Healing low self-worth: the foundation for healthy relationships
Your underlying sense of unworthiness keeps you from experiencing deep connection and thriving in life. Here is how you can start rebuilding healthy self-worth.
For many months now, I’ve been planning to write this blog and finding plenty of convenient excuses to avoid it. Historically, my self-worth and I have had a complicated relationship. It’s not easy to admit, especially since I regularly support my clients in rebuilding their self-worth while my own journey is still in progress. There is a part of me that thinks I’m supposed to have life neatly sorted, including being completely "done" with my own healing. In the past, that inner voice could be quite harsh and critical. Sound familiar? Perhaps you also have a part of you that constantly strives for perfection, often at a high cost. Supporting others in their healing has been a great privilege. It has also offered valuable lessons that have deepened my understanding of this topic. Here, I’d like to share the insights I’ve gathered from my personal healing, my clinical training, and walking alongside others. My hope is that some of these reflections offer support on your own path.
Unlearning the unworthiness script
In my teens and twenties, I suffered from an eating disorder. Low self-worth and eating disorders almost always go hand in hand. I struggled for decades and despite significant progress and developing a much healthier relationship with my body, it wasn’t until I met my husband that things truly began to shift. Let me assure you, this is not a "saved by the prince on a white horse" story. This was me finally listening to and honouring my actual needs. It was saying “yes” to what felt genuinely good, instead of what I believed I was supposed to do. Up until that point, relationships had remained the one area of life where I struggled to show up for myself. For many of us, the underlying belief that we aren’t worthy or deserving of good things in life subconsciously shapes how we move through the world and the choices we make. This often leads to choosing partners who are unable or unwilling to truly choose us. Time and again, we find ourselves in dynamics that seem to confirm our deepest fears: that we are unworthy or not good enough.
Beyond earned love
When I finally chose to say yes to a relationship with someone who treated me as deserving and worthy of attention, love and respect, I felt like I found home. My whole body seemed to relax. I didn’t realise how much tension I had been carrying until then. After years of believing that I had to tick endless boxes and work hard to earn love and acceptance, I was suddenly receiving it simply by being my imperfect, whole self. Not only that, my partner appeared to be fully accepting of himself too - a concept that was quite foreign to me at the time. Like so many of us, I had learnt that love and acceptance were earned by meeting others’ needs and expectations. That our worth was defined by external validation, our achievements and others’ perception of us. Allowing myself to step into a relationship that offered a completely different experience was quite a leap for me. Here is what I later realised helped me get there.
The radical possibility of being worthy
As a therapist, my main area of focus is supporting clients who struggle to navigate relationships and experience connection. Low self-worth inevitably presents as one of the major barriers to engaging fully in life for most of my clients. For a long time, this was no different for me. When I met my husband, I was in the final year of my counselling degree. By that time, I had not just absorbed the theory, I was in my second clinical placement, working directly with clients. Looking back, I believe it was while holding space for others that my perspective shifted just enough to consider the radical possibility that I, too, might be worthy.
When I started seeing clients as a student, I witnessed firsthand their difficulty believing in their own worth. Sitting with them in their pain and utter conviction of their own unworthiness, I realised that I perceived them very differently to how they viewed themselves. I saw them as deserving and worthy of respect, kindness, love and acceptance. I believed in their worth regardless of what they looked like, their background, their education, their achievements or outward success. This made me question a lot of things - both for myself and more broadly. We welcome babies into the world with unconditional love and acceptance long before they have achieved a single thing. How is it that somewhere along the way, we forget our worth is inherent and begin placing heavy conditions on its availability?
After plenty of personal work, research, and reflection, here are what I consider to be the crucial steps in healing and rebuilding healthy self-worth.
Making peace with your Inner Critic (or Perfectionist)
While often unkind and harsh, the inner critic, who may or may not be the same as your perfectionist, serves an important purpose. By getting curious and learning to understand what this part of you is actually trying to achieve by berating you and pushing you towards perfection at all costs, you may recognise just how much you needed it at some point in your life. This critical voice may have developed to shield you from painful experiences, or to help you to stay connected and belong with those around you. This may have been essential for survival or in order to thrive in life. Unpacking this part’s origin, befriending it and providing it some relief from its burdens usually requires the guidance of a skilled psychotherapist. Working through what this part has carried and how it has served you brings noticeable shifts. Over time, the way you relate to your inner critic transforms. It can evolve into your internal motivational speaker, boundary-advisor or a life-coach. Gentler, kinder self-talk slowly replaces the harshness and criticism, allowing you to treat yourself in a way that reflects your inherent worth, independent of external validation or achievement.
