Tiny Buddha

Tag: worthlessness

  • Workaholics: Why Staying Busy Feels Safe and How It Takes a Toll

    Workaholics: Why Staying Busy Feels Safe and How It Takes a Toll

    “The ego desperately wants safety. The soul wants to live. The truth is, we cannot lead a real life without risk. We do not develop depth without pain.” ~Carol S. Pearson

    Workaholism is the body’s wisdom in action, literally.

    Some people develop workaholic tendencies because they crave to be seen as the best through their accomplishments.

    But I’m not here to talk about people who’re obsessed over their image.

    The particular strain of “workaholism” that isn’t talked about enough is a perfectionist’s addiction to productivity.

    It has little to do with being recognized for your brilliance or achievements in the outer world, and much more to do with your own unattainably high standards for yourself and others.

    It’s not about winning a shiny trophy at the end of the day so everyone will know you’re the real deal, but knowing that you’ve improved yourself, others, or the environment around you–even if it’s just neurotically reorganizing your closet.

    It’s knowing that you made the world a better place and that you didn’t cut any corners to get there.

    Whether it’s your career, community projects, or personal to-do lists that consume your everyday life, your addiction to activity is problematic for many reasons. Once you get a dose of completing a job, an impulsive urge to drown yourself in more activity immediately creeps in. Without it, you experience a profound sense of worthlessness.

    You struggle with accepting your work as it is, and your inner critic never settles for okay enough.

    This kind of “improvement” workaholism is about self-worth and a felt sense of safety. Because idleness feels unsafe in the body of a workaholic, non-activity is misconstrued as uselessness, which feels like a gaping hole in your beingness. The wisdom of a workaholic’s body knows that not creating, producing, or improving oneself or the environment is on par with being an unlovable sack of garbage.

    So your body keeps you busy.

    Addiction to activity shows up in myriad ways. Doing your coworker’s job for them because they’re not meeting your standards. Working long hours to perfect a project that you logically know doesn’t need to be perfect. Cleaning the house when it’s not dirty. Pouring more energy than is necessary into helping your kids with their homework. An inability to rest, relax, or experience pleasure unless it’s “earned”–and even then, it’s a fleeting and rare occurrence.

    When the Body Goes to War

    My workaholic perfectionism took a toll on my body starting in my mid-twenties. It’s common for people fixated on perfectionism and activity to chronically hold tension in their bodies. I was so armored in my muscles that I injured my neck from stiffness, leading to some of the worst pain I’ve ever had.

    I was living in rural Japan at the time. Desperate for help, I drove forty-five minutes through snowy conditions down a country road to see specialists who spoke no English, and to this day I have no idea what their area of specialty is called–I’ve never seen it anywhere else. But they treated me in their home on a regular basis to bring me the relief I needed to keep my sanity.

    And that was just the beginning.

    From that point onward, I continued to injure my neck several times a year. After returning to the U.S., I saw chiropractors, physical therapists, and massage therapists on a recurring basis. They certainly treated my symptoms, but I didn’t understand why I was so chronically rigid and injury-prone.

    And then came the injury that changed the course of my life.

    In my early thirties, I developed tendonitis and a repetitive motion injury in my right arm from using the computer in my office job. I worked hard, perfecting every task, email, and spreadsheet that came across my desk. I continued to hold tension in my body, and I rarely took breaks. Desperate to keep working despite the pain in my right arm, I compensated with my left arm and injured it too.

    Different parts of my body were at war with each other–one part guilting me to stay in the hustle cycle, another part sending smoke signals to get me to slow down and rest.

    I ended up on disability for eight months.

    I struggled to take care of myself. Bathing, cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry were no longer feasible. I could not hold open a book to read. It took months to be able to return to normal activities. For someone who’s historically been addicted to staying busy, it was a nightmare to not be able to work per doctor’s orders.

    Two years later, my doctors agreed that I have a permanent partial disability. I am no longer able to work in any eight-hour desk job. A throbbing hand reminds me when it’s time to rest, and now I know to listen.

    Sprinkled through my late twenties and early thirties I also experienced episodes of suicidal ideation and general depressive states. I felt profoundly worthless even though I had my dream job in a beautiful coastal town of California.

    My monkey mind was full of chatter. I fixated on how to feel better, but I was just clinging to the same old habits of endless mental and physical activity.

    Through that difficult passage of time, I believe my psyche was taking me down the dark path of individuation, the transformative process of integrating one’s unconscious and conscious mind-body.

    It’s everyone’s birthright to return to wholeness—a magical reunion of parts that were separated and abandoned in the process of childhood. I discovered that I had banished lazy self-indulgence deep into my shadow.

    Jungian depth psychology and pole dancing opened me up. I healed through embodied sensual movement, accessing my creative inner guidance, making time for spontaneous play with no agenda, and finding peace in my deep stillness.

    Today I move with ease in my body. I find pleasure in places where I could not before. I know how to be in my deep stillness, and I have what feels like true, sustainable joy.

