I think it would be widely affirmed that a deficit of self-worth is detrimental to a person’s health and capacity to thrive as a human being. It’s less clear what precisely low self-worth is and how it manifests in a person. This blog attempts to articulate the ramifications of my self-worth deficit. The next blog attempts to explain how I developed the deficit. For now, I report what I’ve found in retrospection: that self-worth deficit dramatically impacted every sphere of my life. It’s something I have grieved on account of the significant toll it had on me in my youth through my mid-twenties.  

Shame is a natural byproduct of self-worth deficit. I felt it, like touching a live wire. Shame has a physiology, you see, the physiology of fear. Experiencing identity-level shame activates fear like being in the same room as a hungry hyena. It felt also like being emotionally hurt, being offended, constantly. A heightened sense of threat, fight, flight, freeze. I was just as at-arms as one would be when feeling wronged, but my antagonist was usually myself. Now that I’ve healed and relaxed, I see this in retrospect. When I get offended nowadays, I remark that I, for a passing moment, feel what I felt before steadily, for years. Always warding it off, always alert, always hyper-attentive. Low-key insomnia, nausea, digestion issues, inability to relax. Tightness across the body. For a time, a strange fascia pain in my left breast and very sharp pain in the left of my neck.

I had a restless, reeling mind. My brain feeling, knotted and tense. Appreciation of the present was often impossible because I was in the past or future obsessively evaluating my performance and imagining redeeming myself. I obsessed over small past interactions, feeling great shame over very small things, and ruminating on them as if in an attempt to change the past – as if to make it not so that I did that thing, whatever it was, whether a real grievance, or just an embarrassment. I experienced “embarrassing moments” with disproportionate intensity, as my identity was already inflamed and sensitive. Embarrassment too quickly became identity-level shame. Ironically, my attempts to avoid embarrassment often led me to tactless behaviour, but more on that later.

Note that all of this is also constituent to Anxiety and Depression.

I found myself by my teens unable, often, to trust affirmation. Or, if I did receive it, it “leaked out” abruptly. Trevor Walters, a Christian counsellor, presents in his book, “External Affirmation Syndrome,” the metaphor of an “affirmation bucket”. Someone with low self-worth has a hole in their affirmation bucket. This seems to fit my experience. People were surprised at how self-loathing I was, considering that I did have sources of affirmation and accomplishments to stand on. I was disdained even, for my inability to accept praise. It looks like a kind of egocentrism, to be so constantly needing affirmation despite receiving it. It is egocentrism, in a way, fostered by injury to one’s self-worth. It won’t go away until that soul-wound is attended to and heals.

I suspected I was a fraud. In my greatest accomplishments, easily praised by other, I saw insufficiency and incompetence. I actually told the principle that he was wrong to give me the “Global Citizenship” award. It felt very wrong. I felt gross, imposter-y, and hollow. I saw immorality and imperfection in all my conduct. I needed people’s praise, like a heroine shot, but when I got it, I could not trust it for long. My devaluation of my performance had in part to do with intuiting, on some level, that so much of what I did, I did as compensation for self-worth deficit. I knew that and I hated it because I deemed such a need to be humanistic, selfish, and even evil in the same order as Adam eating the fruit. 

As the need did not go away despite my condemnation of it, I developed a soul-deadening perfectionism to compensate. Perfectionism paradoxically became my cry for help. It was both an attempt to secure praise and snuff out the need for affirmation – to silence the cry of the child within. Perfectionism in academics, ministry attempts, music. I found myself trying so hard at things that I was actually lowering my actual output – Stumbling over my own feet because I was running so fast so tired. Problematically, I was also a spiritual perfectionist, attempting with great zeal to be an excellent Christian for God and others. For seasons, I did devotions for three hours in the morning, this my zeal and desperation. I intuited that my greatest barrier to my effectiveness was my sadness and fear (which I didn’t actually name at the time), so I tried to overcome it in prayer. Even after three hours of prayer, however, I would often still have a great deal of sadness and fear (with notable exceptions. There were real moments of comfort in there – shots of light in the dark.)

My perfectionism alone would have burnt me out some time in life, had not grief and heartbreak knocked off the bridge early.

A college professor commented on my reflection paper once. “Like myself, you’re high functioning with base-line wounds.”

