All About Self-Esteem

Your self-esteem is how you see yourself and your opinion of yourself. How useful do you feel? Do you believe you have good qualities? Do you think you're able to do things as well as other people? That's what I'm talking about today. I'm Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist, and I make mental health education videos. Some people have a healthy amount of self-esteem, while others struggle to have a positive self-image. Here are some signs that you have low self-esteem: You criticize and blame yourself for things. You're eager to please people by going above and beyond to make people happy. You're self-conscious and second-guess yourself. It's hard for you to assert your needs. You focus a lot on your weaknesses. You're not born with low self-esteem. It results from early life experiences that shape your self-concept. Some of these early experiences are things like harsh punishment, abuse, or neglect. Children often process these experiences as their fault and believe that they deserve to be sad because there's something wrong with them. A step down from overt abuse is not feeling warmth or nurturing from your caretakers. Part of our self-esteem development comes from receiving praise, validation, and encouragement, but some people aren't good at demonstrating this. Think about how things are in your day-to-day. How often are people saying, "Great job"? They'll speak up if there's a problem, but if you're doing well, they just don't say anything. So it's not that hard to have a parent who's busy and doesn't have time to give you the support and encouragement you really need in those formative years. Failing to satisfy others' expectations can also negatively impact your self-esteem. Were you the irresponsible child, the screw-up, the only child who didn't go to college? If your parents had unreasonable expectations of you as a child, you're not going to recognize that those expectations are unreasonable. You just think that you're not good enough or you're a disappointment. And veering away from parents for a moment, another early experience that can negatively impact your self-esteem is you don't fit in with your peers. This becomes especially important in the teen years when you're establishing your identity. You don't have to be a part of a large group. You just need to feel like you can relate to and connect with the people you consider in your social group. Even though those early experiences set the foundation for your self-concept, having an emotionally abusive relationship in your early adult years can also chip away at your self-esteem. Self-esteem is not all or nothing. You can generally think well of yourself and your abilities, but be vulnerable in certain areas. Here's an example. Suppose your parents were loving and supportive, but you were bullied by classmates because of the way you looked or acted. You know your parents love you, but that's not enough. You also need to feel accepted by your peers. So you finish college, you start working, and you generally feel good about your abilities, but you're insecure when it comes to relationships and trusting people with your feelings. You get into a relationship with someone who uses criticism to control you. You mistake their jealous nature for love and end up spending two years being conditioned to believe that you're nothing without this person. You finally recognize that this person is a negative influence and you break free, but your self-esteem is in the toilet. You have a lot of rehabilitation to do to regain your confidence and undo the negative beliefs that you developed during the relationship. One might argue that a person with healthy self-esteem wouldn't be able to stay in a relationship that makes them feel bad about themselves. My answer to that is we're all flawed. No parent is able to meet all of your emotional needs. If you think of your self-esteem as a protective barrier, even the most well-adjusted person will have some holes in the barrier, holes that allow negative influences to slip through and do damage. But if you start out with a strong barrier without a lot of holes, the damage is minimal and you're able to regroup and recover. That's part of resilience, recovering from adversity. In the relationship example, the person with low self-esteem has a lot of holes in their barrier and stays in the toxic relationship that affirms their negative beliefs about themselves. What keeps you stuck in these negative beliefs about yourself? The beliefs are perpetuated by rules you develop to avoid facing the negative feelings. Some examples are, "I must please people to avoid criticism. It's better not to try than to get it wrong or fail. I must not speak up or express my opinion or people will reject me." These are some of the signs that I mentioned earlier. These rules that you set up for yourself are also called safety behaviors. They are the things that you do that keep you from activating your negative core beliefs. Here's an example of this. If you don't offer to do something, you won't get blamed if it goes wrong. But if you break the rule of not acting and volunteer to do something for someone and it does go wrong, you get tormented with these thoughts of, "See, I can't do anything right. I'm an idiot. What was I thinking?" These harsh self-critical thoughts complete the cycle of reinforcing your negative beliefs and perpetuating your low self-esteem. What can you do to improve your self-esteem? Four things. First, identify your core beliefs. Typical negative beliefs are, "I'm not good enough. I'm not important. I'm unacceptable. I'm defective. I'm unlovable." Keep in mind, these may not be things you've ever said aloud, but your behavior, the decisions you make, the things you avoid, those are the things that tell the real story of what you believe. So your actions are based on these beliefs. Next, you want to identify your safety behaviors that help you avoid facing these beliefs. Go back to the things that I mentioned earlier, like people-pleasing, being perfectionistic, not speaking up, not having any ambition. The third step is to face your fears by breaking your rules or dropping the safety behaviors. This gives you a chance to test your negative predictions. If you avoid expressing your opinion because you predict that the person will reject you, test that out by giving your opposing view and see what happens. You may be surprised to see that you're not rejected, but instead you spark a spirited conversation that would otherwise have been one-sided. People may find you more interesting, but if someone disagrees with you, a disagreement isn't a rejection. By taking this risk of speaking up, you get to learn that you can indeed handle someone disagreeing with you. Then the fourth step is to replace your self-criticism with self-compassion. Let's say with the previous example of speaking up and giving an opposing opinion that the person that you're talking to doesn't like your opinion and argues back. Instead of being harsh with yourself for starting an argument, give yourself praise for asserting your opinion. You're not responsible for other people's behavior. If they can't handle an opposing viewpoint, it's a negative reflection on them and not you. You might say, "But that just means that I'm not good with people if I make them mad all the time." No one is good with someone who lashes out when someone disagrees with them. No one enjoys that. So recognizing that you're not alone in your reaction to feeling bad when someone insults you takes the focus off you and allows you to feel like your experience is common and not the result of a personal defect. That's one way to adjust your thoughts to make them kinder and less self-critical. If you find that you have a harsh inner critical voice, take a look at these two videos on silencing your inner critic.