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parents, my mum and dad didn’t know anything about self-worth contagion. Personally, I’d estimate that my mum met the world as a three and my dad as a four. At such low levels, the concept of high self-worth can be hard to grasp, regardless of what you’re doing in your life, because there’s no frame ofreference, no experience of high self-worth, available to you. It’s like trying to imagine a colour that doesn’t exist.
    Meeting the world with low self-worth has become a habit for many people and I’ll take a guess that you count yourself in this. Regardless of what’s happening around you, what’s being said or how people are behaving, your brain is so used to interpreting the world in a particular way that you’ve never thought to question it. If good things are happening or nice things are being said, your assumption will be that these are one-off events or people are ‘just saying that’ or it’ll blow over you without resonating with you at all. Low self-worth will even cause you to misinterpret people’s words and intentions, because your brain is trying hard to maintain the levels of chemicals it considers normal. Many people with low self-worth will go to the ends of the Earth to find the insult behind the compliment.
    Quite often people marry a person with a similar level of self-worth to their own. We attract people who will bring us the kind of experiences and validation that our brain chemistry is most used to. It’s not at all uncommon for a person with low self-love to shun a mate who will help them to have a happy life in favour of one who will bring them the levels of stress, anxiety and depression that their brain has been conditioned to expect.
    But there is hope – of course there is, otherwise I wouldn’t have written this book! Self-love can be learned at any age with a little bit of consistent thought and practice. We’ll find out how later. But first, here’s some more on parental influences, just to give you a richer understanding of how we develop and to help you change even faster.
How We Learn to Question Our Worth
    At a conference recently, I heard Michael Neill, author of Feel Happy Now , say, ‘You were born happy. You weren’t born needing therapy.’
    It’s so true! Happy is how we start out. We have healthy self-worth then, too. Most of us lose it as we grow up and spend the rest of our life trying to find it again, but young children don’t question their worth at all. Not at first. They learn to do it through their experiences with adults.
    Quite simply, young children take on board whatever adults tell them. If the words and actions of the adults convey to them they are not enough, they’ll know they’re not enough. If the words and actions of the adults show them they are enough, they’ll know that instead.
    How does it happen? There are three main ways.
1) Being Shamed
    Some parents use shame as a parenting style. It’s mostly because they’ve never learned anything else. They were shamed by their parents, and their parents by theirs before them. Shaming is a style that passes through the generations, just like genes. It’s a way of correcting behaviour. But there’s a downside to telling a child that they’re bad, a liar or a good for nothing. It doesn’t come from the reprimand. The problem is in the use of the words ‘You are’ followed by something bad. That’s shaming, and childhood is where it starts.
    The point is that there’s a world of difference between telling a lie and being a liar . Telling a lie is a form of behaviour, and behaviour can be changed. But if a child believes they are a liar, that requires a change of identity. That’s a much bigger thing to change and the thought of it can leave children feeling hopeless. So they accept their given identity, and some rebel, lie, cheat and steal as an expression of it.