Ever feel like you’re constantly “working for your worth”? Most of us have internalized stories of unworthiness that shape how we think, feel, and relate to others. But what if your self-worth wasn’t something you had to earn, but a birthright you’ve simply forgotten to honor?
In this insightful interview, I sat down with therapist and author Dawna Daigneault, author of Understanding Self-Worth: A Guide to Worth Conscious Theory and Psychotherapeutic Practice. We dive deep into why “okayness” isn’t enough, how childhood conditioning creates “lost worth stories,” and practical, actionable ways to finally reclaim the truth of your inherent value. If you’ve ever struggled with shame or the feeling that you need to do more to be enough, this conversation is for you.
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Watch the episode here
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Dawna Daigneault – Author Of Understanding Self-Worth: A Guide To Worth-Conscious Theory And Psychotherapeutic Practice
Dawna Daigneault is the lead author of Understanding Self-Worth: A Guide to Worth Conscious Theory and Psychotherapeutic Practice. Her work focuses on helping people recognize patterns of denied self-worth and understand how those patterns shape the way they think, feel, and relate to others. Dawna, welcome. Thank you for joining me. I hope you are feeling well and that life is treating you well.
Yes, to both.
I am hoping you can fill us in on what brought you to write a book like this and what you are hoping is just the beginning of something or the ending of something. Just tell us about the Worth Consciousness Theory book.
Originating The Worth Consciousness Theory Concept
I have thought about worth and specifically self-worth my whole adult life. I would say it originates in a childhood where I felt both worthy and unworthy at times. I knew the distinct difference, like I had an absent biological father, how that made me feel, versus having adults in my life who were not only present but were attentive and nurturing, and the difference between those two experiences. As I got into adulthood and got into counseling, I fell in love with transactional analysis. You probably see a little bit of that in the book.
I do indeed.
This concept of I am okay, you are okay. I was like, “That is interesting.” Some people believe that I am not okay comes first. Some people believe that I am okay comes first. As I started working with clients and seeing that distinct difference, I was like, is there something maybe more beneficial? I love okayness, and I think it is a nice neutral place to land. When I look at what we are conscious of, and especially how many self-conscious people are people who have been suffering from self-consciousness at certain different levels, how they come in, and they are coming in self-conscious, and I am offering them not self-conscious.
That okayness is not that. It just seemed completely unattractive to some of my clients. I started looking this way, like, “What is over here?” If there was something that felt more rooted and grounded and even wonderful, but more than okayness, what is it? I thought, “What if it is honoring our human worth?” I do have lots of clients from different religious backgrounds, and some of them have come in with the notion that worth is God-given. Yet, even in their family systems, there are still conditions on this thing that is supposed to be given from a higher power.
God-given, freely given.
That actually created a number of my clients. It really got me thinking, why don’t we think we can give worth to each other if we can give okayness to each other? Eric Berne was a genius, in my opinion. I do not pretend to be at that level, but I was like, if we can have okayness and all agree that okayness is a desirable place to land, why don’t we as a community, as a group consciousness, decide that being conscious of our worth is available and even a part of a wellness practice? I did start looking at all the different definitions of self-worth.
You will see in the book that I looked at Rogers, I remembered that Rogers talked about unconditional positive regard. He talked about conditions of worth. They went right back to his books and looked for his underpinnings of that. Maslow references things, and not necessarily about worth, but about values. He had these being values, he called them the B values. We talk about that in the book. I loved Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I read that several times.
Man’s Search for Meaning
The message in that book is that if you exist, you matter. When I went and looked at what the existential movement was trying to create, because it was not just existential psychology, there was the whole existential philosophy. It is like, “Why did that develop and what was that movement about?” They were trying to help us as a human race, not repeat an atrocity. They were trying to help us not only find individual meaning in our existence, but also not strip someone else of their right to exist. That is powerful to me. I feel like self-worth is my individual experience of a collective, the collection of human worth that is available all the time. We just forget to honor it with each other.
There is a teaching that says, we give this moment all the meaning it has for us. We create our own meaning. If we create a meeting that leaves us feeling worthless, we could try again, because it is malleable. We can change it if we know what we are doing. A big part of that, knowing what we are doing, is being aware of how thoroughly we’ve been conditioned.