I found myself largely unable to relax. I found myself unable also to really play. I note times even as young as 12-13 feeling strongly that I could not afford to join my friends in play. Often when I did play, I felt guilty doing it and searched for reasons to “justify” it. I always evaluated my time by its utility – its utility for securing my worth in people’s eyes, and its utility for security my effectiveness (and therefore worth) in God’s eyes. I feel that I didn’t truly recover play until recently.

An inability to enjoy people’s company and trust in their affection led to a strong sense of isolation. Hypervigilance and need to please prevented me from really benefitting from the affirmation of friendships. Emotional isolation grew also because I was unable to articulate my feelings; I was unable to share the war with someone. When I did express it as I was able to, it was always trivialized. Perhaps not always? It feels like always. It didn’t seem like anyone “got it” until my college years. 

The various tenets of self-worth deficit, of which I’m not done listing, resulted in hard-core burnout. People use the word flippantly, but when I say burnout, I mean destitution of the soul. Triggered largely by the death of my mother and friend, and couple of heart-breaks, I crashed hard, twice. The first time it took a year to sort of recover (I didn’t really recover). The second time took another two years, and I’m still feeling in my body the toll of it all. The depression I sunk into then was a familiarity with the void. So, this is hell. “I cannot see the light,” I said often, and desired to die. There in the dark, I reckoned with my faith in a way I never had the courage to before but now had to out of desperation. And, as I mentioned in the last blog. I developed a chronic pain and fatigue syndrome.

 And anger. Oh, such anger. Even when for a time I was angry at my father, or siblings or friends, I found a way to turn it against myself because I knew, deep down, that it was probably me that was the problem.

Moving from personal ramifications into social ramifications, I must mention hyper-vigilance. When a professor described it to the class, I thought, “I’m not a trauma victim so that can’t be me, but it totally is me.” Concerning trauma, I’ve since learned that trauma has many un-obvious forms and that one family member can experience something as trauma which other family members do not. In this world it’s actually not that difficult for a sensitive child to experience something as traumatic.

Hyper-vigilance is a hyper-attentiveness to people’s moods. I had a hyper-attentiveness to people’s moods and their dispositions toward me. I felt this most keenly with my father but also painfully in other relationships. I was always subtly-to-very afraid. What was I afraid of? I was afraid of conflict which would always rocket my anxiety stratospherically, and afraid of disapproval, even just small expressions of it. I often saw disapproval where it did not exist. I was haunted by a suspicion that I was intrinsically condemnable and repellant and worth ostracizing. I could not afford to lose others’ good-wil,l so I tried to make absolutely certain that I had their approval. I was afraid of further confirmation of my unworthiness.

I became, also, people pleasing and hyper-compliant. I was easily a pushover. “Too nice” I got often. I was hyper-compliant to sociopathic behaviours and easily manipulated by needy folks. I was quickly the “rescuer” in co-dependent relationships with shamelessly needy, or just tactless, people. It was nearly impossible to assert my needs or desires or grievances to my father or authority figures. When I did so, it took very little to convince me that the fault was really mine.

Romantic relationships were disproportionately terrifying, and I avoided girls I was attracted to like the plague. When in college I did try, I was quickly devastated. The sense of shame and unworthiness that played out in me in normal relationships, was in these romantic relationships amplified exponentially. With them, my worth was even more on the line than usual. I didn’t survive them and remain functional.  

There are some profound spiritual ramifications to my worth deficit, as well, the most profound of which is that I couldn’t really trust that God loved me. It felt like he loved me obligatorily or that his love was a cosmic exchange devoid of relational valuing. He didn’t really like me. I didn’t like me, and perceived that most people didn’t really like me, or that they only liked the false version of me. It followed that since God saw the real me, he probably didn’t really like me. He’ll get me into heaven, but will he want me there? I’ll feel like the eternal conditional guest, which I felt like in most of my relationships, even, to some extent, with my own family.

In heaven, God would be another entity to whom I was insecurely, nervously attached.  I spent a great deal of energy on earth subconsciously attempting to secure God’s affection, to secure worthiness, to make him like me. I naturally assumed that heaven would be the same, I’d be hypervigilant there too, not sure if I really belonged there, always feeling an imposter, keeping God in my peripheral vision so as to make sure his disposition toward me was still favourable.

This was complicated greatly by the Christian doctrine that no one deserves God’s grace. It’s doctrinally correct to say that all humanity is “unworthy”. It’s something like a de-Calvinized version of Total Depravity that I grew up with, maybe a bit on the hard-core side. Even in larger Christianity, however, some version of this, of essential human unworthiness, is orthodox.

