Defining Your Values is a Great First Step to Self-Acceptance

What are the long-term effects of this kind of treatment on your developing personality? Depending on the nature of the damage, and your fundamental personality, you could be experiencing a range of impacts.?

You’ve probably heard the expression, “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”??It’s a clever line but it’s also true.??It’s true for all of us. But, for adult survivors of a damaged past (ASDPs), many of us fell very early to the lie that we are unworthy. Or we deserve to live in an environment defined by unpredictably chaos. Or we should be “ashamed” of ourselves. Or our behaviors (especially behaviors that adults judged to be too proud, too selfish, too big for our britches) were the cause of our great family misfortune. And that the best way to keep the peace was to deny who we were to please the grown-ups. But that meant denying who we really were – which more often than not in those early years of our lives could be described as sad, mad, lonely, afraid, in desperate need of affection, likely all of these all at once.

Whatever beliefs kept us physically safe, the lies we fell for effectively separated us from ourselves.

Each of these stern admonishments or episodes of emotional neglect, depriving us of the positive regard and loving support that we really needed to grow up whole and healthy, was like a gigantic eraser rubbing out bit by bit our sense of who we are and what we deserve in life.?

Leonard Shengold, MD, calls it?soul murder?in his powerful book by the same title.??Which is an expression that might sound over-the-top intense to your ears and heart. But would you speak to a child the way the adults from your childhood spoke to you? If the answer is a shocked, “absolutely not!”, well, there’s your sign.?

What are the long-term effects of this kind of treatment on your developing personality? Depending on the nature of the damage, and your fundamental personality, you could be experiencing a range of impacts. Some people angrily achieve a high degree of career success with the attitude of, “I’ll show them!” But many ASDPs grow up being vague about who they are and what kind of respectful treatment they deserve. Especially at work.?

They report experiences of finding it extremely difficult to say no to assignments that are way over their heads (setting themselves up to fail) or they’ll say yes to requests that clearly should be delegated to others deeper inside the organization. The upshot is that these ASDPs are overburdened with inappropriate tasks that others who are more junior to them would eagerly welcome as career development opportunities.

Other ASDPs have reported feeling so vague about who they are that their interactions with others are packed with mystifying drama. Because they don’t have strongly delineated boundaries, they’re commonly perceived as being political, untrustworthy, even manipulative. This is especially true for people pleasers. They think they’re doing the right thing, going out of their way to accommodate other people’s needs and demands. Only to discover that it’s that behavior that invites the most negative drama.

One ASDP puts it this way, “You know that scene in the movie?Cinema Paradiso?where the villagers watch movies projected onto a big blank wall in the town square? Well, that’s my common experience. For some reason I come off as a blank wall that others project their own dramas, emotions, and issues onto. I find myself fighting fights that I really had nothing to do with, and certainly didn’t ask for. The common denominator is me, so I have to really look at what it is about the way I present myself that invites this kind of uninvited interaction.”

“I’ll Be Whoever You Want Me to Be.”

Being vague or presenting a blank wall to the world might have been a protective mechanism while growing up. If you grew up in a household governed by chaos or unpredictable rage, the less you showed of yourself, the more you could avoid attracting the attention of dangerous grown-ups. But this doesn’t work for you at work today. People need to know who you are, what they can count on you for, what you have to offer, and what you won’t stand for.??And this means you have to step out of hiding from behind that blank wall.?

The prospect of doing this work of defining yourself might feel unpleasant or overwhelming at first. But this is actually an opportunity to take active steps to define who?you?want to be – regardless of what the powerful people in your past told you were. As an ASDP you grew up to learn self-rejection. And now it’s your time to discover self-acceptance and custom-design the new version of you according to what you most value.

The prospect of doing this work of defining yourself might feel unpleasant or overwhelming at first. But this is actually an opportunity to take active steps to define who?you?want to be?

