You Don’t Have to Be Useful to Be Loved : When Helping Gets Tied to Your Worth

Hello and welcome back to Magic in the Muck, a soul's compass for change. I'm Jennifer Nagel, and I'm so glad that you're here today. So I've been thinking about something since my conversation with Robin Vogel last episode. We talked a lot in that conversation about receiving, and about how sometimes it's actually much easier for us to give than it is to receive. At one point, Robin had talked about overgiving as a protective pattern that sometimes we can actually block receiving by being so busy giving to everyone else. I've been thinking about that ever since, because then our conversation went somewhere else that really interested me. We started talking about the roles we have in our lives. Robin talked about being a facilitator and a therapist and a mother, and how she had begun to recognize that sometimes she could actually hide behind those roles. I totally resonated with that, and I remember saying something about bringing our being into our role. That's something that I talk about a lot in my teaching, especially with therapists. Who am I when I'm sitting with another person? Am I performing therapist, or am I bringing myself, my humanness, my presence into the role of being a therapist? But since that conversation, I found myself wondering about something even deeper. Who am I when I'm not in the role at all? Who am I when I'm not helping or teaching or taking care of somebody, when I'm not accomplishing something or figuring something out, who am I when I'm not being useful? And I notice something even as I ask that question because I like being useful. I like helping. I love teaching. I love being a therapist, and I love being a mother, navigating the challenges of all of these roles. And I like contributing. I like knowing that something I've said or done has made a difference for somebody. And I don't think there's anything wrong with any of that. Actually, I do think a lot of the qualities that allow us to be useful are

being perceptive and intuitive, being capable, being able to read a situation and respond to it, the caring we have for other people, being someone that others depend on, I don't want to get rid of those parts of myself. What I'm interested in is something much more subtle. What's the difference between enjoying being useful and needing to be useful in order to know that I have value, because I think that those two things can get tangled together without us even realizing it. We don't wake up one morning and decide, okay, from now on, my worth is going to be depend on how much I do for everybody else. It happens much more quietly and subtly than that. Maybe we learned very early that being helpful got a particular response. You got praised or appreciated, or that being capable meant people didn't have to worry about us. Maybe we became really good at sensing what was happening around us and responding to it, and maybe somewhere in all of that, we started to experience ourselves as the dependable one, or the strong one, or the one who could handle things. And those aren't necessarily stories that somebody explicitly told us. Sometimes there are simply conclusions that we made about how to be in the world. This is where I think going underneath the behavior becomes really important, because it's easy to look at ourselves and think, "I need to stop doing so much. I need better boundaries, or I need to stop over functioning, maybe. But I'm much more interested in asking, what is all of that doing doing for me? What is all that doing doing for me? That is a different question. If we use the iceberg metaphor as a way of looking at this, the doing is what we can see above the surface, but beneath it, there's this whole internal world. There's this whole internal experience going on. I have my body responding to all the doing or not doing, and what's happening in. Side for me. There's feelings and emotions about that, beliefs.

Maybe I believe that a good mother takes care of everybody, or maybe I expect myself to be able to handle things without needing very much from anyone else, or maybe I perceive that if I don't step in, something isn't going to happen, or it's not going to happen in the way that I think it needs to, or the way I expect it to. When we go deeper underneath these beliefs and expectations and feelings, often we come to something profoundly human. We want to matter, we want to belong, and we want to be loved. We want to know that we have value. There's nothing problematic about these yearnings. They're part of being human. What gets interesting is when we start to believe somewhere inside that we have to do something to earn them. That I matter because of what I contribute, or that I belong because I'm helpful. That I'm lovable because I'm taking care of everybody. That's where I come back to Robin's comment about overgiving. Because if I'm always giving, I get to stay in the position of the giver, and there's actually quite a bit of safety there. If I'm helping you, I don't necessarily have to show you what I need. If I'm holding space for you, I don't have to find out what happens if I take up more space to myself. If I'm the capable one, I don't have to risk letting you see me when I'm uncertain or tired, or I don't know what to do, and maybe I don't have to find out whether you'll still be there for me when I don't have something to offer you. That's where receiving becomes much more than accepting a compliment or letting somebody buy you dinner. Receiving can be incredibly vulnerable because somewhere underneath receiving is the possibility of allowing myself to be met without first making myself useful. I think that's the question that's really stayed with me. Can I allow myself to be loved when I'm not doing anything to earn the love? Even saying that out loud feels different, and I think this is where our roles can become

