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Searching For Self, Identity and Self-Worth
Perhaps the deepest, most enduring search in your life is the search for who you are. It encompasses every aspect of life from birth to death. Life begins with your focus totally on you, your needs, and your wants, both physiological and emotional. From birth, your needs were met by significant people in your life; you depended on them for survival. Your sense of worth depended, in part by how other people interacted with you, and whether or not you were able to bond or form an attachment with them. If your needs were met, and you were nurtured, you formed healthy, positive attachments. Because of these positive attachments, you learned that the world was safe and that you were accepted; you felt you had worth as a person and developed a healthy self-identity. You learned who you are and what you want in your Searching For Self, Identity, and Self-Worth.
As you grew older, you learned to meet most of your own needs, developed independence, and interdependence. Life is a process. Searching For Self, Identity, and Self-Worth involves a series of changes, challenges, growth, and development. When difficulties arise, your sense of who you are and worth as a person is tested. Counselors may help you through many of life's difficulties, help you develop your strengths, and show you how to positively reframe your perspective on life. By changing your outlook, it is possible to change the outcome. You may not be able to change your situation, but you may change your attitude and outlook. Even if you find yourself in a situation that you cannot change, your sense of worth may still grow, perhaps by helping others in the same or similar situation and finding things for which to be grateful.
Your sense of worth determines in large part, how you treat others. If you formed healthy attachments and had healthy role models as a child, you learned to treat others with dignity and respect. On the other hand, children who are abused and have unhealthy role models, often learn to abuse animals and other human beings. Searching For Self, Identity, and Self-Worth become distorted and linked with power and control in people who abuse others. Children growing up in an abusive home often, as adults, attract abusive partners because of pattern of thinking learned as a child. Counselors may help you change your pattern of thinking, help you let go of old, harmful patterns of thinking so that you may attract others who will treat you with respect, dignity, and value you.
Searching For Self, Identity and Self-Worth is pathological when it exclusively puts one's own needs ahead of the needs of others to the point of harming them. A sense of entitlement may lead to violating the rights of others. Cruelty to animals by children is a "red flag" that the child may have been abused or may have seen abuse, and that the child needs professional help to overcome the cause and the symptoms. If left unchecked, bullying, abuse, torture, and murder may follow as the child reaches adulthood. Abuse and cruelty are signs of mental pathology. "The essential feature of Antisocial Personality Disorder is a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood" (DSM-IV-TR, American Psychiatric Association, Washington, D.C., 2000). Aggression, physical assault (including spouse or child beating), lying, manipulation, destroying property, and harassment are also part of this disorder. In Conduct Disorder, cruelty to animals and people is an essential feature, in which the person's actions cause or threaten to cause harm to people or animals (DSM-IV, op.cit.). When you see signs of cruelty to animals or bullying in children, seek help. Qualified professional counseling may help children achieve healthy lives that contribute to the world around them. If you are aware of a child being abused, or if you have reason to suspect that a child (or a person with disabilities or an elderly person is being abused, in the United States, immediately call the Abuse Hotline at 1(800)962-2873. Many professions (for example, physicians, counselors, law enforcement, social workers) require that practitioners in that field report abuse or suspected abuse. If you see or suspect abuse of a person or an animal, report it immediately to proper the authorities; let them check it out; do not allow the abuse to continue because you think no one will believe you, or because you think, you may be mistaken about the suspected abuse.
Abuse is traumatic. If you are being abused, seek help and safety immediately. Abuse is always wrong. Abuse is not your fault. Nothing that you do should result in abuse by another person -- not ever. You are a person with great value and great worth. Seek counseling to help you through this difficult time; you do not have to go through abuse alone. In many communities, there are community agencies available to help you. Your counselor can help you develop a safety plan to escape the abuse and develop a strong support system.
Healthy things grow. One sign of healthy self-worth is continuing learning. Self-care, for body and mind, is evidence of healthy self-worth. Planning and providing for your future, is another sign that your sense of self-worth is intact. Positive self-talk, gratitude, and living in the present are other signs of a healthy self-worth. Healthy Searching For Self, Identity, and Self-Worth leads to personal growth and social interest with a focus beyond self.
Life is not just about self. An egocentric, narcissistic focus that excludes the well being of others, sense of entitlement, the feeling that the rules were made for everyone else, but not for you is not only pathological, but it may signal feelings of inferiority, and may be an attempt to make others acknowledge the worth you seek. Counseling may help if you are willing to participate in the counseling process and are willing to make needed changes. Healthy individuals are independent as well as interdependent upon others, treating them with respect and dignity. Let go of past hurts. Do not live controlled by anger, bitterness, and resentment. Look for the positive things in your life. Every day, think of the new possibilities this day holds for you. Life is comprised of choices we are given and choices we make. Counselors may help you develop a healthy, realistic sense of worth and help you live your life to your full potential.