September 1, 2023
Embody Your Worth:
Essential Strategies to Live Confidently and Create Your Dream Life
Amanda Wallingsford, LMFT-S
Aviva Publishing (2023)
ISBN: 978-1-63618-273-5 (hardcover); 978-1-63618-274-2 (paperback)
New Book Helps Readers Learn to Value Themselves and Create Better Lives
Embody Your Worth: Essential Strategies to Live Confidently and Create Your Dream Life is a powerful new book by Amanda Wallingsford that will help anyone struggling to know their worth.
Wallingsford begins by sharing her own transformative story about how she went from believing she was worthless to living a fulfilling life. She opens the book by recalling a dark day in 1999 when she had an overwhelming feeling that she was a complete burden to everyone in her life and asked herself, What if I am better off dead? Instantly, she realized why some people turn to suicide when they reach the point of feeling completely worthless.
She goes on to share her personal story, including the most devastating event of her childhood—her biological father decided to leave her and her mother, and eventually, he started a new family. As a small child, Wallingsford felt she must have done something wrong or that something was wrong with her for him to leave. She could not understand how he could love his new children and not her. Even though her mother remarried a man who eagerly stepped into the role of a loving dad, she still blamed herself for her biological father’s decisions, which she only understood as an adult were really about him and not her.
Worse, after spending years yearning for her father’s attention, he took his life shortly after her nineteenth birthday. This loss, occurring five years after a neighbor’s suicide, traumatized her and eventually led her to her own suicidal thoughts.
But Wallingsford turned all of that around. After twenty years of self-healing, she became a new person. When another tragic life event hit her in 2020—the death of her infant son—she found that while she grieved for him, her world was not shattered like one would have expected. In Embody Your Worth, she shares the strategies she developed and tools she learned for how to own her worth so that even the most tragic event could not take away the inner sense of peace she had worked for years to develop.
Today, Wallingsford is a licensed marriage and family therapist, a state board approved supervisor to developing therapists, and a transformation life coach. She is EMDR certified, Trauma Conscious Yoga Method certified, and trained in trauma-focused cognitive behavior therapy. She has worked with more than 1,500 people and spent a minimum of 10,000 hours in service with people. She says her clients have taught her more than any book or class could about trauma and the importance of self-worth to weather life’s storms. Now she shares in Embody Your Worth what she has learned to help herself and others.
The book is divided into eight chapters. Each chapter focuses on an important step toward learning to embody your worth. In Chapter 1, the focus is on learning to be loving and compassionate with yourself. Chapter 2 shares survival strategies humans use to cope with life. Chapter 3 focuses on how we talk to ourselves and how to create new patterns for our internal dialogue. Chapter 4 teaches the reader how to recognize their strengths and gifts. Chapter 5 teaches valuable strategies for learning to own your power and determine what is and is not your responsibility. Chapter 6 offers techniques for building healthy relationships. Chapter 7 helps you understand the power of your life choices, and Chapter 8 discusses various healing methods you can use. Throughout, Wallingsford helps the reader to dispel the belief, which likely happened in childhood, that they are unworthy or that something is wrong with them.
Besides offering advice, Wallingsford also provides exercises in the form of journal reflections to help the reader process what they learned and to think through their past and repattern their beliefs. For example, in one journal reflection, she writes:
“Looking back on your childhood, what situations did you face that were beyond your developmental capacity? What information were you incapable of knowing at the time due to being too young to understand and/or due to not having someone to share that information or knowledge with? If you get stuck on this reflection, think of a child you know and whether you would expect them to know how to handle what you were asked to handle.”
Wallingsford also includes growth activities in each chapter. For example, one asks the reader to “Name how you will align your behavior with ‘I am valuable, beyond worthy, and deserve good things.’” I also appreciated all the resources included and the wonderful inspirational quotes. My favorite quote was by Glennon Doyle: “I understand now that I am not a mess but a deeply feeling person in a messy world.”
Embody Your Worth honors people’s personal truths by acknowledging that not everyone can just get over something negative because not everyone has the same situation to deal with, and everyone isn’t born with the same resources or advantages as everyone else. What is traumatic for one person may not be traumatic for someone else. Wallingsford states: “Trauma is defined by individual experience. Because of this, there is not a list of traumatic events. Only the person who has the experience gets to determine if it qualifies as traumatic. This applies to you as well. No one but you gets to define your trauma.”
I also resonated strongly with the discussion on toxic positivity. While Wallingsford is all for positive thinking, she believes it can go overboard. The idea that we can only think happy thoughts stunts our growth by not allowing us to acknowledge and process pain and trauma so we can move past it. Among the toxic positivity sentences she notes are well-meant sayings that inhibit us from discussing openly the difficulties of life, such as “Everything happens for a reason” and “God won’t give you anything you can’t handle.” Such sayings imply people are doing something wrong by feeling negative emotions, and that only creates more internal isolation and feelings of being inadequate and broken.
Other topics include the value of self-compassion, how to look through a strength-based lens and turn negatives into positives in ways that truly are helpful, how to watch out for red flags in other people as you learn to develop healthy relationships, how to worry less, and how to take care of your wants and needs without feeling you are being selfish.
Overall, reading Embody Your Worth is like having a close friend who really does understand what you are going through and is there to help you through it. Give yourself the gift of reading this book. You do deserve it!
For more information about Amanda Wallingsford and Embody Your Worth, visit www.EmbodyYourWorth.com.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of Narrow Lives and The Best Place
