Today I Asked Myself About Discovering Shame & Finding My Worth

I am a writer, not a doctor. Click here to view medical disclaimer

EXCERPT FROM ESSAY: TODAY I ASKED MYSELF MY STORY][TRIGGER WARNING: SHAME, GRIEF, SUICIDE, SELF-LOATHING, ETC.]

I went into my first therapy appointment with a chip on my shoulder. My hatred for unsolicited advice ranks right next to my loathsome fear of being misunderstood, and therapy seemed like an unnecessary way to combine the two. In an effort to cut things short, I had prepared to deflect anytime I heard a word from the bank consisting of trauma, fear of abandonment, addiction, self-destructive behaviors, grief cycle, self-esteem, suicidal thoughts, fear of intimacy, etc. I did not want to sit through an entire session where someone called out in rapid-fire succession what was wrong with me—life itself had versed me well enough to know what those things were already.

Admittedly though, the therapist’s office was not at all like I envisioned. It was a dim, windowless room tucked in the corner of a basement. Its humble second-hand décor didn’t scream, “I like the sound of my own voice, especially when you pay me for it,” but instead, the warm lamps and subtle hues innocuously conveyed, “You are safe here.”

I sat on an overstuffed sofa across from the therapist’s cluttered desk. She was old enough to have just achieved a degree but young enough that I understood she was here to gain experience.

Little by little, I brought the pain forward into the light, placing it between us so that we could evaluate it together. She was observant but kind, indirectly acknowledging my intense vulnerability by staying objective.

Once I finished my story and laid out every last detail before us, I braced myself to hear the advice I assumed would confirm what I already knew: I had abandonment issues. Self-esteem issues. Depression issues. All the textbook “trauma response” issues that surround a tragedy. I was hopeful that maybe she could professionally loop all her conclusions back around and somehow connect the dots to fix my relationships. But even if that didn’t happen, I still felt a sense of satisfaction and relief from having told another person my story, as though I finally had set something very heavy down. I figured if that’s all therapy did for me, I could walk away at least feeling lighter.

What she did say caught me completely off guard.

“Do you know what shame is?” she asked me.

My defenses immediately went up. I wanted to run to the table, peel her judgment off the details of my life I had just laid out, and split from her office as quickly as possible.

Instead, I stood my ground and I answered belligerently, “I am NOT ASHAMED of how my dad died!”

I was mad at her for using all her therapy powers to draw the wrong conclusion. Hadn’t she heard my story at all?

“No—I’m asking if you know what the word shame means?” she repeated.

Was she dense? “No, I don’t feel any shame for How. He. Died. That has never mattered to me.” I was enunciating slowly, hoping my words would sink in.

Without acknowledging me, she opened a disheveled, significantly earmarked blue book perched on her desk and slowly read the definition out loud.

“Shame is an intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” (-Brene Brown, PhD, MSW)

I took this in, tensely unsure yet what she wanted me to do with it.

Then she asked me, “Is there a part of you that believes if you were somehow different, more worthy, that he would still be here?”

I felt my knees weaken at the sound of the word worthy.

My mind had passed over this possibly plenty of times, but I had framed the question differently. I asked myself, “If I acted or behaved otherwise, would he still be here?” Her question hit harder where it was noticeably different. She wasn’t asking about my behavior per se, but instead, if I believed my flaws had played in role in his death.

My head was defending him, telling me logically that couldn’t be it—there were so many other factors outside of me involved. But sometimes, there’s a difference between what our heads rationally and intellectually know and what our hearts inherently believe.

At the heart of it, this belief ran so deep that it had surpassed the need to be defined by logic. Every molecule inside of me was overcome by a sense of unworthiness, or perhaps by whatever this “shame” was the therapist had suggested.

I think they call this the break in therapy, the aha, the moment where the hidden truth finally becomes apparent.

In a glimpse, I could see myself at eighteen, painfully young and equally as impressionable, tentatively asking the world, “Who am I? Am I enough?”

