We return, to pick up on the path we didn’t take last time, though it is the community theme of the month!
Reminder, we’re doing a Worth Challenge in the Discord Community. Each week, setting a boundary with ourselves or others to confront our assumptions about what we’re allowed to do and start modifying the habitual patterns spawned from those beliefs.
We talk about our trials and observations on Wednesdays. Come join.
Today, let’s talk about worthlessness.
And I’ll be honest… if you’re like me, you’d think there would be a ton of research linking emotional abuse and neglect to low-self-worth……… there is not.
So we’ll be covering three research papers today, sewing together a story from what I could find. How do we end up with negative beliefs about our value? What type of trauma, from whom, imparts it most strongly? And what can we do about it?
I want to remind everyone that we’re approaching “worth-less-ness” very literally. As in, believing we are “worth-less” than others. This connects with feeling useless, feeling overburdened by responsibility because we must be, and accepting subpar treatment from others in all areas of life.
Worthlessness beliefs are sneaky, perhaps subconscious, and might need to be spotted through observing our historical actions and reactions, acceptance of low-quality environments, and magical ability to adapt to situations that suck butt… rather than exploring explicit thoughts.
You know the deal – this is the summary version of the pod. For the deep details, hit up that extended nerd edition.
This is the geekaroo edition of the episode. For the main-concept-only report, check out the bite sized summary.
Now lets get into it.
First up.
The Prospective Contribution of Childhood Maltreatment to Low Self-Worth, Low Relationship Quality, and Symptomatology Across Adolescence: A Developmental-Organizational Perspective
Megan Flynn 1, Dante Cicchetti 2, Fred Rogosch 3
Developmental Psychology
2014
And we begin by talking about childhood maltreatment, a title that encompasses abuse as well as neglect. Abuse can fall into our usual domains of emotional, physical, and/or sexual mistreatment. Neglect can be physical – not tending to a child’s basic biological needs – or emotional – not acknowledging or providing support for their responses to the world. Both suggest to the child’s brain “you don’t matter. You aren’t worth protecting, caring for, listening to, treating kindly.”
This thought, over time and repeated confirmation, becomes a belief – a foundational understanding which all subsequent thought and behavior build off. Also known in the literature as a negative schema. The child might learn that they are worth-less – a negative self-schema. And also that they should anticipate corresponding treatment from others; cruelty, dismissal, betrayal; these are negative other-schemas.
These schema, together, can explain attachment patterns. If we anticipate negative treatment from others, we become anxious or avoidant about relationships. When we enter our first peer relationships with these beliefs already at the helm, we end up recreating the family dynamics that instilled the schema in the first place. We seek people who fit our working model of the world in which we are deplorable or lesser-than. Then we repeat the pattern again and again.
In this way, the family environment becomes reflected in the broader social environment. This causes low self-worth to become a permanent fixture, rather than something we grow out of.
And, it also corresponds with depression and addiction. Childhood maltreatment is correlated with inaccurate internalizing and externalizing behaviors used for self protection. In other words, to reduce cognitive dissonance and create a cohesive story about the world, we can either accept WE are terrible (everything is our fault; internalizing the treatment) or that the WORLD is terrible (nothing is our fault; externalizing the treatment). When we internalize, we often become depressed, since “we are the problem”. When we externalize, we often turn to drugs and other avoidance behaviors, since “no matter what we do, the world fucks us, why bother trying to regulate ourselves?”
Per these authors’ estimations, then, childhood maltreatment should correspond with low self-worth, poor relationships in and out of the family, and internalizing/externalizing inaccuracies.
What did they find?
Well, those things appear to be true. And they appear to be stable over time. The childhood environment creates a mindset that corrupts later attempts at relationship, puts the individual at higher risk of depression and anxiety, and disrupts the ability to emotionally self-regulate. If we believe we are worth dirt as the basis for the rest of our thoughts, we have a hard time re-evaluating situations and bringing ourselves back to a neutral or positive emotional state.
They’re findings we might expect, logically. With one interesting detail to mention.
Specifically, it’s low-quality maternal relationships that seem to impart low self-worth and heighten internalizing behaviors. The authors suggest these result from those negative self-beliefs we spoke of, and also that daily maltreatment interactions, themselves, increase negative self-valuations and internalizing responses. So we’re affected by our alrady-established beliefs and also directly by mothers’ ongoing behaviors, increasing hostility, which can be internalized or externalized. Corresponding with mental health challenges and emotional coping behaviors that can snowball into adolescent delinquency, drug use, and escapist relationships.
