Note: This article was originally published in the Spring 2005 edition of MeadowLark, the magazine for The Meadows alumni.

By Kingsley Gallup, MA, LISAC

The concept may be nebulous, but it’s by no means inconsequential. Our very lives are a testimony to our self-esteem, the condition of which is the distinguishing difference between surviving and thriving. Consider the following questions:

• Do you live by the philosophy, “If I can’t do it perfectly, then why do it at all”?
• Are you carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders?
• Do you bend over backward to please others?
• Is it hard for you to forgive yourself?
• Is self-care selfish?
• Do you “shapeshift” to fit your particular setting?
• Do you go one up or one down?
• Are compliments hard to handle?
• When someone says “I love you,” do you silently wonder, “What’s wrong with them?” Maybe even, “I’m not sure I want to be with the kind of person who would want me.”
• What’s the state of your self-esteem issues? 
• How miserable are you making yourself?

There comes a time when we’re faced with our human frailty for each of us. In these moments, we’re confronted with our state. We discover how we think and feel about ourselves. We may find that we have simply been operating in survival mode, having mastered various techniques for disguising our self-loathing. The good news is to make a change. We need not look far. The answers to our self-esteem issues lie within.

What Is Self-Esteem?

Pia Mellody has defined self-esteem as the internal experience of one’s preciousness in the face of one’s human frailty. It’s a total reality experience, and it comes from embracing the concept of inherent self-worth and applying it to self.

Consider what is self-esteem? Keep in mind that the absence of self-love can be masterfully disguised.

Genuine self-esteem is not about adaptations. It’s not about measurement, comparison, or “should-ing” and shaming ourselves. Self-esteem is neither other esteem (the esteem others have for us) nor reality-based esteem (esteem that comes from comparing our reality to another person’s reality to determine how we measure up). Self-esteem neither goes one up nor one down, and it can’t be acquired externally.

The kicker is that external esteem seekers tend to gravitate toward those from whom acceptance and love can’t easily be found. We flee from those who want us and pursue the rejecters. Perhaps we learned external esteem seeking early on. Maybe it was how we learned to garner worth and value. It failed us then, and it fails us today.

On the other hand, genuine self-esteem cuts beneath externals to inherent worth and value. It’s constant, rather than situational; enduring, rather than fleeting. It’s mature and unconditional love, and yes, it truly is an inside job.

Factors that Affect Self-Esteem

Many factors can affect self-esteem, including:

• Age
• Disability 
• Genetics
• Illness
• Physical abilities 
• Socioeconomic status
• Thought patterns 

Racism, discrimination, and genetic factors that shape an individual’s personality have also proven to affect a person’s self-esteem negatively. However, life experiences are the most important contributing factor. 

Causes of Low Self-Esteem

There’s a connection between self-esteem and mental health with many people developing anxiety and depressive disorders from low self-esteem. This can seriously impact your quality of life and increase the risk of suicidal thoughts. It can also make it challenging to pursue your goals and maintain healthy relationships. Some causes of low esteem include:

• Believing that other people are better than you
• Expressing your needs is difficult
• Constantly focusing on your weaknesses
• Frequently experiencing fear, self-doubt, and worry
• A negative outlook on life or a feeling of lack of control
• Intense fear of failure
• Trouble accepting positive feedback
• Difficulty saying no and setting boundaries 
• Putting other people’s needs before your own
• Struggling with confidence

Why Is Self-Esteem Important?

The psychology of self-esteem proves that higher self-esteem leads to positive mental health and overall well-being. It helps you let go of feelings of blame, self-doubt, hopelessness, and parts of yourself that you’re not happy with. It also enables you to develop coping skills, handle adversity and put negative thoughts in perspective. As a result, you can cope better with stress, anxiety, and other external pressures. 

A person with high self-esteem is more likely to evaluate what parts of themselves or their lives they can change instead of focusing on feelings of failure or hopelessness. Conversely, someone with low self-esteem gets caught up in negative feelings about themself. Research shows that feeling positive and respectful towards yourself during childhood helps you adapt to different challenges in adulthood. 

Recovering from Low Self-Esteem

Breaking the shackles of our histories and reclaiming our preciousness hinges on the internal work of shame reduction. Much like faith and fear, shame and self-esteem are also opposing forces: more of one, the less of the other. It’s a shame that toxic carryover from our histories that cripples us. Letting go of this shame is an act of self-love. It’s motivated by an awareness of the truth of who we are — inherently precious, worthy, and valuable.

