How Kristin Found Freedom From Unworthiness

For almost 30 years, I believed a painful lie. 

This lie poisoned my relationships, my confidence, and my career. While I can see it as a lie now, for most of my life it looked like the Truth. 

I first encountered this lie at a pool party in fifth grade.

My Painful Lie

I can’t breathe. I try to come up for air, but the tangle of arms and legs blocks my way. As I shove my way upward, they lash back out at me, kicking and pushing me down. I tumble around in the deep end of the pool like a tennis ball in a washing machine. I’m only underwater for seconds but it feels like hours. What if this kills me? Panic floods my system. Finally, I break the surface, sputtering and coughing. 

I swim over to the edge of the pool and drag myself out. The game of watermelon football continues, but I’m done playing. My classmates push the watermelon in opposing directions. Laughter fills the air as tears fill my eyes. I stomp out of the fenced in pool area to the sidewalk that encircles it. Feeling vulnerable and scared, I pace back and forth outside the entrance. A wet trail on the cement reveals my path. Tears mix with chlorine water. 

As I pace, another boy exits the party. He’s upset too. I don’t know why. Perhaps he was pressed underwater in the jostle of the game. Maybe he had a disagreement with another classmate. Either way, we pace in our own areas, upset together, but in our own worlds of turmoil. 

A gaggle of popular girls appear in the entrance to the pool. They call out to him. When he doesn’t come, they walk over to him. He’s resistant, but they plead and pull. They convince him to come back to the party. He follows them in.

Now I’m alone. No one is coming to get me. My crying turns into sobbing. No one is coming. I’m unwanted. 

I dry out and come back to the party. I stop crying, but I’m grumpy and hurt. Little did I know, this event would impact my life for years to come. On that day I came to a conclusion. A lie settled itself into a belief. I believed no one wanted me.

When I lived from this idea, I had to prove to myself that I was wanted. This lie created friction in my relationships and career. I sought validation from others. When I came from the need to be wanted, it pushed others away. Their reaction to my neediness seemed to validate the idea that I was unwanted. This dynamic set the stage for my own anguish and deep heartache. I cycled between defensiveness and selfish attempts at connection, all because of an unquestioned lie.

When I became a coach, I discovered that I’m not the only one who believes a painful lie. They take hold of my clients too. 

One of my clients, Kristin, sits across from me. As we explore her self worth through a coaching conversation, I ask her this question: 

Kristin’s Painful Lie

“Is it completely and essentially True that you’re not good enough?”

“Yes.”

Oof. I wasn’t expecting her to say yes. It throws me off. I sensed through our conversation that a part of her believed she wasn’t good enough. I hoped a direct question would help her to see it wasn’t completely true. Her answer came without hesitation. The lie goes deeper than I thought.

While I sip on blood orange tea, I contemplate her response. I can see her belief as a lie, but she can’t, at least not yet. 

I realize that her ability to tell the Truth is compromised. If I tried to convince her that she was good enough, I would waste words. She doesn’t have the ability to hear it. Her deeper, erroneous belief would reject my attempts. She would want to believe it, but it wouldn’t stick. We need a bigger conversation now. If we could hone her ability to find Essential Truth, her unworthiness would vanish. 

I know this is possible because it happened to me. After 30 years of believing I was unwanted, I tuned into to my lie. I felt the pain of it. Then, I felt the pain without the story, without my conclusion. I questioned its validity. If I found my own freedom in a deeper Truth, she could too.

I can sense the pain of a lie in her. It hurts for her to hold on to her unworthiness, just like it hurts to squeeze the blade of a knife. She thinks the pain validates the unworthiness. If she listens deeper, the pain reveals it as a lie. Near the end of the session, I share what helped me find my Truth:

“The Truth can’t be painful,” I say. “It may be disorienting and uncomfortable, but it won’t hurt.”

Kristin seemed to hear what I said. She started to see her belief on a deeper level. An intellectual understanding wouldn’t do anything for her. If she saw it as a nice idea, it would never budge the lie. If she understood my words at an experiential level, this single idea would change her life.

We ended there.

For our next coaching session, we connect over Zoom. 