Heavy Parental Injunctions And Conditional Worth
That is the hard part, because one of the things I wanted to differentiate was going back to Eric Berne’s work, which had these twelve injunctions. I know he borrowed those from Goulding’s work, but I learned them from transactional analysis literature. These twelve injunctions are really heavy. One of them is do not be you, do not grow up. There are these heavy parental injunctions. I looked at that, and I said, “My clients that are more severely traumatized have some of those, but my clients who are conditioned and just not seen, they do not have that level of injunction.”
“They had injunctions. Splitting those up and saying there are abusive injunctions, and then there are just intrusive injunctions that still create conditions. Sometimes the condition is desirable, like growing up and being a good mother. When that woman grows up, and she is as good a mom as she can be, and then her kids are all gone, she cannot work for worth anymore. Her worth was not rooted in a birthright. It was in this condition.”
In the role or the purpose that someone is given, right?
Yes. There is meaning in that, and yet it does not reinforce worth as a birthright.
Because it does not reinforce the worth as a birthright, it keeps you in this very precarious position that you are always asking or being asked, “What have I done for you or what have you done for me lately?”
Perfect. It is working for worth. Many of my clients, the conditions in their family system or in even community systems have these requirements of how are you working for your worth? How are you earning your worth? That is a dangerous proposal.
When you say dangerous, the biggest danger for me is that it blinds us to the actual worth that is always there.
People come into therapy, and a client will sit with me, and I can tell they do not feel worthy, but I know that they do not know me yet. I am a stranger. I am going to give them some time to get to know my style and to feel safe in the room. When they let me see behind the story, they have a front-facing self, or some people call it a mask. They have backstories or things they do not want everybody to know. When they let me into that backstory, and I see all the evidence of denied self-worth that they have collected over decades of living, they can name them all for me.
I was not good enough this way. I did not say the right things. I upset this person, who wanted to be a dancer, but I was told that I was not coordinated enough. I tried singing, and then my boyfriend broke up with me, and you start hearing all of this accumulation of evidence that they decided to deny their self-worth, and therefore, they must not be worthy. The ability of human beings to decide we are unworthy, it is just such an ugly reality we can create for ourselves, and then, unfortunately, our families can contribute to that. We call it a lost worth story, and yet I do not believe worth can actually be lost.
I don't believe worth can ever be lost. Share on XThat is why the word “story” is so important in that phrase.
Lost worth story. I will listen to all the evidence, and that is really important that we do, that we take all of that in, and then we start helping the person look at, if your work had not been denied in that moment, if it had been affirmed instead, how would that have gone differently? How would that conversation have gone differently?
Shame As A Social Regulator And Isolating Pain
That is huge. As I am listening to you, I am thinking about the similarities between what I have read so far in your book about worth consciousness theory and the book, Bruised Not Broken, by Kristine Jensen, with whom I recently did an interview, where the subtitle there is Healing the Shame of a Troubled Childhood. When I am reading your book about worth and worth consciousness and birthright worth, etc., realized self-worth, etc., I keep feeling like there is a parallel between the worth or lack of worth and the shame. I do not know if you would separate those two, but as it sits with me, they are pretty much equatable terms.
Bruised Not Broken: Healing the Shame of a Troubled Childhood
They have become more knotted up together. When I was looking at shame and wanting to understand it, I was looking for the earliest evidence of it. What I found was a reference to Mesopotamia and that they believed that shame worked in early civilizations as a social regulator, like a behavior regulator, which, of course, we look at, “If we are going to all share space, let us not kill each other when we get upset. Let us not steal each other’s goats or wives.”
There is a set of rules that was established to allow us to be more civilized. Shame was useful for quite a long time. This is back when we talked about Julian Jaynes’s concept of groupthink, before he believed human beings did not have the consciousness we have now for thousands of years. In this going from groupthink mode to independent thinking mode, we had several steps that we had to take.
When we look at the origin of shame, it was meant to control behavior that was probably deadly or very harmful. What I believe or see that it has morphed into is an isolating, humiliating, and deeply individual pain point that you suffer along, even in your own family system, where you would hope you get support. Shame can be used to make one person feel worse than everybody else in the system. Sometimes it is designed to do that.