    It doesn’t mean I never slip into old habits. In fact, I still find new iterations of old patterns as I move through life, but I know how to work through them. It’s become my superpower.

    The Unconscious Driver in Your Mind and Body

    Often, we glorify hard work, refusing to admit the destruction it does to our minds and body when it’s become a habit.

    Many workaholics see their patterns as justified, always armed with a list of reasons why they must deliver the much-needed improvement or task despite the obvious sacrifices being made. They do not respond well to being told that they need to slow down or prioritize their well-being.

    Best case scenario, they agree that they work too hard but don’t know how to be any other way.

    If this resonates, maybe you beat yourself up for not being more present with yourself or your loved ones. And maybe you have a tendency to be your own worst critic due to your sky-high internal standards, so you’re particularly sensitive to critical feedback from others.

    The good news is that there’s nothing “wrong” with you. You’re not a bad person because you’re too busy to show up for others. You’re not a self-sabotaging idiot because you worked so hard that you injured yourself. You’re not broken because you can’t sit still.

    Just like any other addiction, workaholism is a coping strategy.

    Workaholism is a learned behavior that serves to protect you from feeling the pain and discomfort of being completely tuned in to your deep stillness without the activity. A work-oriented perfectionist unconsciously harbors a belief that they’re unworthy unless they’re busy fixing themselves or the world.

    Your workaholic tendencies have an incredible intelligence. Your body is brilliant, much more than your conscious mind and ego-persona, which think they know better. But they’re vastly mistaken.

    Five percent of your cognitive activity is conscious and the other 95% is unconscious.

    The 95% largely drives your actions, non-actions, urges, and beliefs. Your endless activity isn’t coming from your conscious thinking mind. You might be convinced that your sheer willpower and self-discipline are the reasons you’re so productive. But that’s simply not the case. You’re the result of unconscious conditioned patterns that influence your behavior in the world.

    If that isn’t humbling, then I don’t know what is.

    The urge to work longer and harder than is good for you is a felt sense in your body. Your impulses—if you pay really close attention—are a reaction to not wanting to feel a certain way. Ultimately, it’s to avoid the discomfort of being fully present to your perceived worthlessness in the midst of being idle, non-productive, and undisciplined.

    It’s so sneaky that you often never feel the first dose of discomfort because your body is so well programmed to keep you busy that it knows exactly how to keep you from feeling like a useless waste of space.

    Your body in its wholeness is so much smarter than your tiny fraction of conscious thoughts.

    It’s not your fault that you’ve never learned how to be any other way. It’s not your fault that most therapists, mentors, educators, and caregivers have no clue how to actually help you change your patterns.

    The great news is that you can change. Your mind-body is not permanently wired this way.

    Science and many different proven techniques tell us how we can change ourselves in ways that seem unimaginable. Unfortunately, these methods lag behind in formal education and the knowledge base of many healers. But, there are many entry points to working with your mind and body to transform how you show up.

    Mind-Body Practice

    While it’s not your fault that you’ve been conditioned to stay perpetually busy, it is your responsibility to do the inner work if you want to enjoy life as your best self who doesn’t need to work to feel worthy.

    If you have a conditioned tendency to avoid stillness because your body misconstrues it as dangerous, then you have to prove to yourself that endless activity is not the way to live fully in your pleasure, presence, and peace.

    Partner with your body and get lovingly curious about yourself.

    The precise activity that you avoid most, idleness, is one way to get acquainted with your inherent, non-negotiable worthiness. This will inevitably dredge up anxiety, depression, and other uncomfortable feelings.

    Learn to be in touch with what you’re feeling in your body, known as interoception. This alone is a practice that will pay you back tenfold in overall well-being, decision-making, and trusting your inner guidance.

    Observe where you’re holding any physical tension. Pay attention to places where discomfort begins to stir and notice what your first impulse is. Often, the urges that arise have a positive intention of squashing the discomfort. For someone with workaholism, that urge is productive activity.

    The body is excellent at reacting at warp speed to these signs of discomfort. Notice where the unease is showing up in your body and develop a practice of sitting with it–another practice that’s worth learning if you want to take the risk of being a human in a world of uncertainties. The treasures of life are found in the unknown.

    Over time, you will learn when your activity is exiting the healthy, productive realm and entering the unhealthy, self-sacrificing realm–so you can intervene.

    You’re incredibly capable of healing and changing your life. You’re not broken, no matter what your struggles are. Trust me, every practice I preach is one that I’ve used to transform my own life.

    Remember that you’re a beautiful creature who’s learning to exist exactly as you are—magnificent, perfect, and worthy.

  • Dealing with Unrequited Love: How I Started to Let Go and Love Myself

    Dealing with Unrequited Love: How I Started to Let Go and Love Myself

    “If you don’t love yourself, you’ll always be looking for someone else to fill the void inside you, but no one will ever be able to do it.” ~Lori Deschene

    I was a simple girl who met a complicated boy and fell in love. It was unrequited. I loved him with all my heart for six months, and acted like a teenager with her first crush. It was humiliating. I did things that I should never have done—the incessant texting, calling, arranging meetups, and what not.

