The Problem of Self-Worth: An REBT Perspective

1. What is Self-Worth?
2. Contingent Self-Worth
3. Demanding Conditional Self-Worth
4. Self-Rating Scale
5. People Aren’t One-Dimensional
6. Conflating Behavior with Identity
7. Worthlessness, Blame, Moralistic Judgment, and Perfection
8. Evaluative Thinking
9. The ABCs of Worthlessness
10. REBT’s View of Self-Worth
11. How to Overcome Worthlessness
12. Unconditional Acceptance
13. References

What is Self-Worth?

Psychology does not have one unified definition of self-worth. Dictionaries also seem to differ on the term. Common definitions include:

• The intrinsic value you believe you have as a human being.
• One’s internal sense of being good enough.
• Giving oneself value for being alive and having accomplishments.
• Recognizing that one is worthy of love and acceptance from others.
• The evaluation one has of themselves as a valued human being who deserves to be respected.
• Another term for self-esteem.

There is a sense that one has inherent worth because they are human; they are naturally good enough already; and they deserve to be accepted, loved, and respected by others. However, what does self-worth mean to you?

Contingent Self-Worth

Someone may define their self-worth as dependent on various factors, both internal or external to themselves.

• Achievement or success: “I’m worthwhile only if I succeed.” or “My value is based on how well I do.”
• Approval from others: “I must be loved or liked to have value.” or “I must receive high praise so I know I’m worth it.”
• Fear of failure: “I should avoid doing a certain task because I’ll probably fail at it, and I want to avoid being a failure.”
• Imposter Syndrome: “I have value only if I meet high standards, gain approval, and avoid failure. Otherwise, I’m not competent, I’m a fraud.”
• Moral behavior: “If I do wrong, I am a bad person. I should be blamed.”
• Not good enough: “Unless I’m exceptional, I’m not good enough to be valuable (at work, in my relationship).” or “I’m not as good as others, so I’m less than, inferior, worthless.”
• Perfectionism: “Only if I perform perfectly am I worthwhile.”
• Status or social comparison: “If I’m not better than others, I’m not good enough.”

Demanding Conditional Self-Worth

The demanding theme of conditional or contingent self-worth is “I absolutely must do, receive, and be exactly what I say I absolutely should, and I certainly must not get or do anything that I say I should not get or do, or otherwise I’m a complete failure and entirely worthless.”

According to rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT), demandingness is irrational because of the rigid, absolutist belief that something “must, should, need, have to, or ought to” be a certain way.  It’s a perceived lack of choice. There is a demand instead of a preference or desire for things to be a certain way. The difference is in the effect, or consequence. “If I make a mistake, then it’s the end of the world!” It’s saying that someone has committed an atrocity and must punish themselves through self-blame, condemnation, hatred, or otherwise just giving themselves a hard time because obviously, “I’m a failure, a bad person, worthless, a nobody, unlovable, and fundamentally flawed beyond repair.”

Irrational statements are unrealistic, illogical, nonpragmatic, and rigid propositions that lead to unnecessary emotional and behavioral disturbance. According to REBT, beliefs are irrational if: 1) The belief creates a self-defeating emotion/behavior consequence, a/o 2) If the belief includes a demand (must, should, have to, or need).

Self-Rating Scale

Clients often struggle when asked to rate their self-worth. How do you quantify it? How do you determine or express worthiness in numerical terms? Is your self-worth at 78% today, and if you received a compliment it would go up six points? It’s not a character’s health bar in a video game. However, it seems people are looking for power-up coins to raise their worth like a performance boost.

This exposes the flaw: Self-worth isn’t a measurable quantity as there’s no objective scale for it. People might use a subjective and arbitrary metric, but that highlights another point: It is the individual who is choosing their own criteria by which they judge themselves to rate how worthy they are.

Therefore, why would anyone choose any other criteria than: “I’m alive; therefore, I am worthy of being alive.”? They could simply choose to accept themselves as they are.

People Aren’t One-Dimensional

Human beings are multifaceted, not fixed traits. Competence varies by context, and excelling in one area doesn’t mean a person excels in all. Performance can also fluctuate depending on factors like sleep, stress, health, environment, time of day, or energy levels. Someone’s capability is fluid, and can’t define a person’s worth. The analogies below show how labeling someone based on their action is misleading and inaccurate.