The idea that the Truth can’t be painful seems to have sunk in. I can sense her inner world rearranging. Her relationship to her past shifts and shakes like tectonic plates. I listen as she attempts to describe the impact of what she heard. She has difficulty finding the words, but she can feel the power of it. She tries to share that feeling. 

It feels like relief after 60 years of pain. It feels like soulful recognition. It feels like newfound freedom.

I want to add to her understanding. If she can tell the difference between conceptual truth and Essential Truth, she might shake this lie for good. 

Conceptual Truth Vs. Essential Truth

“Conceptual truth is the idea of truth. Essential Truth is the Truth itself,” I say. 

“Imagine a tree in your mind. Then compare that image to standing at the base of the General Sherman Tree, the biggest tree in the world. The difference is massive.”

“Conceptual truth and Essential Truth are completely different beasts. It’s like the difference between the idea of a tiger and a live tiger right in front of you. Like the real tiger, Truth is alive. Conceptual truth is a representational tool. Useful, but not the real thing,” I say. 

“For thousands of years, philosophers attempted to use conceptual truth to find Truth. They can’t ever quite get there. No one can completely encapsulate anything with concepts and ideas. It’s the wrong tool for the job. Essential truth is experiential. You can meditate on the image of a tree all day, but until you go outside and place your hand on the bark, you don’t really touch it.”

“I want to help you get in touch with Truth, the truth of who you are.”

With her permission, I recorded our conversation. You can watch it at the end of this post. 

I want to help Kristen recalibrate her Truth Compass. A few days later, I wrote her a letter: 

The Letter

Dear Kristin,

I wish you knew how powerful you are. You hide an inner strength behind a mask of lies. You don’t mean to. We all lie to ourselves in some way. Only they don’t look like lies. They look like certainties, engrained within our being. 

Your mind likes the feeling of certainty. It wants the events of your life to make sense. In fact, it prefers that life makes sense over your happiness. 

It drew so many conclusions about you. While they might make sense, they are not inherently True to who you are. I know this because you weren’t born with them. You came to them later. They are an addition, like a barnacle on the hull of a ship. They latched on to you like a sucker fish on a whale shark. 

If you can see through the lies you tell yourself, you will find freedom of being. You already know that Truth can’t hurt.

Here are eight more ways to tell the lies of your ego apart from your Essential Truth:

You can’t find Essential Truth with the intellect

The analytical mind is a great tool, but not for navigating to essential Truth. Your intellectual mind will try to convince you it can help. It loves having a job, but finding Truth with the intellect is like using the minute hand of a clock as a compass. It contradicts itself constantly. You aren’t good enough. You are good enough. You’re only good enough if this person likes you. The intellect creates a subjective reality. It doesn’t understand essential truth because it isn’t designed to. Don’t look to it for guidance. 

Truth has a feeling

You can feel your way to truth. It’s like the feeling burlap and then finely woven silk. Lies feel rough and jagged. Truth is smooth. Where lies are loud and obnoxious, the truth is quiet, hidden within an inner presence. It speaks softly, but it carries a big stick. The movement of Truth has a great depth of power. Instead of sounding dissonant, like the cacophony of a lie, truth rings like a tuning fork. If you attune to its frequency, the Truth cuts through anything. Otherwise, you’re lost in noise. 

Your heart knows

A part of you rejects the lies you tell yourself. This is why they are so painful. Your heart can tell Truth from fiction. The body throws up when you ingest poison. When I had knee surgery in my twenties, my bone rejected two of the screws. It broke them in half and started to push them out. If I didn’t allow a doctor to remove them, I would suffer. If we don’t listen to our heart, it’s like we tighten the screws back in. Allow your heart to reject your lies. 

Don’t resist the lie

It’s not your job to reject your lies. That would be an overwhelming responsibility, and it wouldn’t work. When you resist them, it gives the lies power. A deeper mind knows how to deal with lies: it knows that they don’t need to be dealt with at all. What isn’t True doesn’t need to be denied. Meet each lie like an innocent fib a child tells. You wouldn’t argue with a child, so don’t argue with yourself. 

