Being Worthy

By Dr. Richard Waldron

Being Worthy is an essential guide written for anyone who has struggled with a lack of self-worthy or a sense of imposterism, and who is unsure of where to turn for help. Dr. Waldron wrote Being Worthy to help readers break their self-judgements wide open, and make their way to a happy, fulfilling and empowered life.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Being Worthy LLC
• Release date: Jul 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798988469612

Book preview

Being Worthy

A Step-by-Step Process to Discover Your Innate Worth

Dr. Richard Waldron

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Being Worthy LLC

Copyright © 2021 by Dr. Richard Waldron.

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Contents

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

1.Beginning a Quest for Worthiness

2.The Search for Your Innate Self-Worth

3.Who Do You Think You Are?

4.Worthiness versus Worthlessness

5.Worthiness and Personal Transformations

6.Worthiness and the Power of Belief

7.Worthy Kids Grow to Worthy Adults

8.Worthiness and Personal Effectiveness

9.Becoming a Worthy Warrior

10.The Stairway to Worthiness

Epilogue: Under the Moon and Stars

About Author

Dedicated to Victoria,

my colleague and most worthy friend.

With profound gratitude to those worthy folks

who helped make Being Worthy possible:

Danielle Barnes

Robert Brooks

Sarah Johnson

Kelly Notaras

Jayne Rubenfeld

Robert Whiteman

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Preface

In the past, if you had said the phrase being worthy to me, I would have laughed because it used to remind me of the movie Wayne’s World. Whenever they met rockstars, Wayne and Garth would fall to their knees and chant, We’re not worthy. It was a punch line, a joke.

Said by an individual, it becomes I’m not worthy and takes on a very different, dark, and perhaps tragic meaning. Feeling worthy requires recognizing your worth to family, friends, your community, and most importantly yourself. Too many people don’t see, or even worse, don’t allow themselves to feel their worth. One such person is Amanda, someone you will meet in the chapters that follow.

I knew Amanda. I knew she felt, or more accurately believed, that she wasn’t worthy, wasn’t deserving of so many things, such as some tangibles, such as gifts or compliments. There are other intangibles that are far more important. Things like love, respect, or comfort. I couldn’t understand how or why she could feel this way. Being worthy is so personal, so private, and completely internalized that there’s no way to convey your worth to someone else.

There’s no scale, measurement, or roadmap to feeling worthy. Through reading this book, you’ll better understand the experiences and emotions that sometimes build and reinforce—and sometimes erode—worth. You will learn that being worthy is a critical component of a solid psychological foundation, a key to well-being, and essential to your mental and physical health.

The concepts and exercises in this book represent a new approach and a shift in focus, taking a close look at underlying traits that may influence thoughts and behaviors. Whether you’re reading to help yourself, someone you care about, a patient, or simply to expand your knowledge, embrace the theme of worth. Understand its origins and how it can be increased.

Amanda couldn’t say, I’m worthy, and we’ll never know if her sense of worth could have been unearthed from under the years of pain she endured. You have the chance to help yourself and others.

Along the journey, you may even save a life.

— Amanda’s Dad

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Introduction

Being Worthy. You probably picked up this book because the title is intriguing. You may be on a journey of healing and understanding of who you are, where you came from and how these things impact your life at this very moment.

In my writing, I equate the process to weaving, as it is metaphorical of life. Each day we weave the stories of our lives whether or not we are aware of the narrative. This is especially true in Being Worthy.

This book is the story of a therapeutic relationship that I had with Amanda (names have been changed for privacy), how that relationship became interwoven in my life, what she taught me, and what I can share with you to help move your life forward in the direction you want it to go.

While many may think that mental health practitioners are aloof, we are sensitive people who feel things very deeply. In my training, I was taught to be detached, objective, and to work within certain theoretical frameworks. I am somewhat unique because I’m not only a psychologist, but also a psychiatric nurse practitioner, having become the latter at age 53. In weaving my story, I want you to learn some of the inner workings of people like me who devote our lives to improve the mental health of others. For me, my work is very personal. It is a mission, and I literally put my heart and soul into it each day. I love what I do, and I feel others deeply. It’s a blessing and a curse to be naturally empathic.

So why write a book about being worthy? I hope you will discover how important you are just for the very fact that you exist. It is essential to your being that you matter. You have a foundation to your personality structure that I call your cornerstone of worth. You will hear that phrase many times throughout the book. Your experiences can strengthen and reinforce that cornerstone for the better. Conversely, negative experiences, interactions, and trauma can chip away at it. In the extreme, the cornerstone of worth can be destroyed.

Amanda struggled with her personal foundation despite having people in her life who truly loved her. Traumatic experiences and stormy relationships broke her to where she didn’t feel she was worthy of much of anything. I missed this fundamental, existential truth when she expressed her unworthiness.

I was trying to convince her of her personal value but was also afraid she was not buying it. I often expressed to Amanda how smart, talented, giving, creative and beautiful she was, but I missed an inconvenient fact. That is, if one so deeply believes that they are unworthy, there can be no acceptance of their fundamental positive traits.

For myself, it took a long time to finally feel and know that I am worthy. 65 years, in fact. What’s more is that I had decent self-esteem, but at my core self, the foundation of worth took so many hits that it was sort of patched up. I now know I’m solidly worthy, and I will tell you how I got there so you can recognize your own path to worthiness.

Tragically, Amanda died one night by suicide.

