Most people think devaluation is something that happens to them.
Someone criticizes you… ignores you… rejects you… and you feel it immediately. It registers as drama, or even abuse. There’s a clear sense that something “out there” is happening to you.
But when you do the exact same thing to yourself…
You don’t recognize it at all.
You call it fact.
“My body doesn’t work.”
“I’m not good enough.”
“I can’t have what I want.”
This is the first problem: self-devaluation doesn’t feel like something you’re doing.
It feels like reality (or fact).
Our self-devaluation stories feel like “truth.”
But they’re not truth (or facts).
They’re stories.
Looking at this with a Germanic New Medicine perspective, there’s a critical distinction between valuation and devaluation.
Factual valuation is necessary. It’s how we navigate reality.
- We can measure weight, quantity, distance.
- We can test hypotheses.
- We can observe patterns and outcomes.
That’s real.
But devaluation is a judgment based on a feeling, turned into a story, and then mistaken for a fact.
It’s a comparison between imagined versions of ourselves and others… happening entirely within the psyche.
But we don’t question it. That’s why all devaluation is self-devaluation.
Even when it appears to come from someone else, it only exists because of an imaginary devaluation process happening within your own psyche.
There is no way to measure subjective “value.”
You can be more skilled, less experienced, stronger, weaker. I can like you more or like you less.
But you cannot be objectively more or less valuable.
Because the value of you, others, life, the colour of the sky, the weather today, and so on is not measurable.
So when you say something like:
“My body doesn’t work”
you’re not stating a fact.
(If your body, brain, or psyche didn’t work, you wouldn’t be here reading this)
What’s actually happening in devaluation is this:
- You have a feeling…
- You create a story from that feeling…
- And then you mistake that story for reality.
This pattern runs deeper than individual thoughts. It’s built into the mythology of our entire culture. It’s the story that we are separate from life, separate from source, or cut off from something essential.
A “fall from grace” story.
From that perspective, everything becomes a competition for limited energy. Someone has to win. Someone has to lose.
And that underlying assumption creates constant self-devaluation. It’s the basis for almost all the other devaluation we experience.
But that assumption (of a fall from grace) isn’t a fact. It’s a story. And, like any story, it can be seen for what it is.
In the moment you recognize that what you’ve been calling “fact” is actually self-devaluation…something shifts.
And you are well on your way to resolving your biological conflict.
Listen now:
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