When Proving Our Worth Undermines Our Value

When we prove ourselves, we are expending so much energy outwards. This energy is lost to ourselves forever.  This continuous outflow creates a very depleted state of being.  It reminds me of algebraic equations where you were required to balance each side.  Only this is one equation that can never be balanced.

Proving ourselves inherently starts from the position that somehow, we are not worthy or are less than.  I know this energy well because it has driven me for most of my life.  Without even knowing it from a young age I adopted this stance on life because it felt safe and secure and gave me a false sense of confidence. Little did I know that it would largely dictate the course of my life.

I attended law school because it gave me an outlet, along with deep validation, for all this proving energy. In truth I can now see so clearly how that, combined with a fast and agile mind, were the ingredients that propelled me on a career path I would eventually leave when the energy of needing prove myself the legal arena dissipated.

In my personal life, my priorities were always other people.   Doing for others.  And most of the time they didn’t always know it (talk about a poor pay back strategy). It’s why I stayed in a dysfunctional marriage longer than was healthy for me to do so.  And why even though I knew it was the right thing to do, leaving was very hard.  In fact, it took me the better part of three years to do so.

Proving is a precarious way to be in the world because we are always vulnerable to others’ opinions.  Our inner security depends on it. 

Proving myself kept my true essence hidden from me for most of my life. Proving causes, us to project all kinds of images of who we want others to know us to be, which of course only keeps us hidden from ourselves and others.  It’s a one-dimensional way of being when we are anything but one-dimensional beings.

I recently had the experience of feeling this energy dissipate in a big way from my life shortly after the death of my children’s’ father.  I hadn’t even realized how much I had been holding on to proving myself to the two people in the world I never thought I needed to, my children.  For so long I had held myself to this incredibly high standard of needing to be superhero tough for both of them, to compensate for their highly unavailable father.   I didn’t realize I was already more than enough.

Death has a strange way of doing that.  Of releasing us from those deeply buried patterns we fooled ourselves into thinking we had somehow mastered. 

Anytime we release a false way of being there is liberation. Liberation usually arrives with a crescendo, followed by waves that slowly become smaller and smaller as we integrate the new way of being within ourselves. This week as I sat down to write this blog I could feel the energy diminishing even more as I replaced proving with a desire for heart felt connection pure and simple.  It felt marvelous, like I was riding a wave.