Episode #101 Self-worth - Self Esteem

Understanding one's value can be difficult process for anyone. Our world is a confusing place.  Self-worth requires that we understand our value and feel that value and anytime feelings are required mental illness is going to make it that much more difficult.

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Welcome to episode #101 Self-Worth and Identity.  I am your host, Damon Socha.  I hope that you are enjoying the podcast and also hope that you will continue to spread the word.  

So this last week I found out that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has added a section to their self-reliance program called “Finding Strength in the Lord: Emotional Resilience.”  I guess that this section was added not too long ago.  Somehow, I missed its publication and announcement.  I took some time this last week to peruse the course work and the sections.  For the most part, I found the information interesting and helpful although having suffered with mental illness most of my life most of it I have heard before.  There was one section where I realized that the material may not be entirely suited to those who suffer with mental illness and that the program might be structured more for individuals suffering mild to semi-moderate symptoms. The section is entitled “Our Thoughts Influence Our Emotions.”  The section is exactly as the title reads. It reinforces the idea that changing our negative thoughts leads to better outcomes emotionally.  I don’t have any issue with thoughts directing our emotions as I know that they do and this can and does lead to better outcomes even for those who suffer more serious forms of mental illness.  However, my concern was that it felt as though the material wanted to reinforce that our thoughts direct our emotions exclusively.  That I know is not accurate.  Meaning that as I have suffered mental illness and my episodes commandeered my emotional state, simply changing my thoughts rarely if ever changed my emotional state.  I worry that sometimes outside forces that have not experienced mental illness do not understand how difficult it is to think outside of the negative thoughts brought forth as a result of depression or anxiety.  This idea and theory of thoughts controlling and determining our emotions has been around the Church and outside world for as long as anything has been written mental health.  What I felt was missing in the discussion is the real world experience of mental illness.  As much as I work to change my thoughts, it rarely if ever changed my emotional state.  In fact, for me this is what causes such severe problems in my mental state.  The rational side of me could work through the environmental conditions and know that I should not feel the way I do but I continued to feel depressed desires and emotions no matter what I did rationally in my mind to change the thought patterns.  Normally, my mind would fight the feelings of depression and anxiety until it couldn’t fight any longer.  What I am trying to communicate in all of this is that often during episodes the chemically driven depressed state of mind, one cannot change the emotional state of the mind simply redirecting thoughts and also that thoughts do not have complete control of our emotional state, especially when mental illness takes over.  It is important for those who suffer that they understand that thoughts do not entirely control all of our emotions when we suffer with mental illness and simply changing thought patterns will not cure or even for the most part remove the overriding feelings of doubt, despair and anxiety.  It can help but it can also be a source of serious frustration if you believe that you can simply change your thoughts and it will drive away your depression or anxiety.

Now given that rather long backstory, today I would like to work through how we perceive our self-worth.  What makes you who you are? How you feel about yourself? How you perceive your value?  We might call it finding our place or where we fit in.  Ultimately, throughout life we are consistently evaluating the idea of value imposed upon us by our social groupings.  When I say social groupings I mean our immediate family, our friends, our peers, our online social group in various platforms, our culture, everywhere we interact with another human being.  Needless to say, our value can be a complex equation based on the different social groupings and their individual requirements.  Included in that valuation are the pressures cast upon us by others to behave, think, and feel in certain ways they deem acceptable.  Because our various social groups are not likely to always agree, we must at times choose whose value is most important or even change our valuation of ourselves based on who we are with and our relationship to them. 

So how do we determine our value once we have a basic understanding of the many unwritten and written rules of our social groups?  The answer is interesting and not as straightforward as one might hope.  If I asked you to tell me your value or how you value yourself.  What would you say?  Most people are simply confused by the question.  If I asked what is your value to society overall, what is your value to your family, what is your value to your work or school? The question is still difficult as our evaluation is not based on definitive standards but fluctuating social norms and family culture.  The reality is that based on our environment only, we often do not have a good grasp of our value.  That is because we often do not fully understand how we are being evaluated and our systems of feedback are seriously flawed or limited.  It is not like we have some form of standards-based evaluation where we can definitively determine the value we provide to the social group.  We actually rely on subjective clues and cues to determine if we have a value and what that value is.