His suicide had inadvertently answered, “You are not enough to keep me here.”

So when the therapist then asked me at twenty-two, “Do you believe you are worthy of being loved?” my heart didn’t check with my head before I heard myself answer through tears, “No. I am not even worth living for.”

…………..

My therapist rounded out our conversation by giving me the book that she read the shame definition from. It was called “I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t)” by Dr. Brené Brown, who had just as recently as a year before I sat in my therapist’s office, given the viral TED talk about vulnerability and ignited the global conversation about shame. As of this writing in 2021, her name now is ubiquitous with courage, vulnerability, and shame-resilience.

At the time, I didn’t know who she was. She was just the co-conspirator to the most hurtful, most damning conclusion I had ever drawn about myself—that this deep-rooted feeling of inadequacy was neither grief nor depression—it was something else entirely. However untrue, the story my “shame” had told me was that my dad had died in part because I was not worthy enough—not good enough—for him to stay. While not substantiated by logic or fact, that painful belief (that I was flawed and therefore unworthy) is, by definition, shame.

Looking back over the last few years, it began to dawn on me the overarching ways shame had influenced my life…

My relationships had been doomed to fail from the start because, at the heart of it, I assumed the “real me” was too damaged, too sad, too depressed, and too unworthy to be loved. So instead, I created a false narrative of an ambitious, carefree person—I thought she would be worthy of love, so I projected her out into the world. But she wasn’t real, and therefore any love she received I could not authentically feel at heart. This only perpetuated my belief that, because I couldn’t feel loved, I was unworthy of it. And I cycled through relationships, fueled by a ravenous need for connection, but discarding anyone who I felt loved me imperfectly, not realizing the whole time I was the problem.

Alcohol had been my enabler, had been the magic potion that had allowed me not to have to be me anymore. I didn’t feel able to show up socially, without alcohol, for fear that the authentic me would be rejected for not being enough. It permitted me to misrepresent myself and simultaneously numbed the guilt away.

I had resigned from my ambitions and turned my attention away from the future because it is hard to strive for good things when you can’t even look them in the eye—when your head is bowed so low with shame, you feel like, at your core, you don’t deserve them. As a result, I had isolated myself, cut off hopes for the future and therefore any chance of failure. It was easier to live in a constant state of disappointment than have the world acknowledge it for me. Ambition would almost certainly reaffirm what I already knew—that I didn’t have the credentials needed for a bright and shiny future. I was flawed.

Try uttering the words, “I am worthy,” while looking in the mirror when deep down, you don’t actually believe it. The outcome will look something like a red wine bottle, raised overhead and smashed against the glass—shattering your broken image in pieces all over the floor where they rightfully belong—because now that you have uncovered shame, shown a light on it, and called it by its name, the recognition is painful.

Self-loathing is a difficult concept for me to articulate because, like anger, it’s a headspace that’s not always reasonable or logical. Even the simplest affirmations meant to elevate me would instead cause tears to sting my eyes and my face to burn with rageful hatred. I couldn’t even sit in the same room as a compliment—I felt like I was living, breathing, walking evidence to the contrary. I hated myself for who I was. Hated myself for not being “normal.” Hated myself for always being at the mercy of grief’s daily dictates. Hated myself for overthinking everything. Hated myself for being me. Hated myself for how low I had fallen. Worthy was just about the last thing I felt qualified to call myself.

I had absolutely no pretenses or facades to hide behind anymore—I could not reject, project, or deflect shame away once the curtain had been drawn back and I had come face to face with its origins. In truth, this was more than just a petty self-esteem issue; my perceived inadequacy had infiltrated my identity so profoundly, that at my core, I believed I was unworthy of love. And this realization absolutely leveled me—transported me straight back down to the rock bottom I had just recently climbed out of. I could still see the etchings on the wall, tally marks from the last time I had ended up here, fighting for my life in a completely different way.

