Stop Questioning Your Worth

Knowing your worth is an necessity

Questioning your worth creates a self-blindness in love that warps your perception and makes it seem like the love you want is impossibly far away or that you have to overwork and "fix" yourself endlessly to deserve it.

Stop questioning your worth.

Take it out as a variable as to why you don’t have the love you want.

Treat your worth as a constant.

Considering wherever you are on your self-worth journey (whether you’re at the beginning, still wobbly, or near solid) is irrelevant for the frame of thinking I’m presenting here and it’s actually not useful.

For this frame, it’s required that you think beyond that.

So assumed worth is necessary.

To demonstrate why, let’s take a common example: when a woman has overextended herself with a man and doesn’t get half of the effort back that she puts in, she complains, and the man then says something to the effect of,

“Well, I didn’t ask you to do those things.”

The average response to this is the react, retract, spiral, and question-her-worth stunt that she pulls every time, where she blows up or breaks down over the thought,

“You are supposed to do things for the people you care about. Clearly he’s showing me that he cares nothing about me. Why is it always like this for me? I love too hard and I’m never getting it back in return. I guess it’s not meant for me, and I don’t know what’s wrong with me or why I can never be treated well. Why am I never enough? I can’t do this anymore.”

And then she retreats for a while, focuses on herself, and eventually puts herself back out there—except nothing is resolved.

She’s starting from the same starting point with the same trajectory toward an endpoint where she doesn’t get the outcome she wants, and the react, retract, spiral, and question-her-worth combo is set off again.

It starts all back up again because the core issue (overextending to prove worth and get love) remains unresolved, so the cycle repeats.

Like most unhelpful patterns, once you’re aware of them, they can be skipped.

Instead of the repeat pattern, she can actually skip all of the thoughts that question her worth or value to be loved, keeping her worth as a constant, and open her eyes to other variables presenting themselves (through the feedback she’s getting) that shows where, how, and when she’s sabotaging the love she wants.

Like, the feedback the man is giving when he says “I didn’t ask you to do those things.”

He’s right.

He didn’t.

The woman can ask herself:

“Why did I do those things?”

She might think:

I guess I was bargaining for love.

I suppose I felt like I had to.

But then, she realizes:

Every time I do, I get the same result.

Maybe I’d get a better outcome if I stopped overextending myself just to be loved.

Maybe I’d stop attracting ‘takers’ this way, too.

If she is taking her worth as a constant (despite her current feelings that want to automatically go to questioning it and using it as a reason for why she’s not experiencing the love she wants), then she’s left with examining herself on the action/behavioral level.

As it is on the action/behavioral level where the sabotaging happens.

And it’s often small things that need to be changed that you don’t allow yourself to see if you’re attributing not having the love you want to a vague idea that your self worth needs to be endlessly worked on in a conveniently undefined and ambiguous way.

Solid self worth only matters because of what it translates to in your practical choices, behaviors, actions, and what you choose to accept or not.

It’s the little, observable things that make the difference.

It’s not always a gigantic truth that you’re missing.

You don’t always need to scrap everything you’re standing on, rebuild yourself again and again, and try to align with this alien version of yourself just to have the love you want.

You don’t need me to tell you how even the thought of that is exhausting.

I’m not here to tell you that “you’re doing the love thing all wrong.”

That angle is tired and often untrue.

I’m here to say that there is something (often a collection of small things tied to one central theme) that is trying to be worked out through the man in front of you and you must be sensitive enough to see what it is without being reactive, retracting, spiraling, and making it mean that your worth is in question.

And when you work it out, the door of being loved in the way you want opens up for you.

When something happens (like the man pulling away, or not being who you thought he was, or him acting against your perceived best interest) and you react, retract, spiral, or question your worth, you miss the subtle, fine detail that tells you why you’re experiencing this and how to stop experiencing it.

It’s often not this big drastic overhaul of things you have to do and mountains you need to climb.

Attributing non-ideal outcomes in love to your lack of self worth allows you to keep thinking that it is and that you need to be fixed in all sorts of ways that just aren’t true.

This is NOT to say that the self worth aspect is not important.

Yes, a low sense of self-worth can cause actions that sabotage love (like overextending, chasing, people-pleasing, tolerating poor treatment).

But the core problem isn’t your self-worth itself. It’s the actions you’re taking because you think your worth is in question.

The constant pursuit of “fixing” your self-worth becomes a kind of busy work or distraction. It is like you’re trying to “earn” or “prove” something that was never actually missing.

And that mission is impossible, because if you’re already inherently worthy, you can’t “become” it.

You just have to believe it and act from that belief.

The real “self-worth secret” is assuming you already are worthy (because in truth, you are) and shifting your actions accordingly, not endlessly fixing yourself.

When I, for instance, work with clients on the self worth aspect as it relates to romantic love, it’s not like we’re actually making them more worthy.

They may come off that way by how they begin to operate, but we didn’t really do anything but get them to believe what already is.

So for some, taking their worth as a constant and operating beyond questioning it (like I've detailed here) solves the worthiness issue for them as they just settle into taking it as a constant.

For others, the decisions they make and actions they take that contribute to what they want in love from the point of operating beyond questioning their worth is what anchors their worth.

Others benefit from more of a real-time back and forth of dissolving of the walls they have up against them being worthy with me who never questioned their worth to begin with.

And others benefit from a combination of those things or other things.

Anything that helps them believe what's already true is effective.

When you can understand that it’s not some drastic issue of you being unworthy or needing to spend 10 more years on inner work, and getting discouraged and retracting just to start up again with no resolve and go through the same thing, your mental and emotional sanity is restored.

And you have a simple “do this, stop doing that” way forward that gives you the outcome you want in love.