    Embarrassment doesn’t even cover the emotions I feel now. There is also a lot of guilt and pain.

    When I was kid, I learned by watching my parents to sacrifice myself and show up for others before myself.

    Gradually, my sense of self become entwined with others. I only felt worthy when I served a purpose in someone’s life, and otherwise, I didn’t think I mattered much.

    Every little thing became focused on other people—how I behaved, how I dressed, how I worked. I would mindread, try to control how people perceived me, and stretch beyond my limits to show up for people who probably never even cared about me.

    That is exactly what happened with the boy I loved. My life became all about him—what he said, what he never said. I was waiting for a proposal that was never going to happen. My mind had created all these stories about a fantasy relationship that would never be and was constantly lost in a daydream.

    Instead of loving myself, I was pouring all my time and energy into someone else. My family and friends knew what was happening, and they told me I needed to accept that he didn’t love me back, but I didn’t listen to them. I was on a high, addicted to the dopamine rush of seeing him and talking to him.

    One day, I suffered a nervous breakdown and cried. The boy I loved would never love me back. It was emotionally traumatizing, both for me and my family. The heart of it was my need for validation from someone else.

    It was hard for me to accept the fact that he would never love me. I wanted him. I loved him so much. Why couldn’t he see my love for him and love me back?

    It’s been one year since I’ve talked to him. My heart still beats a little faster when I think about him or see him.

    For a long time, I was ashamed of how I’d obsessed over him and pursued him. Sometimes I wish that I hadn’t met him. He was the beginning of a dark and depressing change in my personality. I was so sad. I couldn’t eat properly, sleep properly, think properly.

    I blamed it all on myself. It triggered a sense of worthlessness. I wasn’t good enough for his love, for him. I cried a lot. More than I should have.

    It felt silly. To cry over someone who doesn’t even know what you’re going through.

    For a long time, I didn’t forgive myself. I would wallow; I was in pain. I’d always struggled with low self-worth and self-esteem, and the pain of a broken heart was too much for my already broken self to handle.

    I had placed my worth in someone else’s hands instead of my own. I was cruel to myself, constantly criticizing myself and putting myself down, all because of a boy. I had been abandoning myself and treating myself far worse than I treated others. My mind was suffering; it felt rejected.

    But thankfully, support from the right people and therapy slowly helped me figure out what was going wrong and forgive myself.

    Therapy helped me rediscover myself. I was no longer the girl who placed her self-worth in someone’s hands.

    It also helped me recognize that my obsession was more about me and my issues than him. I already didn’t feel good enough; his rejection just magnified it.

    It was a gradual process, and at first, it was a little scary. I was fundamentally changing myself and rewiring my personality, learning to treat myself with kindness and compassion. Letting go of my old self wasn’t easy, as I had been so used to the pain and heartbreak.

    But I was patient with myself, and it paid off. I conquered my demons, and slowly, gradually, fell in love with myself.

    All of this happened last December and one year later, I can finally say that I’m letting go.

    It hasn’t been an easy journey. There are days when I don’t treat myself kindly. There are days when I still place my worth in someone else’s hands and expect them to ease my self-hatred and guilt and make me feel good enough. There are days when I end up sacrificing myself for people, but those are outnumbered by the days when I look at myself with loving kindness.

    There are far more days when I take care of myself instead of focusing on someone else who probably doesn’t care about what I’m going through.

    I have finally forgiven myself for all that happened. I look at the past and I wonder how I survived. I am far stronger and more resilient than I thought myself to be before, and now I can show up for myself, hold myself together, and be there for myself.

    I look at myself in the mirror and feel proud of coming so far. I love myself, and I’m not ashamed of what happened. Unrequited love teaches you a lot: It teaches you what you’re looking for and what you don’t want in someone.

    I know my worth, and I know that the right person will love me the way I deserve to be loved.

    But most of all, I know that I will love myself the way I want to be loved. I no longer look at myself with hatred. The pain of my heartbreak comes and goes, but I know I’m strong enough to handle whatever life gives me.

    I’m happy after a long time, and I want to hold on to this happiness and cherish all the good memories I’ve made.

    I have collected all my broken pieces and created art, writing down my thoughts and emotions, and also, appreciating all I’ve gained through my struggles has helped me work toward forgiveness and acceptance.

    Unrequited love can be a blessing because it gives us an opportunity to practice loving ourselves.

    Loving someone is hard but unloving someone and pouring all your love into yourself is even harder. It doesn’t happen overnight. Self-love is a journey, and it has its highs and lows, but it is worth it.

