What Makes Me Worthwhile?

I frequent a site called “Inner Bonding”. It is put together by psychologists who have developed their own approach to healing. I get updates in my email about new articles and workshops. I haven’t attended any workshops, but have found some of the articles to be very helpful and insightful.

My inbox contained such an email, this morning. The subject line of today’s post was, “Healing Emotional Dependency”.

I love it when someone breaks something down for me. This part of the article did just that:

There are two major decisions you need to make to heal from emotional dependency:

1. You need to decide to learn how to take full 100% responsibility for your own feelings - your happiness and pain, your inner sense of safety, and your sense of worth.

2. You need to decide to define your worth - not by what others think of you or by your looks or by how much money you have, but by how well you love and what you contribute.

(Click here to read the entire article.)

So, first I have to take responsibility for my own feelings. That is a phrase I have heard before. I think it is a lot more complicated than it looks in that one sentence description. Before I could begin to take responsibility for my feelings, I had to:

1. Admit I had feelings. (CoDA would say, “Not deny them.”)
2. Learn to identify what these were (CoDA would say, “Not alter them.”)
3. Stop judging my feelings (feelings are not good or bad, they are just feelings.)
I think I have actually gone through steps one and two, here, but step three is still elusive.

Secondly, I have to reevaluate what makes me worthwhile. Talk about complicated! This is almost too much to get my head around. I want to believe that the ten pounds I’ve gained do not make me a bad person, but when I get dressed in the morning I have a hard time not thinking about how people will see me. I want to believe that I am just as valuable as my husband, who makes a great deal of money (that still never seems to be enough) even though I made only about $250 writing last year. I would like to believe that my life is as meaningful now as it was when I was a young mother with the responsibilities of little ones who needed me to take care of and guide them, but that role has defined me for decades.

Articles like this make me think about what is important, and I believe that is important in itself. I have to keep reminding myself that I am a work in progress. One way I am trying to define myself as “worthy” is through my belief that trying hard, working with true integrity towards bettering myself in ways that seem right, is significant – perhaps essential – in being “worthy”. The trying is all I can do right now, so I’m going with that.