Shame and the Lost-Worth Story: Understanding Why We Deny Our Own Worth with Dawna Daigneault

<p>What if the heaviness you carry, the quiet sense that you are somehow not enough, was never about a flaw in you at all?</p><p>In this episode I sit down with <strong>Dawna Daigneault</strong>, a licensed therapist, trauma-informed care specialist, and the creator of <strong>Worth-Conscious Theory</strong>, for a conversation that goes far deeper than the usual self-help talk about confidence and self-esteem.</p><p>Dawna's work is built on a radical idea: <strong>your worth is a birthright.</strong> It is foundational, not earned, and it has to be honored even when the families, communities, and systems around us fail to affirm it.</p><p>After more than a decade of research, she reached a striking conclusion. Sometimes depression and anxiety do not come from a chemical imbalance or a hard season, they come from denied self-worth, a pattern that had gone unnamed in clinical practice for far too long.</p><p>We get into the distinction almost everyone misses, the real difference between <strong>self-worth and self-esteem</strong>, and what gets lost when we treat them as the same thing.</p><p>We talk about what low self-worth actually looks like day to day, in your relationships, in the stories you tell about what you deserve, and in the quiet weight you carry when the messages you grew up with did not match who you really are.</p><p>At the center of it all is what Dawna calls the <strong>lost-worth story</strong>, the narrative you hold onto that keeps you denying your own worth, often handed down through generations.</p><p>She walks through how shame works inside that story, both as something you feel and as a social force, and what it takes to start pulling shame apart from your identity.</p><p>We close not with a tidy five-step plan, but with a real invitation: <strong>get curious about the story you have been telling about your own worth, and where it came from.</strong></p><p>Dawna and her co-author Chris Brown wrote <em>Understanding Self-Worth: A Guide to Worth-Conscious Theory and Psychotherapeutic Practice</em>, already being called required reading for counseling students and one of the most inspiring clinical books in years.</p><p>Whether you are a clinician, someone in your own healing, or simply curious about why so many of us struggle to feel like we are enough, this one is for you.</p><h3>More About Dawna</h3><p>Understanding self-worth is Dawna's passion project. For more than a decade she has studied what it means to claim self-worth as a