← Notes from the Edge
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Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have
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been having all along.
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We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir, Notes from a Certified Mad Woman. Welcome to the Edge.
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Welcome back to Notes from the Edge. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, and this is where we have the conversations we should have had all along. Tonight, I want to talk about a word I didn't know existed. It's called devaluation. Not criticism, not constructive feedback. Not a parent telling a child you can do better because they genuinely believe in them. I mean, the slow repeated experience of learning that nothing you do will ever quite count. You make straight A's, but somehow that is not the thing that matters. You lead committees, captain of teams. You show up, you perform, you succeed. You become responsible, accomplished, useful, impressive, and almost painfully capable. And still a person whose approval you are trying to earn finds a way to move the finish line. They tell you to go left, so you go left. Then they tell you that going left was wrong and that you should have gone right. So what happens is eventually you stop trusting your own sense of direction. That's what devaluation does. It does not only make you feel bad in the moment, it can interfere with your ability to know whether you're doing well, whether you are lovable, whether your instincts are trustworthy, whether your accomplishments are real, and whether you are allowed to feel proud without somebody immediately reducing you back down to size. And I know this because I accomplished it anyway, not because devaluation made me stronger. I want to be very careful with that. People love to make suffering responsible for success. I say things like, oh, it made you who you are. And maybe that's true, but it also made becoming who I am much harder than I think it actually needed to be. And I accomplished things while dragging an invisible argument behind me. I accomplished things while still trying to prove that I was worthy of being valued. And I did it while carrying a voice inside me that could take almost any victory and quietly ask anyone, is it enough? Children are extraordinarily good at adapting. They do not have the perspective to say, this adult may be limited in their ability to affirm me. They do not think perhaps my parents response is shaped by their own wounds, disappointments, conditioning, emotional capacity, or ideas about whom I'm supposed to be. We make it personal as kids. We think I can do better. I will be loved more if I achieve enough. I will be seen more if I become Impressive enough, useful enough, attractive enough, successful enough, agreeable enough, or emotionally manageable enough, maybe warmth will come. So then as children, we begin the performance. And it can look healthy from the outside. Good grades, leadership, responsibility, committee, sports achievement, talent, independence. But boy, oh boy, when the child becomes an adult, mature for her age means she's already learned that her value depends on how well she can perform. I did it all. Yet none of it seemed to settle the deeper question, am I valued by you? Because that is the question underneath devaluation. It isn't simply, did I do a good job? It becomes, do I even fucking matter? And when achievement does not create security, a child usually does not stop achieving, they try even harder. And one of the most disorienting parts of chronic devaluation is the inconsistency. You are told to go left, you go left, and then you are criticized, because apparently right was the correct direction. You can try to learn the rule, but the rules are constantly changing. So then you anticipate what is wanted from you, and then the expectation shifts even after you meet that. So it creates a particular kind of hyper vigilance. So you stop asking what do I think is right? And start asking what answer will keep me from being criticized. You study facial expressions and tone and timing and even silence and predict disappointment before it arrives. And boy, oh boy, can you read a room even as a kid and really know how to disconnect from yourself when you need to. And then people praise you for being intuitive, and sometimes that's the truth, but sometimes you're actually scanning for danger and those things can coexist. But when the standard keeps moving on you, you begin to believe the problem must be you. Maybe you misunderstood or should have known, or are too sensitive, difficult, not trying hard enough, not good enough, need to be more, more, more, and then that more can start running your entire life. The terrible secret of chronic devaluation is that more was never going to solve it, because the problem was never our performance. Sometimes the problem was that our value was being measured by somebody who did not know how to reflect it back consistently. My mother once told me, you used to be pretty enough to marry a doctor. When I was talking about a very high achievement. And there is a lot packed in that one sentence that my appearance had declined, that it was a currency. And then evidence of my former value was that I might have been chosen by a high status man. Not that I could have become the doctor, not that I could build companies, which I did, and lead teams, which I did, and create ideas and write books and survive impossible things and construct a meaningful life filled with purpose and mission. That gets laughed at. Just that I might have been pretty enough before. And I know people say things carelessly, and I know parents come from generations where women were valued differently and mothers sometimes repeat the same measuring systems that once harmed them. Understanding that context matters, but context still doesn't erase the impact. Words like that enter the architecture of identity and teach us that being chosen is an achievement, that beauty has an expiration date and that a man's status can validate a woman's life, and that whatever she builds may be less impressive than who might agree to marry
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us.
