Elizabeth Chanter of Honour Being is a Creatrix, Classical Homeopath and experienced shamanically trained Reiki Master in The Golden Reiki Way. She offers in person and Remote Reiki Treatments, Attunement and Training, Honour Sacred Art Workshops and Retreats (Dreaming Your Inner Child) and conducts regular Moon Ceremonies in person and online.
You arrived in this world with the expectation that you would be loved. You were programmed to love in return. So, what went wrong…? There are many phrases and “buzzwords” being thrown around on social media. Loving yourself is one of those phrases. Toxic thinking is another. But just how do you love yourself in a healthy manner? How do you shift toxic mindsets? And what is the connection between the two?
“The greatest love of all is easy to achieve… Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.” (Whitney Houston)
The key is to understand the causes. Then you can begin to experience what it feels like to nurture yourself. You can find emotional release and well-being in balance with mental well-being (no, they are not the same!) You can experience growing self-worth, self-esteem, and self-belief. As these vital affirmations of self are put into place, letting go of any toxicity in your life becomes easy. You find a place of ease with yourself. As you truly begin to love yourself, the beauty within you shines outward into the world.
You are a complex being, being comprised of the physical, emotional, energetic, psychological and the spiritual. Any aspect can go out of balance because of the emotional wounds and hurts you may have passed through in childhood. This is well-recognised and documented (The Effect of Childhood Trauma on Adult Attachment Styles).
The patterns of childhood then repeat throughout your life interwoven with generational patterning, unless there is a healing intervention. The most destructive effect of emotional trauma is damage to self-worth, upon which toxic self-beliefs are based. Life can then rise to meet those expectations and to confirm them, trapping you in a negative spiral of repetition. Healthy self-worth is linked to higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress.
The following series of 7 vital steps are offered as a way to break out of this self-defeating pattern of lack of self-worth and toxic thinking by increasing your self-awareness.
The step to self-worth: A healthy foundation
“No matter what you have done, or left undone, you are worthy of love.” – Nithya Shanti
Self-worth is affected most deeply by the nurture and love you have received from your mother or by its absence. It is also affected by the degree to which you felt protected by your father. When either or both of these is lacking, you become more easily affected by the pressures of society to look, act and behave in a certain way to be acceptable or worthy of love and protection.
A variety of circumstances may have taught you as a child to doubt you are loveable. Causes can vary. Your mother may simply have been absent through busyness, illness or post-natal depression. She may not have known how to show love, because of a pattern of lack of nurture handed down by her maternal line. In turn, this will have affected your ability to receive the very love that is your birthright.
If you doubt that you are loveable, that you are unworthy of being loved, your self-worth has become deeply damaged. Because you subconsciously believe you are not worth loving, you may then have developed a sense that you have been abandoned, rejected, neglected, blamed or betrayed. This is a pattern that can then be repeated in relationships you form in later life, and ultimately hand on to your own children.
In your search to feel worthy as you grow up, you may have come to believe that you have to conform to external pressures, and to people please to gain love and approval. In its most extreme form, this can lead to abusive and sometimes narcissistic relationships. The first step towards creating a healthy foundation of self-worth is by recognising that your inner child is in need of gentle healing.
The step to emotional healing: Releasing the wounds
“When you feel joy, all the circuits are open, so the Life Force can be fully received. When you feel guilt, blame, fear or anger, the circuits are hindered and the life force cannot flow as effectively.” – Abraham Hicks
The wounds and hurts of your inner child become deeply buried in your unconsciousness, and yet your expectations and beliefs about life arise from this place. Your emotional experiences then create the negative beliefs you have about yourself, about the potential that lies within you, and the expectations you have of yourself, life and the world around you. These can then give rise to anxiety, addiction, insecurity, depression and form toxic mindsets.
Unreleased emotional patterning reinforces generational patterning. Conversely, released hurts and wounds positively change family patterns and relationships. A sign that healing is happening is when you return to playfulness, joy and trust in yourself and in life to bring you good things – and you begin to truly love and value all aspects of yourself. You no longer need to be the “good” girl or boy to be acceptable to yourself.
As emotional healing happens, mindsets organically begin to shift and change. Expectations become more positive and life rises to meet those expectations, thereby creating positive emotional experiences which affirm you, further influencing your positive mindset.
The step to de-toxification: Listening to what is right for you
“Listening to the heart offers the knowledge that we cannot receive through any other means.” – Felicity Warner
How often do you listen to your heart, rather than to the voices of others? How comfortable are you in your relationship with yourself? This determines how at ease you are in your relationships with others. How healthy is your self-esteem? Self-esteem relies on a healthy sense of self-worth. Are you able to release yourself from damaging and toxic relationships? Do you value yourself enough to be able to say no? If not, ultimately the stress of being in a toxic relationship can lead to depression and inflammation in the body.
