Are You Feeling Unworthy??
So, I don’t know how much you know about me, but I have a Master’s Degree in Sociology. I got that Master’s Degree because right after I moved to New York City, the 2008 recession happened, and it seemed like all the things in the fucking world were working against me.
It seemed like I had to fight so hard just to get to New York. I had a middle-class family, and nobody I was related to ever left Northeast Pennsylvania. I didn’t have a single friend who knew anything about moving to a global city. All I knew was that I wanted to go, so at 22, I started finding out the answers on my own (and borrowing a lot of money to do so, mind you.)
I let that major economic event terrify me into not making any moves. I got a job that paid the bills, and I was petrified to leave it.
Do you know how long I was petrified? Over a decade. But that’s an aside.
I ended up studying Sociology because I was convinced that growing up poor, being on welfare at one point, and having parents who didn’t really have many connections anywhere but in one small field in Pennsylvania put me in a crappy life situation and were the sole reason why I couldn’t move forward. (Obviously, completely disregarding my white privilege, the help I did have from my family, which I know now was a lot and all of those other inherent advantages I didn’t even know about until my late twenties.)
And, as you’d expect, I read a lot of books that confirmed what I believed was true.
So, what then?
“I guess I should just deal with it, right?" I thought. "Life is against me.”
I entered this state of victim consciousness, where everything in the world was “someone else’s fault.”
“I’m poor and it’s the government’s fault.”
“I’m fat because I don’t have time to do anything about it because I have to work at this job because I have so much debt, and that’s their fault for never saving for our education…”
It was obnoxious.
Cue 2018, after being left at an airport in the middle of the night by my ex-boyfriend, when I finally decided that I had to stop that, or I was going to end up killing myself by 40.
I started to take responsibility for my life.
Everything began to get better. Everything. My body, my fitness, my finances, my relationships… I got rid of almost all of my vices (except coffee because you can pry it from my cold, dead hands.)
Yet, I still have things that are deep-seated that hold me back.
I just finished reading Boni Lonnsburry’s The Map to Abundance, and she talks about a concept I’d heard many times over: that the way we feel about money and wealth can actually keep us from achieving abundance.
Think about that for a moment.
I have a ton of guilt and shame about abundance because I watched my parents struggle with money for so long. I watched my mother lose her home, and sleep on a couch for two years while we lived with my grandmother, a woman who never let my mother forget a single financial misstep. I watched my mother put herself through college on government assistance, working full-time, falling asleep in her books at the kitchen table, and waking up with highlighter on her face.
Every time I think about accepting abundance, SUBCONSCIOUSLY I experience a psychological roadblock that actually prevents me from allowing it in.
And I’ll tell you what- going back to Sociology, that’s a middle-class value. Tony Robbins talks about values all the time, and how what we believe is based on our values.
But what dictates our values?
The other night, I was having dinner with a friend of mine who basically told me that he hates the word “manifest,” and that manifesting is bullshit.
I said that while he can believe that all he wants, I’ve made a lot happen in a short period of time in my life by changing my thoughts.
He snarkily replied that I had the help of a global pandemic (which is true,) and then tried to guilt me by mentioning how many people died during said pandemic.
And while I do not discount the suffering over the last year and a half, because it was traumatic and horrific, it’s a middle-class value to believe yourself unworthy of success, forward motion, or abundance if others are experiencing lack.
As middle-class people, we have this guilt and shame around accepting if the other is struggling.
Even with the vaccine, I experienced the shame!
I became eligible for vaccination in my state before many people in other states were able to get a vaccine. One of the people in an online community I’m in lives in Paris, and said he doesn’t know a person under 50 who has gotten it. A client of mine who is quite a few years older than I am just got her first shot in Vancouver, BC.
But before that, there was the shame of “why should I get this if a 70-year old in “x” state has no access?”
Yet, my getting the shot would have had no impact at all on the availability of the shot to that 70-year-old in the other state. Yet, I felt guilt, shame, and an underlying sense of unworthiness, that I should go without.
And as humans, we have this “unworthy current” flowing down deep all the time.
And our values, for whatever they are, often times are subconsciously altered by things we aren’t even aware of.
So, I would encourage you all this weekend to do a deep-dive, and see where you’re holding yourselves back.
A good example- maybe you’re very overweight, but so is your whole family. Would you subconsciously feel guilt or shame for losing weight, having seen the struggle of your mother, or your sister?
We all have those areas where we’re stuck, but we are the ones who aren’t letting go and letting what we need in.
I did an entire Instagram Live yesterday about this, which you can watch here.
I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
Be free and stay beautiful,
-Andee
