If You Don’t Act Like You Deserve it, Nobody Else Will

Note on worthiness…

If you are one of those people who are always available to others, always respond when people need you, accommodate endlessly and keep showing up even for those who rarely show up for you, then this article is for you.

Being a helper, healer, or highly dependable person might well be your destiny, but even so, there comes a time when you will need to understand that nobody’s energy is limitless.

What you consistently give in one direction is energy that cannot be invested elsewhere — in reciprocal relationships, or in yourself.

Few experiences erode self-worth more than chasing approval from people who are unwilling, or unable, to give it. When you cling to people who have stopped caring about your presence, you are engaging in self-rejection; the effects of which will often become widespread.

This article is written as a reminder to you that you are responsible for maintaining your worth and value. Nobody else can define it for you, and no one else can remove it — unless you hand them that authority.

Other people’s stance towards you will ultimately become a reflection of how much you value your own time, energy and presence.

If you give without limits, people will stop appreciating it and instead take it for granted. This is usually not a reflection of other people’s cruelty (although, of course, there are situations when it is), but rather a mirror of how easily you make yourself available even to those who have no problem letting you down.

Reaching a place where your value feels independent of others’ opinions is stabilising and freeing. It is also one of the foundations of genuine self-respect.

People who fail to see your worth are not waiting for you to convert them

You might come to believe that someone who has been unreliable in showing up or has taken you for granted is somehow lacking the knowledge of what valuing you would look like. This can be a comforting thought. ‘If only he/she actually understands my needs better, then he will, of course, make an effort to reflect how much he cares’ said many a hopeful client of mine. Unfortunately, this type of reasoning tends not to be true at all.

Somebody who really places a high value on your presence and who wants to ensure you stick around will typically have a behaviour pattern that supports this!

If you are not sure what that would look like, just know it would typically include timely responses to contact, and mutual interest is shown by shared responsibility for meeting up and making plans. Not all of the efforts start with you, and you are not finding yourself doubting and questioning whether you matter to that person.

In more established relationships, the idea of mutuality extends beyond logistics. It includes emotional reciprocity, a sense that support flows both ways. You are not o the only one doing all the listening, accommodating, or adjusting. Your needs, moods, and experiences matter too.

In a nutshell; When someone really wants you to stay, their behaviour tends to make staying feel natural and not like something you have to work hard to earn!

Worth is intrinsic and not dependent on whether someone else approves of you

Our worth as humans is intrinsic. This means it rests within us and is not dependent on whether other people agree, rate us highly or approve of us.

An extremely common trigger to self-abandonment happens when someone who has previously cherished your presence gradually starts taking it for granted or rejects it.

This can be one of the most confusing scenarios, but it is still one that requires swift handling to avoid further leaking of energy into relationships where you will no longer be able to be emotionally nourished.

It is at this point that a lot of people’s behaviour takes a strange turn. Instead of catching on and redirecting their energy, they make it their business to continue to hand out VIP treatment as though the job now is to ‘win back’ the attention and approval of the person who lost interest.

Doing so can end up having a profoundly negative impact on a person’s self-worth and create negative spirals of self-doubt, overthinking and obsessing.

For those with pre-existing low self-worth, this can create a self-fulfilling cycle where over-giving leads to a diminished sense of value, which fuels further over-giving, self-abandonment, and emotional exhaustion.

Before looking at how to break this vicious loop, we will do a little deep dive into the symptoms and origins of low self-worth, as this can help you better understand cause and effect.

Symptoms of low self-worth

As mentioned, low self-worth does not always show up in the way we may think. Far from everybody who struggles will come across as meek and underconfident. Yet when you look more closely at a person’s behaviour patterns, you will often be able to detect some trends.

Some of these are:

• Staying in relationships where respect and effort are inconsistent
• Overworking and trying too hard just to feel ‘enough’
• Trying too hard to control and fix situations
• Oversharing to increase the sense of connection
• overapologising
• shrinking and editing yourself
• overexplaining and justifying choices
• sticking around for crumbs even if it disappoints and hurts you

Low self-worth often has early roots

For many people, love became conditional early on in life. In some situations, there has been outright destructive parenting where love and validation of any kind was inconsistent or absent.

In other situation there are far more subtle (and more understandable) circumstances that, for one reason or another, resulted in needs going unmet and feelings not being validated.