Truth doesn’t change

Thoughts in our mind morph and dissipate. Emotions flow in and out of our bodies. Beliefs come and go. Truth doesn’t change. When we filter out what changes, we can distill down to Truth. Lies may cover the Truth up temporarily, but Truth never waivers. It’s our bridge to experiencing life. Like a popsicle stick, the Truth allows you to hold on to reality. When everything else melts away, Truth is what’s left. 

Truth lives now

The lies you tell yourself can only survive in the past or in the future. They die in the moment, where Essential Truth lives. Like a fire dwindles out without oxygen, lies fade away in the present moment. Conceptual time is their source of fuel. Deny them the future and past to snuff them out. Then, meet your Truth in this moment right now. It’s like rediscovering a long lost friend. The Truth was always there, waiting for you. Like searching for the glasses on your head, Truth is with you. You were just looking in the wrong place. 

Truth is Universal

Essential Truth has no exclusions, exemptions, or outliers. It applies in equal measure in all situations. It can’t be True that everyone else is worthy and you aren’t. Your mind might try to convince you that you are a lone exception. Check that against the universality of essential truth. Truth is impersonal. If it only applies to you or you are the only exception, that’s your clue that you’re holding on to a lie. 

Kristin, I hope these guideposts help you discover your Truth. We innocently create conclusions about the stuff of life. Where there is a painful story, the ego mind will come in to make sense of it. The conclusion most people come to: there’s something wrong with me. These erroneous conclusions create insecurity and suffering. 

We can wrap our entire personality around a lie. I did. To truly see a lie is freeing and frightening at the same time. We attach to a painful self concept because it grounds us. Something to hold on to is better than nothing. But what we hold on to burns. The pain invites us to let go. Essential truth scares the ego. In the movie A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise’s character demands, “I want the truth!” to which Jack Nicholson’s character bellows, “You can’t handle the truth!” Your ego thinks you can’t handle the Truth. It would rather seek safety in the comfort of concepts. Don’t believe it’s certainty. Can you handle the Truth?

Find out. Question the conclusions your mind comes to now and in the past. Tell yourself the story but leave off the moral at the end. You have the ability align your mind with essential Truth. Explore this possibility in yourself. Feel your way to the Truth of who you really are. 

Kristin’s Freedom

By the time I wrote this letter and gave it to Kristen, she felt like she didn’t need it. She said so much has changed already. An internal revolution had taken place. Now, she lives with a newfound sense of freedom. She can see through the thoughts that tell her she’s not good enough.

Living with this freedom is a possibility for you too. It doesn’t matter how long you held onto a painful lie. You can let go now. You can find Truth now. Like Kristin, you can create your own internal revolution.

Calibrate your Truth compass. Read these words as a reminder of who you are. Activate them in your being. Seek for Truth and then take a stand for it in your life. 

You might get lost along the way. It might feel like you can’t navigate your way through the tangle of lies. 

If you get lost in the woods, common wisdom suggests you hug a tree. Search and rescue will have a harder time finding you if you’re on the move. This applies to your inner world too. If you find yourself in a storm of thinking, stick to the Truth. Hug the tree of Truth in your mind and wait. You will soon be found. Your essential being is seeking for you. All you have to do is be still.

I want Kristin and everyone reading this to know there’s more on the table. The lies we tell ourselves are invisible until we bring awareness to them. The more lies we release, the more subtle they become. Peer underneath the surface of your actions. Look for the lies in our cultural conditioning. There is always more to uncover because Truth is infinite. More levels of joy, peace, and connection are available. 

There is no end to the depth of Truth we can experience.

Below our recorded conversation:

Author’s note: I take liberties with quotations from coaching conversations and webinars. These are not verbatim. I edit and clarify my words in the writing process. I receive permission from my clients to share ideas from our coaching sessions. A huge thank you to my clients for opening themselves up to me and to you. Coaching and transformation is an act of co-creation, and I couldn’t do it without you. These are more your insights than mine. I appreciate you for sharing this space with me. Thank you.

For less mental tension and a richer experience of life, explore more articles. If you want freedom from your lies, let me reach out to you. Don’t miss a post!  Sign up for my mailing list and get Insights in your Inbox.