What Do You Truly Value?
Many people will be able to answer the question, “What do you value?” They’ll say things like: family, health, honesty, freedom, progress, adventure. These are all admirable and common values most people care about and wish to honor and uphold, and maybe some of these resonate with you as well. But if someone were to silently observe your life for six months… would they reach the same conclusion? The truth is that we don’t live according to our stated values; we live according to our embodied values. If someone were to look at our calendars, what would they see filling our time? What about our spending – where does most of it go? What about the content of our conversations? Our attention? Our habits? Our nervous systems? Behaviors speak much louder about what truly matters to us than the principles we say we believe. These behaviors reveal our values long before our words do. When we’re not living in alignment with our values, there is a quiet but distinct internal tension. Left unexamined, this can begin to slowly erode our authenticity, leading to a fractured sense of self. Values aren’t what we say – they're what we repeatedly choose.
Human behaviors are peculiar and complex, but they usually originate from an underlying desire, need, or drive within us. Every behavior protects or expresses something we value. In my clinical work, I often see individuals whose behaviors reveal values they may not even realize they hold. I hear people express frustration with conflicts in their relationships around dishes, chores, money, bedtime, holidays, and so on. But what do these behaviors represent? When someone repeatedly requests their partner help with the dishes after they’ve cooked the meal, maybe they’re not actually asking for clean dishes. Maybe they’re longing for peace. Completion. Shared responsibility. Rest. The partner who refuses or isn’t consistent with the dishes may not be rejecting or disrespecting the other. Maybe they’re protecting their autonomy. Freedom. Independence. Now the argument becomes understandable. The dishes aren’t the conflict – the values underneath them are. Behavior is often the visible expression of an invisible value. You just have to look a little harder to see what’s underneath it all.
Values can be powerful motivators of choices, behaviors, and goals. We often stand firm in our stated values and will share them openly with others. I’ve heard individuals say they value hard work, loyalty, money, and more. But my curiosity drives me to ask – where did these values come from? We often inherit them long before we examine them. They are passed down to us through childhood, culture, religion, family, trauma, a need for safety, scarcity mindsets, attachment... In childhood, you may have observed your father working long hours and teaching you that hard work is important, yet he never truly learned how to slow down, rest, and engage in pleasure. Perhaps slowing down made him feel lazy, while usefulness became deeply tied to his sense of worth. The man who craves order... did he really choose that, or did chaos become dangerous in his childhood home? The woman devoted to work labeling herself as a ‘workaholic’... does she consciously value achievement? Or could achievement be where she first felt worthy? There is a vast difference between values we’re conditioned to believe are important and the values we’ve consciously chosen and examined. We don’t necessarily have to discard any values. By reflecting on them and examining what’s truly ours versus what’s inherited, we have the opportunity to embrace a deeper connection to ourselves rather than blindly following those created for us.
So when does an inherited value become your own? For much of my early adulthood, I don't know that I could have told you what I valued outside of the identities I had inherited. I could have given you the right answers. Family. God. Marriage. Motherhood. But I had not yet lived enough of my own life - or perhaps listened deeply enough to myself - to know which values had emerged from within me and which had been handed to me by the people and institutions around me. I became a single mother at age eighteen, right out of high school. I met a man at age twenty that I married a year and a half later. But he was deeply religious and there were parts of my history and identity that seemed difficult for him to accept – parts of myself I hadn’t fully learned to accept either. I had a religious upbringing as well and always felt the pressure to be less.... myself, and more God-like. So, in this marriage I became heavily entrenched in the church and established my first set of adult values. Not by myself – mostly by religious leaders and institutions. These values were family, motherhood, and God, but they were embedded in a worldview that had been largely constructed around me. This was the identity I built out of a desire for acceptance, leadership, and connection. But when betrayal led to the ending of that ten-year marriage, the identity I’d built around it was dismantled.
When that life eventually fell apart, I didn’t simply lose a marriage. I lost much of the structure that had been telling me who I was supposed to be. As I waded through the grief, I had to begin asking: What do I believe? What feels true? What kind of a woman do I want to become? What deserves my devotion?
A value isn’t merely something you believe is good.
A value is something you are willing to organize your life around.
I may have inherited the importance of family and still deeply value family today. The difference is that now I’ve chosen it consciously. Sometimes examination causes us to release a value. Sometimes it makes us hold it even more dearly. Sometimes it transforms what the value means. For example, “family” at 22 might have meant preserving the marriage and keeping everyone together. “Family” in my forties now means creating relationships in which each person can remain fully themselves, even when that requires boundaries, separation, or letting go.
