Why do I only feel Worthy When I am Useful to Others?

If you stopped being useful tomorrow, would you still feel worthy of being loved?If you only feel worth something when you're useful to people, then how you feel about yourself depends entirely on how those people respond to you. Their gratitude. Their feedback. Whether they noticed, and how they said thank you, and whether you believed they meant it.Which means your sense of your own worth is not in your hands. It's in theirs.

And they don't even know they're holding it.That is a terrifying position to be in, and most people in it have never once named it.This episode goes to where that equation came from. Somewhere very young you solved it, the way a child solves things, under pressure and in the dark: if I can meet everyone's needs, I'll finally be safe, I'll be loved, I'll be worth something. Then it looks at what you had to exile to keep running it.

The part that has needs. The part that rests. The part that says no. The part that receives.And at what happened next, which is the cruel part. Every other wound gets called a wound. This one gets called virtue.It covers why you became a reader of rooms, and why that isn't intuition. Why the resentment underneath the giving is information rather than a character flaw. The invisible ledger that turns giving into buying, and the bill the people you love never agreed to pay.And then the question you have probably been asking for years.

Why can't I stop, when I can see it so clearly? The answer is that you have been working one floor above where the thing actually lives. It was built before you had language. It isn't a belief you picked up, it's architecture, and architecture doesn't wait for your opinion.Michael Lauria spent twenty years as a therapist and built this pattern into two businesses before he had to address it in himself.

This comes out of his book The Death of the Savior.Start the Atlas, free - no account neededhttps://app.codexofthearchitect.com/get-started?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=show-notes&utm_campaign=death-of-the-savior&utm_content=worthy-when-useful