What in the BLEEP are values?

It probably goes without saying that anyone raised in a stressful, traumatizing, or otherwise dysfunctional household (hello, everyone) are probably not very in touch with their values.

Even the calmest, most composed people may not be aware of what is actually driving them, but that kind of awareness is particularly useful for people who are stressed the BLEEP out. It’s also one of the facets of the human experience that is hardest to pinpoint. Sorting it out can feel like throwing darts at a dartboard or trying to read tea leaves with no training in tea-leaf-reading. Brene Brown has a list of over 100 values to choose from (I made an estimate based on some questionable math after counting to 31), if that tells you anything about what we’re all up against in terms of getting specific.

Fortunately, there are a lot of useful books, worksheets, and tools to choose from these days as well. I have started to use Mark Manson’s Purpose app, which is branded as an AI mentor and has a whole module on discerning values. I have found the app incredibly useful as an additional layer of (non-emergency) support and I highly recommend it.

Whether you use a piece of paper or a highly sophisticated AI bot which responds to your every whim doesn’t matter. What matters is taking some time to pay attention to what we believe in, what drives us, what really pisses us off, and how we live in alignment or out of alignment with our top five values. Those unspoken (and often unconscious) priorities drive our choices, the people we surround ourselves with, our wins and losses, when we experience joy or shame, all of it, really.

One important part of life I was totally unaware of until relatively recently is that if we are making choices that are out of alignment with our values, particularly on behalf of others, it can lead to a lot of stress, anger, and/or shame. We do this for any number of reasons, but most often its because childhood patterns are so potent, all other priorities cave to enduring and sustaining them. As a child, survival is the only priority.

The sacrifices we are forced to make as children or adults in complicated situations often become the same sacrifices we consciously or unconsciously make over, and over, and over again until we focus on our own healing and growth. We have no idea what our values are when we’re just trying to survive.

This is where organized religion can sometimes fail. Values get imposed upon us, and for the highly traumatized, that is the exact opposite of what we need. That already happened to many of us, either through strict religious experiences, traumatizing childhood environments, and some BLEEP-backward societal standards, and let’s just say the outcomes from those circumstances are… less than optimal.

Defining a simpler, more accessible focus on faith in Good (or God) in very broad terms can be both supportive and liberating for many. That includes a patient, introspective, open search into what drives us, what we want to prioritize, and whether or not we are making choices in alignment with those priorities.

In other words, our values. Not our mother’s values or our father’s. Not what we think we should believe, but what we actually do believe. A good indicator is often what really pisses us off - if something makes us viscerally angry, that’s usually a good indication that one of our boundaries has been violated, and it should go high on our list of what matters to us.

The search for our list of priorities can take a day or it can take weeks. It doesn’t really matter, so long as we actually commit to the search. A list of five is plenty to start. Once that list is created, we can experiment with paying attention to them, how they impact our lives, and whether or not we are actually making choices in accordance with them.

Usually, we are not due to a basic lack of awareness. Who ever asked any of us to consider our values? Who ever stated their importance explicitly? It’s very rare than anyone does, so this is your opportunity to start and, if necessary, to start to do things differently.