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You? Me? That sentence did not create every insecurity I ever had, but it belonged to a larger pattern that I was so used to. It was rarely, look at who you are becoming. It was usually, here's where you still fall short. I trained for years in comedic acting and performed in more than 100 comedy leads. I know timing, I know character. I know the strange intelligence required to make people laugh when you're on stage. And still I was told, you're not funny. You're too intense. Now, to be fair, I am also intense. That is not exactly breaking news, but intensity and humor are not opposites. Some of the funniest people alive are intense because they notice what other people miss. They see the absurdity. They detect the contradiction. They understand pain well enough to reveal the comedy hiding inside it. But devaluation does not usually offer a nuanced assessment. It just says, you don't have it. You are not it. You are not chosen. It takes something you have studied, practice, performed and proven and reduces it to one person's inability or unwillingness to see it. And that's what makes devaluation so powerful. It can override the evidence that you have. You can have a room full of people laughing and still hear the one voice saying that you are not it. You can have degrees and certificates, awards, leadership, role, success, clients, readers, listeners, and visible proof of your ability. But if you were trained early enough to distrust affirmation, praise can bounce off you. Why? Criticism goes directly into your bloodstream. And this is why so many highly accomplished people cannot absorb their accomplishments. They can list them in a biography or on stage, but they cannot always fill them. Because there's a difference between knowing what you have accomplished and allowing it to become part of who you are. Because sometimes we imagine confidence as a personality trait. Some people have it, some people do not. But confidence is not relational, develops when your perceptions are acknowledged. Often enough that you begin trusting yourself. If a child says, I'm hurt and somebody says, I believe you. If a child says, I am proud of this look, and somebody says, you know what? You should be. And some a child says, I'm good at this. And then somebody helps that child explore the ability even more. That is how internal trust develops in childhood. And devaluation interrupts that process. You can become outwardly confident and inwardly uncertain. You can command a room while privately second guessing everything. And you can lead companies by still feeling like you are one mistake away from exposure. You can make big bold decisions and then spend hours wondering whether you had the right to make them at all. And you can accomplish extraordinary things and experience them as temporary exceptions rather than evidence of who you really are. And that's expensive confidence. It requires constant maintenance and producing proof. And the accomplishment buys relief for a little while, but then doubt returns. So then you do it again. And that is not ambition alone. That is a body trying to secure value through performance. What we learn about love early often becomes the template we unconsciously bring into adult relationships. Not because we are foolish, but because familiarity can sometimes feel like chemistry. If love as a child involved moving targets, mixed messages, criticism, emotional inconsistency, or the repeated experience of trying to earn approval, then a relationship that recreates those conditions may strange feel strangely compelling. So we become attracted to people who are difficult to please. Or we may over function for them or explain ourselves endlessly. Or believe if we finally get them to see our value, it will heal what is wrong and toxic. And so we stay too long. No, this time I will prove that I am worthy of loving correctly. I will get it right. But adult relationships cannot repair childhood devaluation when they are built on the same pattern, they only deepen the wounds. You can become highly tolerant of disrespect because your attention is focused on winning the person back rather than evaluating how they treat treated you. To begin with, you minimize cruelty, you become grateful for breadcrumbs, and temporary approval becomes intimacy. And you feel relief when that person who devalues you suddenly gives you affection. And there's a lot of biology about that. There's another solo podcast about it. Go find it. Because that relief can feel like love. And sometimes it's the only thing that temporarily ends the pain. Devaluation also affects healthy relationships, because when somebody genuinely values you, you may not trust it. You're waiting for the criticism or what comes next that's bad. Or you dismiss the compliments or almost become uncomfortable with the care you're given because your body was never trained around just receiving without it feeling suspicious. Here's the part people often miss. Devaluation doesn't always prevent achievement. Sometimes it produces the opposite, which is enormous achievement, but it changes the emotional experience of achieving. You can accomplish more than anyone around you and still feel behind. You can become a leader but still not feel loved. You can volunteer for every committee, project, situation, every phone call that somebody needs turn into the fixer. But it's a lot to carry. Begging please value me, not me now. Sometimes the world responds to that by handing you more weight. And that is one of the cruelest outcomes of chronic devaluation. You become so competent at carrying too much that people stop noticing the cost. I accomplished it anyway. And I say that without minimizing what it took. I accomplished things by questioning myself and carrying contradictory instructions and after being told directly and indirectly that my gifts were excessive, insufficient, inconvenient, or not quite right. Too much, too intense. But I did it anyway. Anyway means I succeeded while managing the emotional residue of being underestimated. I built confidence after learning not to trust praise. I became visible after being taught that visibility