It is a mystery to me how anybody ever thought that would be useful for productive or loving human development. I have heard stories of cultures where, in indigenous cultures, they have traditions like when a woman becomes pregnant, she goes off and meditates, and she hears the song of the child, and she comes back and teaches that song to the tribe.
Throughout that person’s life, all the major events in their life, coming of age for this or that, the tribe gets together and sings their song to them. The only other time that happens is if they step out of bounds and they have offended somebody, and the tribe gets around and puts them in the middle and sings their song to them, which is just instead of a shame on you, it is a remember your worth.
I have not heard that.
It seems like a much more potentially positive solution for living together cooperatively than shame. Reminding someone of their worth, I would think, would be highly preferable to a decent outcome or positive outcome as opposed to trying to shame somebody into changing their behavior.
Reminding someone of their worth is far more effective than shaming them into changing their behavior. Share on XYet we know shame has been used for thousands of years. It has been used to control and condemn. Unfortunately, we have gotten good at it as human beings because we can do it to ourselves. In my own head, one part of my mind can shame another part of me.
When you are working with somebody who has really low self-worth from whatever its origins, what are some of the general approaches or specific things you do to help them make a shift to realize that their thoughts about themselves as negative are false?
What I have learned to do, because I have been in private practice for just over twenty years now, and I did not know how to do this at first, and it slowly occurred to me as I was reading more about self-worth and really wanting to always honor it, that became a goal of mine is that the way I hold space for people invites their worth to be seen and be available. It is not lip service. I am listening to how they make moves against their own worth and how they affirm theirs or other people’s worth.
One client who was the most resistant to any worth-affirming responses from me, like this, is me catching this person saying something that is worth affirming. I would say, “That sounds like you believe that person has worth just the way that you interacted with them.” “Yes, I believe that.” I say, “Would you move against that person’s worth as a human being or as a friend?” “No.” I am like, “You know not to do that. Yet, when you and I talk about you, you move against your own self-worth pretty consistently, like daily.”
This guy was like, “I know where it comes from.” Said, “I cannot get my mom out of my head.” There was a voice in his head, and it came from childhood, and it was critical. It was telling him what made him wrong, bad, foolish, ridiculous. It was pretty heavy criticism. I did not yet have enough power to counter someone from his childhood who had the most positional power in the family. Why would anything I say have the power he needed to have the first 50 years of his life? We needed to go back in time and give him the power that we were talking about in therapy.
Developmental Windows And Self-Hypnosis In Early Life
Help him give it to himself. One of the ways you have been talking about it lately is if you have got these first six or seven years of your development, where you are just wide open like a radar dish. You are just sucking up everything. Some people say that for seven years of your life, you are living in a state of self-hypnosis. You do not even realize it. You are taking in so much stuff, and the billions of neurons in the brain are still growing and making connections.
There comes a part in our brain development where there is a shift. Instead of producing new neurons and all kinds of new connections, our brain starts pruning off the stuff we are not using. If you think about that, there was this window of time during which a child can take in from the outside, self-worth, love, self-respect, whatever you want to call a good self-image. When that window closes, they can no longer take it in from the outside.
The good news is they can always give it to themselves. If we start out earlier, saying that there is a teaching that says, “I give this moment all the meaning it has for me.” I can create a meaning for whatever happened in the past that I am carrying along with me, which leads to my thinking I am not worthy, or I can go back and change the meaning that I am carrying right now that I downloaded from back then. I can change what I am thinking. Actually have the healing happen.
What I would add is that as I was listening to clients and learning what would make the difference, it was that worth and truth need to be congruent, and that somewhere along the way, his truth was unacceptable in his family of origin. He learned to water it down, to not display it, to not engage in it, to get conditional worth, and so then he hates himself because he participated in giving himself up.
He hates himself because he did not stay true to himself.
He diluted his truth to remain acceptable in a system that did not know how to give unconditional worth. We pair truth and worth together in the work with clients, where we look for what you believe. The first thing I am looking for in a more severe case is whether they believe in human worth. I have got to have a base.
I used to give an exercise to people that said one of the options they could put on their list of statements is, “I am a good person, and I deserve to be treated with respect.” I got away with that for years. I finally had a woman say to me, “I do not believe that.” I said, “You do not believe what?” “I do not believe I am a good person.” I’m like, “Okay.” I gave it a week to think about it. When she came in the next time, she said, “How about this? I am a human being, and I deserve to be treated with respect. Do you agree? Do you feel like you are a human being?”
