Understanding Self-Worth

A Guide to Worth-Conscious Theory and Psychotherapeutic Practice

Dawna Daigneault, Chris Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040411872
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Understanding Self-Worth: A Guide to Worth-Conscious Theory and Psychotherapeutic Practice is a guide for psychotherapists confounded by the struggle of working with clients who present with a pervasive pattern of denied self-worth.

When self-worth is perceived as conditional or denied altogether, clients may become complicit in creating a lost-worth story—the story they tell that keeps them denying their own worth. The denial may include generational abusive and/or intrusive injunctions that go against their lived truth.

Psychotherapists will come away from this book with a deep understanding of the importance of attending to the degree of trauma experienced when the client's self-worth is separated from their individual truth. Moreover, where there is worth-based trauma, the psychotherapist will learn models both for helping clients gently and honestly reestablish a worthy and true sense of self and for consciously guiding clients toward recovery of human worth as a birthright.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Endorsement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Theoretical Framework
• 2 Human Dignity and Wellness
• 3 Congruent Sense of Self
• 4 Worth-Conscious Theory (WCT) Constructs
• 5 Realized Self-Worth, Lost-Worth Story, and Trauma-Informed Care
• 6 Systemic Exigencies and the Four Pillars of Self-Worth
• 7 The Four Quadrants
• 8 Psychotherapy Techniques
• Index