Core Belief Engineering Articles By Lisa Sidorowicz, B.A., M.A., B.Ed., Certified Practitioner and Instructor Self-Worth It has been my experience as a Core Belief Engineering practitioner that self-worth is the single most important determinant to how much happiness, love, and abundance people will allow into their lives. Self-worth is the cornerstone of a healthy ego. Living from a place of innate worth permeates an individual's life, allowing one to be open to giving, receiving, enjoying, loving, and being loved. Low self-worth is at the root of so many mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual problems because it detrimentally impacts the most important relationship people have in their lives - their relationship with themselves. It undermines people's ability to love and trust themselves, forcing them to look to others for external approval and validation. The painful void of unworthiness and the resultant feelings of guilt and shame can be emotionally and spiritually crippling: they can separate people from their true selves, and inhibit the formation of close personal bonds of mutual acceptance and respect with others. Feelings of low self worth and inadequacy have their roots in childhood. Some people grew up in homes where they were directly or indirectly told they were not good enough through blame, criticism, or shame, and concluded from these reactions that they must deserve such treatment. Children tend to take emotional responsibility for their parents and blame themselves when things go wrong. In addition to such self-blame, children absorb the belief systems and emotional programming of their parents, and quickly learn that they are rewarded for being good and punished for being bad. Having subconsciously internalized this black and white disciplinary world view (according to the beliefs, rules, and expectations of their parents, society, culture, religion, etc.), children grow into adults who may feel compelled to punish and blame themselves for every wrongdoing. Time and time again, my clients discover that their outdated subconscious childhood beliefs about their lack of worth have grown into complex, self-sabotaging defense mechanisms and coping strategies. For example, some people deal with their feelings of inadequacy by becoming over achieving perfectionists, striving to gain approval from others. They may continually try to improve themselves through harsh self-criticism, second-guessing and self-doubt, or they may choose to project their lack of worth onto others, while hiding behind a facade of superiority and self-importance. Others may become overwhelmed with anxiety and worry, fearing failure and/or success to the point of emotional and mental paralysis. Some people may attempt to fill their bottomless inner void with food, alcohol, sex, material possessions, or a full social calendar, while others go from one unsatisfying relationship to another, hoping to find wholeness and fulfilment outside themselves. Still others may hide behind their successes and wall themselves off from intimate relationships for fear of being exposed as unworthy frauds. Regardless of how individuals choose to cope with their feelings of unworthiness, it can have devastating repercussions in all aspects of their lives. Low self-worth often sabotages success and happiness. It has been my observation that people don't get what they deserve, they get what they subconsciously believe they deserve. When people subconsciously believe they are fundamentally unworthy, they tend to instinctively make choices that are unproductive, limiting, or even destructive. They may stay in unsupportive relationships, tolerate unacceptable behaviour, ignore their own needs in order to please others, put themselves in harmful situations, or withdraw from life altogether. Believing they are small and inconsequential, they live their lives in a small way, too afraid to take risks and embrace life fully. They may also limit how much recognition, fulfillment, or success they allow themselves to receive, believing that they are undeserving of these things. Or, they may subconsciously undermine themselves by creating self-imposed troubles when they feel too happy or when life is going along too smoothly. Low self-worth is a crippling emotional state that can be entirely resolved. Limiting subconscious belief systems, no matter how negative, destructive, or deeply entrenched, can indeed be completely transformed. There was a time in everyone's life when self-worth was an unquestioned knowing, where an innate sense of self-love, trust, and respect was a given. Whether people can consciously recall such a time-period in their early lives, or whether this mind-set of inner wholeness existed in their pre-conscious awareness, a deep sense of worth still exists at the very core of everyone's subconscious mind and can therefore be revisited and reinstated. Core Belief Engineering is an extremely effective psychotherapy that examines, changes, and completely re-engineers self-sabotaging subconscious mind-sets, allowing people to reclaim their intrinsic sense of worth. Having embraced their goodness and deservingness, people naturally blossom into self-loving, self-trusting, self-respecting individuals who are able to create the lives they wish for themselves today.