“Yes.” We had Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City. I said, “Here is a person who did this and is getting three meals a day, and has been transferred to different jails to avoid abuse and is getting a fair trial. Have you done something worse than that?” “No.” You deserve to be treated with respect. You have to work with what that person is holding onto and help them step into something that they feel the truth of within themselves.
The interesting thing, hopefully this will not change in the future, you’re doing this for as long as I have been talking about worth, is when I listen for what level of worthiness they can attach to or believe in, or trust. If they do not believe it exists within themselves, every time I mention a child, a sibling, a best friend, sometimes a parent, or a grandparent, and I say, “Do they have worth?” The answer is yes. That is the end. That is where we start, “Tell me what they are worth. Why do you know they have worth? Tell me how you define that.”
What does it come from? It is like the flat-earth syndrome. Same argument. This is because our Earth is flat. What about the moon? What about the sun? What about that star? What about this other planet? What about that other planet? “Yes, they are all right.” If everybody else has worth, I might have worth too. Are you old enough to remember the movie, The Point?
Remind me what it is about.
The Point And Flat Earth Syndrome Analogy
There is a little animated movie based on a story about Oblio, who was born in the land of Point.
I do not know this.
By the way, in the land of Point, everyone and everything has a point. People are born with a point at the top of their head. Trees have points and buildings have points. Oblio was born without a point, and so his mother knitted him a pointed cap, with which to conceal his pointless condition. Oblio runs afoul of the evil Count’s son by beating him in a game of ring and toss and gets banished to the pointless forest. Oblio and his dog, Arrow, go as a little boy and his dog to the pointless forest, banished forever, where they discover that everything in the pointless forest has a point. The leaves have points. All trees have points. They end up coming back to the land of Point and saying, “We figured that if everyone has got a point, I must have one too.”
I love that.
It features the music of Harry Nilsson. It is lovely music, fun, and bouncy. It was an animated made-for-television. You can probably find it on YouTube, but this is what you are doing with people. You are trying to help them see, listen, if everyone I ask you about, you say, “Yes, they have worth and they have worth.” You are a human, too?”
The work then shifts to how much change they can tolerate, even though it is wellness-oriented, because feeling worthy can inform so much of our sense of self. Yet the pattern of denied self-worth that they have had, again, sometimes 3 or 4 decades before I meet with them. That is their familiarity. That is their known world. I do not care to introduce changes that would make them alter 50% of themselves. I think that is cruel. I do not think it is tolerated well. A ten percent change is scary, or at least that is what I have seen in the people I have worked with.
We do the increments that make them feel safe and still make them feel like themselves. A lot of the defenses they have developed living this life of having denied self-worth, wondering if they are worthy, but being afraid that they are not. Lots of defenses get developed, and those feel like armor. Sometimes I want them to be vulnerable and take off a piece of their armor. They are like, “No, I never take that off.” I said this to you. We had a chat before, but I just lost my thread. That happens on occasion.
Yes, it does. It will come back to you. When you are talking about the armor, there is so much that all the great practical spiritual teachings talk to us about how we cannot get where we want to go, protected with our armor on. That essence of us is something that does not need protecting and only works well and grows and flowers when it is wide open and breathing, and there is the exchange of energies.
Yes. I remember I said that some of the things I work with clients on in the office, like removing a piece of armor, I have had a few people say, “I have to put it on when I leave here, or I cannot remain this vulnerable outside of the safe space.” We talk about that, right? We talk about, is there anybody out in your day-to-day life that is safe enough to practice this worth-to-worth exchange with? I see your worth, and I am going to let you see my worth. I see your truth. I am going to let you see my truth at a tolerable level.
That’s the essence of meeting a person where they are. What you are talking about is my idea of how somebody should be and live their life, which has almost no relevance to what is going to be good for them. They have to grow into what is going to be good for them. They cannot try to remake their life based on some theory I read in a book.