  • How I Stopped Chasing Men Who Hurt Me and Found Healthy Love

    How I Stopped Chasing Men Who Hurt Me and Found Healthy Love

    “There are two things you should never waste your time on: things that don’t matter and people who think that you don’t matter.” ~Ziad K. Abdelnour  

    “What is wrong with me?” I asked myself. Crying in the dark of the night. “Why doesn’t he love me?”

    I’d tried to fold myself in all the ways I could to be loved and accepted, but it was never enough. I found myself repeating patterns of chasing men who just didn’t want me. Same cry in the night, different men.

    The more I chased them, the more they ran away, and the deeper I lost my self-worth. 

    I was addicted to them. They were my drug. These men who were wounded and just needed a loving, caring woman to come save them. I wanted to be the answer to their pain so then finally, a man would choose me. Finally, I would get the love I had longed for and chased my whole life.

    I always chased men that were unavailable in some way. They may have been addicts, in other relationships, or just not ready for a relationship. The more they didn’t want the relationship, the harder I would chase.

    I would be up late in the night, full of anxiety, obsessing about them. So preoccupied with trying to make them love me that I forgot to take care of myself.

    I had no boundaries and would accept any kind of awful behavior. It would break my heart and I may pull back for a moment, but then they would notice and come toward me, so the pull-push cycle would begin again.

    I lacked self-love and self-worth, and this pattern was destroying what little I had. I felt like nothing and like there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

    My happiness, my everything, was tied up in receiving validation from these unavailable men. The older I got, the worse it got, and the more obvious it was that something was not right. My friends were getting married, having children, and moving forward. But I was stuck ruminating about my latest obsession.

    I even drove my friends mad! No matter what they said to me, it wouldn’t stop me chasing a fantasy. When they stopped listening, I rang a psychic line multiple times a day for validation that the man I wanted was ‘the one.’ So not only did my self-worth disappear but my bank balance with it.

    It was exhausting and brought me to my knees in my mid-thirties.

    Then I noticed something. If someone was interested in me, available, and wanted to move forward, I would feel suffocated and tell myself there was no chemistry. But if someone showed some interest but was not available, I would want them more than anything.

    I felt like there was something really wrong with me because of this pattern, but I was determined to change, so I could have healthy, loving romantic relationships.

    I read You Can Heal Your Life, by Louise Hay, and decided to change my beliefs.

    Here are the five things I did to heal so I could open up to a healthier relationship:

    1. I adopted a daily self-care practice.

    It became painfully obvious to me that I knew how to love others but not myself. So I began with adding some practices to my day to help me build self-love.

    I listened to affirmations on Spotify and read them to myself looking in the mirror. I tried meditation and hot baths to begin my journey. I was always researching new ways to show myself love. In addition to developing a self-care practice, I invested in support to help me get better, including therapy.

    2. I began doing inner child work.

    I went back to my earlier story through meditation and discovered that younger-me was always chasing after my dad’s unavailable love. Trying to help him, to be seen. Trying to fix him so he would tell me I was enough. Seeking his validation, his connection, because he was unavailable due to his own childhood trauma. My inner child had internalized this to means I was unlovable.

    I began to say affirmations to a photo of my younger self. “You are loveable,” “You are enough,” “You are worthy.” I would literally talk to her and ask her how she felt and what she needed. I would imagine playing with her and showing her love.

    I explored my inner child’s story and learned lots about attachment theory. I realized that I had disorganized attachment from my father’s inconsistency, and that this was not my fault but just part of my old programming. The great news was I could change this! A book that helped me was Healing Your Attachment Wounds, by Diane Poole Heller.

    When I recognized why I sought love from men who couldn’t give it to me, that ache for unavailable love lessened.

    3. I set clear intentions.

    I grew up on my dad’s little crumbs of love. It made me feel starved for love and attention, so later in life, I would accept them from any man who showed me interest. Even if they weren’t the right fit for me. I had no idea what that was!

    When I realized this, I compiled a list of what I didn’t want. I tuned into what brought me pain and unhappiness growing up. Things that made me feel unsafe. These became my red flags. For example, emotional unavailability, anger, shouting, gaslighting, denying my reality, and addiction were a few items from my list.

    I became conscious about what I didn’t want so I wouldn’t blindly go into a relationship that made me feel unsafe again.

    I also compiled a list of things I did want—must-haves like kindness and safety.

    4. I ended contact with unavailable men.

    This was a hard one and felt very uncomfortable. I took a step back from my ‘drug.’ I even unfollowed people on social media to allow myself space to heal. Sometimes I would have a bad day and make contact, but slowly my addiction lessened.

    To support myself through this process, I read books, listened to podcasts, and even trained for a marathon to give me another focus. Books like Father Therapy, by Doreen Virtue, and Facing Love Addiction, by Pia Mellody, helped me to understand my pattern. I also found communities where I could share my story and not be judged.

    I learned how to stop numbing the pain from my past with these unhealthy relationships by learning how to soothe myself and let my wounds heal.

