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Living and Loving after Betrayal
you give it value—you invest energy and effort to fully perceive it,
thus allowing you to appreciate it. While it does nothing for the sunset
if you value it, valuing it does wonders for you. The moment of
value creation makes you feel more vital, engaged, interested, appreciative—in
short, more alive. Life means more to you at the instant
you create value, just as it means less to you when you are not creating
value. Most positive emotion, passion, meaning, purpose, and conviction
come from creating value, and most emptiness, aggression, and
depression result from failure to create value.
Virtually all our accomplishments occur through value creation,
and virtually all our failures owe to devaluing (value destruction).
Consider who is more likely to maintain healthy weight: the person
who values health or the one who devalues her body? Who is more
likely to succeed with fewer mistakes, the coach who values the skills
and cohesiveness of the team or the one who devalues his players?
Who will do better at work and feel more satisfied with it, the
employee who values her contribution and her coworkers, or the one
who devalues his job, peers, or managers? Now here’s the really important
question: Who is more likely to thrive after intimate betrayal, the
betrayed partner who values her well-being, her other relationships,
her strengths, and her resilience, or the one who devalues his life and
most of the people in it?
Unfortunately, there’s a large problem with core value: Creating
value consumes enormous amounts of energy. It takes a lot more effort
to appreciate a sunset or a child’s smile than to ignore them. Most of
us try to conserve our limited stores of energy by withholding the
necessary components of value creation: interest and attention. If we
withhold too much too often, we’ll end up running mostly on automatic
pilot, just going through the motions of living. Eventually, we’ll
get depressed. Depression can be understood as extremely low value
creation.
A common way to avoid the depressed mood of low value creation
is to devalue—to lower the value of someone or something by