Peanut Butter Revelation Part 1: 6 Realities Why Self-Reclamation Can Be an Uphill Climb for Women

Part 1

Peanut butter is my jam. And I’ve felt this way about it for a long time. Growing up, we were a crunchy peanut butter family. Mind you, as full blown hippies, in addition to sticking it to the man, my parents believed in natural food and nudity. And I mean that with all my heart. “Good morning, Dad,” we’d say, as he drank coffee, naked as a jaybird. 

Mom also enjoyed a good birthday suit but her hippy oath was more targeted on what was happening inside your body. Martha Bell’s commitment was to nutrition and any food group that contained braggable vitamins. She was passionate about nutrients like Vitamin C but strongly opposed to artificial ingredients like red dye number 5. Sugar was also on her shit list. In addition to giving our skin a healthy orange glow with regular doses of carrot juice or lining us up and knocking us down with a tablespoon of cod liver oil daily, mom was one of the early adopters of the peanut butter machine at the health food store—a brilliant invention which pulverized the peanuts without totally removing that crunchy all-natural texture. 

I’d never tasted anything like Jif peanut butter until I visited my best friend’s house in 4th grade. Cheri’s parents were divorced and her mom worked. In addition to playing the glockenspiel, another one of Cheri’s cool qualities is that she knew how to cook. At her house, we were two unsupervised and overconfident nine year olds burning grilled cheeses made of wonderbread and kraft singles, overboiling Campbell’s tomato soup on the stove, and packing pbj’s for our romps about the neighborhood. If her mom was ever home, I don’t remember. I have this feeling her teenage sister was supposed to be babysitting us but she also was never home. I know this because we had a habit of sneaking in her room undetected and gawking at her Bon Jovi posters.

My own parents were going through the first wave of downhill fights fueled by jealousy, alcohol, and drugs. It is a long winding tale that I’ll summarize here in a few sentences. Through a trail of broken glass, my parents found sobriety and eventually each other. In between, they would have epic fights, file for divorce, get back together, separate again after Dad got busted for smuggling marijuana off the coast of Jamaica, and officially pause their relationship when mom married Mike, a totally rotten character she met in rehab. When mom finally divorced Mike’s ass in, you guessed it 1999, mom and dad remembered how much they loved each right around the same time the feds suddenly released Dad after 12 years of appeals. They remarried in 2000, and I’m happy to report that at the time of this writing my parents are very much alive and kicking and in love. 

But boy oh boy. As a 9 year old, I loved being away from home. I was one kid who was never homesick. It helped that at Cheri’s, we did whatever we wanted. We stayed up extra late inventing highly choreographed dance routines to Madonna’s Borderline. One night, we assembled a candle lit seance. Not really knowing how such things worked, we opted for a ceremony where we vowed to become blood brothers after a bold finger prick and pinky swear. I even got my first kiss on a Sunday afternoon standing inside one of the concrete tunnels that ran beneath Cheri’s neighborhood streets in Roswell, Georgia. By then I was a fifth grader who’d heard of french kissing, so I closed my eyes and opened my mouth. The neighbor kid Zach went on to perform something like an around the world mouth swab with his tongue. Afterwards, we both sighed, somehow understanding that we’d passed through a major adolescent milestone to discover it was more bark than bite. 

But no matter how much time I spent with Cheri or how many creamy PBJs we ate while roaming wild and free, I still preferred my crunchy peanut butter origins. Which is something of a marvel because for decades I would on principle and in some uninformed attempt at self-differentiation reject most things my parents liked or believed in. 

Food was my big exception. Give me the coordinates to your local farmers market, a tall glass of refreshing organic carrot juice, and dammit, give me a vat of healthy, crunchy peanut butter. 

So here’s something crazy. After everything I’ve told you about my crunchy peanut butter devotion, for the first 15 years of motherhood, I exclusively bought creamy peanut butter. Let me explain. My oldest son had a texture thing and it started early. If he ate one wheatberry in a slice of bread, a strained strawberry in yogurt, a steel cut oat, and you guessed it, a crunch of peanut in peanut butter, he would gag. And it wasn’t just the bite full he would spit out – the entire contents of the meal would come up too. 