• A data scientist may excel at building predictive models but struggle with public speaking.
• A program manager may coordinate complex projects seamlessly but have difficulty asserting boundaries in personal relationships.
• A software engineer may write elegant code but forget appointments or social commitments.
• A teacher might be inspiring in the classroom but struggle with managing their own stress.
• A data analyst might detect patterns in massive datasets but feel overwhelmed by creative writing or art.
• A business accountant may balance budgets with ease but have trouble speaking up in a meeting.
• An IT support specialist may solve technical problems effortlessly but feel anxious in group conversations.

Conflating Behavior with Identity

Self-rating is like saying, “I have evaluated myself, based on my actions, and rated myself—my entire being, the essence of who I am, my complete-global-self, my very personhood as a bad person, a complete failure, utterly worthless.”

The individual is making a negative evaluation of themselves… based on their behavior…

That is a category error in logic: It conflates a person’s behavior (a specific, context-bound action) with their identity or essence (a global evaluation of the person as a whole). As such, they think that they are inadequate in some way. “I’m only valuable if I succeed.” or “I’m fundamentally flawed.”

You cannot reduce a whole person to a single global label as it ignores the complexity of human behavior and every changing aspects of what it means to be human. It turns a judgment of a single behavior or situation into an arbitrary value judgment, not a rational or logical conclusion.

Worthlessness, Blame, Moralistic Judgment, and Perfection

Blame is the act of judging someone, finding fault, and then condemning them for their actions. When we blame, we are pointing out a behavioral error while also condemning the person for the act, implying, “You should not have done that,” which resists the reality of what already happened.

We are also viewing the individual as the problem: It’s their fault for what they did, they caused the situation. Even if the person changes their behavior, the fusion of identity with behavior can create a sense of helplessness or hopelessness, as if who they are is not ‘good enough’ and they are fundamentally broken.

Blame tends to be associated with worthlessness, taking the form of moralistic judgment. “You’re a bad person because you did something wrong.” The implication being, “You must always do the right thing to be accepted.” It’s perfectionism in moral clothing, rooted in fear of being rejected, shamed, or unlovable unless one behaves flawlessly.

Perfection is like finding a genie on a unicorn at the end of a rainbow… who doesn’t understand English. An interesting idea that doesn’t exist.

Blaming can also be a form of avoidance, as it sidesteps problem-solving by focusing on fault rather than finding solutions or taking constructive action, keeping a person stuck.

The REBT stance is simple: Separate behavior from personhood, and reject the act of blaming ourselves or others. People are not blameworthy; they are not worthless, bad, evil, or sinners. They are fallible humans, prone to mistakes.

Evaluative Thinking

People tend to think that events cause how we think, feel, and behave. Not so. Our evaluative beliefs about events mediate how we think, feel, and behave. What we believe has consequences, because we act on our beliefs. And, where ever you go, you take your beliefs with you. We are each biased when we view a situation. It is how we think—our philosophizing—that determines the consequences we experience, and not the events themselves.

We are the ones who become aware of a situation or event, make an inference about it, evaluate it, form beliefs, and then act based on those beliefs, which may be rooted in an incorrect assessment or assumption. The formula is events and inferences Activate (A) Beliefs (B) and lead to emotional and behavioral Consequences (C). This is the ABC Model. It was created by Albert Ellis, founder of REBT.

So, if your evaluation is inaccurate, and how you feel is based on your own beliefs… would that mean that you are the one disturbing yourself? Here are examples of possible inaccurate assessments.

• You think someone is ignoring you because they haven’t replied, but they’re just busy.
• It seems like everyone is judging you, but most people aren’t even paying attention.
• You assume someone was rude on purpose, but they were distracted or having a rough moment.
• A mistake at work does not automatically mean you’ll get fired unless you were told that.

The ABC Model emphasizes this key insight: It is not the situation itself that disturbs people, but their beliefs about the situation. Ellis found this insight in Stoic philosophy and often attributed it to the famous quote from Epictetus: “People are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them.”