    5. I dated myself.

    I stepped back from dating and focused solely on learning to love and date myself. To start, I took myself on a trip for three days in Italy. I took my books, went on tours on my own, and journaled about my story. I  regularly spent time with myself and even found new hobbies. Before, I had been so obsessed with these men that pleasing them was my hobby.

    I found ways to enjoy my own time and have fun! To feel whole and enough on my own. I took myself to restaurants and treated myself to gifts. I became the person I always wanted. Validating, attentive, kind, and fun!

    Sure enough, in time, I found an emotionally available man who chose me and was everything I wrote on my intention list. He had no red flags, unlike any of my previous partners. He makes me feel safe every day, and most importantly, he gives me space to continue the most important relationship in my life. The one with me.

    If you can relate to this pattern of choosing emotionally unavailable partners, just notice the behavior. It is not you. It is just a behavior you are doing to keep safe. Thank this part and know that it is possible to change and find your healthy love.

  • No One Was Coming to Save Me: The Insignificance I Felt as a Kid

    No One Was Coming to Save Me: The Insignificance I Felt as a Kid

    “Never make the mistake of thinking you are alone—or inconsequential.” ~ Rebecca McKinsey

    I can still remember it as vividly as if it happened yesterday.

    Our kitchen was small. Only enough room for a few people, and there were four of us kids scrounging to get our hands on the rest of the leftovers. It wasn’t a fight, but I can say with certainty that there was an underlying assumption that whoever got their hands on it first was able to claim it, so there was competition.

    I grabbed my spoon first and then went to the fridge to get my food when my dad grabbed the spoon out of hand.

    “Dad! Give it back!” I said in my most rude teenage voice.

    Not a second passed and his hand met my cheek with a blow that knocked me to the floor. There must have been a loud noise as I flopped to the floor, hitting the dishwasher, because my mom, who was doing laundry, came running inside to see what was going on.

    I lay there helpless on the floor, not struggling but also not fighting.

    I looked up at my mom, who looked back at me, then at my dad. She gave a sigh of disapproval, turned the corner, and walked away.

    Still on the floor, I looked up at my brother who was eating at the bar that faced where I was lying. He looked at me chewing his food, continued to eat, and said nothing.

    This was the first time I remember feeling alone. It was a reminder that hit me like a ton of bricks that nobody was coming to save me… nobody. 

    Of course, this reality check didn’t come without consequences. It most certainly left a hole in my heart and closed off parts of me that later became nearly impossible to break. But I survived. I just learned to survive without the parts of me that were open to love and compassion.

    While the trauma of getting hit by a parent has repercussions, I believe it was the ignoring of suffering that had more catastrophic consequences for me.

    Having both parents fail me at the same moment and then looking up to see my brother carrying on with his life as if nothing was out of the ordinary was complete devastation for me.

    In that moment, it was a reminder of my worth, and it was a reminder of my insignificance within my family. 

    And that became my voice for a large part of my life.

    It’s funny, though, because I never remember feeling alone as a kid, and it’s probably just because I never understood what that even looked like. It took years of trying hard to sit with my feelings to understand that what I was feeling was insignificance. Years.

    Not having the vocabulary around my feelings made normalizing them so difficult. Now I can look at what I was feeling with confidence and not give it more weight than it deserves. I can label it, feel it, look at it objectively, and move on without taking it personally.

    Today I realize that feeling lonely, unseen, and insignificant was simply a product of emotionally immature parents, not a reflection of who I was. But as a kid, I internalized it as a problem with myself because I couldn’t properly label it and assign meaning to it. Instead, I made what I was feeling a part of my character, and thus I subconsciously became a magnet for all the things that would validate that “character flaw” in myself.

    I dated people who treated me like crap and sought out mean guys. I had friends who were hurtful. And all the while I felt like I had a problem that made me unlovable.

    And I’m not gonna lie, I’m a lot of “too-much-ness” for a lot of people, but emotionally mature people cannot just handle me, they can love me too. Because while I am a lot, I’m also full of a lot of love too.

    I tell this story because I realized that naming our feelings is foundational to learning to communicate without projecting blame onto others. This isn’t just true for children going through a difficult time. This is true for many of us adults who just never learned the vocabulary around what certain feelings even look like.

    When we own our feelings, we’re less likely to blame other people for causing them because we understand where they originated and know it’s our responsibility to work through them.

    My feelings of insignificance will probably never go away when it comes to my relationship with my family. Mother’s Day was difficult for me this year because it brought back those same feelings of loneliness (and a bit of sadness), but they no longer hold the same weight. I now can see my feelings at face value without judging myself and my character as a result.

    Instead, I know that…

    I am not insignificant, and I am worthy of love. And that is why I have created a life full of love and meaning in my own family.

    My “too-much-ness” is only “too much” for those that don’t have the ability to see the beauty in me. And that is why I surround myself with only those who see me through a lens of love.

    There is value in learning what our feelings are, defining them, recognizing what they look like, and realizing how they can run us ragged if left unchecked. If you do one thing this year, learn about your feelings so they no longer can control you.