When the other two boys came along, I’d already stopped thinking about it. We were a creamy peanut butter family and that was that. And this went on for years. My peanut butter preference lost to myself, as just one of many sacrifices that felt both necessary and virtuous. After all, I’m easy. 

Then one day I was standing in a grocery aisle not thinking much about selfhood or identity. Instead, I was laser focused on searching the racks for a peanut butter brand that fit my criteria: on sale, creamy, and sugar free. Suddenly, my eyes landed on a jar of Adams peanut butter, and through the glass I could see the layer of chopped peanuts floating atop the peanut butter magic. A little spit formed at the back of my molars and a tiny flame pulsed inside my heart. And then without thinking, I did something absolutely selfish. I reached for that brilliant jar of crunchy peanut butter like a fucking lifeline and jammed it in my shopping cart.

Because I am also Captain Responsible, I reached back a second time and grabbed a creamy peanut butter for the kids. I wheeled out of that market in a daze of astonishment, trying to understand how I’d missed this quiet truth all these years: two peanut butters—one just for me—had always been an option. I just couldn’t see it. 

***

Can peanut butter really teach you something about yourself? I think so. Look, maybe your thing isn’t peanut butter but I’m willing to bet that somewhere along the way to here you left a piece of yourself behind without noticing. Now maybe you don’t need that old cast off—maybe that part of you was like an old sweater you’d borrowed from a friend that never really fit right anyway. Leaving it at your ex-boyfriend’s and forgetting all about it was one of the nicest things you’ve ever done for yourself. But maybe, just maybe, that stranded part of yourself was something you gave away without ever really calculating the personal cost, and now it’s back like the ghost of Christmas past and knocking on your door because sister, there’s something important you need to remember about yourself. 

Dramatic? Maybe. But aren’t you sort of tired of being casual about yourself? After all, as psychologist and Buddhist teacher Tara Brach says in Radical Self-Acceptance, “Where do you think you’re going?” And she doesn’t mean heaven or hell. Let me give it to you straight: Growth and aging is, if you’re lucky, a long walk to the grave. Knowing ourselves and choosing to live in a way that’s aligned with this knowing is one way we can choose whether it’s a race or a slow dance.  

Of course you don’t want to think about it, and honestly most days you shouldn’t (at least not all day). But the reality is that no matter how old you may be, time is running out. That’s why in part one of this article, I dive into what gets left behind in the name of self-sacrifice. I explore why so many people, especially women, lean into self-sacrificing behavior and how this choice can delay your personal growth. This first part includes six realities that make it hard to know and reclaim yourself, and then in part two, you'll learn four ways you can strengthen your self-worth muscles with the help of some personal development experts. I’ve also got a few of my own helpful practices. I think you’re gonna love discovering how to love, accept, and wait for it—celebrate—yourself. So, let’s party. 

Reality #1: Hi, I’m Victoria and I’m easy. 

“Beauty must suffer.” This saying was a mantra I heard throughout my childhood from mothers, grandmothers, and aunts. As a young girl it was frequently applied to situations that involved hair brushing or bow tying, as a way of saying, “Stop fidgeting, child.” As a teen, the saying began to shift to a more humorous application for occasions like squeezing into your too-tight jeans or displaying self-control when the foul chemicals from your perm activated your primary itch centers. Language is funny that way. While ‘beauty must suffer’ had once meant “sit still or I’m gonna get my hickory switch,” it now was a whispered lady secret that teased “go on and hurt yourself, dear” and “welcome to womanhood.” 

