Source: Life Map
Struggles with low self-worth are at the core of most human suffering. Low self-worth is not a random occurrence: it is the direct result of not being appropriately seen, heard and validated as a child. The truth is that many parents did not succeed in making their kids feel seen or heard in the ways that they would have needed.
Most parents simply reproduce what they went through and what they were taught as children. This is called the generational transmission cycle. One generation after another repeats the cycles and patterns that they were brought up with, even if those patterns were hurtful and/or dysfunctional. When people decide to face themselves and to heal: they give themselves the freedom to choose what kind of life, patterns, and relationships they desire to create.
Most people who didn’t feel seen or heard by their caretakers learn to treat themselves similarly. They, therefore, become unable to meet their own emotional needs and end up self-neglecting and self-sabotaging. Breaking generational patterns of trauma requires huge amounts of courage, self-awareness, resilience, and drive.
The first step to breaking any generational transmission of trauma cycle is to become aware of it. The second step is to heal your emotional wounds by reconnecting with your inner child and your best parent. The third step is to realize that breaking your generational cycle will require a lot of work from your part. The fourth step is to take responsibility.
Whatever kind of wound you still harbor, the fact of the matter is that you are now an adult. This means that no matter what you went through, you need to stop waiting for people to miraculously become the parent/sibling/partner you always hoped/wished/dreamed they would be and you need to start taking full responsibility for your current happiness and life situation.
If you don’t think that you deserve better, then ask yourself why you don’t feel more deserving. Which disempowering and destructive subconscious beliefs have you internalized about your self-worth? Do you feel like you are a worthy person? Do you feel like you deserve love, peace, happiness, and success? If you don’t feel that you deserve these things, start asking yourself why. Why do you have these disempowering and hurtful beliefs that you are undeserving of? Why do you have the belief that you are not worthy? Worthy of love, worthy of money? Worthy of safety? Where do these beliefs come from? Who made you or is still currently making you feel unworthy, unloveable and/or unsuccessful?
It was usually one or more caretakers in our childhood that made us feel like we did not belong like we were not worthy enough or like we were not deserving. Adults with low deservingness have usually internalized their caretakers’ critical voices and will begin to bring themselves down the same way that they were criticized as children. And why do they do this? Because all human beings will treat themselves the same way that they were treated as children.
As children, we are dependent on our caretakers to survive but as adults, we have the access and the awareness to reflect on our behavior and to develop the tools that we need to change our lives.