And that’s paper one for ya. Next up:
The Relationship Between Negative Self-Concept, Trauma, and Maltreatment in Children and Adolescents: A Meta-Analysis
Daniela M Melamed
1, Jessica Botting
1, Katie Lofthouse
1, Laura Pass
1, Richard Meiser-Stedman
1,
Clinical Child and Family Psychological Review
2024
And we begin by discussing self-concept; the cumulative thoughts, beliefs, and observations of oneself. Our identity, our image, our understanding of who we are in relation to the world and everyone in it. Self-concept might sound like no big deal or something we can “fake our way through,” but it’s deeply rooted in our subconscious psychology. We can’t simply override or replace it. In fact, it’s correlated with a large variety of psychopathologies. With negative self-schema, as we discussed already, we have limited ability to help ourselves when life is also negative. When we can’t correct our thoughts or change our emotions, we end up with mental illness and poor life outcomes. It should come as no surprise, then, that one of the three criteria for CPTSD is poor self-concept.
The ICD-11 more specifically refers to this concept as beliefs about oneself as being worthless or diminished with accompanying feelings of guilt or shame (WHO, 2018).
As such, these authors set out to review prior studies connecting childhood trauma, maltreatment, and self-concept in the attempt to understand how large the effects of childhood events are and what factors are responsible, specifically, for creating the pipeline between traumas and feelings of worthlessness.
And their review found?
Traumas correspond with poorer self-concept. Specificlly, this relationship is boosted by factors of 1) trauma consistency, or number of traumatic exposures, and 2) the type of trauma exposure, with sexual trauma having the greatest negative impact. This fits with prior findings that sexual trauma generally correlates with more negative outcomes in life. Perhaps with negative self-concept from the abuse, as the driving cause.
It also fits with the general finding that women exposed to trauma have poorer life outcomes compared to males. Female children report more sexual abuse; female adults report more negative life qualities. One might, then, believe that females may, in general, suffer from greater sense of worthlessness which mediates the relationship between the two points. However, this wasn’t supported by the current review. What WAS supported is the ubiquitous nature of this relationship; across gender, country, and economic quality of that country, the connection between childhood maltreatment and poor self-worth appears stable.
And that’s paper two. Bringing us to the paper we’ll spend the most time with today:
Family Environment and Self-Esteem Development: A Longitudinal Study from Age 10 to 16
Samantha Krauss 1, Ulrich Orth 1, Richard W Robins
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
2019
And here, in a slight deviation from last time where we spoke about self-concept, we start by discussing self-esteem.
Research suggests strong self-esteem correlates with positive experiences in social life, career, bodily functioning, and mental wellness. One might say “lifetime satisfaction or destruction depends on esteem.” Within self-esteem is self-image. And we don’t know how positive image or esteem is developed. Why do some of us regard ourselves positively, and others, as if we are the scourge of the earth? Like worms, or the dirt where they wriggle? Why do some of us think we are “worth-less”?
We know, family environment is strongly implicated. And unfortunately, as we spoke about earlier, we don’t outgrow the family home just because we fly the nest. Research tells us that the greatest influence on self-esteem is the quality of the home, which encapsulates the quality of parenting, parental depression, paternal inclusion, and financial state – all of which impact self-esteem from childhood into adulthood.
Therefore, these authors ran a longitudinal study across six years to examine qualities of the childhood home that reportedly affected esteem all the way through adolescence.
And they began by looking at:
Parenting Behavior and Children’s Self-Esteem
The prevailing theory of self development states that social interactions create our self-image. The way we are treated informs us of our value; our worth. Starting from 0 understanding of self, we first interact with our parents and family members, laying down the cement that becomes the foundation of our self-valuation. If we are interacted with and responded to in an easeful, appropriate, predictable, manner, this contributes to positive self-schema (self-beliefs) as well as secure attachment. We cannot separate self-esteem from attachment; understanding of self informs expectations of others.
For these reasons, the present study looked at parenting behaviors and qualities of the home environment as influences of esteem. Those behaviors and qualities were:
Parental warmth, parental hostility, parental monitoring, and parental involvement in the child’s education. Family values, maternal and paternal depression, economic hardship, and paternal presence.
And in the long nerd version of this show, we run through a description of each, along with the rationale behind its examination. Which we will do NOW, if you’re streaming it:
One more interesting point they assessed? The vice-versa effect of child’s self-esteem on these family qualities. Research tells us that family dynamics are affected by all players in the system, so the authors also examined how the child’s self-understanding could affect family characteristics over time.
And they found?
DISCUSSION
Positive influences on child self-esteem included parental warmth, monitoring, and paternal presence. Negative influences included economic disparity and maternal depression. Strong child self-esteem positively influenced family values. And low economic status had a negative effect… that seemed to be mediated by confounding factors of low parental warmth and monitoring.
Let’s talk about each one in greater detail. For the greatest detail, get into that long-form ep.