Now I grew up in a very special part of the United States. The American South is famous for teaching women to embody the three Ps: pretty, polite, and pleasing. And although my mom had joined the hippy rebellion she was not exactly a bra burner. Like her mother and grandmother before her, Martha Bell’s self-belief was hogtied to her femininity. My mom was especially passionate about looking and smelling clean. Special attention was given to crisp ironed clothes, combed hair, and feminine hygiene. “If you don’t wash your pupie, it’ll smell,” she told me and my sisters. “And you don’t want people to think you’re strange.” As a very creative and articulate woman who coined the word pupie for our girl parts and ding-a-ling for my brother’s boy parts, mom gave me many idiosyncratic lessons such as this, but splashing some fresh clean water down there was considered a priority bathing protocol. If smiling and making everyone’s life more wonderful was a woman’s meal ticket, in my mother’s universe, a stinky vagina was surely a pink slip.

What I learned from the three Ps stuck with me for most of my life. I learned that everyone will like you more, something I have admittedly cared about, when you’re easy. And guess what? Having a sensitive streak and a short temper as a child and getting a lot of big reactions to those qualities made me feel like I was failing the lady test. 

Reality #2: Lady Lessons 101: One Day You’ll Forget All About It 

You don’t have to be from Georgia to have received some lady lessons of your own. And if you’re like a lot of women, these came from everywhere, not just your family. The trouble with this cultural programming is that in addition to giving these instructions exclusively to girls, the message emphasizes that you’re most desirable when you're quiet, lovely, uncomfortable, and in my upbringing, clean and fresh smelling. To be absolutely fair to my mom, being clean down there is not only about not offending others; for women, it’s also about avoiding infections. But like so many lady lessons I received from the world, this one got tangled up with the basics of my sex.

For a lot of us, the intent behind self-sacrifice is the place to shine the spotlight. Because it’s there that you’ll often see the gentle suppression of your humanity, with expendable traits like curiosity, movement, preference, even sweat, tossed aside in favor of shaping, grooming, pleasing, and coy behaviors performed for the benefit of others. (My beloved high school English teacher, one of my lady role models, used to say in her beautiful Scarlett O’Hara accent, “Honey, I don’t sweat. I perspire.”) It’s worth noting that a lot of this acculturation happens when you’re so young that you forget it happened at all.  

 There’s a story from Fatima Mernissi’s memoir Dreams of Trespass about the tradition of women indoctrinating girls into the rules of society, and it’s a text that I used to teach to my college freshman. The story comes from the chapter entitled “The Harem Within” and looks closely at Mernissi’s early life as a curious, playful girl growing up in an affluent Muslim family in 1940s Morocco. Young Fatima lives in a large, busy household in Fez, along with aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins. Although she loves to run, jump, and play like her boy cousins, she slowly learns that being a woman comes with many restrictions. While her mother and other female relatives yearn for more independence, they cannot leave the premises without permission or facing down the doorkeeper. Like all clever women in history, many of the women find they can leap from their rooftop terrace to the next and take the stairway down to the street undetected. 

To young Fatima, her grandmother Yasmina offers a wonderful exception. While she and her family are ruled by walls and gates, Yasmina lives in the countryside and can move around as she pleases. But it’s Yasmina who teaches young Fatima that not everything is as it seems. Her lessons begin with an understanding of the word  ‘harem,’ a slight variation of the word ‘haram,’ which means forbidden, and whose basic definition simply means a place where a man shelters his family. Yasmina explains that there are many different types of harems—they could be a tent, a house, a large family dwelling like her home in the city, or even the countryside, where Yasmina lives. 

The most important thing to know, Yasmina emphasizes, is that each one has its own rules about what is forbidden, and it’s young Fatima’s job to learn them and behave accordingly. For example, although there are no walls in the country, she tells her, there are frontiers of invisible rules everywhere. According to Yasmina, “Women could walk or ride for hours without seeing a soul. But if by chance they did meet a male peasant along the way, and he saw they were unveiled, he would cover his head with the hood of his own djellaba to show that he was not looking.” Yasmina explains that the peasant’s reaction happens because what is forbidden is now “inscribed under his forehead.” Young Fatima begins to worry that these rules, which are not written down anywhere and are too many to remember and are overall dreadful, will be impossible to remember much less obey but her grandmother reassures her. One day, Yasmina says, the harem will be within. 