Nearly all of this feedback is going to be various forms of verbal and nonverbal cues about our place in the social group and how we are perceived.  Unfortunately, the information is rarely direct, often misinterpreted and lacking substance.  We must take a smile, a frown, an “I love you”, good job, anger, frustration and every movement and word out of someone’s mouth and interpret it as our value to the relationship or group.  There exist thousands of combinations of words, facial expressions, body postures that we must interpret to determine this value.  The problem with all this communication and interpretation is that we don’t know what we don’t know.  Meaning that we are not very good at interpreting our value from these cues.  And we are often looking for meaning, validation and information from someone else when they are not speaking to us about it.  Meaning they are more concerned about themselves and their own value rather than communicating what our value might be.  So we use limited information and poor interpretations to interpret our value that is critical to us feeling part of the group and not just part but contributing to the group or relationship.  Because of this we tend to have significant gaps of information in our valuation and of course the brain that doesn’t like missing gaps and so it fills in what we don’t know.  So what we typically possess as our barometer of self-worth is a limited, often misinterpreted set of feedback we get from imperfect human beings who are probably more concerned about their own self-evaluation rather than giving you a clear evaluation of your own worth.  Meaning we often do not evaluate ourselves effectively or even correctly.  

Now I have discussed self-valuation or self-worth as though we are a computer running a program interpreting signals and assigning a value.  However, that is not the case.  I am sure that our brain runs some type of rational evaluation subconsciously.  However, it is critical to understand that self-worth is comes as a feeling more than a rational determination.  We feel our worth more than we rationally determine it.  This then brings a whole new set of considerations when we talk about self-worth.  We have to consider our own emotional state when we feel our self-worth.  And as I have said before our emotional state at any one point in time is our reality.  We don’t separate our feelings of value from our overall feelings and emotional state.  This is often why our self-worth fluctuates even daily.  So if you consider that we are interpreting limited information through our current lens of emotions, filling in missing banks of information and then forming our self-worth, one could see how that process might go awry and give us a false narrative about ourselves.

Before we descend into the problems mental illness interjects, it is important that we look at self-worth through the lens of the gospel.  Many if not all of us have heard this narrative.  You are a son or daughter of heavenly parents who have potential to become like them.  Gods in embryo. Although I prefer to think of us and teenagers more than embryos, especially considering our behavior in mortality and the significant amount of time we have existed and experience the world around us both spiritual and temporal.  In addition to the potential we possess through our heavenly parents, our self-worth is also informed by our obedience to the knowledge and commandments we have received.  We tend to lump worthiness and self-worth into the same category and they do inform on another so for now we will leave be as it is.  However, to obtain our true value and knowledge of our worth, the rational words have little effect at least upon our feelings.  We need confirmation of that truth and we need to know that what we are doing and how we are living is acceptable to God.  Not only do we need the truth and the confirmation but as Alma has said “do we feel so now”.  In other words, our value spiritually is something we must feel regularly if not daily.  This is of course the purpose of the various small spiritual things we do daily to tap into the spiritual realm of conversation with the Spirit of the Lord.  Without the Spirit we will not feel worthy or valued within the boundaries of the church.

In addition to our knowledge and our daily confirmation, we exist within church societies and we desire wholeheartedly to be of value to this group.  The church society can be and is often a strange environment.  It should be the most accepting, loving, forgiving, and friendly environment in the world where we always feel accepted and valued but it is governed by men and women who are trying their best to find their own value and who are imperfect in many ways.  So what should be the perfect society tends to become a clustered mix of traditions, imperfect worldly evaluations, mixed with societies version of worth.  I certainly do not fault the people for this.  The reality is church membership in a ward and stake were always meant to be this way.  A group of individuals learning together and striving to do what they should but falling short in many ways.  So it is not unusual that we find mixed feelings and value when we attend to meetings, activities and relationships within the group.  What this produces as value is as mixed as its people.  I know many people who have been disillusioned by this problem and wonder why they don’t feel more valued in their ward.  I think for the most part, people come to the church to find value and the problem is that most of the members are looking to others who are looking back at them to find this value.  It is difficult for someone who is trying to find their place and value to give that to others.  The reality is that you have to possess a reasonable self-worth to be able to look outside yourself to give it to others.  Most members of the church do not have sufficient understanding of their own value through the Spirit of the Lord to be able to give what they have to others.  And so you have a great deal of members all looking for value from each other when they don’t possess enough self-worth to go forth and give that feedback to those around them.  Also of quick note before we move on.  Individuals who tend to give negative feedback regularly and attempt to bring others to their level, possess a low self-esteem and do not feel that they have value to extend to others and so they will attempt subconsciously to bring others to their level.

Now let’s consider adding all of the difficulties I have already mentioned to that skewed process of mental illness depression, anxiety and bipolar.  Meaning let’s possess and illness that seriously alters the lens by which we obtain and interpret our value and use that same set of feelings to produce a view of our value to our networks.  The answer is obvious, but I am going to say it anyway.  There is likely nothing true about a self-worth evaluation during an episode of mental illness.  And I mean nothing.  You are going to feel worthless, rejected, seriously undervalued and with little desire to change it.