But rock bottom is an interesting place because you only ever land here to reckon with existential, metaphysical problems. Superficial issues and noise cannot follow you to rock bottom because they have zero relevancy beneath the surface. Universal truths like hope, grace, worthiness, love—just to name a few—are always what bring you here, and likewise, a reckoning with them is your only way out.

The last time I was here, I had all all-out reckoning with hope. This time, it was for worthiness.

I knew I had let my sense of shame and unworthiness severely influence who I was, from my relationships to my ambitions, all the way down to my identity. I could name for you one thousand different reasons why I felt unworthy of life, love, and good things, with my dad’s death serving as the damning evidence. But despite all the reasons I felt unqualified, I had still made a choice not to take my own life. I had chosen to live. By doing so, I invited in the tiniest glimmer of hope that perhaps deep down, I chose life because I felt I was worthy of living.

But why? Where does worthiness come from? What factor or factors ultimately make us decide, “yes, I’m worthy” or, “no, I’m not?” Why, when I could not see my worth in other places, did I assume I was worthy of life?

There is a simple formula for receiving revelations and answering questions when dwelling in rock bottom:

Be.

Be still.

Be still, and know.

When I looked deep inside myself, beneath the noise of the world, this is what I learned:

Life had been given to me, without my asking for it, without merit, without any proof that I was deserving of it. The universe had configured atoms in such a miraculous way that I was here, breathing and growing and learning and loving. Life is an irrefutable phenomenon, that much is certain—and I don’t think there’s a scientist or religion that would dare to tell you otherwise. Life had been bestowed upon me since my inception, without any original dispute over whether I was worthy enough to receive it.

This raises the question, if the Universe or The Creator or God created humans, why would They do so, if only to hold our humanity against us?

Could it be that worthiness is not defined outwardly? Or humanly? That while decisions might affect our circumstances on earth, they do not have any bearing on our soul’s worth because our worth here is as inherent as being alive?

If love can exist within an imperfect world—can’t worth exist within an imperfect person? So therefore, if our worth is not correlative with our perfection, does that mean worth is not earned—it is bestowed, like life itself?

Furthermore, if our actions did not give us worth to begin with, how then could our actions take it away? Meaning worth, therefore, is unconditional?

So conclusively, when you say “I am worthy because…” the only possible ending to the statement is, “I am.”

I am worthy because I am. Because worth, like life itself, is inherent. By design, there can be no other way.

This realization might seem reductive, but fundamental truths are always the simplest. It took me being on my knees and at my stillest to fully recognize a simple truth (I am worthy) that would have otherwise been convoluted beyond comprehension on the surface. (In fact, when you find a Universal Truth, like love, for example, heavily regulated to be opportunistic to some but to exclude others, you will know its meaning has been tampered with by humankind.) Universal Truths have been encoded deep in the core of each and every human—which is why we cannot define, control, or steal each other’s love, hope, or worth—although humanity has a very long history of trying and an even longer history of failing at it.

What’s more is the beauty of recognizing inwardly that our worthiness is unconditional and inherent is that, when turned outwardly, you begin to realize everyone else is worthy too.

Therefore things like wealth, beauty, education, skin color, credentials, geography, gender, successes, failures, and status are just adjectives used to describe circumstance, not worth.

So here are some things I know, now, for sure:

No one person is any more or less worthy of life, love, and good things than another, no matter the circumstance. All the reasons we assume qualify or disqualify us from “being worthy” actually have no bearing.

No one person’s life is worth more or less than another. There is no such thing as a hierarchy in life itself, which can be confusing when the world and society we live in allow us to measure each other based on our circumstances. However, there is no such thing as an “important” life and an “unimportant” life. Every life is equally as important and as worthy as the next.

We are all enough. We did not show up here incomplete. Worth is universal.

Until tomorrow,

Tess

Click here to read about Rebuilding With Worth

Click here to read more of this essay: Today I Asked Myself My Story

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