I do not want to replace the conditions they grew up with the conditions of this model or that model. I want to say, “If you’re interested in affirming your worth and honoring human worth and developing self-worth, that looks a certain way, but we are going to tailor it to your truth and who you are and who you need to be.” Even though they are right now in my office is worthy, even though they have a pattern of denied self-worth that does not take away their birthright.
Self-Worth: If you’re interested in affirming your worth and honoring human worth and developing self-worth, that looks a certain way, but we are going to tailor it to your truth and who you are and who you need to be.
Birthright is there cannot ever be chipped, rusted, faded, or broken in any way. If you can learn to let life happen and then come back into that awareness of that birthright self-worth, then you will start to see your life change in positive ways. Do you still do a lot of work individually? Are you working online and virtually? What is your work life like these days? What kind of population are you serving aside from writing a wonderful book like this?
I have a full-time private practice. My clients are adults. I have been doing that for a little over twenty years. All of that work informed the book, plus all of the research. I realized that I cannot see all the people who want to help people repair their self-worth. The book became a way to let other clinicians know how to do what was working with my people. It has just been beautiful. I have had a somewhat diverse population.
I am in the Midwest, so it is not the most diverse population, but as people have done word of mouth with the type of work I do, the most beautiful thing is somebody who shows up that maybe would not have shown up in my practice. I am of a certain age and of a certain race and sex. When people found out, “She still helped me with my self-worth stuff,” they were willing to give me a chance.
I got to work with some diverse people, and their stories added to the richness of this theory. I was so grateful to meet and work with people who have a little bit different cultural background or a different personal history where their worth was denied in ways that were to the left or right of what I had experienced so far personally and professionally. I really wanted this to be something that spoke to any client that came in, because if birthright self-worth is available to everyone, repairing it should be available to everyone.
Wonderful thought. Everything we can do to help make that happen is worth the effort, right?
Attachment Theory And Early Internal Wiring
Yes. I just have not met a person that I would not include in having human worth. I have not met that person. I have met some really unhappy people in my professional life. I have met some people with deep pain points. When they recover their sense of worthiness, even at the most basic level, and then we practice honoring it every session. It just let us co-create this together. I believe that’s the first place it happens.
When we’re born, we do not know our truth, and we do not know we’re worthy. Our brain knows when our tummy is rumbling because it is empty. The first thing that wires is our tummy rumbles, and our brain recognizes that signal. It signals our mouth to make a noise. If we’re lucky, there is a nurturing person nearby who cares to attend to that signal. In attachment theory, we know that we’re wiring between the caregiver and us, but we’re also wiring internally self-trust. I trust my brain to recognize my signals and to signal the world. The world responds.
When we’re born, we don’t yet know our truth or that we’re worthy. Share on XWhen I look at Erik Erikson’s model, the first year of life is the Trust vs. Mistrust. There is a lot more that we’re trusting there. There is a lot more trust building that is happening, including it could have self-worth being affirmed. We talk about Maslow’s life needs, that is, the bottle, to quell the hunger in the tummy. But how the bottle is delivered is the self-worth need. That nurturing component that we matter to be fed, that it matters to figure out which cry is happening now. It is not always a hunger cry. Sometimes it is a love cry or a tired cry, or I need to change cry.
My diaper pin is sticking to me.
What we look at is as we come to know ourselves and trust what is internally signaled, that is true for us, and that matters to somebody else. What we learn is that what is true for us matters, and then it is made worthy. Over each of those developmental stages, we learn a little bit more about ourselves, and a little bit more truth about me shows up. Do I remain worthy in ages 2, 3, 4? Do I remain worthy as I am developing truth at age 5, 6, 7?
In each developmental stage, as I am becoming me and learning what is true for me, do I still remain worthy in that system? Things change for people at different stages in development. There is unfortunately a point in time for many of my clients, and it is different in those developmental stages where they’re like, “Yes, I do not know. My mom stopped liking me when I was twelve.”
I have had a lot of people over the years. When puberty hits, the parents of the opposite sex suddenly hand off, and yes. It is incomprehensible for the child to put that together and figure out what is going on. Why is this happening? What they almost always do is download a belief, “There is something wrong with me.”
“It must be me.”
When you download that belief, I do not know. Have you heard about the memory reconsolidation work and coherence therapy?
I have heard a little bit about coherence therapy, and I actually listened to one of your episodes, and you mentioned it.