Practicing healthy boundaries
Having explored boundaries in earlier posts (read more here and here), I want to focus here on the direct link between our boundaries and self-worth. Knowing where we end and others begin is the essence of healthy boundaries. When we are clear on what is and isn’t our responsibility, we are freed from the exhausting job of trying to manage other people's feelings, opinions, or behaviour. We also stop attaching our worth to how others respond to us. How someone treats us simply reflects what they are willing and able to offer in the relationship. Others only have the power to define our worth when we hand it to them. Not only does this power not belong to them, often they don't even want it or realise they have it. The truth is, there is no world in which everyone likes us or agrees with our choices. And that is completely okay. Our worth does not shrink simply because someone doesn’t like us or something we did. It can feel deeply uncomfortable, yes. Which brings us to why learning to tolerate discomfort is so important in healing low self-worth.
Vulnerability and tolerating uncomfortable feelings
In her famous TED Talk on the power of vulnerability, Dr. Brené Brown shares a striking finding from her research. When comparing people who have a strong sense of love and belonging with those who do not, the defining difference is simple: those who feel it believe they are worthy of it.
When we doubt our own worth, we rarely show up authentically. Instead we lead with our protective armour, hoping to prevent rejection and the deep discomfort that comes with it. While this may feel safer in some way, it also robs us of our chance to be seen and accepted for who we are - our whole, imperfect, real self. When our armoured self is accepted by others, our subconscious tells us that people only love the performance, reinforcing the sense of unworthiness we were desperately trying to escape.
The main reason we avoid vulnerability is that it feels uncomfortable. Unfortunately it is impossible to selectively numb only the unpleasant emotions. Shutting down discomfort also blunts our capacity for experiencing joy, pleasure and genuine connection. Along the way we also lose contact with our needs, values and desires - critical information communicated to us through our emotions.
When we embrace vulnerability, we give ourselves a chance to be seen for who we really are. We create space for our hidden parts to be met with empathy, compassion, and acceptance. This is where deep healing takes place. It signals to our nervous system that showing up authentically in relationships is safe rather than threatening. It also sends a message to our subconscious that we have the right to exist just as we are and our needs and emotions are valid. We can then start reconnecting with what feels good and what we desire in life - an essential step towards living a fulfilling and meaningful life.
Demonstrating your own worthiness to yourself
While healing damaged and low self-worth involves tending to past wounds, so much of the transformation happens through the way we treat ourselves now - not at some distant point in the future when we’re “perfect”. Start small by pausing to take a conscious, grounding breath in the middle of a rushed day, or sitting down to enjoy a nourishing meal without multitasking. Build up to finishing work on time, giving yourself permission to leave the to-do list unfinished when you are depleted, or saying a clear, unapologetic "no" to commitments that drain you. At some point, treating yourselves with respect and kindness will become your baseline. Before agreeing to an invitation or request, you will naturally pause and check in: Does this feel good? Does this work for me? Do I actually have the capacity for this? These daily, micro-choices communicate a fundamental truth to the younger, wounded part of you who struggles to believe in their own worth: you matter, your needs are valid, and your right to take up space is unconditional.
The self-worth jar
In one of my previous blogs, I explored the link between self-worth and our fear of rejection (you can read the whole blog here). I also introduced the concept of the “self-worth jar”. Imagine that every time you choose yourself and treat yourself kindly and with respect, you drop a small pebble, shell, or marble into your self-worth jar. The jar continues to fill up and eventually, no single disappointment, rejection, or setback has the power to easily knock it over. You begin to know, at a core level, that you are worthy whether life is flowing smoothly or feeling heavy. When difficult moments hit and you feel low, you don't abandon yourself. You continue to take care of your needs because you believe you deserve it. You seek out the right support and stay engaged with life. This is healing. It’s not neat or perfect, there’s no certainty or guarantee and it’s never quite “done”, because our growth is never really complete.
Healing low self-worth is usually a gradual process, and at first, it can feel like a mountain too high to climb. It takes patience to rebuild trust with the vulnerable, younger parts of you and help them believe that you are already enough, and that softening into self-kindness is safe. Keep showing up with small, manageable choices and take things one step at a time. It’s OK to need help along the way - you don’t have to walk this path alone. Reaching out for support is often the very first way we begin choosing ourselves.
