Name: Authentically Developing Self-Worth | Being Well Podcast
Uploaded: 2025-10-08T06:28:56.000Z
Duration: 53 min 56 s
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If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today.

And if you've listened before, welcome back.

We recently released a couple of episodes focused on identifying and expressing our wants and needs to other people.

And during those conversations I mentioned that an important part of the process is developing a greater sense of self worth.

When we increase our self worth, it allows us to get on our own side more easily, which can help us take our needs more seriously and change our lives for the better.

And it's really easy to tell somebody to just develop some more self worth, but

it's often a lot harder to do it in practice.

So that's what we're going to be focusing on today, how we can develop a more durable sense of self worth.

And to help us learn how to do that, I'm joined today as usual by Dr. Rick Hanson.

Rick is a clinical psychologist, a best selling author, and he's also my dad.

So, dad, why do you think that self worth is so important?

It's really hard to take action on our own behalf if we don't feel that we're worth the results right right from the start.

Second, low self worth is associated, as a lot of research shows, with depressive mood.

So when you feel like you're running on empty because you don't feel much sense of worth, it's really hard to keep on going.

And then third, when other people bump into us, if you don't feel like you have much worth, it's hard to bounce back from that and it's hard to challenge other people who've been mistreating you and even pursue assertiveness, reasonable assertiveness with them over time.

The last thing I'll just say is that apart from all those kind of functional explanations, as a person who entered adulthood when with really low self worth, very low self worth, and

it's been a lifelong journey for me actually to engage this deep down, you know, in the core of your being.

What's it feel like when you don't feel very good about yourself, when you don't really feel like a particularly good person, you don't feel very lovable, very worthy of love.

At the bottom of low self worth is a lie.

Lies that other people told you and lies that maybe today you're continuing to tell yourself.

And it's really unfortunate that those lies can cast such a long shadow.

So, Forrest, I'm so glad that you foregrounded this topic and we're going to get into it.

Yeah, I think that was a great summary for starter's dad for why we're talking about this in the first place and why it's an important thing for people to focus on in their own lives.

And whenever you start talking about something like self worth, there are two families of questions that show up really quickly, often for people.

The first is, well, how is this different from other similar topics like self esteem or self confidence?

And the second one that sometimes shows up for people is, if I develop more self worth, isn't that just going to turn me into like a malignant narcissist?

And I'm going to start kind of being an asshole to everyone and we're going to address both of those.

But I want to start with the second one first, dad, and

give you an opportunity to reply to some of those common criticisms that come up when people talk about developing more self worth.

It's been observed for a long time and there's just a lot of psychological theory about this, including in early psychoanalysis that people who present out in the world as arrogant and top dog, very, very, very often that's a compensation for feeling the opposite underneath.

It all often rooted in being treated in opposite ways when they were young.

A variation of that as a detail, we'll get into it.

Alice Miller really developed this notion.

I kind of experienced it some of it myself as a kid.

Where you grow up as a kid and you sort of get whipsawed between being put up on the pedestal one moment and then knocked down on the other side, it would be almost easier if you were always being knocked down.

At least you'd kind of see what's happening or if you were always put up on the pedestal.

But to have both of them happening can be really confusing to a kid.

And you can kind of fight desperately to stay up on that pedestal and you start to really fear any lapse or any revelation of anything inside you that would lead others, including maybe your parents or your older sibling or kids at school, whack, to knock you back down again.

Yeah, it's kind of similar to the idealization devaluation pattern that we've talked about a little bit on the podcast.

people who are vulnerable to low self worth around, which may well be an act, a kind of shell of pretentiousness and being impressive.

You know, one of the things that tends to drive that is a deep fear of being devalued sometimes accompanied with preemptive strikes of devaluing others first.

What we present to the world is often a compensation for what we feel inside.

So therefore, the paradox is when people feel truly worthy inside, when they feel truly lovable, when they truly feel comfortable in their skin, then they don't have to keep proving it, they don't have to keep impressing others, and

they don't have to keep pushing others down to lift themselves up.

So in the process of talking about that, you mentioned some features of people who might tend to struggle a little bit with self worth.

And one of the things that you mentioned were difficulties that people have in childhood, sometimes with parents who maybe went through those cycles of idealization and then devaluation with them.

And the research generally shows that self worth is easiest to develop in childhood and adolescence, which is no surprise to anybody.

And it sort of supports these two main strategies, which is to provide kids with unconditional love and respect and positive regard.

And then the second one is to give kids or adolescents the opportunity to experience success of different kinds.

And those two things together tend to support self worth.

And this actually ties to recent conversation we had with Gabor Matei who talked about how unconditional love is one of the needs that children have to be valued just because they're a being rather than because of what they can do for other people.

And that gets us into a little bit of a conversation about the differences between self worth and related things like self esteem, that what you can do is often a bit more tied to self esteem, whereas who you are is often a bit more tied to self worth.

Self esteem is generally framed as how you feel about yourself and the opinions that you have about yourself.

And where do our opinions about ourselves come from?

Well, most of the time they come from other people.

And a lot of what influences that is our evaluation of ourself relative to others.

And this to me is a little bit different from self worth, which is more the internal sense of being good enough just as you are.

And my sense personally with my self esteem is that it can really fluctuate on a moment to moment basis.

It's really possible for me to feel good about myself in a moment while not having a really durable sense of self worth.

And I think that like you dad, when I was younger, my self worth was more in question, but

my self esteem might have been quite high.

And it reminds me of clients I've had who really could come in with a master's thesis on their positive qualities, who deep down still felt bad about themselves.

Deep down inside, there was a sense of shame and low self worth and shame tend to really go together around.

It was that shell that rationally they knew they were talented, intelligent, they'd accomplished a lot, but

deep down inside they still did not feel very good about themselves.

And they did not enter into the next interaction with much confidence that others would see their worth, both self esteem and self worth.

But a lot self worth is socially situated.

Lizards don't struggle with low self worth.

And you can see behaviors in primate cousins like chimpanzees, let's say even rats, who in the experiment, let's say, what will be constructed is a kind of social insult.

They will be devalued socially and as a manipulation.

And often what they'll do is they'll go off and pick on another rat or another monkey that they're dominant toward in the larger hierarchy.

You mentioned earlier on in the episode dad that you were somebody where you would self describe as having some struggles with self worth personally.

And then as time has gone on, you've achieved a more durable sense of that.

And so maybe to ask an overly simple question here, what did you do?

It lets me make another point too, which is that I think people can err too far on either side.

Like, for example, the history of the self esteem construct is connected a lot to the psychologist Nathaniel Brandon, who is situated a lot in individualism and somewhat libertarian adjacent.

He was an early student and protege of Ayn Rand.

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Authentically Developing Self-Worth | Being Well Podcast

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