Coherence therapy basically is a non-pathologizing approach. You can call it a foundational underpinning or an overarching theory about things. It is not a specific way of doing therapy, other than it’s what developed out of Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley, his wife, and their research, trying to figure out all of the years that they were doing therapy, marriage, and family therapy, and what was working when they had somebody have a really significant shift that stayed. As they moved forward in life, that shift was maintained.
What they found was that when I have a felt sense within me of this truth, whenever it is out here and active, everything about my worldview in that moment makes sense of that view. I can have an infinite number of other worldviews back here that conflict with this, but only one of them can stay conscious at a time. If one has some information like this, one is that, “I am worthless. I am a bag of scum, and nobody loves me. Everybody hates me. I think I will go eat worms.” That is out here. It is full. I am living my life this way.
All of a sudden, “I did a good job. I am not so bad.” Now, I am not horrible scum, but that worldview is still back here, and if it gets active, I feel the truth of it. The memory reconsolidation piece is this deeply experiential process, however you want to get there, where you help the person go back and remember this deep truth about their lack of worth or whatever. You help them step into another life event where they actually feel their truth, and then go into that experientially and leave the other one alone for a minute. Quickly jump back to this one and let that full set of the felt sense of the truth of that. If I just keep flipping back and forth between these deeply true felt senses, which are opposing, my mind will make sense of it.
That is lovely.
Memory Reconsolidation And Rewriting The Meaning Of Past Memories
That is the memory reconsolidation piece, a quick summary. The idea of the research on it says it was somewhere in the 1990s that they started to realize that this thing about once you are traumatized, always traumatized, or anything that changes in the brain stays stuck in that way, or the brain mapping that says one location in the brain is responsible for one activity, that is all wrong. Not only that, but they had research that says if you go back and access a deeply troubling memory and leave it at this experiential level, you open up a window.
They said in the original work that it was about a five-hour window during which time you can do this memory reconsolidation business and effectively rewrite the meaning of that memory. The memories can stay the same. Instead of it meaning that I am a worthless piece of scum, I grow into the awareness that “My mother was 24 years old and stressed out of her mind, and my dad was an alcoholic, and this was not about me.” When I do that, then my brain, instead of doing this with these two felt senses of reality, goes, “Here is a way to make sense of it.”
We do a really modified version of that, which I borrowed from acceptance and commitment theory, the choice point model. I saw the usefulness of using it in a limited way, just around worth. You have a moment of choice. In our book, we call it the conscious moment technique. You have this moment of choice. From that moment, you can go towards self-consciousness, which is the familiar path. I call it the six-lane superhighway. It is easy to get on, and then you go all the way to the end, or a worthwhile conscious choice, but there is no mental or emotional muscle built around being worth conscious.
I do not know why, as an aside, I want to say that what breaks my heart the most in our world is that the more I talk about this and make this available to people, I say, “Why aren’t we learning this in kindergarten to be worthy of consciousness? Why aren’t we doing this as a whole community of humans that we honor as worth in each other just as a routine fact?” I would probably be out of a job, but it is okay.
In a lovely way, you will find something else to do.
It would be so beneficial.
Wonderful and lovely. My brain was going five other directions as you were talking, but I realized that we are just about out of time. If you would get centered and take a breath and settle in and think about, we have talked about some things already. Is there one of those things we have already talked about you want to go back and highlight, or something we have not mentioned yet that you want to put in this interview?
There is so much. Do you have a question?
No, I was just going to say I am just so grateful that you and people like you are out there doing this work and putting the book together. It is a really good tool for therapists to get stirred up again some of the old questions and thoughts, and to see some of the connections between the different theories and models that have come out. Again, as it’s coming from you and your experience doing therapy, you know this works. You’re just sharing with people what you have found really works. That’s a gift.
I have had a client for about ten years who had CPTSD because this person’s childhood was really rough. I did not get DBT trained, and I knew fairly early when the trauma started surfacing that I needed to help this individual get some DBT under their belt. I was like, “Let us get you over to this group that is doing DBT skills.” This client was like, “Are you getting rid of me?” I said, “You can come back, you can stay with me. You can come back anytime you want. What do you need to do?” The answer was, “As long as you are not getting rid of me, I will go do this thing.”
