the problem of self-worth

The last therapist I had was really good. I found her through the employee assistance program I have access to, and I was lucky to get her. My problems were depression and anxiety, and although I had some serious depression and anxiety, I must have been strawberry shortcake compared to her main focus of specialization: most of her clients were sex offenders.

In any case, when I got the referral, I called to interview her. I asked about her orientation and methodology. She was amused. I'm pretty sure she thought I was the biggest smart-ass in the world. But I know a little about psychology, have seen a handful of mainly very bad therapists, and I wanted to know. She didn't say.

One of the tasks she kept presenting me was to understand my troubles in terms of how I interpreted and told myself what my experiences meant. (So, if you're keeping score at home, she was probably operating out of some version of rational-emotive or cognitive therapy.) She would ask me why I was focused on the negative judgments of me made by people I didn't respect - which I was, honestly. To me, doofus that I am, this was a revelation.

She also asked me very difficult questions about self-worth that I still struggle with. I'm not sure, even now, what self-worth means, or how it would function in my life. In her view, it meant something like valuing myself, simply and solely because I am me. This is very hard for me to do, to the point that when she would ask me about my self-worth, I would start to rattle off the things I had done or the qualities I had that seemed to be worthy. "I'm intelligent," I'd say, pointing out what seemed obviously to be a worthy characteristic. But she'd say that intelligence isn't something I'd really earned, and isn't something intrinsically worthy, anyway.

It was a trick, of course. Any particular characteristic one has isn't the real source of self-worth. Under this model of therapy, self-worth arises from a rational and emotional notion of one's centrality to one's own life. Let me rephrase that: under this model, self-worth is you telling yourself that you're worth consideration. There is no magic, no psychohistory or psychodrama at the root of the problem of having a poor self-concept.

That it still comes up, while my life in general is demonstrably, objectively, in every way better than it was when I was dealing with depression, is stunning and puzzling to me. But it's true: a bad class session, poor reception of a paper I've written, listening to superior guitarists, an offhand comment, can all shake my self-confidence and undermine my feeling of self-worth.

But this remains an open question for me. As much as I would like to feel good about myself, and not have that sense of my own worthiness threatened on a daily basis, I remain suspicious of the idea of intrinsic self-worth. Do we not need to deserve it? Do we not need to deserve ourselves, or deserve the good, the happiness, the pleasure, that we continuously demand for ourselves?