As a smart little girl, young Fatima is not comforted by this revelation. Is it any surprise that Mernissi grew up to become a highly regarded sociologist and Islamic feminist? 

The origins of special rules for women seem to come from many directions. Religion has been especially problematic for women across centuries, and in some places like 1940s Morocco, and in many countries still today, a woman's appearance and movement are heavily conscripted. It may seem strange to compare Western women’s experiences to Mernissi’s life because admittedly most of us have not faced that level of cultural oppression. The reason why I taught it to college students, however, was because it fit into my class’s theme on self-discovery. Because we can’t grow if we don’t understand the ways so many of those pesky societal rules live below the surface of our awareness, or as Yasmina teaches us, underneath our skin. In my classes, even the guys had invisible rules to share. So if you’re going to claim yourself, you first may need to battle with all the stuff that claimed you first. 

Reality #3: Your Homework is To Love Yourself

You’ll notice that our earliest lessons in self-governance are not written down anywhere and tend to come from social cues or pressure we experience in our growing up years. And if you grew up in a religious culture or in my case the Bible Belt, lessons on self-sacrifice were often compounded with scriptural teaching. Caring for orphans and widows is a frequent loving biblical instruction because these two groups historically have been highly vulnerable (for different reasons), and adding them to your family, or caring for them as a society, requires a sharing of resources. Jesus himself considered the second greatest commandment, “after love your God with all your heart and soul,” to be to “love your neighbor as yourself.” And if you want to understand Jesus’s truly radical views on love, read the parable of The Good Samaritan alongside some historical context. This story is so revered because Jesus broadens the definition of ‘neighbor’ to include people who sometimes show up in the outsider or enemy file in your brain.

One interpretation of the second greatest commandment is that you’re to love everyone without hesitation because that’s what God expects of you. How I saw this play out in my own life was that doing the right thing in God’s eyes meant always putting others before myself and not having any boundaries around my own needs. So when it was my 8th birthday and my sister Bell pitched a fit because my parents gave me Crystal Barbie, the present she had wanted on her birthday but did not receive, my mom wasted no time in asking me to give her my present. Of course I didn’t want to, but not doing so meant preferring myself to her (selfish) and giving her my present was one of the highest forms of good (selfless). Do I regret it? Yes! 

Christians are often instructed to be like Jesus and to lay their lives down for others. When this message is taught without sophistication, selflessness can make you into a doormat. For the record, I think loving your neighbor is an excellent and important way to live. But the other piece of this scripture is to love your neighbor as yourself. And I would be in my 30s before I heard a pastor tease out the interdependent relationship between loving yourself and loving your neighbor. 

It was around this same time that I was begging my therapist for the names of books, even classes that I could take to help me fastrack my healing after working through a traumatic experience. Vibrating with constant rumination and stomach aches, I remember asking, “Can’t I just have some homework?” As someone who loved school, someone who literally loved reading the dictionary for fun, someone who at that time was relatively happy part-time teaching in academia for very low pay, I believed that the shame and isolation I felt from processing this trauma might be relieved by something I could learn from a book. I didn’t really understand that when it comes to cognitive behavioral therapy, the ‘self’ is the primary text. I know. Former Victoria can be extra adorable in her naivety. As usual, Dr. B treated my desperation with gentleness. “Your homework is to love yourself,” he said. At the time, his assignment seemed like a joke. Love myself? What foreign language was that? 

It took time, and I still don’t always get it right, but today I have learned to love myself. And it’s probably no surprise to learn that this upward trajectory coincided around the same time as my peanut butter epiphany. Helping you learn to love yourself is actually a huge motivation behind writing this article, and later I’ll share a few ways I practice this art. If you don’t remember anything else from this piece, don’t skip this point. Because learning to love yourself just may be your life’s work. 

