t actually safe; it is just familiar. However, knowing this is what’s happening inside my body isn’t enough to fix it. Awareness is only the first step. The rest is much more difficult, but I am working on it. I have to learn to separate care for someone else from care for myself. Sometimes we have to love at a distance and respect ourselves enough to walk away from these situations when we see them for what they are: a perpetuation of unhealthy dynamics in childhood. We have to love ourselves enough to demand what we deserve, unconditional love, affection, and attention. It’s not easy, especially for an empath like me who sees and feels value in literally everyone. When I invest in someone, I want to make it work. I am not a quitter; I am a manifester. But love doesn’t work that way; it has to work in two directions, not one. 

Worthiness is definitely a complicated concept, but it is worthy of our attention (see what I did there haha)? Until we truly understand that we are worthy of love exactly as we are, we likely will continue to have discomfort around love in our lives. I will fight for that state of being until the day I die because I deserve to know it, and I do know it intellectually; I just need to feel it in my body and in my soul. And so the work continues…