Healing and Hypnotherapy Volume - 4, Issue - 5, 1 November 2019 | Page 7

What Determines Self-Worth?
So, WHY do we develop low self-worth?
Well, you know that low self-worth is really a way of protecting yourself from
being vulnerable, right?
We develop low self-worth for two reasons:
1 Due to our childhood traumas and core wounds
2 To protect ourselves against what we fear
Reason #1: Childhood traumas and core wounds
In a nutshell, low self-worth is a product of fear and a fundamental
misunderstanding about who we are.
I’ll break this down in the next two parts:
Reason #1: Childhood Traumas and Core Wounds
A childhood trauma is a deeply distressing event that happened when we
were children. We’ve all experienced traumas, and they form the basis of the
core wounds we carry.
How did they develop? Well, the core wounds that derived from our childhood
traumas were a natural part of growing up. As young children, there was a
point where we began to understand our powerlessness and limitations and
the power that our elders (parents, older siblings, caretakers etc.) had over
us. That itself was traumatising.
We learned very quickly that we were punished when we did something “bad”
according to these more-powerful-elders and rewarded when we did
something “good.” As a result, we learned to adopt a mask or external
persona that would protect us and keep us in the good favour of others.
Unfortunately, if we had parents who weren’t mentally or emotionally mature,
we may have adopted beliefs about ourselves as young, vulnerable children
that served to destroy our basic sense of self-worth.
For example, our parents may have said things like “No! You’re being bad!”
and smacked us. Or we may have been compared to another sibling, had a
family member constantly criticise us or even sexually assault us. We may
have been neglected by overly busy parents, humiliated by our siblings, or
generally looked down upon by one or both parents.
All of these situations served to teach us the flawed belief that there’s
something fundamentally wrong with us.
Core wounds are the fundamental underlying beliefs that we carry about
ourselves. Examples include, “I am stupid,” “I am ugly,” and “I don’t deserve
to be happy.”