Your ability to love yourself is crucial to your ability to grow and accept yourself, and if you prize your relationships, scholars like Brené Brown will tell you that it’s key to loving others. And as one of my favorite self-improvement gurus Iyanla Vanzant sometimes says, “You can’t give what you didn’t get.” In other words, and although we pay a lot of lip service to unconditional love, most of us didn’t experience unconditional love growing up. Sure maybe you felt your parents loved you but you probably also received extra love when you did something they liked and maybe some disappointment when you went against their wishes. If you're a parent or partner, this observation could change your life. Because if some of that conditional love residue got on you, you may still be trying to love someone in spite of their perceived flaws (instead of loving them for all of who they are) or if you’re trying to change someone so they can be a better fit for you or even a better version of themselves for the world, that’s not love. And changing your way of loving others starts with changing how you love yourself and unconditionally loving that beautiful person in the mirror, which is something we’re gonna talk about soon in part two. 

Reality #4: Working Overtime to Earn Your Worth

So whether or not you grew up with a faith tradition, if you’re American, I probably don’t need to remind you that this country was founded by a lot of religious people (which if you think about it means you sort of did grow up with a religious influence), and given that American women didn’t get the vote until 1920, and Black women couldn’t vote in many states due to poll taxes and literacy tests for decades afterward, our cultural legacy as fully empowered women is historically brief. 

Our delayed start may help explain why today, there are still vast differences in the social perceptions around how women live their lives. We simply haven’t had thousands of years of human rights to back up the belief that we belong here. And so for many women, we spend a lot of time proving, earning, and defending our choice to build a badass career (without being perceived as a bitch or for not loving our kids) or our choice to stay home with our kids (without being perceived as less important to society or fully valued in our own homes) or our choice to not have children (without being perceived as less of a woman or not very nurturing) or our choice to sleep with whoever we want whenever we want (without the double standard judgments for loose morals), etc. And these are just our choices. Facts of our existence are equally controversial—don’t forget about your period. Even though a lot of men (and very polite women) would like you to do just that. 

I know guys have it hard too. I have three sons, one step-son, and a rockstar husband. I’ve seen firsthand how cultural expectations of manhood can limit a boy or man’s personal development. There’s a reason why ‘boys don’t cry’ was a frequent invisible rule my male college students pointed out when we read Mernissi. Self-sacrifice is of course not limited to women but because many women are acculturated to believe their worth is associated with self-sacrifice we need a reality check that’s all our own.

In a modern age, being born a woman comes with an uphill climb to self-reclamation. Because as women we have to deal with the cultural backlash of what happens when we’re not “nice,” something Helen Lewis writes about in “Fighting the Tyranny of Niceness: Why We Need Difficult Women.” Few women enjoy the perception (or receive any benefit for that matter) of being a bitch. And even in the progressive age of stay-at-home dads and enlightened partners, studies show that women tend to carry more of what’s called the mental load in a family, which encompasses the unpaid work of “knowing what needs to be done, the anticipating of chores and events that are coming up, and the planning for them.”  

In a BBC article, author Melissa Hogenboom argues that the mental load is actually holding women back. Not only do women who carry more of the mental load feel more stressed at home, their exhaustion and break-neck lifestyle contributes to a ‘less capable’ perception at work because they “cannot physically or mentally put in the extra hours demanded by many workplaces.” By the way, if you want a fantastic illustration of what the mental load looks like, check out this fabulous comic strip by French artist Emma. 

The reality is women have a lot going on — inside and all around us. It’s no wonder that we struggle to connect with ourselves. And just to pile one more layer on, cultural expectations and the influence of religion are just two parts of the equation for some women. Because if you grew up in a dysfunctional family, you learned early to prioritize taking care of a parent, maybe even siblings. And what about your needs? The answer is complicated. 

Reality #5: You May Not Be Who You Think You Are

I’ve gotten really far in this article without defining what I mean by the word ‘self.’ To be honest, that’s because it’s not just a hard word to define, it's actually somewhat controversial and deserves something more like a whole book instead of an explanation here. But here goes. The American Psychological Association defines self as the “totality of the individual, consisting of all characteristic attributes, conscious and unconscious, mental and physical.” Other definitions highlight the self as “the object of introspection.” The totality of the individual and the object of introspection is something most people can agree on. Now for the freaky stuff. 