My Father attempted to release me of my anxious egocentrism by assuring me that I would be free of all my fretting if I just finally accepted that I am not worthy.  As I write this, I hear a thousand counsellors cringe, so I defend my father: This is the phrasing of the Gospel for many and for many it works. They don’t feel existentially destroyed by it. Rather it helps them get over their pride and accept unconditional love. So, now that I’ve absolved my Father of piritual abuse, I state that however good his intentions, the effect on me ultimately was further inflammation of my self-worth wound.  

My Father, I think, was among those who had no way of seeing my worth-compensation behaviours to be anything other that bizarre ego-centrism.

This compounded with my shame and became further reason to be ashamed of the crying-out within me. I could now deem my worth-seeking behaviours to be arrogant, humanistic, maybe even legalism, and maybe be an inability to just finally accept the gospel. When the craving then came up, and I saw it influence my relationships, I was ashamed of it because it was arrogance, in my estimation. This is why I prayed “Humble me, Lord” probably thousands of times. On an average day of after-school shame, I would sit staring at the ceiling praying that dozens of times.

Time with God in “devotions” was so often a warfield for me. It was stressful. It was where I confronted my demons, my “phantom council” and found them resilient to my aggressive prayer, scripture reading, and scripture memorization.

I heard of people being angry with God. I was surprised at that because I was never really angry with God. In the same manner as in my human relationships, I quickly turned my anger to the other against myself. Toward God, I don’t actually remember feeling anger until I grew a sense of having rights and worth in my mid-twenties. (I said finally at 26, “I’m angry at God” and it felt like progress). In my youth, I wasn’t angry at God. I was angry at myself for not qualifying for his affection and care, or for being too arrogant and entitled to accept the present scarcity as sufficiency. “This is just what it means to be Christian, Jacob,” I said, essentially, to myself, “Accept it and get out and save some freaking souls.” So, I considered my worth-deficit to be normal to Christian life and considered my craving for worth to be an evil desire of the flesh. My desire for something more was wrong humanistic entitlement. Effectively, my Christian life became imprisoning. I lived in my own personal cult.  

When I was asked in my mid-twenties whether I would want to invite a non-Christian to live my life, I had to reply, “not at all.” Not at all. I wouldn’t wish this life on anyone. So, I quite definitely had to admit that something was amiss in my faith life. Either Christianity was inherently damaging and imprisoning, or I had received it and actualized it in my life wrongly. In either case, something had to change. And it did, by the grace of God. Look at that, I can still say that authentically.

But returning to the past, I was effectively insecurely attached with God, and with everyone. That’s hardly an understatement, sad as it is. I think, though, that some measure of insecure attachment with God and others is common. But I digress. I could not resiliently feel and know God’s affirmation and that of others, so I became hypervigilant and perfectionistic and veritably strove for their approval.  It was a cruel inner word. I was cruel to myself out of sensed necessity. People didn’t know why I did it to myself. For me it was out of necessity and survival.

I’ve written elsewhere about pre-rational vs. rational beliefs and it might serve to reiterate here that while I knew rationally that God loved me and I was going to heaven, I didn’t know pre-rationally whether God loved me. I believed pre-rationally, that God didn’t really desire me in heaven. My self-worth deficit did not permit me to enjoy such affection.

Through my adolescence, and teen years, and mid-twenties, my self-worth deficit accrued for me a great deal of suffering and emotional isolation.  I was misunderstood by my father and others such that, to put it simply, my soul-injury was labeled a sin. My corresponding mental illness was a character flaw and represented an inability to “just accept the gospel.” By my shame, my anger turned inward and fed the shame. My relationships all felt insecure, including mine with God, and my Christian striving felt imprisoning, and necessarily exhausting.

I know that the Christians in my life would not have wanted this for me, but it happened. On the other end of some healing, however, I can also say that it was Christians – some of the same who did not understand me before, and many new ones – it was Christians who validated my suffering and helped me understand that God did not desire that distress for me and that he is with me in my destitution. I have been counted worthy of the solidarity of God, and nothing that I am or that I have done has power to disqualify me from the affection and investment of God. Many things have changed, and now I can truly feel love and feel secure attachment. I can enjoy people’s affection without wondering if I’m actually worthy of it, and without worrying about how long it will last. I am loved. I am worthy of love, respect, and care, by virtue of having been created human, and having been called “child” by the Father. I know this now, but for many years I experienced, instead, a harrowing self-worth deficit.