For just the sake of example, think of your favorite brand of soap. Why do you like it? Its fragrance? The way it makes your skin feel after you use it? The fact that it’s pretty in your powder room? The fact that it’s strong enough to clean the worst dirt you pick up while working in the garden or rebuilding an old car? Whatever the reasons might be, this soap has the brand attributes that you specifically appreciate in a soap.

But what if the soap company says, “But if you don’t want soap, you can also use the product as motor oil. We’ll be whatever you want us to be.”??At best, you’re confused as the customer. At worst, you’ll try it in your engine and that would be a disaster. The brand attributes of this fragrant bar are utter failures as motor oil. Try as the company might to convince customers otherwise, it’s just not going to happen. You’ll ultimately end up hating the soap for being soap because it was dishonest with you about the whole motor oil story.

In the futile effort to reach out to and please as many people as possible, the soap company that eagerly puts itself forward as a motor oil company ends up pleasing no one. Even the soap customers will find a replacement brand because they’re disenchanted by the company’s lack of authenticity.

This is the same experience that people have with you when you’re fuzzy and vague about who you are and what you stand for. They’re confused at best. And, at worst, angry and disrespectful. And you’re left thinking, “All I wanted to do was please.”

People-pleasing is not a respectable brand attribute. It’s emotional slavery. You’re exhausted by the useless effort. And the people you work with don’t trust you, so they begin to feel manipulated. You can never do enough, and all your energies are poured into either pleasing others, or dodging their disapproval, that you don’t actively serve the values that are most important to you.

Your Values Tell the World (Including Yourself) Who You Are

Knowing what your values are in just a few very specific terms will emancipate you from the trap of people-pleasing. Finally, people will come to know who you are and be attracted to you by your consistency and authenticity.??You’ll even discover that that word “no” is a gift to them as much as it is to yourself. It releases you from an undesired expectation. And it frees them up to find someone who will authentically and enthusiastically say yes to the unexpected opportunity.

With every yes and every no that you authentically extend to people where mutual goodwill and respect prevail, you are building definition as to who you are. Your values are the foundational building blocks of your newly created version of who you are.?

Even though we might know this intellectually or intuitively as we mature into adults, it’s quite another thing to go through the exercise of actually identifying which values take priority for us over all the other values. Just the exercise alone is an important experience in defining our boundaries, therefore defining ourselves.??It was only a couple of years ago when Celinne Da Costa, in her "Master Your Story" course, challenged me to consider a list of over 150 terms describing a wide variety of values, all of which anyone would want to identify with. Here’s the thing: I could only pick three. Three out of 150 wonderful, powerful, respectable values! How is that possible?

With every yes and every no that you authentically extend to people where mutual goodwill and respect prevail, you are building definition as to who you are.?

I took days and days sorting through the list. Finally, I selected?courage,?honesty and clarity. And then I had to write my own thoughts about how each one of these values would be manifested by my actions. (In all honesty, I have to admit that I was especially vague about?clarity, which Celinne kindly pointed out. So, after we had a big laugh over the irony of it all, back to the drawing board I went.)

By doing this exercise, I discovered more than just what top three values take precedence over the others. I discovered a little bit more about who I am by carefully considering each value and what it means to me as a driver of how I make my choices throughout my days. As a result, the delineations of who I really am began to re-emerge – sort of like a video of that big eraser being played in reverse and the lines of who I am reappearing for all the world to see. As it turns out, whereas some of us might use episodes from our past to draw the lines of who we are, we can also use values as fundamental building blocks to help us rebuild ourselves exactly as we want.??We’re not limited to three, of course. Pick, maybe, five values to start. One for each cornerstone and the fifth to be the keystone in the arch over your front door.?

There is no right or wrong way to do this. Nor is your answer permanent. The five you pick today may be completely different than the five you pick next year. Whichever values you select, just make sure they most accurately depict who you are today, what your boundaries are, what your authentic no’s are, what your authentic yes’s are.??The person you project will be a reflection of a joyful, self-accepting you. A work in progress, to be sure. But it’s your work. And that’s the best part of all.?