The problem with self-worth and an incorrect evaluation is that we use this evaluation of worth all of the time in our lives to determine where we go, what we do, how well we do it, where we desire to get involved and even to determine our spiritual natures and how we should worship our Father and Savior in this life.  Self-worth is critical to motivation, faith and progression.  We have to know that we are in a path acceptable to God before we can really move towards him and we have to know that we are on the path regularly.  Also it is important to note that nearly all value created by our societies and by worldly pursuits is fleeting and will end.  To be greatly valued by the world, holds no real value in the Lord’s kingdom and that is simply because the standards by which the world evaluates are false and without merit.

Mental illness really causes us to be cut off from those feelings we need to confirm our value with the Lord on a daily basis.  The Spirit is difficult to hear over all the other voices in our minds and our depressed, anxious or mania feelings will be the lens by which we determine or value.  Anyone who has experienced mental illness in the least understands that the emotions brought forth by the illness are not determined by our thoughts or our environment for the most part.  The force of negative, consistent, paralyzing feelings is a chemistry problem where we feel darkness, negativity, and loss of value on a consistent basis without really the ability to address it by ourselves.  The same can be true for mania in that we might feel great value and over confidence but that value is also false and does lead to acting in ways contrary to gospel standards.  So the truth of the matter is that during our episodes we are going to feel worthless, sinful, of little value to anyone including the Lord when it comes to depression and anxiety.  And there will be little we can do to change our feelings as they are not necessarily thought driven but chemistry driven.  This doesn’t mean that we can’t use good thought patterns to avoid a deep dive into the darkened world.  What it does mean is that mental illness will almost always give one a sense of worthlessness and a self-worth that needs consistent nourishment from outside sources to even reach a minimum level.  For most of us this doesn’t happen because for someone to be able to nourish us in this way, they themselves must have a good sense of their self-worth in terms of the spiritual and the Lord.  We unfortunately find so few individuals that possess self-worth in any real quantity to help others.

So what do we do then and how can we feel worthy and of value to society and the Lord?

1)      The first answer is that relying on the world for value is not going to provide and true value.  There will be accepting people who will provide for value but often they do not possess a true value of themselves but a worldly one and they impart value through their own sense of false value.  The image of the great and spacious building with no foundation really gives a wonderful picture of what I mean.  For them the building, which is their value, feels real and solid but the reality is that what they have built their esteem upon will eventually crumble and fall.  We simply must be careful to avoid worldly valuations or at a minimum see them for what they are.

2)      True self-esteem and value only come from the Lord and most often that value comes from personal revelation.  True value in the sense of self-worth is a two way communication with the Lord through the Spirit as to our standing spiritually.  This is what we must seek to find true and lasting value.  During an episode, this communication is going to be difficult if not impossible and we are likely going to rely upon another for a true understanding of value.  We must be very careful who we choose and whose information we will accept.  I realize that when we are in the moment of difficulty we will reach for anything that will tell us we have value and it will be difficult to distinguish between the worldly admiration and value and the spiritual.  And so we should avoid making changes based on value found during our episodes and yes this is far easier to say than to do.  But understanding that what we feel as value is false rationally can be at least a little helpful to us during those dark moments.

3)      We must be careful not to consider the wonderful church members our own barometer of value.  Most church members are learning and trying to understand spiritually who they are and where they stand with the Lord and their cues to us as to our value are really only a measure of their own self-esteem.  So rather than provide to us what our true value is most often they are subtly telling us how they feel about their own personal relationship with the Lord.  We should be discerning and careful about any message of our value outside of personal revelation.  Of course, personal revelation can come from someone else if confirmed by the Lord.

4)      Finally, while our minds and bodies are very attuned to what the world and our church society thinks of us, we should do our best to avoid listening.  My experience is that most of the cues, clues and direct information we get from other human beings is not accurate or extremely helpful due to their own problems with self-esteem.  I have found that most individuals that surround us do not possess sufficient self-esteem to extend to others effective feedback, in fact, I have found very few who do.  I think that it is important that we are aware of this problem and we do what we can to avoid taking into our hearts and minds their evaluations, especially when those evaluations are far more worldly than spiritual.

I personally have found the Lord to be loving, forgiving, kind, understanding and always positive when it comes to our self-esteem.  This doesn’t mean he does not send us the chastising moment but even in the moment his words are encouraging.  I have also found that my person evaluation of my value and self-esteem is often far lower than the Lord’s value of me and my potential.  When we truly come to understand our true standing with the Lord and our value, we will find great comfort and happiness in the Lord’s evaluation of our lives and we will feel truly valuable to the Lord, to those around us and to our society and we will not be concerned what others think of us or our value.  May you find this wonderful feeling of value and may you do your part so that the Lord can do his.  Until next week.