You are not worthless.

The idea that you owe something to the world, a relationship, a person, or a job, is at the core of the belief that you have no value.

Once this toxic belief takes hold, earning your value becomes your primary focus in society, friendships, and love. You believe you have no value until you earn it, and you earn it by putting others first. Instead of inspiring others to lift you up, you create universal insistence on always taking last place.

If your behavior communicates that you have no value, other people will agree, if only to accommodate you. They are trained to consider you the bottom priority and treat you as a low-value person. The anxiety, depression, and stress this creates in the codependent only leads to more dedicated, virulent people-pleasing behavior.

Positive messaging for this behavior is crystal clear in all major social systems. In capitalist society, you must be productive and succeed at acquiring wealth, or you are a failure and have no value. In communist society, you must be productive and succeed at promoting the revolution, party, or government, or you are a failure, have no value, and are an enemy of the state.

In each case, ass-kissing (aka politics) is the only way to achieve any real value or security. “Good” citizens believe what they are told, make every attempt to be a good person, and succeed in gaining objective evidence that they have value.

Believing you are worthless often comes from adverse childhood experiences. Physical and sexual abuse, neglect, and living under a parent with any variety of mental illnesses can leave a child feeling powerless, unseen, and worthless.

Getting hit by someone who is supposed to protect you, being criticized in the home where you are supposed to feel safe, or failing to cheer a depressed parent can eviscerate a young, healthy child, and leave them with a gaping hole where other children are bursting with self-esteem.

Feeling worthless is not an accident. You were not born this way. You were not offered developmentally appropriate support to learn to trust yourself. Hating this fact is often misunderstood as hating yourself, and makes self-destructive behaviors like smoking cigarettes, alcoholism, work addiction, high-risk jobs, supporting abusive partners, and walking away from your children relatively easy to do. Since you are unlovable, and have no value, nothing you do has any effect on anyone.

————Reality Check————-

Nothing can compromise your compassion for others, for the world, and for the universe. You almost see the world like a Bodhisattva, where everything is almost perfect. Almost everything.

One critical piece is missing. The most critical piece. The piece is you. It is the tremendous, shining core value that you always carry with you. This is the natural self-belief that most people are born with.

All people are precious, riddled creatures walking the earth because they belong there. They came into the world with life in their eyes and have no purpose other than to live and keep on living.

The universal, boundless love that you express with your supportive, pleasing, and rescuing behaviors shows your deep connection with the innate value of everyone on earth. You even see the good in people who manipulate and insult you and treat you as subhuman.

You love all people, and as soon as you see yourself among them, you will have the antidote to toxic beliefs: unconditional positive self-regard.