  • How Trauma Can Cause Mental Illness (It’s Not Just a Chemical Imbalance)

    How Trauma Can Cause Mental Illness (It’s Not Just a Chemical Imbalance)

    “What seems to be clear is that we humans are an accumulation of our traumatic experiences, that each trauma contributes to our biology, and that this biology determines, to some extent, how we respond to further traumatic events as they emerge in our lives.” ~Shaili Jain

    The stigma of mental health is decreasing. That’s wonderful, but the way we’re doing it is wrong and damaging. We are ignoring the trauma that is so prevalent and pervasive in our society.

    Think about how many times you’ve read something equating mental illness to cancer or some other disease. People say that taking medication for mental illness should be considered the same as taking medicine for blood pressure, cholesterol, or other medical issues.

    The phrase “chemical imbalance” is used quite often when referring to mental illness. There is a connection, but there’s so much more to mental illness than that.

    When we say that mental illness is simply a result of a chemical imbalance, we are pretending our trauma isn’t what causes so many of our mental health struggles. Most of us have had more than enough of others invalidating our trauma and the mental illnesses resulting from it.

    Now, before anybody starts screaming that their mental illness is purely a result of a chemical imbalance, hear me out. I do believe it is possible to have a genetic chemical imbalance.

    At the same time, I think that possibility needs to include a look at epigenetics. I’m not going into detail about that. Take yourself on over to Google for that.

    What I will say about epigenetics is that I believe these “genetic chemical imbalances” come from trauma that is inherited from each generation. It has been proven that trauma can change our DNA.

    That is probably why scientists have shown that some have a genetic predisposition to mental illness. The brain has a chemical imbalance as a result of epigenetics.

    Now, back to simply labeling mental illness as a chemical imbalance. I suppose it feels like a softer blow for some to believe that’s why they have a mental illness.

    This allows them to think that they and/or their experiences have nothing to do with their mental illness. Let me just take this pill to fix my brain.

    When I hear or read that anywhere, I get incredibly frustrated. It is minimizing or completely ignoring the fact that mental illness is typically a result of trauma.

    My father was a depressed alcoholic who died of cirrhosis nine years ago. I experienced a good bit of trauma as a result of his drunken rages on top of him being absent for a large part of my childhood.

    Not only that, but I had the additional trauma of my mother pretending there was nothing wrong with him. I was also taught to pretend the violence wasn’t a big deal.

    It was incredibly confusing for me as a little girl because my mind and body knew those experiences were traumatic, but I heard otherwise.

    I got a double whammy when it came to mental illness. Unfortunately for me, my mother was not emotionally available. I needed a parent who would validate my feelings and allow me to express what I was feeling.

    So, I had the genetic predisposition to depression from my father and probably my mother as well since she stayed with him for many years. However, I also had severe depression and anxiety as a result of my childhood trauma.

    I believed my depression was simply genetic and a chemical imbalance until I began therapy. As it became clearer that my childhood trauma was the biggest reason I struggled with my mental health, that way-too-simple theory began to piss me off.

    If a genetic chemical imbalance was the sole reason I was depressed and had anxiety, that meant my trauma shouldn’t have affected me the way it did. That didn’t sit well with me.

    How could a genetic chemical imbalance result in my thinking that I was worthless and unlovable? How could it be the reason I never felt safe, emotionally or physically? It just was not possible in my mind!

    A genetic chemical imbalance wouldn’t cause those negative, false beliefs. It would make me feel depressed or anxious overall, but not linked to any particular event.

    Witnessing violence in my home was the reason I had anxiety. I never felt physically safe after the first episode. I was always creating plans of what I could do to be safe if this or that happened.

    When I was little, there was a roof over a storage shed outside my window. If I heard my father throwing furniture or screaming violently, I could go out my window, slide down the roof, and run into the woods behind my house.

    I had escape plans for every room in my house. I also used to sleep with a portable phone so that I could call 911 if I was ever somehow brave enough to do that.

    Hearing that the violence I witnessed was not a big deal and being told not to talk to anybody about it resulted in a very confused little girl.

    I felt intense sadness because I believed that my father didn’t love me enough to quit drinking. When I would voice that sadness, I was told that I didn’t have a reason to be sad. So then I thought there was something really wrong with me.

    Why am I so sad if I don’t have a reason to be? Why should I feel unlovable if that’s stupid to say or feel?

    Once I began therapy, I learned that all of those thoughts and feelings resulted from my trauma. So, even if I didn’t have that predisposition to a genetic chemical imbalance, I would still have had depression and anxiety.

    Any child who experienced anything similar to what I experienced would have depression and anxiety. That genetic chemical imbalance garbage was keeping me from acknowledging the fact that trauma was the cause.

    As I mentioned earlier, I hear a lot of people saying they need medication for mental illness simply because they have a chemical imbalance. In my opinion, that is incredibly dangerous and prevents people from healing.

