Why is understanding attachment so important in understanding self worth?

Attachment is all about developing a felt sense of security. When we do not develop that felt sense of security, fear replaces it. What kind of fear? Fear of abandonment. All attachment insecurities are built upon one thing - fear of abandonment. It’s quite an interesting phenomenon and easy to evoke, even in adulthood. I remember when I was 23 living in NYC hanging out at a friend’s apartment. I had developed quite a reputation for “Irish-exiting” parties. At some point in the night I got up off the couch and started walking to the hallway. My friend, who’s apartment I was in, jumped up and in a panicked voice said “Vin! Where are you going!?” I just had to pee. But the regular, unannounced nature of my departures had instilled such a fear of abandonment in him that he jumped to retrieve me.

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When we are taught that relationships are inherently conditional and transactional, we reduce ourselves to the roles we provide to others and turn ourselves into a resource for other people’s consumption. By reducing ourselves to this role-resource, we lose connection to that unqualified, fundamental humanity within us.

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Chapter Two: What Moves The Needle of Self Worth?

If you want to fundamentally improve your self worth, you must first understand what actually impacts it the most. Working on one’s mental health should always be targeted at getting the best bang for your buck, so let’s first address a common approach that doesn’t yield much return: affirmation.

The hard truth is that self worth is not something you can profoundly influence with words (e.g., words of affirmation). It’s not that words of affirmation outright can’t impact you positively, they may be able to move the needle somewhat. The problem is that words are about as powerful as we believe them to be true. Thus if we speak words we do not believe, if we speak words that are not an accurate reflection of our internal experience, we will not get very far. That is why so many people find words of affirmation do not completely “scratch the itch.”

Words that are not an accurate representation of what we already believe will therefore carry little weight. You can say you are a good person in the mirror until you are blue in the face, but if you do not believe it, then you are basically trying to half-heartedly cast a spell over yourself. Harry Potter learned this lesson the hard way after his failed first attempt to make something levitate with his wand. As Hermione once said, “It’s LeviOsa, not LevioSA!”

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Chapter One: What Is Self Worth?

At its core, self worth is simply valuing oneself just as much as we value others, plus a little extra. Why a little extra? For the same reason we are told to secure our own oxygen mask before helping the person next to you - in order to take care of others we must first take care of ourselves. We should be more invested in our own well-being by default, for the same reason we’re more inclined to wash our own car rather than our neighbor’s; our life, not someone else’s, is our ultimate responsibility. That does not mean helping your neighbor is a bad thing, nor does it mean you can’t find joy in doing so. What it does mean is that if you are washing your neighbor’s car while yours is filthy, it’s a sign you might suffer from low self worth.

Low self worth essentially means not feeling enough. What does it mean to truly feel not enough? If feeling enough equates to having self worth, then what is it that some people just don’t have enough of?

Feeling not enough may sound like an abstract concept until one day it becomes a visceral gut punch to your psyche. Many of us are born with this vague, underlying sense of inadequacy, but it’s not until that sense of inadequacy is evoked in a specific setting does this feeling make itself known. Only then do we start to recognize there is a problem, and this happens usually at the worst possible times, like during a speech, or on a first date, or even during a sexual encounter.

At the end of this book, you will realize this sense of inadequacy that previously controlled your life and made you feel not enough was in fact a fiction from the beginning. The central thesis of this book can be summed up as follows:

To go from not feeling enough to feeling whole is a process of recognizing and removing, not a process of changing and improving. We recognize our inherent sense of wholeness after we remove all of the unnecessary beliefs and rules we thought were necessary to be loved by ourselves and others.

By the end of this book the insight you eventually will feel in your bones is that nothing needs to be added to feel this sense of wholeness, we just have to remove that which obscures our recognition of it. We just need to clean our glasses to see what was always in front of us. There is nowhere to go - just something to return back to.

The Deepest Secret Truth About Self Worth

The deepest truth about self worth is that it would not exist if other people did not exist. Self worth is inherently relational. Other people need to exist for self worth to even matter. If you lived on a planet by yourself and never knew of other people, this book would not even be necessary. Comparison may be the thief of joy but what you will soon learn is it’s also the thief of self worth.