Damaging and toxic relationships rely on a low sense of self-worth. When you have an inner knowing that you are enough just by being in existence, when you truly love yourself, it becomes easy to enable such toxicity to fall away. Then you can step out of any victim, rescuer and bullying behaviours that may have been dominating your life. Then you create space in which to attract those who love you unconditionally and do not play control games. But you have to be willing to step out of those roles too!
The step to changing a toxic mindset: Self-forgiveness and dropping self-judgement
“What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.” – Anthony Robbins
Damaged self-worth affects your self-belief and your beliefs about life. You can adopt the unhealthy beliefs of others. You can begin to judge them as well as yourself. When you point at others, you place yourself in the role of victim and give your authority away. When you harshly judge yourself, you can impose impossible standards of perfectionism. When you perceive you are “failing”, you can direct anger against yourself. This can ultimately generate inflammatory auto-immune illness, literally attacking the self on a physical level. Auto-immune illnesses are on the rise, and the majority of sufferers are women (National Library of Medicine). Women are much more likely to internalise their emotions and blame themselves than men. Auto-immune illness can become self-perpetuating as the tendency is to become one’s own victim.
Emotional healing and release is crucial to changing your mindset and mental well-being as mentioned above. Then you begin to value all of your feelings, thoughts, ideas, hopes, wishes and dreams. It is vital to then begin to forgive yourself and to drop your self-judgements and self-blame, knowing that you were never to blame for the experiences you passed through as a child. You were intended to be nurtured as a child, not to become the nurturer. You were intended to be protected, not become the protector. Those were the intended roles of your mother and father respectively. As your mindset changes, as you forgive yourself, so you can begin to experience and express gratitude for all that life has been teaching you so far.
The step to seeing the bigger picture: Infinite possibilities
“If we learn to quiet the mind the soul has a way of painting the bigger picture for taking the right action into growth.” – Matthew Donnelly
As your emotional wounds heal, your self-worth increases. As you allow toxicity to fall away and practice self-forgiveness, your perspective begins to shift further. You are now beginning to transform, evolve and grow. As you step out of the bindings of low self-worth and toxic thinking, so you begin to see that there are an infinite number of possibilities open to you. You can begin to dream of and write a different future for yourself.
The step to releasing the past: Valuing experience
“I have great respect for the past. If you don't know where you've come from, you don't know where you're going” – Maya Angelou
As part of this process, it is vital to take your experiences and grow more wisely, recognising that you are the sum of all that you have passed through. You can acknowledge there is a common humanity which binds us all. As you give yourself permission, to share your story and to be vulnerable, so you gift the same to others you meet along the road of life. And your story begins to change.
Once you value your experiences for the teaching they offer you, so it becomes natural to feel an increasing sense of gratitude and to wish to inspire others by your example. Your sense of self-worth continues to grow as you are affirmed in the mutual sharing of positive experiences, and your empathy and ability to love others unconditionally as well as yourself increases.
The step to inner peace: Self-compassion and creativity
“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” – Dalai Lama
As your self-worth and your self-esteem blossom, you can discover a sense of serenity within combined with a growing sense of expansiveness. When there is expansiveness, there is spaciousness for the flow of creative living to channel through you. Through practising self-compassion, you learn to love and value yourself unconditionally. You come to a place of ease, knowing you have nothing to prove either to yourself or to others. All toxic thinking is left behind, and you find it easy to be in love with life and with yourself…
Conclusion
These 7 vital steps to generating self-worth are fundamental to healing the deep and unconscious patterns affecting your ability to love and value yourself. As you move through them with growing self-awareness, toxic patterning falls away and you can create a place of ease with yourself. As you truly begin to love yourself, the beauty within you shines outward into the world. As the light within you glows, so you inspire and give permission to others to do likewise.
Honour Being exists to pay attention and offer healing to every aspect of your being, physical, emotional, energetic, psychological and spiritual, so that well-being is created in a balanced manner. The steps outlined above have been simplified for this article, but are fundamental to the way Elizabeth works with her clients. She does this by offering space and time for exploration, followed by the gentle healing of Golden Way Reiki and Dreaming Your Inner Child Soul Work. Treatments and sessions are always tailored individually according to client needs and preferences. Sessions are offered both in person and via Remote Healing both in the UK and overseas.
Start your healing journey today
Ready to begin your Golden Way Reiki journey? Book for a free Discovery Session or for a nurturing and releasing first Reiki Treatment to honour your emotional healing by sending an email or going to the Honour Being Website.
Elizabeth Chanter is recognised as a leader in her chosen field of healing, energy medicine and Golden Way Reiki. Since 2004, she has been assisting others to make transformational change in their lives, leading to positive, lasting and sometimes extraordinary results. She is passionate about helping her clients to evolve and grow into the bright, beautiful beings they were always intended to be. Having passed through many personal dark nights of the soul, she combines empathy, deep compassion and understanding with many years of professional expertise in her field. She believes in the regenerative power of hope, listening and healing touch.