In many families where parents are emotionally immature, the response to children’s distress often becomes filtered through the parents’ own needs, moods, and limitations rather than the child’s emotional reality.

As a result, the child grows up feeling unseen or emotionally alone. These children may internalise the belief that their needs are excessive, inconvenient, or unimportant. Over time, this can lead to chronic self-doubt and a tendency to measure worth by how well they adapt to others.

Children grown up trying desperately to be approved by their parents learn to prioritise connection over authenticity.

They become highly attuned to others but disconnected from themselves. In adulthood, this often shows up as people-pleasing, over-functioning in relationships, and feeling responsible for others’ emotions — all rooted in a fragile or externally dependent sense of worth.

Outsourced worth has a negative ripple effect

When worth depends on other people’s approval, there are a number of knock-on effects. All of which in turn tends to lead to a negative feedback loop keeping individuals locked in a system where further rejection (and self-rejection!) will ensue.

Problematic behaviour patterns often involve weak boundaries, constant comparison or chasing of approval.

When fear of rejection and disapproval are ever-present, behaviours of people pleasing and attempts to negotiate one’s value often become second nature.

A Behaviourist perspective: Why the cycle persists and how to change it

As someone who is trained in behavioural therapies, I almost cannot resist my compulsion to break this all down into behaviourist principles:

Much of low self-worth and self-abandonment can be understood not only as emotional experiences but also as a pattern of behaviours that provide short-term relief but carry long-term costs.

Old behaviours:

• People-pleasing
• Seeking approval or validation
• Over-extending yourself

Short-term ‘pay-offs’:

• False sense of control
• Temporary reassurance or hope
• Avoidance of painful reality

Long-term consequences:

• Warped sense of self-worth
• Reinforced over-giving
• Low self-esteem becomes ‘evidenced’ by repeated patterns

Let’s now look at what will happen if you decide to change your behaviour. The previous short-term positives and long-term negatives will now trade places.

New behaviours:

• Setting limits and boundaries. Getting clear on the basic requirements of a relationship worth hanging on to.
• Focusing on balance and reciprocity in relationships
• Prioritising self-care without guilt

Short-term ‘negatives’:

• Anxiety about feeling selfish
• Fear of disapproval, particularly from those who previously benefited from your lack of boundaries
• deep discomfort about valuing oneself and feeling strange, and an increased sense of unworthiness if other people don’t react to your withdrawal in the way you had hoped

Long-term benefits:

• Increased self-empowerment
• Greater ease in setting and maintaining boundaries
• Healthier, more reciprocal relationships
• Strengthened intrinsic self-worth

In other words, behaviour that once seemed ‘necessary’ to keep people happy is replaced with behaviour that supports you. The initial discomfort is part of the unlearning process, but over time, your actions will reinforce your intrinsic value rather than undermining it.

Make an active choice to value yourself irrespective of other people’s opinions

Take stock of all relationships in your life that are ‘infected’ by your old way of relating and do recognise that sometimes there will be a degree of ‘pruning’ needed. (a great term borrowed from the book ‘Necessary Endings’ by Dr Henry Cloud)

“Being alive requires that we sometimes kill off things in which we were once invested, uproot what we previously nurtured, and tear down what we built for an earlier time”

Henry Cloud, ‘Necessary endings’

When I support clients through this phase, the most common fear is that nobody will show up at all — that everyone will reveal themselves as indifferent, and it will finally feel clear that nobody truly cared.

The unfortunate truth is that this is often when those who genuinely needed and valued you separate from those who merely wanted your presence without truly cherishing it.

Final words of encouragement:

“People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime”

quote by Brian A. Chalke

One of the common obstacles to fulfilling the steps described in this article is the felt need to avoid a reality in which you discover that you were making too much of the effort.

Naturally, pulling back in situations will feel rough. You are essentially going to need to face yourself, and this is a step that, intuitively, many people would rather avoid.

While the mind hoped that people would catapult out of their stagnation and start making efforts, the sad norm is that often very little happens.

Those who did not try before will likely not start trying. Things become eerily quiet. This is where your work of healing happens.

Remember, you are not losing out if the person you are losing by putting yourself first did not have your best interest at heart and/or had no interest in demonstrating to you that you matter.

So even if it is painful right now, this is the space and quiet you need to sit with for a moment. When you can see it (and feel it) for what it is, things will become clearer as your internal source of power comes to life.

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