Building self-esteem hinges on exposing our harsh inner critic — you know, that critic who, without our awareness, shames us, blames us when things go wrong, and calls it simple “luck” when things go well. That inner critic is dishonest. It exaggerates our failures; it calls us names; it records all past mistakes and transgressions. Sadly, this critical voice may be so familiar we hardly notice its destructiveness.

Recovery is about coming to our assistance. We match our healing steps to our unique histories, giving ourselves today what we didn’t get then. If we were falsely empowered as children, says Pia Mellody, we need first and foremost to base our sense of self-esteem on the concept of inherent worth. We stop controlling, manipulating, and caretaking others, focusing instead on self-care and interdependence. Self-care is not selfish. It’s not a character flaw to ask for help. We learn to love ourselves in the face of our humanity — as human beings rather than doing.

Developing High Self-Esteem

If we are disempowered early on, we also need to develop self-esteem from the concept of inherent worth. We learn to use boundaries accompanied by an attitude of moderation to start living in action rather than reaction. We take responsibility for our issues of self-care.

All of this involves stepping out of our comfort zone. It entails thinking our way into feeling and behaving and behaving our way into thinking and feeling. It’s the “act as if” principle. We say goodbye to our adaptations — the coping mechanisms that perhaps helped us survive less than nurturing histories. We find gratitude for our insights and, in so doing, become liberated from resentment. We learn to change the one person we can change. After all, if we want something we’ve never had before, we’ve got to do something we’ve never done before!” (Drina Reed) In this spirit, here are some thoughts for developing self-esteem:

• Do an accurate self-assessment. List positive and negative traits. Then, clean up the negative statements by making the statements factual, not judgmental. Remember, self-esteem is based on an accurate self-assessment. List important positive traits, and repeat them frequently with feelings.
• Accept the things you cannot change. Don’t confuse an unchangeable cause with an immutable characteristic.
• Become a change agent, a self-helper. Attend to your wants and needs, identifying and respecting what fulfills you.
• Make your first responsibility yourself. Self-care isn’t selfish.
• Identify the internal critic inside you. Write about it. What messages bring you mental misery?
• Use affirmations to challenge negative cognitions. Tailor them to counteract individual self-defeating cognitions.
• Confront the internal critic. Your inner critic is dishonest and exaggerates your failures. We must expose our harsh inner critics to address our lack of self-confidence and understand our worthy and valuable selves.
• Eliminate shame-based self-talk. It drains and discourages. It distracts us from identifying and fulfilling our needs, abilities, interests, and goals.
• Watch out for victim language. People and events don’t cause feelings. They simply trigger mental habits.
• Adopt responsibility language. Instead of “I can’t,” “I should,” or “I’ll try,” use “I can,” I will,” or “I choose to.” As Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can or can’t, you’re right.”
• Set achievable goals. Seek out situations in which the probability of success is high, places where you’ll stretch but not overwhelm.
• Be proud of who you are. Don’t try to be someone else. Rely on your opinion of you, for that’s the one that matters.
• Be patient. Our self-concept reflects years of experience and self-evaluation. Seeds were planted in our subconscious long before we had a say. Debunking the internal critic is a daily practice.

The Journey of Healthy Self-Esteem

Today, we have a choice. We can drape ourselves in the cloak of self-love. We can let go of the old to grab onto the new, remembering that recovery isn’t changing who we are but rather letting go of who we’re not! (Claudia Black) We can choose to no longer accept the lies we learned about who we were, embracing instead the beauty of who we are — perhaps for the first time.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past. As such, the best redemption is recovery. We can embrace the pain of the past and burn it as fuel for our journey. We may not have had a choice early on, but today we do.

This is mind, body, and spirit work, the fruits of which are nothing short of freedom, authenticity, and acceptance of self and others. How liberating for those who have long played to an audience, denying the truth of who we were to come to love ourselves — not despite our humanity, but because of it!

The journey of healthy self-esteem is a homecoming of sorts. It’s coming home to self — to a place we have always known and to a place that we’ve never known. It’s both liberating and daunting, familiar and foreign. It’s the essence of authenticity and the ultimate soul work. Pretty soon, our hearts become strangely warmed. We’ve arrived home at last.