In contrast to expectation, parental monitoring had a direct correlation with high child esteem, suggesting that even strongly surveilled children have better self-regard than those who are attentionally neglected. However, as they say, “monitoring needs to be clearly distinguished from control” – monitoring suggests that the parent is purely interested in the child, rather than interfering or reducing their autonomy.
Surprisingly, parental hostility and involvement in education did not have significant effects on the child’s esteem. That said, the correlation that was detected did move in the expected direction; which is to say, parental hostility reduced esteem and educational involvement improved it. Perhaps just not significantly – which may be an artifact of the study’s limitations. There were not many reported incidences of hostility, especially compared to parental warmth, which may skewing the research findings.
Economic hardship negatively predicted child self-esteem, partially through corresponding parental behaviors. A stressed parent is not necessarily an attentive or warm parent, and authors suggest that low finances contribute to low esteem through degrading the parent-child relationship. Additionally, financial differences from peers may be an isolative factor that further damages self-esteem outside the home.
On the subject of parental warmth, the authors had more interesting things to say than you might expect. Of course, a coddled child is generally assumed to be a self-loving or even self-entitled child; as expected, high self-esteem was correlated with higher parental warmth. But the relationship seems to be more complicated than that due to the bidirectional nature of relationship dynamics. They say a child with high self-esteem is more likely to elicit and receive parental warmth. But a child with low self-esteem is likely to eventually spawn parental warmth when their challenges spawn compassion and care. So a parent who is warmly responsive can positively affect a child with low-esteem, even if their own prior hostility partially created the negative self-regard.
Now let’s talk about gendered differences.
Originally, we stated that paternal presence predicted higher esteem. However, the authors note that this effect disappears during mediation analysis, resulting in a nonsignificant effect. So, in fact, paternal presence is NOT implicated as a strong factor in child esteem development; a controversial finding and one I would love to hear anecdotal evidence for or against. As a person with an absentee father…. I’m not sure I agree. What about you?
And in the case of the mother, depression was found to be a negatively impactful factor. But corresponding parental qualities (hostility, lack of monitoring) were not found to cause the effect. Instead, the authors suggest that an uncomfortable home environment might negatively impact child socializing or the mother’s depression, itself, might suggest to the child that they are not worthful. If they were, surely, mom would feel better. One might also think that genetics are to blame – and yet if this was the case, paternal depression should also correspond with low child esteem. Combined with our first study, it appears that the mother’s emotional and mental health, specifically, are tantamount to the child’s positive self-image and sense of worth. Dads in their stereotypical role? Maybe not so much. Something to get your wheels spinning if you suffer from low self-worth.
And lastly, on the backwards subject of child esteem affecting the family environment… they found that it influenced only one factor; family values. This is probably because a happy and healthy child suggests positive things about the parents and home, which improves THEIR esteem and commitment to the household.
So? In this study’s:
CONCLUSION
Parental warmth, monitoring, and maternal mental wellness are highly implicated in positive child self-esteem. But being overly warm – inaccurately complimentary, for example – may actually diminish esteem. Monitoring with an iron fist may become controlling and abusive. And maternal wellness can’t come at the expense of child autonomy or social exploring.
What is clear? Attention and affection matter. Especially from the primary parent. And in a cruel joke from the psychological universe, a child’s esteem has effect on both the parenting behaviors they will receive, as well as the quality of the family environment. So that a spiral of doom might be created, should an ailing mother with economic hardship influence a low-esteem child, which then further depresses and stresses the mother, perhaps past the point of being able to engage in warm parenting behaviors. Another point to perhaps reflect on.
And in one last surprise, we touch on this paper for our close:
The roles of shame and poor self-concept in explaining low social connection among adult survivors of childhood emotional maltreatment
William P Archuleta 1, Patricia L Kaminski 1, Nicholas D Ross 2
Psychological Trauma
2024
From which I’ve pulled their greatest finding:
Emotional maltreatment (abuse, neglect) often leads to social disconnection. The child assesses themselves as “incorrect” based on their parental experiences, which then increases chronic shame, which then reduces their likelihood of forming other relationships. This then reduces chances for corrective experiences to take place, allowing their low-self-esteem or high sense of unworthiness to persist or even deepen. This explains concisely how emotional unhealth at home creates an avalanche of self-diminishment that persists across a dissatisfying and unsafe feeling lifetime of assessing oneself worth-less than others.
I hope this discussion of worthlessness has helped you think about the mirage you may have been living through since childhood, and the personal factors that may have made it appear very real. I hope you find healing on the other side of acknowledging the hurt.
Come hang out in the discord community if you’re ready to take on the July Worth Challenge (actually running through the beginning of August – you got time!). And I’ll talk to you soon.