    It typically results in people thinking a pill will solve all of their mental health struggles. I’ve yet to hear about anybody who took a pill that completely removed all symptoms of mental illness.

    Now, I’m not saying the medication does not help. It most certainly does for many people. However, there is much more to mental illness.

    Not only that, but the chemical imbalance can also be a result of trauma. There is much more needed to heal trauma than just a pill.

    In my late teens and into my early twenties, I tried tons of different medications for depression, but I knew I needed more than that.

    Also, each medication only helped a little bit, and only with the day-to-day functioning to get my work done. I was just going through the motions, though. I never even had moments of peace or happiness.

    There was no medication that changed my feelings of worthlessness. I still felt unlovable. If I heard or saw certain things, I would get triggered with anxiety. Quickly, my mind would return to that childhood fear that I wasn’t safe emotionally or physically.

    If my mental illness wasn’t a result of trauma, then the medications would’ve cured it all.

    Oh, how I wish those medications would’ve been the answer for me. That would’ve saved me a lot of time, energy, and money in therapy.

    Therapists wouldn’t even exist if mental illness were nothing but a simple chemical imbalance. Medications for mental illness truly would be “happy” pills.

    It just doesn’t work that way. Mental illness typically results from years of trauma, covered up or not processed.

    Trauma needs intense therapy in order for the brain to get rewired. Trauma also needs to be acknowledged and validated for people to function in a healthier way and begin the healing process.

    Saying mental illness is just a chemical imbalance sends the message that your brain is just screwed up and some loose screws need to be tightened.

    Equating mental illness to cancer or any other medical illness or disease is denying the major damage trauma causes.

    For me, I had enough people downplay my childhood trauma. I’ve also heard way too many people downplay their own.

    So, let’s stop doing that. Let’s start naming trauma as equally damaging, if not more, than a simple chemical imbalance.

    Name the traumas that resulted in your mental illness. Acknowledge the significant impact that trauma has had on your life and the ways it continues to affect you on a daily basis. And find a good therapist who can guide you through processing your trauma, as I did, so you can heal. Your mind, body, and soul need you to do that.

  • Why I Stopped Measuring My Self-Worth and Trying to Prove Myself

    Why I Stopped Measuring My Self-Worth and Trying to Prove Myself

    “You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anyone.” ~Maya Angelou

    How do you measure your self-worth? By the salary you make each year? By the length of your resume? By the number of people who follow you on social media?

    Now what if you never had to measure your self-worth again? That is what I want to do.

    I grew up as a gifted kid with high expectations to boot, always pushing myself to meet them. I earned the best grades I could, secured a full-ride scholarship to a local university, and soon enough ended up at one of the top law schools in the country.

    Thanks to all the achievements, my self-worth was high. I believed I was outshining my peers, boosting my ego. I felt safe in this comfort zone I’d created. 

    Law school drastically changed my perspective of the world. My peer group became some of the smartest and most talented people in the country. I tried competing against them to prove myself, but I struggled more than ever to stand out and feel accomplished.

    In just a few months, my ego began crumbling apart, taking my once lofty feelings of worth down with it. I was out of my comfort zone and felt invisible.

    I turned to strangers online in an attempt to put the pieces back together and resurrect my worth. I relied heavily on social media to put myself out there for superficial likes and comments. I turned lifelong hobbies into side hustles, trading content I cared about for bits of validation here and there.

    I was desperate to find some new measure of success on which I could rely. But I never noticed the damage that desperation was doing to my psyche until it had already taken its toll.

    My ego had protected me for so long from doubt that as soon as it was gone, I never felt good enough. Once I believed I was a failure, I only kept confirming my demoralizing feelings by pushing myself to excel immediately in new areas. I compared myself to the best of the best and treated myself like the worst of the worst.

    I was trapped in a downward spiral leading to worthlessness. It was only when I slowed down to reflect on my mental health that I realized my life looked like an endless rat race to find some proverbial cheese. I strained to earn my worth and ended up empty-handed.

    If you always chase after self-worth, you never stop to see if you have found any.  

    How is it so many of us believe our worth is conditional? I believe it is a long, grueling process.

    Many of us learned growing up to associate self-worth with achievement of some kind. As we discovered authority figures gave us the most positive feedback and attention when we were doing a great job, we linked our worth to excelling. Without that encouragement, we were lost.

    The world around us exploits this correlation on a daily basis. To some extent, it makes the world go round.

    Western culture, in particular, thrives on permanently tying worth to achievement: the more people pursue success in what they do, the more productive they are and the more money that flows. Accordingly, society constantly tries to push the idea that hard work is sacred and will ultimately lead us to a life of achievement, ergo worth.

    Western culture does not reward those happy to just be. Instead, we are expected to keep laboring away until we can do something well. Even then, some types of work are highly valued over others, so we have to find the right work to do just to get by. 

    So, if you do not feel happy and fulfilled, do you not just have to work harder?