Low self-worth therefore will always be born out of comparison. When we see others as having “more”—a sibling’s success, a friend’s accomplishment, a colleague’s attractiveness—we unconsciously and inevitably begin to experience ourselves as having “less.” It’s not only that we have less, we start to feel like we are less. This quiet, unconscious transition - perceiving that we have less to feeling like we are less - is the root of all self worth problems, and it happens without us even realizing it.

It is not that you decided you are inadequate, no one chooses to feel lesser than - your mind made that jump in logic without your consent. It happened in the background of your consciousness without your direct awareness. It did this in order to explain what it was witnessing, i.e., that other people seem to have more of something than you do.

So what answer does the mind come up with then?

Our minds are not interested in being completely accurate with explaining what it is perceiving. The goal is to just explain what’s happening in some logical way to make sense of the world. Because our minds hate uncertainty, the explanation of what it is witnessing (i.e., being less attractive, less athletic, less smart) tends to lean in the direction of finding fault within ourselves. “There must be something fundamentally wrong with me, that is why they are better looking, more athletic, smarter, etc…” Unfortunately, this explanation is the breeding ground for developing a sense of inadequacy and feeling fundamentally flawed as a person. This leads to a lifetime of low self worth.

What does it mean then to feel fundamentally flawed? In the Western world, the best word to describe this sentiment is shame. Shame is more than just an emotion - embarrassment is an emotion. Shame is a core belief that one is lacking in a fundamental way - that one is inherently flawed, and as a consequence will never truly be enough for another person.

Our mind is quite crafty in how it hides this shame. You might be reading this thinking, “I don’t have shame. I just sometimes feel inadequate.” But shame does not have to be evoked in most relationships for it to still exist inside of you. In fact, shame is often only evoked in particular relationships where you play certain roles where you believe you don’t measure up. You may feel “enough” as a daughter, or a husband. You may even feel enough as a friend, or employee. But more often than not, this sense of lacking comes out in romantic relationships. It may come out in other types of relationships too, but most acutely this sense of shame rears its ugly head in romantic relationships precisely because they demand us to be vulnerable in order to be successful.

Low self worth is always going to be tied to our sense of how we measure up in certain roles in our life. It doesn’t even have to be a relational role like parent or sibling, it could even be an abstract role like “the caregiver,” “the glue,” or “the smart one.” The important point to understand is that when we are labeled in such a way that forces us to play specific roles in life, it invites the possibility of shame and low self worth the second we don’t measure up to that expectation.

So what do people with a lot of shame unknowingly do? They start avoiding any situations where rejection can occur. If shame was a person, its arch-enemy would be rejection. Shame hates rejection because when we are rejected, our deepest, darkest beliefs about our inadequacy come out of hiding. It’s painful to feel rejected, and even more painful when that rejection seemingly confirms a fear we had about our own inadequacy.

It is very possible you have a lot of shame right now but simultaneously never feel it because people with a lot of shame tend to curate lives around triggering it. If shame was personified it would never go on a date, it would never ask for that promotion, or even try a new hobby because rejection is its kryptonite. Rejection, from the perspective of shame, is confirmation of the deepest beliefs about one’s un-lovability.

Is there hope or what?!

If shame is the root of low self worth, vulnerability is the ladder that helps us climb out of it. Shame tells you to hide parts of yourself for the sake of acceptance by others, whereas vulnerability invites you to show all of yourself in order to find those who accept the real you. Both concepts are promising the same outcome, the difference is - when we hide parts of ourselves, we may achieve acceptance by others, but in the process we estrange ourselves from our most fundamental sense of who we are.

