If you’ve ever had a moment, or maybe lots of moments, where you felt you just bombed as a parent, and you really started to wonder “Am I worth a darn? The most important job I have in life and I can’t even get it right with my parenting?” At The Connected Community at The Maine Children’s Home, we want you to push a pause button right there and tell yourself, “I am worthy. I am worthy just by virtue of being human - all human beings are worthy of being seen, heard and valued.” Please know this: your worth isn’t based on your performance (by the way, it’s not based on your performance of anything - whether it’s as a parent, an employee, a competitor in sport - performance does not equal worthiness).

We have just started our first group of “Making Sense of Your Worth” at Maine Children’s Home, and we are excited to offer this now and moving forward to any person who recognizes they are struggling with knowing their worth. We are particularly excited to invite parents to join us, because, the truth is that a parent’s solid foundation of self-worth must be intact before they can help their child form a foundation of positive self-worth. Remember the saying “you can’t give what you don’t have?” This applies to positive self-worth as well.

You may be having feelings of inadequacy - based upon, perhaps, things people have said or done to you giving you these negative messages in the past (like you are not lovable, or not worth my time, or you’re always wrong, or you must be perfect – the list can go on, unfortunately). We want you to know, you are worthy. Simply by being you - a human being. We talk in Making Sense of Your Worth about the difference between self-worth and self-esteem; and these are different things - high self-esteem meaning ‘I can do things well’, and positive self-worth being “a belief and feeling that I am worthy of being seen, heard and valued.” Period.

If you are interested in knowing more about growing your foundation of positive self-worth, for whatever reason you would like to do so, with a special emphasis on parents who want to be sure their self-worth is intact so they can help their child form their own positive self-worth, please consider joining us in one of our future Making Sense of Your Self Worth groups. We’d love to meet you, get to know you, and have you grow in the knowledge of your own value through this highly impactful and potentially life changing, group experience. This group has already started but we can put you on a waiting list for the next training!

Contributed by: Debra Levenseller, LCSW, RPT-S Clinical Director at The Maine Children’s Home for The Connected Community @ MCH.