    Yet, not all hard workers reap the benefits. After all, achievement requires meeting a certain standard, inevitably doing better than someone else. Only significant time and effort may lead to a worthy triumph.

    There will inevitably be haves and have-nots because the system at play rewards a limited number of people who play the system best, who achieve the most success. The more limited the rewards, the more everyone forces themselves to try harder day in and day out.

    Unfortunately for us, the reward is merely the validation we apparently need to go about our lives. If our worth is dependent solely on our achievements, we have no choice but to compete with one another over a limited, essential resource. Achievements are only as valuable as they are rare.

    But this competition cannot be won. There will always be more to do. And someone will always do more.

    External validation never makes you content. It only keeps you hungry for more.

    In my struggles, I have had a difficult time understanding how to view my worth.

    How much worth do I have? How does it compare to other people’s worth? Does it go up and down?

    When am I finally worthy once and for all?

    To answer these questions, I vehemently tried to attach a number to my worth whenever possible. After all, a number is a concrete, self-explanatory concept. I could tell when I had more or less than someone.

    Thus, using numbers allowed me to measure my worth and other people’s worth with ease. This gave me a way to understand my place in the world.

    Using numbers also allowed me to gauge how my worth was changing. For example, if I received more likes than usual, I was happier than usual since I must have been doing something right. If I received less, I was in need of quick improvement.

    Except numbers are hollow. They have no value unless we agree to give them value, but our obsessive nature often gives extraordinary value to the benign.

    We use shortcuts like numbers to explain concepts we have a hard time comprehending. Self-worth certainly seems to be one of those trying concepts, always just out of reach like an elusive fruit hanging above us or a receding pool of water.

    Breaking away from society’s expectations provided me the room to realize self-worth is only as complicated as I make it.

    If self-worth need not exist conditionally, it can exist inherently. In fact, it exists now without exception.

    Your worth cannot be assigned a value. It simply is. 

    By virtue of the fact that you are alive, you are just as worthy as anyone else who has lived before, lives now, or will live after.

    We all come into the world the same, and we all leave the same way. Our lives may differ widely in content, but not in value. Nothing separates us at the most fundamental level.

    And none of us start out deficient in worth. We need not go on a lifelong journey to earn our worth by moving up in the world. Our worth remains steadfast regardless of how our lives take shape.

    Work does not shape our worth. No matter how you decide to share your skills and talents, the world will be better off, even if you alone trust the value in what you do and who you are.

    Society may try to tell us how we should view and feel about ourselves, but we are not obligated to listen. Fighting those ingrained ideas of what others think we should do is never an easy battle, but it is worth the independence.

    No matter how one does or does not measure worth, it does not vary, and it does not waver.

    We are all enough as is, right now.

    There exist millions of ways to compare ourselves to others, but we owe it to ourselves to make light of differences and revel in our shared humanity.

    So how do we move forward knowing that we cannot improve or reduce our worth?

    Well, the possibilities are endless. The doors open up to a life where you can be you unabashedly. And more importantly, you can be a part of something bigger than yourself without feeling small.

    Waiting for others to prove you are worthy is time better spent sharing your true self. 

    After spending the last few years of my life trying to prove myself without ever reaching the level of success I wanted, I realized my definition of success kept changing until I made it impossible to feel fulfilled. I stopped myself from being happy unless I was universally revered.

    I lived thoughtlessly, spending what free time I had attempting to make myself look accomplished rather than enjoying the time. I conformed to what I thought people would like rather than let myself flourish.

    My true self was suffocated. Receiving even the most primitive criticism felt like being stabbed in the chest. I was more distanced from others than ever before because I did not feel like I deserved to be liked anymore.

    But I do deserve to be me, to take up space, to contribute to the world in my own way. And you do too.  

    Knowing that what you do cannot change who you are promotes freedom in how you want to live, freedom not just from others, but also from expectations and doubt.

    Knowing you always have worth allows you to connect with the people around you more deeply, empathize with them, and support their journeys through life.

    It is with this knowledge you can find and share true joy.

    You can pursue what you love instead of what you feel you ought to do. You can work at your pace to be the person you want to be. You can stay present knowing neither praise nor disapproval affects your worth.

    Many will struggle to agree with you, though, that you can exist in peace without having to fight to prove your value. Even I still struggle to keep not just naysayers, but also my inner, learned uncertainties at bay in regard to whether I offer anything worthwhile.

    Learning more about your inherent worth means unlearning those harsh, ingrained principles of life as we have known it. These principles will never fade away completely, but we can make a choice every day to drown them out.

    Take it from me, your life will not immediately change in discovering your own worth, but it can improve a little day after day the more you take your discovery to heart. As is the case with any transition, there will be ups and downs. I still have doubts creeping in when I least expect them.

    But the more you live openly and share yourself with others, the more those principles will take hold and the stronger you will be in challenging what life throws your way. Instead of seeking achievement and improvement, you will be content, one with the universe.

    You will be free.