In his TedEx talk “Where Does Your Sense of Self Come From?” Anil Ananthaswamy highlights that certain neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, and foreign limb syndrome (xenomelia–a condition where one feels like their own body parts, typically their extremities, do not belong to them) suggest that the self may just be an elaborate construction. His argument goes like this. If we are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, then altered selves (schizophrenia), lost memories (Alzheimers), and even our sense of ownership of our own body parts (xenomelia) is teaching us that the ‘self’ is not a solid fixed thing but a construction. “Sometimes the construction goes wrong,” says Ananthaswamy, and we perceive our bodies, or our selves, in a way that’s not real. “What are these experiences of altered selves telling us?” asks Ananthaswamy. “They’re telling us that just about everything we take to be real about ourselves—real in the sense that we think we’re always experiencing undeniable truths about our bodies, our stories—well that’s just not the case.” You probably didn’t believe me when I said that the definition of self could be controversial, but there you have it. The storyteller in me hates this because I really do believe we are our stories. But the sojourner in me loves this because it means we’re not stuck or limited by our experiences.

(By the way, there are many fascinating books and TedTalks that explore selfhood and consciousness. Neuroscientist Antonio Demasio is an especially interesting speaker and author, who reveals in Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain that neuroscientists now think they understand the regions of the brain where the self resides. Incognito: The Hidden Lives of The Brain, by David Eagleman, is another great book that shows just how sci-fi the brain truly is. But my absolute favorite when it comes to this stuff is the late author and neurologist Oliver Sacks. You can’t go wrong with anything he wrote, but I especially loved Musicophilia, The Mind’s Eye and Gratitude.)

Although Ananthaswamy’s perspective threatens to blow the doors off your mind, many enlightened teachers have harnessed the belief in a constructed identity to help us become happier humans. In his mind bending book, Mind Hacking Happiness, which gave me my first glimpse at name-it-to-tame it psychology, Sean Webb outlines something he calls your self-map. Your self-map is essentially your brain’s way of ranking what’s most important to you—it includes everything you want to protect ranging from your body to your children to your unshakable urge that everyone likes you (okay this last one is mine!). He argues that the more you value something, the closer it is to the center of your map. In turn, you tend to experience more suffering when an experience or memory falls near the middle. What’s interesting, and what really helped me, is discovering how often something inconsequential would cause me crazy pain. Eventually, I learned to locate it on my self-map and begin the internal dialogue of asking if it was in the right spot. Sometimes the thing keeping me up at night really did matter. In this case, I used visualization to push it farther away from my center because it was hurting me. 

I plan to go deeper into Webb’s work in a later article because it revolutionized my ability to shortcut rumination, and frankly is one of the primary ways I practice loving myself when I’m hurting, something I discuss in “The Dog Ate My Compass." For now, I want to spotlight how over the course of your life a lot of shit ends up on your self-map and a lot of it you did not put there. We’ve discussed how the relationship between your cultural identity as a woman and expectations around self-sacrifice can infect your sense of worthiness but there’s another creeper in the room you deserve to know about. And because most of us have never considered the self as a construction, much less scrutinized the pop psychology that equates self-care with things like happy hour, napping, and pedicures (don’t get me wrong – I am a big fan of all three!), we’re also unaware of the way painful life experiences sometimes cause us to take necessary yet drastic measures that ultimately shape and limit who we become.