There is a fundamental authentic self (we will discuss in future chapters) that we must learn to not just tolerate but also love, because that part of us we do not get to choose. Vulnerability always starts with oneself - we must first be willing to accept all of that which we are before we are able to love that which we are. We must first be willing to see our internal truth before it can even be revealed to us. How can you even tell me your favorite color if you never afforded yourself the right to look inward and observe what it is? This sounds easy to do but it is far from it -knowing one’s favorite color is not a scary exercise because there are no implications for what we discover. The color red is not at risk of inconveniencing other relationships. Your sexuality, on the other hand, may be depending on who we are talking about.

Ultimately, the root belief of shame - that you must hide who you are in order to find a sense of community with others - can only be unearthed if you recognize the false choice of this statement. To hide your true self from others is the real estrangement that you fear. To feel alone in a crowded room because you did not want to risk the real you being rejected is the real estrangement. To know that the real you is deserving of love and to live in accordance with that truth is the only path where true connection (both with yourself and other people) is possible.

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“Comparison may be the thief of joy but what you will soon learn

is it’s also the thief of self worth.”

Low self worth essentially means not feeling enough. What does it mean to truly feel not enough? If feeling enough equates to having self worth, then what is it that some people just don’t have enough of?

Feeling not enough may sound like an abstract concept until one day it becomes a visceral gut punch to your psyche. Many of us are born with this vague, underlying sense of inadequacy, but it’s not until that sense of inadequacy is evoked in a specific setting does this feeling make itself known. Only then do we start to recognize there is a problem, and this happens usually at the worst possible times, like during a speech, or on a first date, or even during a sexual encounter.

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Because of this belief system, we conclude something must be done to navigate this uncertainty in relationships. To reduce that distressing feeling underneath everything, we unknowingly will either abandon the connection we have with ourselves or abandon the connection we have other people just to regulate that sense of discomfort. Which direction you take will be determined by your attachment style, but the aligning reality across all types of insecure attachment is that we will inevitably make the following bargain:

“I must either abandon my self or other people in order to feel safe.”

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Personalizing occurs as a way for us to explain when bad things happen. Specifically, when personalization happens we find a way to make a bad outcome a consequence of ourselves. Thus to personalize a bad experience means to blame ourselves for a situation. Not only do we blame ourselves, we often will specifically point toward our deepest insecurities when these bad things occur as a way to explain it.

Why would we personalize if it is so harmful to our self worth?

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Sitting with an emotion simply means allowing it to exist, and doing nothing with it. You can attend to it (i.e., give it your attention), but you can’t fixate on it, because then your attention becomes an obsession. This is a nuanced concept because our mind wants concrete instruction. Our mind wants to know what to do in order to get rid of this thing that is so distressing.

If you have been working on your mental health, you are probably at the point where you have stopped avoiding feeling a bunch of unpleasant emotions - shame and guilt and anger are no longer sublimated into more digestible morsels of pain, but they are still there. You may be thinking - what do I actually do with these unpleasant emotions now that I am aware of how much they have unconsciously been controlling me and hurting my self worth?

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Share Vincent Barbieri, PhD

Sure you can take it but should you? Your self-worth is what’s at stake here, and your self worth doesn’t care what you tell yourself, it cares about how you treat yourself. And all it sees is someone who willingly and knowingly exposes themselves to harm.

Some relationships in your life right now are like the above example. If you get within 5 feet of them they will harm you. You may have your rationalizations for why you can’t distance yourself but the part of yourself that you can’t speak to directly (i.e., your self worth) does not really care, it is immune to rationalizations. Rationalizations are manufactured by the mind, and your deeper sense of self only cares about your behaviors - all it sees is someone consciously exposing their hands to getting bitten.

Here are three common rationalizations that keep us in relationships that don’t serve us:

• “They mean well.”

• “They are your [husband/wife/mother/father/sister/brother/best friend]”

• “It’s not that bad.”

Let’s now go through each of these rationalizations one by one:

“They mean well.”

The central thesis of this statement is that you should not distance or remove yourself from relationships where the other person seemingly has positive intent. Here is the main problem with this rationalization: anyone can hide behind positive intent. Intent becomes the cover that allows people to avoid accountability and perpetually mistreat you.

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Attachment is all about developing a felt sense of security. When we do not develop that felt sense of security, fear replaces…

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