I said, “I just want you to go get these DBT skills because I am not trained in that. I believe that is going to be very helpful to you.” They go, they come back. Some major life events help in the net hit in the next three years, major hit after major hit after hit. That is really disruptive to this person’s nervous system. When a person cannot self-regulate, I am not going to do worthwhile work with them. We talk about that in chapter eight, like that window of tolerance and helping a person be within it and be able to self-regulate because self-worth and denied self-worth trigger people.
What I decided to do, even though this person felt like they were going backwards more than they were going forwards, is every time they came into session and they said, “I am repeating everything again, and I am not making progress,” I would say, “It is okay, you tell me what you need from me. It is okay if we do the same thing every time you come in here, as long as that is okay with you.” The worth of being in that session and not making progress became the thing.
Me not need this person to move differently, me not need to see evidence of my skill, but just letting this person show up and vent and cry and talk. We would get regulated by the end of the session. This went on for a while, and then a change happened. A really amazing, profound, “I am holding onto myself better.” I honestly believe it took being worth somebody’s time, session after session of meltdowns.
Even though they weren’t performing like a good client or a good patient would. “I am a really good therapist. You should be better already.” The beach is my best tool.
I cannot even use my best tools in some of those sessions. It was not the right move to make. I needed to just be present with this person and say, “I see you, and you matter, and this pain is real, and it matters, and this is your truth right now, and truth and worth belong together.”
I needed to simply be present with this person and say, “I see you. You matter. Your pain is real. This is your truth right now, and truth and worth belong together.” Share on XThe Pro-Symptom Position In Coherence Therapy
It is lovely that you were able to just see that, okay, wait a minute. If I join, this is another part of the coherence therapy model. Another part of the coherence therapy model is that most therapy is built around an anti-symptom position. “I have this problem. I spend too much money, and then I go into debt, and I have to work for a long time to get out of debt. I have that problem of spending.”
Most therapies would be focused on helping this person regulate their spending. The coherence therapy model says, “We do not want to talk about how bad it is to spend money you do not have and why you might do that. We want to know why it is so important for you to keep spending money, even though you know there is no money in the account.”
When you go into the pro-symptom position, that is when you start discovering, “This is what I need to see to be able to find a different way to meet these needs and shift over into the worth consciousness pathway of neural firings rather than the old path.” I realize that we are out of time, and I have to run because somebody’s waiting in the room already, but I thank you greatly for being willing to share the book with us and this interview time. How do you prefer people reach out to you?
They can find my co-author at UnderstandingSelf-Worth.com and me. The book is there, a link to our Facebook group is there, and there are other free resources there.
Of course, all of that material and information will be in the notes for this episode. Thank you so much for the work you’re doing and for sharing it with us. It has been a blessing.
Thank you so much.
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Dawna Daigneault is the lead author of Understanding Self-Worth: A Guide to Worth-Conscious Theory and Psychotherapeutic Practice. Her work focuses on helping people recognize patterns of denied self-worth and understand how those patterns shape the way they think, feel, and relate to others. Her work offers a thoughtful and practical perspective that helps people better understand themselves while also giving them language for experiences they may not have been able to name before. She is also currently developing the Worth Conscious app based on the book’s material, which invites users to reflect on how they question their worth and use guided journaling to capture insights they can carry into conversations with their therapist.
Important Links
- Dawna Daigneault on LinkedIn
- Understanding Self-Worth: A Guide to Worth Conscious Theory and Psychotherapeutic Practice
- Man’s Search for Meaning
- Bruised Not Broken
- Understanding Self-Worth
- Understanding Self-worth on Facebook
About Dawna Daigneault
Dawna Daigneault, EdS, LPC, CCTP, is the lead author of Understanding Self-Worth: A Guide to Worth-Conscious Theory and Psychotherapeutic Practice. Her work focuses on helping people recognize patterns of denied self-worth and understand how those patterns shape the way they think, feel, and relate to others.
Her work offers a thoughtful and practical perspective that helps people better understand themselves while also giving them language for experiences they may not have been able to name before. She is also currently developing the Worth-Conscious App, based on the book’s material, which invites users to reflect on how they question their worth and use guided journaling to capture insights they can carry into conversations with their therapist.