Reality #6: The Self-Reliance Riddle

My friend Nikki grew up with an alcoholic mother. Of course she loved her mom but her mom was often unreliable. One night when she was ten years old, her mom arrived very late to pick her and her two sisters up from the ice skating rink. It was not the first time they were the last kids left standing around and waiting for their ride home. On this night, they were shivering in the dark parking lot because the rink was closed and everyone had already gone home. When her mom finally arrived, it was such a relief that they all piled into the car without much thought or conversation. But within minutes, they were thrust into a harrowing scene as their mom swerved all over the road and eventually started driving straight into oncoming traffic. Nikki says that whenever she remembers that night several things stand out: the vision of the blinding lights from the oncoming cars, the sound of her own voice screaming “Mom! We’re gonna die!”, the lifesaving swerve when her mom got back onto the right side of the road, and the nanosecond when Nikki made a bold inner declaration. Next time this happens, she told herself, I’ll drive the car. 

Did Nikki know how to drive at ten years old? Of course not. But in her words she was done relying on anyone else to keep her and her sisters safe. 

Self-reliance is generally considered a highly positive trait. Self-help experts point to the upside of being able to think for yourself, problem solve, and find direction. But in Nikki’s case, her self-reliance shifted quickly from a distrust of her mom to a fierce skepticism that other people could care for her well-being, and that feeling came with her into adulthood. While this may have saved her life as a child (she became hypervigilant around whether her mom had been drinking before she got in the car), it made forming trusting bonds difficult. 

As an adult child of an alcoholic parent, Nikki’s reaction is not unique. Substance use disorder researchers often use attachment theory and family systems theory to help understand the impact of living in a family affected by addiction. In short, attachment theory researchers argue that healthy attachment (the developmental experience of having basic needs met with care, love, and consistency) with the primary caregiver is the foundation of all future relationships. Family systems theory explains that families have their own ecosystem and each member is committed to maintaining homeostasis. For families dealing with addiction, normalcy may look like the child caring for the parent or keeping the parent’s substance abuse secret. Notice that Nikki didn’t think: “The next time this happens I’m calling the police.” 

Every person who grows up dealing with a dysfunctional family member is shaped differently, but researchers have found some trends. One side effect that many children who grow up with a mentally ill or addicted parent share is what psychologists call destructive parentification. Parentification happens when roles get reversed at home and an actual child becomes the caregiver for a parent or sibling. This troubling backdrop can have lasting effects, according to Cindy Lamothe who wrote an article for The Atlantic entitled on this subject. One of the adult hallmarks of parentification is compulsive caretaking and a lingering feeling that you do not feel seen. Gregory Jurkovic, author of Lost Childhoods: The Plight of the Parentified Child, explains that these early experiences cause children to distrust their interpersonal world. 

Nikki says she’s spent a lot of time in therapy learning to dismantle the old belief system. Ultimately, she had to face the fact that her operational system had been built by a child who was driven to keep herself and her siblings safe. What she wanted now was a more robust internal ecosystem constructed to move beyond surviving to flourishing. 

Nikki is like a lot of women who are waking up to the ways cultural and personal experience have shaped their sense of self and how a lot of their inner guidance is being directed by a wounded inner child. And here’s the thing. You don’t have to come from a religious or dysfunctional family or have experienced child abuse to get mixed up about your intrinsic worthiness. You might even be from a family who put all their dreams and hopes on you, which in turn, encouraged you to sacrifice what you wanted in order to prove your love. There really are a lot of ways to catch the self-sacrifice virus. The most important thing for you to do though is to assess if your self-sacrifice is making you sick or well? Is it helping you grow or is it limiting your potential? I believe it’s time to decide that YOU matter just as much as everyone else. 

So far we’ve talked about all the baggage that comes with a potential upbringing that sidelined your needs and breaking free of what everyone else thinks you should do with your time and energy, including perhaps your own previous ideas about what the words good or successful mean to you. In part two, we’re going to get into the life changing shit. You’ll hear from some personal development wizards like psychologist and Buddhist teacher Tara Brach and motivation expert Mel Robbins, along with some original Victoria-isms to help you love and celebrate yourself on the reg. I can’t wait to help you cross the bridge from ‘who am I? to the land of ‘I am significant.’

Go here to read part 2: 4 Ways to Strengthen Your Self-Worth Muscles.