interesting too. I have a lot of roles in my life. I'm a therapist. I'm a teacher. I'm a mother, a wife, a friend, a daughter, a sister. I'm a leader in some of the organizations that I'm part of. All of those roles matter to me. They're part of my life, but they're not actually who I am, and I think there's something really important about that distinction. When I talk about congruence, I'm not talking about becoming this perfectly authentic person who behaves exactly the same way everywhere. Of course, I don't show up exactly the same way with a client, as I do sitting at the kitchen table with my family, the role changes, but the self who enters the role doesn't have to disappear. In fact, I don't. I don't disappear when I'm in my roles. That's what I mean by bringing our being into our role. I don't become therapist Jennifer and leave Jennifer somewhere outside the room. I bring my presence, my wisdom, my compassion, my life experience, my limitations, and my humanity. I bring me into the role, and maybe the really important shift is recognizing that the role doesn't give me my worth. I bring my worth into the role. I bring my worth into the role. Then, when I look at it that way, I can also step out of the role and still be me. I want to invite you to notice something for a moment. Think about a place in your life where you're very accustomed to being needed. Don't overthink it, and just notice what comes to mind. Notice what it's like to imagine that just for a moment in this role, that nobody needs anything from you. There, there's nothing you need to fix. There's no answer you need to come up with. You don't need to make anything better. You don't even need to be protected. Particularly productive. As you imagine that, just notice what happens inside you. Maybe there's some relief, or maybe it's surprisingly uncomfortable. You might notice an urge to do something. You might even wonder, well, if I'm not doing anything, then what is my purpose

here? Whatever you're noticing is okay.

Rather than trying to figure it out, maybe just come into your body for a moment and just feel whatever is supporting you right now. Noticing your breath, noticing that underneath everything you do, underneath every role you inhabit, and underneath every way that you contribute to the people around you, you are still here. There's life in you. There is self here, and you don't have to accomplish anything in this moment for that to be true. Maybe just stay there for a breath or two. Notice what it's like to ask yourself, "Who am I when there's nothing I need to do to be worthy of being here? I don't think we need to come up with an answer. In fact, maybe trying to come up with the right answer just gives us something else to do. Maybe this is something we experience rather than solve, and this is really where I want us to land today. I'm not interested in being less helpful. I don't want to stop caring or contributing, and I don't want to give up the parts of myself that are capable and responsible and deeply attuned to other people. What I want is freedom, space. I want to know that when I step forward, I'm doing it because I have a genuine yes. This fits for me, not because somewhere inside me there is a fear about what that would mean if I didn't step forward. Sometimes I will still step forward, and sometimes I might notice that I don't need to. Maybe somebody else is perfectly capable. Maybe the thing doesn't need fixing, or maybe I can sit down and let somebody else bring the coffee. Maybe I can receive the compliment and simply say thank you, and maybe I can rest before I've earned it. That one is still a hard one for me, and perhaps there's another layer of what I've been trying to explore in these last few episodes. I've talked about caring without carrying. Robin and I talked about giving and receiving. Underneath both of those conversations is this deeper invitation to remain connected to ourselves while we're connected to other people. To be

able to say, "I can care deeply without making myself responsible for everything, and I can contribute without using my contribution to prove my worth. I can bring all of my resources into my relationships and my work because they're expressions of who I am, not evidence that I've earned my place here. And maybe coming home to ourselves isn't about getting rid of the ways we've learned to navigate life. Maybe it's about having more freedom within them, the choice, more room to receive, and more room to simply be. So, on that note, I'll leave you with the question I've been carrying: Who might you discover yourself to be if, just for a moment, you didn't have to be useful, not somebody new that you'll need to become, maybe simply more of the self that's already there, and even here, in all of the doing and striving and figuring out who we're supposed to be, there's magic in the muck. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, be well and take care.