The term self-esteem is a broad construct. When we explore a person’s self-esteem we measure, in general the positive regard that they hold for themselves, including the acceptance of one’s weaknesses, one’s strengths and a perception of your equality to others.
Individuals that have positive, not over inflated, self-esteem are more compassionate to others, able to forgive their own mistakes, hold themselves more accountable, and set realistic goals. External circumstances do not define their value. In general, they know what they are worth.
In counselling when we see a person with poor self-esteem, we have a lot of work ahead of us. We need to determine the genesis of our client’s self-esteem before we work on creating a customised intervention to improve their self-esteem.
The creation of your self-esteem can be shaped by your thinking style, the messages you received as a child from your family, your current acceptance of how you look, achievements and disappointments in your life, messages received from friends and within romantic relationships, the information that you feed yourself on a daily basis (eg social media) and the challenges that you have been tasked to overcome so far in your life. . Helping clients identify the drivers of their self-concept is interesting, and complex work.
Take a moment to consider your self-esteem. How would you rate your current self-esteem? Positive? Weak? Inflated? You can consider an online assessment to gain a snapshot of your self-esteem. A simple assessment can be gained via the following link from the anxiety centre website. Take the test. How did you do?
If your self esteem was positive, well done. You can read on to ensure that you maintain a robust, reflective self- esteem. If the assessment indicated that your self-esteem was weak, could you consider the following reflections and exercises to help you rebuild a positive self- esteem.
The genesis of our self-esteem.
Think about how you were raised, how your family spoke to you, or treated you as a child. Did you feel accepted? Did you readily receive love from your parents? Do you feel you had to perform tasks, or hide parts of yourself, in order for you to feel accepted by your parents? Was your home as safe place for your, or rather a source of fear or chaos? All of those elements will influence the value you give yourself. It is not surprising that children who believe they needed to perform extremely well in tests at school encounter emotional difficulty accepting career development setbacks as adults. These individual’s “value” is attached to achievement rather than self-acceptance.
The teen years seem to have a strong impact on that adult’s later self-esteem. Success in friendships can help bolster ones’ self-concept. The experience of bullying, teasing or exclusion seem to leave long term scars on ones’ perception of self-worth. “How can I be valuable as a person, if people chose to treat me so badly?”. When our teens encounter such experiences, it is extremely valuable to help them talk out such experiences, potentially with a counsellor if you lack the confidence to manage this empathetically.
An interesting source of nutrients, and toxins, to our self-esteem is the consumption of social media. If one explores the values endorsed by Instagram, women are exposed to a plethora of contradictory positions – have a juicy ass and no butt at all; in order to be valued you should have a boyfriend; but be also be completely ok being single, you should be confident and willing to speak up, but be polite and make people comfortable; be ambitious about your career but also be willing to prioritise the need for rest and time out. Perfection on the internet is not only impossible, it’s insane.
A large component of your self-esteem is attached to how you process the world, and if you are strongly influenced by thinking filters.
How your thoughts influence your self-esteem
It is possible to change your thoughts. A famous psychologist, Albert Ellis, identified a plethora of irrational beliefs that we develop as part of the way we are raised, see the world, and believe in ourselves and other people. These beliefs are like a pair of glasses, which can interfere with the way that we see situations. When we see a situation though faulty filters the result can be self-hatred and diminished self-worth
You can help yourself and remove your faulty filters by creating a constructive dispute with yourself, or even have a counsellor lead this discussion for you. The dialogue will depend on the filters that you use most frequently. Experiencing faulty filters is quite common, if you discover you have been experiencing faulty filters, you can change the view.
Black-and-white-thinking.
This type of thinking occurs when you look at situations in a polarized way – situations, people, activities are either good or bad, nothing in between. Most situations are neither complete disaster or beyond fantastic, often situation have both good and bad aspects. Most people have some attributes that you find challenging, but this doesn’t make these people totally bad or good.
Black and white thinking. When people wear black-and-white-thinking filters they can respond in an inflexible way to challenges – “I didn’t get an A in that test and now my future is ruined “or “I submitted that assignment but I made an error in the first paragraph so the whole article is now rubbish”.
In particular people who have black-and-white-thinking in relation to people find themselves being particularly judgmental towards themselves – seeing themselves as either a winner or a loser in a situation. This can erode their resilience. Every setback can become a tragedy, rather than a minor bump in the road of life.
Shoulding or Musting expectations.
It is irrational to believe that most things are absolutely necessary. Believing that acts should be performed in a particular way, at a specific time, or in an exact order, creates a tyranny of should – a condition where you live life dictated by a list of thoughts which are not really rational.
Whilst everyone has lots of things that they should (or could) be doing, some beliefs are irrational in their detail and in their believed consequences. For example, if everything needs to be perfect, this creates a lot of pressure on a person to perform a task to a (sometimes) unrealistic standard. Believing that you need to be the perfect student, parent, worker, lover, or be in control of all events in your life, be slim and attractive at all times, always be interesting, always have a friction free family – is unrealistic and unrelenting on your self-esteem.