The purpose of this book is to share with you the insights and wisdom that can be uncovered in the process of discovering your self-worth. I will challenge you to drill down deeply into your heart and soul to discover the greatness of you. Some of the experiences will be difficult and even painful.

That’s okay. Take your time. This is not a quick read.

Being Worthy – it sounds so basic almost to the point of trivial. But when you find your inherent worth and express it every day in ways you find meaningful, it is truly a gift of joy to behold.

1

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Beginning a Quest for Worthiness

Do you believe in leprechauns? The Irish hold that if you encounter one, it always tells you the truth. Finding one, or at least being near enough to one to experience its presence, is the hard part, but on the west coast of Ireland, between Galway and the Cliffs of Moher, there is a leprechaun’s church.

I was on a Galway tour bus in May 2018. The bus driver pulled the bus over to the side of the N67 to overlook what appeared to be another Irish green field, beautiful but otherwise as ordinary as any other part of the road. Tommy, our tour guide, announced, I want to show you something, folks.

Galway tour bus

Galway tour bus

He pointed out the window at a tiny grey stone structure on the other side of the road. That structure you see over there is a leprechaun’s church. He emphasized the next part proudly; We Irish believe that if you ask yourself a question that you don’t know the answer to at the leprechaun’s church, you will have your answer within a day.

He paused, And remember folks - leprechauns always tell the truth. I couldn’t find any references to Tommy’s tale of the leprechaun’s church in Irish literature. It might have been his own or local folklore from Galway. As an empirical clinician, I thought his tale was charming, but I would not understand its impact for several days.

Amanda was very much on my mind, a beautiful, bright, warm young woman. I had treated her for over nine years. Over those years, I got to know her inside and out. Not only did I have the pleasure of watching her improve her mental health, but I also got to watch her grow into her own being, who showed incredible power and strength through her genuine caring for others.

Our sessions impacted both of us, so much so that she decided to become a graduate student in psychology, studying trauma and resilience. Part of that was her wanting to help others but also to continue to heal herself. I was touched by that endeavor and told her, I look forward to the day when you’re not my client but my colleague and friend.

Tragically, Amanda took her life one night when she seemed at her best over the nine years I had known her. Nobody saw it coming. None of the typical signs were present.

I had been wrestling with a question for eight months. The question was painfully simple: why did Amanda die by suicide?

What was more painful, I didn’t have an answer. I went to Ireland to attend a conference on Resilience Across the Lifespan, presented by Robert Brooks. Brooks is a prolific writer and researcher of resilience, the hard-to-measure quality of being able to ascend from adversity.

As much as I wanted to learn more about resilience, I was trying to bounce back from the pain I was feeling from Amanda’s death. It made no sense to me, making the grief much more challenging to work through. Perhaps there would be some pearls of wisdom coming from the workshop in Ireland, maybe some insight and takeaways to help deal with the loss. Was there a formula that I could follow to move on somehow?

So, as I was at the leprechaun’s church in County Galway, why not ask them the question?

On October 2, 2017, I was looking forward to our weekly appointment with Amanda, scheduled for 8:00 p.m. Things seemed to be going very well for her.

Two weeks before, she had acquired a new car she loved driving. She’d gone to a couple of rock concerts with her family and had a first date scheduled with a new fellow later that week. She expressed some worry about running the statistics for her master’s thesis. As I once taught psychometrics and research design, I told her I would help her with that. She left that session reassured.

In the middle of one of the day’s first sessions, I began receiving an unusual number of incoming calls in sudden succession. I knew the number. It was Amanda’s father. Amanda is dead.

Amanda often insisted that I was wasting my time trying to help her. Amanda’s nihilism could be overwhelming and would occur mainly at night.

She avoided sleep because of her recurring night terrors and nightmares. She did not find much rest or serenity in sleep. This was the food for her depression.

"You don’t understand. There’s nothing you can do for me. You’re wasting your time. I’m not fixable. I’m going to be alone, empty, and unhappy. One day when nobody is expecting it, I will kill myself. It’s not a matter of if but when. I am not worthy of anything else."

At times, Amanda would state this while crying, but more often, it would be said in a chilling matter-of-fact manner. As a psychologist and psychiatric nurse practitioner with decades of experience, I battled against her mental illnesses and these very troubling, disturbing, maladaptive thoughts, feelings, and defeatist attitudes. There were many weapons in our arsenal, or so I thought.

Cognitive behavioral psychotherapy (CBT) challenges the negativity and attempts to instill more positive thoughts and beliefs to generate a sense of hope. Dialectic Behavioral Therapy (DBT) helped Amanda ground herself when she felt numb or floating away in dissociation. We often talked while sitting on the floor. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) allows people like Amanda to process traumatic events through a technique and protocol that stimulates both brain hemispheres to promote self-understanding and healing.

Amanda loved studying neuroanatomy, brain function, and plasticity and was a major advocate of EMDR, wanting to learn how to use it with others eventually. Then there were the medications I prescribed.

So many to choose from, and many we used in combinations. Despite the occasional bad rap, psychotropic meds are often lifesaving. Several classes, old and new, are effective, including antidepressants, anxiolytics, anti-obsessional, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, and stimulants. It is also possible to genetically test a person’s DNA to provide some clues to determine which medications may be more effective than others and have less intolerable side effects. That was done as well.

Working with families using a systems approach can also enlist support and modify the dynamics of communication while gaining insight into their structure and history over generations. I could engage Amanda’s parents and sister in this battle as she came from a loving, functional family.

Above all of these is the relationship in which treatment happens. The magic of it all lies within empathic understanding, hearing the pain, and seeing