We all have a need to be valued, to be considered an equal to others, worthy of love and belonging. Indeed these are essential to a healthy sense of self and ability to form healthy relationships. But what happens when that need is met with conditions? When the need to be valued is no longer based on your inherent value as a human being, but rather that need is filtered through a set of conditions that change that need from one of being valued to being valuable. The person develops a sense of self that includes those conditions; that to be seen as valued one has to be valuable. In this episode, I talk to Tim Jennings, a family therapist, about his own experiences of this and how it created a false sense of self, one that masked who he really was, what it took for him to find himself again and come to understand himself as a worthy, valuable, and loveable human being.
In this episode you will learn:
- What some of the consequences of conditional love can be
- How the need to be valued can be distorted through conditional love
- How a mask based on the need to be valued develops
- What the consequences of such a mask are
- What to do about having such a mask
