The hardest pain I have ever carried did not come from financial collapse or physical suffering, though both have left their marks.
It came from being devalued by people I loved.
That specific pain — working harder, sacrificing more, reaching for spiritual maturity, and still watching the people closest to you treat you as though you don't quite matter — is its own category of wound. It doesn't follow logic. You do more, you get less. You pour out, and the return is silence or contempt. The equation breaks down in exactly the place you most need it to hold.
I spent years trying to fix the equation before I understood that the equation was never the point.
The Wrong Source
The problem was not that I lacked worth. The problem was where I was looking for confirmation of it.
When your sense of value is routed through other people's responses to you, you have handed them something that was never theirs to hold. Every time they fail to return it — or return something diminished — you interpret that as information about what you are. It isn't. It is information about what they are carrying, what they are capable of in that moment, what their own wounds have made them.
But pain does not naturally reason that clearly. Pain asks: why am I not enough?
Tehillim (Psalm) 139:14 answers that question before it is asked:
"I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well."
Yirah (יִרְאָה) — fearfully — carries the weight of awe, of reverence, of something that demands to be taken seriously. Pele (פֶּלֶא) — wonderfully — points toward the extraordinary, the set-apart, the thing that cannot be reduced to ordinary categories. HaShem did not make you incidentally. He made you with the same intentionality with which He spoke the cosmos into existence.
That is not motivational language. That is a covenantal declaration about ontology — about what you are before anyone has weighed in on the subject.
The moment you outsource that declaration to human approval, you have placed a finite, fallible, wounded person in the seat that belongs to the Creator. They will fail that assignment every time. Not because they are malicious — though sometimes they are — but because no human being can bear that weight. We were not built to be each other's source.
What Self-Worth Actually Requires
There is a principle I encountered through Alfred Adler — a psychiatrist who spent his life studying human motivation — that stopped me cold when I first understood it:
The courage to be disliked.
Not the performance of indifference. Not the posture of not caring. The genuine interior freedom to remain yourself when someone withholds approval, expresses contempt, or simply does not see you accurately.
That kind of freedom is not natural. It has to be cultivated. And for those of us whose earliest formation included chronic devaluation — homes where love was conditional, relationships where worth had to be earned and could always be revoked — it requires active reconstruction of something that was never properly built in the first place.
What I have found is that this reconstruction cannot happen through self-improvement alone. You can become more capable, more articulate, more disciplined, more spiritually informed — and still reach for external validation with the same desperation as before, because the root has not changed.
The root changes when you locate your worth in something immovable.
Not in your performance. Not in your relationships. Not in what you have built or survived or understood. In the tzelem Elohim (צֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים) — the image of God — that you carry by virtue of being human and known by Him.
The Samaritan's Logic
Yeshua's parable in Luke 10:25-37 is usually read as a lesson about compassion toward strangers. That is not wrong, but it is not the sharpest edge of the story.
The Samaritan stops for a man that two religious professionals — a cohen (priest) and a Levi — have already passed by. Their reasons for passing were almost certainly religious. Touching a potentially dead body created ritual impurity. The logic of their system told them: the cost of engagement is too high.
The Samaritan has no such protection. He is already considered impure by the Jewish establishment. He has nothing to lose in terms of religious status. And so he stops.
What Yeshua is illustrating is not just kindness. He is illustrating what happens when your actions are no longer governed by what others will think of you for taking them. The Samaritan is free to see the man on the road because he is not calculating his social position in the seeing.
The chesed (חֶסֶד) — the covenant love — that Yeshua calls the fulfillment of Torah flows most freely through people who are not performing it for an audience. It flows through people who have located their worth somewhere the audience cannot reach.
"Love your neighbor as yourself" (Mark 12:31) assumes that you actually love yourself — not narcissistically, not performatively, but genuinely. The command is not love your neighbor more than yourself or love your neighbor instead of yourself. It is as yourself. The quality of your love outward is connected to the quality of your relationship with your own God-given worth.
You cannot give what you do not have. You cannot extend grace from a place of depletion.
The Reconstruction
I am not going to tell you this is simple. It is not.
If you have spent years — or a lifetime — having your worth conditionally dispensed by people whose job it was to simply give it to you, the rerouting goes deep. Moments of genuine progress coexist with moments of sliding back into the old hunger. The old question surfaces: am I enough? And the old reflex reaches outward for the answer.
The work is to catch that reflex. Not to shame it — it developed for a reason, it was trying to protect you — but to redirect it.
Ask it back to the source. To HaShem, who knew you before you were formed (Yirmiyahu/Jeremiah 1:5). To Yeshua, whose treatment of every person He encountered was governed not by their social standing or their religious credentials but by the nefesh (נֶפֶשׁ) — the living soul — He saw in them.
Clothe yourself in what Sha'ul names in Colossians 3:12: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience. Not as performance toward others, but as the daily practice of someone who knows they are chosen, holy, and dearly loved — the three words that precede the list. Identity first. Then conduct that flows from it.
The devaluation you experienced was real. Its effects are real. But it was never a verdict.
The verdict was rendered before you arrived, by a Creator who does not revise His assessment based on whether the people around you are paying attention.
Nobody gave it to you. Nobody can take it away.
Selah.
Where are you currently routing your sense of worth — and is that source capable of holding what you've placed in it?
What would it look like to love someone else today from fullness rather than from the need to be seen doing it?
And what would you do differently if you truly believed the verdict was already settled?
Shalom v'shalvah — your brother in the Way,
Sergio
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