REBT also takes a relativistic philosophical approach that moral standards are not absolute. So, what you think is wrong may not actually be the case. For example…

• Resting your foot on your leg and pointing it at someone is rude in Thailand, but normal in the U.S.
• People usually wave their hand or smile to greet someone. The French go in for a kiss.
• Small talk and pleasantries with strangers and at work may be commonplace in the U.S., and a waste of time in Germany.
• A person who casually crosses an empty street mid-block is just practical to them. Another sees it as jaywalking, breaking the law, and condemns them for it.

A person’s behavior is perceived and interpreted to figure out, ‘what’s going on here?’, and filtered through their own cognitions. The question is, how are you filtering reality, and is it helping or hindering you to achieve your goals?

The ABCs of Worthlessness

The ABC Model from rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT) explains how situations and events Activate (A) a person’s Beliefs (B) which lead to their emotional and behavioral Consequences (C).

People are defining themselves as worthless based on their thinking. This highlights that worthless is a judgment, not a feeling. The phrasing, “I feel worthless” is often used colloquially to describe a combination of emotions felt as a result of the belief. People may feel a range of things, such as being sad, depressed, ashamed, guilt, embarrassment, despair, hopelessness, or self-hatred (self-loathing and self-contempt).

Some more ABCs of Worthlessness

How to Overcome Worthlessness

Albert Ellis says that “no human is damnable and worthless” and suggests people stop rating their self at all, and to evaluate their behaviors instead of their being.

Remedy for worthlessness

• Recognize that self-worth is an arbitrary, axiomatically defined concept with no empirical grounding. It’s made up.
• See your behavior as separate from your identity: Evaluate specific behaviors as effective or ineffective, helpful or unhelpful, but never the whole self.
• Focus on accountability and change rather than condemnation. Blame often obstructs growth and problem-solving by shifting attention away from solutions.
• Abandon global evaluations altogether. Adopt a mindset of unconditional self-acceptance, which means: Accepting oneself without rating the self at all—positively or negatively.
• Acknowledge reality: Humans are fallible creatures. They make mistakes, they’re error-prone, that is a natural part of life. Now say it with me: Humans are fallible, including myself.

“REBT teaches individuals how to accept the existence of suffering and grim circumstances in life and how to change what they can through effort instead of by whining and demandingness.” (1, p. 61)

Unconditional Acceptance

REBT advocates for unconditional acceptance of self, others, and the world. This means recognizing one’s inherent fallibility and accepting oneself without conditions. To acknowledge that it is natural and inevitable that everyone will make mistakes, so not to denigrate or label someone in totality as awful, and instead to learn from mistakes, set preferences, and come to terms with reality—life does not go our way at times. Acceptance is the willingness to affirm what is actually true.

“The rational and healthy alternative to self-damnation is unconditional self-acceptance (USA), which involves refusing to give one’s “self a single rating (because it is an impossible task due to one’s complexity and fluidity and because it normally interferes with attaining one’s basic goals and purposes) and acknowledging one’s fallibility.” (2, p. 7)

REBT has different methods to learn and practice unconditional acceptance. The common one has been covered throughout this article. It is primarily an understanding of how different words are defined (e.g., self-worth, demandingness, irrational), then using a rational analysis of one’s beliefs, and questioning if they are empirical, logical, and pragmatic (i.e., disputing them). There are also other cognitive and emotive REBT techniques that may be prescribed by an REBT therapist; exercises suggested by the client; approaches taken from other therapeutic modalities (such as acceptance and commitment therapy or mindfulness), or practices drawn from other disciplines (such as the Stoic exercise of objective representation).

Practicing Acceptance Through Observing Nature

It is also recommended to spend time observing nature because nature simply is. Nature does not apologize, justify, or explain. Trees don’t demand to be taller. The crooked branch and the silent stone exist without seeking approval. If it is raining and you do not have an umbrella or hood and you’re outside, you’re going to get wet. Observing this can remind us that existence doesn’t require justification, and that we too can allow ourselves, others, and life itself, to simply be, without any harsh judgment or demandingness. Welcome to the human experience.

Written by Shawn, not AI.