invited correction. I learned to lead while expecting somebody to tell me I had chosen the wrong direction. I am still practicing. Building healing is not always reaching a point where your family's words or your ex's words or your parents words no longer affect you. Sometimes healing is noticing when they do and refusing to let them help you make the next decision. Because eventually the person who devalued you does not have to be in the room anymore. Their voice can be portable. You can bring it with you. You can hear it when you get dressed. Post something, submit an idea, finish a manuscript, somebody compliments you, raise your prices, enter a room full of powerful people. Consider doing something big. But the voice says who do you think you are? That is not good enough. You are embarrassing yourself. You are too much. You should have done it differently. Because the voice is internal, you may mistake it for discernment. And that is an important distinction. Not every self doubt is wisdom and not every critical thought is truth. And not every feeling of discomfort means that you are doing it wrong. Sometimes discomfort is simply what happens when you stop obeying an old hierarchy. Rebuilding after devaluation is not about convincing yourself that everything you do is brilliant. It's about becoming immune to feedback that doesn't feel right to you. It's not about declaring that everybody that disagrees with you is jealous or toxic or incapable or appreciating your greatness. That's not confidence. That's just another type of fragility. Healthy self value means being able to receive accurate feedback, accurate and precise feedback without allowing it to become a verdict on your humanity. It means saying, yeah, maybe that part does need improvement, but I'm still valuable. Or yeah, I made a wrong decision, but I'm still making good decisions too. Or yeah, that person doesn't understand me. But you know what? I don't need them to because I'm not abandoning myself to make them comfortable. And yes, I will disappoint people, but that is not proof that I have failed. My value was not always reflected back to me. But that does not mean the value is absent. It means the mirror was limited. That may be one of the most important things I've learned. The mirror was limited and I spent years using somebody else's capacity to see my evidence of whether I was worthy. They are not the same thing. There is grief involved in this process. Once you recognize the word devaluation, once you see it, you cannot unsee it. And you see what was missing. And you may realize how young you were when it started, when you started to earn something other children were just given. You may grieve the version of yourself who kept presenting accomplishments like offerings. Look. Look what I did. Look what I became. Is it enough? Is it enough now? Is it enough now? And that grief deserv space not because you need to stay trapped in blame, because that's not where healing happens. But humans are complicated. Our parents can love us and wound us. Two truths can exist at the same time. They can support us in some ways and fail profoundly in other ways. And they can be shaped by their own unhealed histories and end up doing better later as they grow. Or they can remain limited. But compassion should not require dishonesty about the impact of their behavior. You can understand why somebody became who they became and still tell the truth about what it cost you. So this next chapter of my life absolutely cannot be about accomplishing enough to finally win an argument that began long ago in childhood. Because that one has no ending and there's no reward. And at the end of it, there's no ranking high enough, no success enough, or power enough, or just not enough. No amount of capacity to see will change. The mirror will not change. So the question has to change. Not how do I finally prove my value? But what would I create if I already knew I was valuable? What can I stop tolerating? What can I stop explaining? And what can I stop performing? And what will I Pursue now because I am unwilling to abandon myself in the process. What relationships will I choose if love isn't so expensive? And what will I do when I don't need permission? That is the work now. Not accomplishing less, not shrinking, not pretending ambition is unhealthy. Creating, building, leading, making meaning from chaos. Bringing and birthing an idea that did not exist into the world. The goal is not to abandon achievement, but use achievement. Oh, definitely not use achievement as self worth, but accomplish from expansion and not desperation. And from truth, not proof. And from self expression and not self defense. Maybe you grew up with people who could always find the flaw. Maybe you were praised publicly and diminished privately. Maybe nothing you ever did seemed to land quite right. Maybe you are still trying to make the people around you proud of you. I want you to hear this. The inability of another person to consistently recognize your value is not evidence that the value isn't there. Maybe you spent your entire life with a distorted mirror too. That does not mean you were distorted. I accomplished anyway. I found my voice anyway. But now I want something more than accomplishment despite devaluation. I want it without devaluation, living inside me at all. I want to create without immediately searching for who will reduce it. And I want to experience my own life without handing somebody else the verdict of it. I want to trust myself when I go left and if I later realize I should have gone right, I want to change direction without treating the mistake as proof that I was never capable of navigating my own life to begin with. That is the deepest reclamation that I'm looking for, knowing that other people's assessment was never the final authority. So I will leave you with this question. What have you spent your life trying to accomplish in the hope that somebody would finally recognize your value? And what might you create next if you no longer need their opinion? I'm Lisa Lacey. This is Notes from the Edge. What did you perform in order to survive? When you find the answer, I'll see you at the edge.