Values cost us something. If I value authenticity only when everyone approves of me, it hasn’t really been tested. If I value family until family requires inconvenience, what happens? If I value health but refuse to make room for rest or adequate sleep? If I value inner peace but continue participating in relationships that consistently require self-abandonment or a contribution to chaos? We often discover what we truly value when honoring it costs us something. Time. Money. Approval. Convenience. Sometimes even a relationship. A value becomes embodied when we are willing to make choices that protect what we say matters – even when another choice would be easier.
Values require an inner authority. I no longer fret over who may or may not agree with my values because I have spent so much time with myself that I don't need agreement or permission. I've noticed that when we haven't developed a strong enough relationship with our own inner authority, difference can feel surprisingly threatening. We may unconsciously need the people closest to us to validate what we value because their agreement reassures us that our way of living is somehow right. But when I know why something matters to me, I can hold it without requiring you to share it. The more securely we can hold our own values, the less threatened we need to be by someone else’s. I can respect your values and simultaneously recognize that they make us incompatible. That makes genuine compatibility easier to discern because I no longer need to persuade you. If you don’t want children and I deeply want children, I don’t need to prove that children will make you happy. I can believe you. If you deeply want roots near your family and I want to spend my life traveling, neither of us needs to be wrong. We simply may not be walking toward the same life.
The topic of values is often brought up in the early stages of dating, but sometimes attraction can cloud our vision. We often believe that attraction is the beginning of compatibility. It may be helpful for creating chemistry and magnetism, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to healthy relationship longevity. Sometimes attraction becomes the reason we stop paying attention to compatibility. You might discuss children, travel, lifestyle, spiritual life, money, where to live, career, family, and more in those early stages of dating. This is the crucial listening period because these aren’t preferences. They’re life direction. Sometimes the information is already there, but chemistry edits reality. We stop listening. Not to them – but to ourselves. We hear, “I don’t want children.” Our mind says, “They’ll change once I convince them how wonderful life is with children and express how much I want them.” We hear, “My work will always come first.” We think, “Once we’re married it’ll be different.” That’s hope replacing awareness. Self-knowledge allows us to accept another person's truth without trying to negotiate it into compatibility.
Seneca wrote about hope and fear as strangely intertwined, both pulling the mind away from what is and into an imagined future. I think there is something valuable in that observation when it comes to relationships. Hope can be beautiful, but it can also become the place we hide from reality. When our attention becomes organized around who someone might become rather than who they are, hope begins replacing awareness. Sometimes attraction makes it easier to ignore what awareness already knows.
Examining and aligning with our values begins long before partnership. But when partnership arrives, knowing ourselves allows us to speak more honestly about the life we hope to create. We aren't asking another person to tell us what should matter. We're allowing them to see what already does. And when both people can do this, compatibility becomes less about agreeing on everything and more about understanding whether the lives we are building can move in the same direction.
But living according to our values does not mean becoming rigid around them. I notice this tendency in myself at times. The more deeply I understand what matters to me, the easier it can become to protect it too fiercely. Yet genuine self-knowledge should make us more curious, not less. Integrity allows me to say, This is what feels true for me now. Rigidity insists, This must remain true forever. I want to know what feels true for me today while remaining open enough to allow life, love, loss, and relationship to continue changing me. A value can guide us without becoming another identity we have to defend. Two people don't just need to discover whether their values align at the beginning. They have to remain curious because values evolve throughout adulthood.
Perhaps our values were never meant to become a permanent list of principles we spend the rest of our lives defending. Maybe knowing what we value is simply another form of deep listening.
Life changes us. Relationships change us. Grief changes us. Love changes us. The people we meet reveal parts of ourselves we had not yet encountered. And if we remain curious enough, our values become clearer – not because someone tells us what should matter, but because we have spent enough time in relationship with ourselves to recognize what does.
The more clearly we understand what we are building, the easier it becomes to recognize who can genuinely build alongside us. But perhaps partnership is only one expression of this awareness. Our values shape the way we work, parent, love, rest, create, spend, speak, and move through the world.
Perhaps knowing what we value isn’t about deciding who we will be forever.
Perhaps it’s about listening closely enough to recognize what matters deeply to us now, living courageously enough to embody it, and remaining open enough to let life continue revealing what matters.
What does the life you are living today reveal about what you truly value?
Relational Alchemy is an invitation to know yourself deeply enough to recognize what is truly yours - and to build relationships and a life that allow you to remain in alignment with it.