You Can't Chant Your Way to Worth

No matter how often you chant "I am worthy, I am worthy..." this is simply you lying to yourself, in a sense, because you are telling yourself, over and over again, something you simply don't believe, deep down. If I asked you to jump off the roof of your house because you will float gingerly down to the ground, you would not believe me, no matter how convincing I am. Your direct, life-long, first-hand experience with gravity contradicts it.

That's what we're dealing with here. All of your direct, life-long experiences have convinced you that your feelings do not actually matter, and that you do not have inherent worth.

Your parents led you to believe this through their attitudes, and every experience in life has seemed to confirm it. (Nothing in life has truly confirmed this. But based on the perspective you were working with, you interpreted the experiences as confirmations of what you had already been led to believe.)

So the solution cannot be anything superficial, and it cannot take effect from one day to the next.

The way we change these beliefs is that we first identify what they are. Then we work to understand how they got there.

Were the sources of those messages ever reliable or trustworthy to begin with? Have your parents' perspectives brought harmony, contentment, and peace to their lives? Or frustration, disorder, and discontent?

How would your thoughts, decisions, and feelings have looked different if you had believed the opposite of what you were taught: that your feelings are never good or bad, right or wrong, and that you inherently matter?

I learned Spanish in my 20s, and the best thing I ever did to make it a real part of me was to go out and let what I had learned make contact with real life. I made so many mistakes! I embarrassed myself. But I was observing myself and getting immediate feedback, and I made slight corrections day after day for years.

That is the nature of authentic recovery: sincere desire, accurate information, and insight. Much of the insight comes from observing yourself while you're living life and applying what you are learning.

Slowly but surely, the old, false perspectives will fade away to nothing, and one day you will realize that you were gradually reborn. It will be so gradual, in fact, that you won't be able to mark a date on the calendar for when it happened.