deconstructing the worthiness wound and reasons for women's unworthiness

The deeper I go into my studies of neurology, cognitive psychology, and trauma work, the more I recognize a certain set of common denominators within almost every single woman I coach or teach.

For now, I am calling this trend the worthiness wound. You can also think of it as the arts of personal objectification. And it lies at the core of every women’s psyche.

While we carry many spaces of emotional wounding within us, places where a deep lack of being seen and heard created a defense mechanism that keeps us frozen and alienated from ourselves… none of them seem to be as unrelenting and deeply embedded in our being than the worthiness wound. {If you want to know more what I mean by “wound,” I invite you to read this blog post}

What am I am finding is that this worthiness wound stems from a combination of potent forces.

At the most foundational level, there is no denying the power that the overarching patriarchal mindset has on all of us. The misogyny of our culture teaches us that there is something wrong with women while we were still nestling in our mother’s womb. You can imagine how that must impact us from a very early age. This baseline assumption that women are a problem becomes an unintentional but potent lens we are now unconsciously assessing our life through. From this paradigm, nothing that we do will ever be enough, for ourselves or society.

We are practically born feeling unworthy and broken.

On top of that, we have to grapple with various layers of lineage inheritance and the worthiness wound as it impacts our ancestry and caregivers… as well as the personal challenges we experience on the human plane. Both of these elements turn up the volume on our sense of unworthiness and further placates women to a space of invisibility and smallness.

I like to imagine a little baby being handed a suitcase filled with lead at birth and now forced to lug it around, feeling it get heavier and heavier as life’s experiences further condition her to believe that there is something wrong with her and that she is not enough.

Because children cannot handle these types of understanding, they create an image {a set of belief systems and stories} to make carrying this suitcase more bearable. This image becomes the foundation from which women navigate the world.

What is important to highlight here is that our worthiness wound is not “our fault.” You are not defective or broken for carrying this sense of unworthiness around wherever you go. You have literally become conditioned to do the opposite of everything you need to do become a self-actualized, confident woman.

This baggage you are carrying now was never yours to begin with. But because we were not taught the necessary skills to feel worthy, well, we drag along this suitcase to the best of our abilities, compensating with beliefs and stories that help us stay safe in an unwelcoming world.

That is why worthiness is so hard to just "shift." As much as we say to ourselves, “I am worthy” and “I deserve better,” we can’t seem to shake off this fraud-like feeling that makes us question ourselves at every turn. Mindset won’t work when it comes to healing this wound.

The worthiness wound affects us in every which way. It keeps us feeling a lack of confidence {the confidence we need to charge our worth, ask for a raise, start a business, etc} that no amount of validation can assuage. It keeps us from deriving pleasure from our lives as we are constantly stuck in a spiral of feeling on edge and unsafe. It keeps us in a spiral of pushing people away, sabotaging our efforts, and feeling unfulfilled and dissatisfied, but wholly unmotivated to do anything about it.

There’s clearly a lot to unpack here. And what I am seeing is that this worthiness wound results in various  patterns that play out in the lives of women. Here are three:

1. Emotionally disconnected - as in feeling either overwhelmed by emotions or numbed out, unable to embody our bodies, and distrustful of our inner guidance system.

2. People pleasing - as in our addiction to receiving validation from others, losing ourselves to the opinions of others, and placing other people’s needs above our own

3. Comparitis - as in our obsession with comparing ourselves to others, competing with other women, and distrusting people’s motives

In the next few weeks, I would love to take you on this journey of exploring how our worthiness wound manifests, as well as begin to deconstruct the skills women were taught to supposedly “flourish” in our society… but are actually keeping us feeling not enough and hungry for genuine love and expression.

As I finish writing this, a memory comes to mind. A few years ago when I first started to rediscover my inner femininity and what that even meant, I felt inspired to draw a little girl with a big heart to represent this energy of womanhood within me. Inside that heart it read, “ahhhhh yesss, I am enough.”

What I love about that drawing is that I intuitively knew then that reclaiming our feminine leadership would be the path to finally feeling worthy and enough.

This is the opposite of the hungry, wounded, unworthy woman. It is a woman that stands in her power, that expresses her truth freely, that feels deeply and loves fully. A woman completely unapologetic and unfuckwithable, coupled with a compassionate gaze and a bold, open heart.

I am here to dismantle this worthiness wound and shift the story from the objectified woman to the embodied, worthy woman.

Because claiming our worth is the most rebellious {and necessary} journey we can embark on. Let’s begin.

To your worth,