You may start to doubt yourself: feeling like a failure because you can not maintain your own (self-imposed) impossible standards,
You may lose the confidence to start new tasks (procrastination) – too frozen in fear to start a project without already being an expert, or knowing you will be perfect at it.
Jumping to negative conclusions.
We all have the tendency to occasionally jump to conclusions and this may influence our self-esteem. We may assume that someone deliberately performed an activity that hurt our feelings, or event assume and intent to their inaction (e.g. they don’t like me). In these situations, limited information or evidence can be used to support negative conclusions. This may be the case when we fail to get success at work, thinking that others are not supportive, when they are sometimes just too busy or not focused on our priority.
This type of faulty filter can lead to inaccuracies regarding our perception of people and situations. If we attribute our self-worth to the perceived view that we believe that others hold of us, our self-esteem can be impacted.
Overgeneralizing.
Overgeneralizing is a special type of jumping to thinking that involves jumping to conclusions – both negative and positive. Overgeneralizing is often reflected in our language choices – we use extreme frequency terms to describe behaviours – “they ALWAYS forget”, “Things NEVER go right for me in love relationships, EVERYBODY is happy except for me”. “Now that I am separated, ALL my married friends won’t want to see me”. Occasionally we may even do this after a single instance – one rejection letter leading to the assumption “I will never get a job”.
This type of faulty filter can impact our self-worth, especially if we attribute our perception of self to the beliefs, real or otherwise, we believe others have of us.
Personalising.
When we personalise we feel responsible for events or situations that are not our fault, or we assume that those events are our fault. It can lead to us feeling offended when it isn’t necessary. If a friend ignores your text may not mean that you’ve offended them, instead it may mean they are busy. They may not be trying to offend us, or even be having an emotional reaction to something we have done.
Personalization can be a symptom of co-dependency in relationships. I once had a grumpy boss, and many of us who reported to him walked around on eggshells, torturing ourselves over what we had done wrong to upset him. Rather than wasting valuable energy on this worry, it might have been more constructive to let him have his time being grumpy (after all his emotions are his responsibility) and get on with the work that needed to be done.
If you have performed an act, either selfishly or unwittingly, where another person was hurt. You can take responsibility for your role in a situation, and apologize or try to make amends, but leave it to that situation. Whilst we can take responsibility for our own behaviour and thoughts, we do not need to take responsibility for the choices of others. Our own behaviour determines our worth, not the emotional responses of others.
Filtering
People with poor self-esteem often filter information in a way that maintains their poor self-esteem. Imagine you are in a group of people and each is providing feedback on your work. Nine of the 10 people say you did a wonderful job. One person says they thought your contribution wasn’t as good as they needed from you on that occasion. Which do you remember – the 9 positive remarks, or the one negative. That is filtering.
Filtering becomes a threat to our self -esteem if you use this faulty thinking style frequently. In the era of the internet where people can feel more willing to troll other people and say horrible things online, selecting what you choose to believe and reinforce as regards your sense of self, is extremely important. This is especially true for teens who use internet vehicles to test reactions to their world views – and perhaps do not yet have the resilience to rebuff negative feedback.
Comparing
Comparing is such an influential thinking filter on our self-esteem that I have included a full blog on this topic.
COMPARISON: a one-way ticket to Misery
It is common to consider our own attractiveness, status, success, and personal worth relative to others. Comparing oneself constantly can become quite negative, especially when we assume elements about the other person and ourselves. For example, thinking a person who gets a better pay rise than you is an overall better person than you is not only unrealistic, it is unproductive.
Labelling.
We all make mistakes or act foolishly sometimes. When we label ourselves, rather than placing the label onto our behaviour, we diminish our self-worth. For example, if you made a mistake on a report you could say, “I made a mistake”, or you could label “I’m so stupid”. The latter response does nothing for your self-esteem. Acknowledge mistakes and bad choices as part of life, that can be forgiven.
It is also illogical to label others, on the basis of one inference or observation. One fight with a colleague does not make her a “bitch”. When we label others, we not only diminish them, we provide rationalization for further retaliation, “its okay to do xyz, because she is a bitch”. This is clearly not rational, and can often become prejudicial. Believing in these labels can erode our self-worth, as well as our regard for other people.
In counselling we work to help our clients capture, explore and refute these thoughts. When we start to let go of these thought patterns it is likely we will be able to release ourselves from negative self-talk that impacts our self-esteem.
In the attached blog I provide advice how you can change the channel on some of these thought patterns. Please consider to engage in these reflections and exercises.
If you feelings of low self-worth persist please consider to work with a mental health professional such as you will find at RED DOOR. #selfesteem #catastrophising #commonthinkingerrors #faultythinking #blackandwhitethinking #comparison
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