Do You Feel Like You’re Just Not Okay With Who You Are?

If you’re dealing with low self-esteem, you might find yourself doing everything possible to avoid feeling inadequate. Maybe you apologize excessively and go out of your way to please others. Perhaps you have trouble saying no and maintaining healthy boundaries—you’re too concerned with making sure other people are happy to worry about yourself.

Your low self-esteem may come from deep-rooted negative beliefs like: I’m not good enough. I’m not smart enough. I’m not pretty enough. These beliefs may be so strong that even when people say nice things about you, you don’t believe them. You dismiss their comments and assume they’re just being nice or dishonest. Deep down, you just don’t feel okay with who you are.

With Low Self-Esteem, Your View Of Yourself May Change Based On Your Circumstances

The hallmark of low self-esteem is a sense of self-worth that’s dependent on how other people interact with you. When you don’t feel good about yourself inside, it’s only natural to define yourself based on what happens outside. For instance, when you receive love and affirmation, you might have fleeting moments of joy. But as soon as disappointment strikes—a criticism, harsh word, or rejection–you fall back into negative self-beliefs and your confidence disappears.

After a while, you may find yourself avoiding any situation that could risk making you feel worse about yourself—refusing to speak your mind, declining invitations to social events, etc. This kind of life may feel comfortable for a time, but it can get lonely fast.

Most Of Us Have Internalized Negative Beliefs About Ourselves

Few people are able to escape childhood without internalizing negative beliefs about themselves. Oftentimes, this is true even if your parents weren’t abusive and your childhood wasn’t all that bad. Maybe your parents were relatively kind but they had unusually high expectations for you. Or perhaps you had a sibling who followed their rules better than you did. Experiences like these could make you see yourself in a negative light.

Although the seeds of low self-esteem are often sown in childhood, they are usually reinforced as we get older. In today’s world, pressures to perform run at an all-time high—pressures to excel academically, vocationally, socially, morally. What’s more, we have a natural tendency to compare ourselves to others. And in the final assessment, we often end up with a self-appraisal that falls short of our assessment of others.

A lot of times, however, it isn’t entirely clear where low self-esteem comes from. It usually has its roots in memories and beliefs that are unprocessed or lie outside of conscious awareness. In therapy, you have the opportunity to dig deep, get to the root of your low self-esteem, and improve your sense of confidence, and self worth in the process.

Self-Esteem Therapy Can Help You Learn To Love Yourself From Within

Low self-esteem can make you afraid to open up and express yourself. It may have taught you to hide certain parts of yourself that you didn’t like. Therapy provides a safe space to share your vulnerabilities without any fear of criticism or judgment. It gives you a chance to find unconditional acceptance and learn new interventions for improving your self-concept.

Together, you and I will explore the emotional wounds that led to your low self-esteem and focus on healing them. We will work to change any negative core beliefs so that you can improve your confidence and fully love and accept who you are. Our goal will be for you to walk away with a more positive and empowered view of yourself.

What To Expect In Self-Esteem Therapy

Oftentimes, the first step of counseling is looking at the events in your life that contributed to the development of low self-esteem. Together, we’ll explore how early relationships in your life may have led you to feel unworthy or unlovable. The goal is to uncover your negative core beliefs and understand how those ideas influence the way you feel.

Additionally, we may focus on the strategies you employ to avoid feeling bad about yourself. Perhaps you tend to people-please excessively. Or maybe you resort to substance use and other mood-altering behaviors to cope with low self-esteem. Counseling can help you experience a deeper internalization of self-love, allowing you to feel more worthy and empowering you to be authentically you in your relationships.

Tailoring Your Treatment Plan

My practice uses a wide array of research-driven healing methods for treating low self-esteem. I am well-versed in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a mindfulness-based approach that promotes accepting the present moment and putting distance between you and your thoughts. Instead of identifying with negative thoughts, ACT will teach you to question them and recognize that they do not define you.

I also use EMDR, which is a more trauma-focused approach to self-esteem therapy. The goal of EMDR is to help you process the emotional memories responsible for your negative core beliefs. The other approach I draw from is IFS. We are all made up of many different “parts.” IFS can help you understand the function of these parts and heal the ones that are wounded. For instance, maybe there is a part of you that was injured by a past relationship, so you learn to excessively people-please in order to avoid rejection and criticism. IFS can help you make peace with your parts and heal the emotional wounds that your parts are protecting.

With increased self-awareness and more effective coping skills, I believe that you can heal from hurtful events, discover your uniqueness, and learn to love yourself from within. Counseling can help you develop a sense of confidence and self-love that is based on your own internal worth instead of relying on the interactions of others to make you feel worthy and lovable.

I have always felt this way and I don’t think that I’ll ever feel differently.

It’s normal to think that change is impossible. But it’s important to remember that the way you feel stems from experiences in your life. Healing the emotional pain that those experiences caused paves the way for change and makes it possible to feel differently. In therapy, you and I will explore why you internalized feelings of low self-worth and use that knowledge to help you improve your view of yourself. In this way, self-awareness is liberating and opens the door to increased options and healthier choices.

I’m not sure that I really deserve love and acceptance.

No matter what your low self-esteem tries to tell you, you are worthy of love and acceptance. Feeling unworthy stems from deeply-held beliefs that you internalized when you were too young to discern or challenge the messages you were internalizing. With skilled interventions, you can make sense of those beliefs, heal the painful memories that created them, and develop an entirely new relationship with yourself—a relationship characterized by self-love and self-compassion. Gradually, you can genuinely begin to feel worthy and loveable again.

I wouldn’t have low self-esteem if my circumstances were better.

Circumstances can certainly impact how you see your yourself and your place in the world. We all tend to look at events through the lenses of our collective experiences. When we see ourselves as less than worthy, we avoid making decisions that are healthy and positive because we do not feel deserving of good things. For instance, we might put up with a bad relationship or consistently deny what’s important to us and choose to people-please instead. Improving our self-esteem can help us become more assertive, establish healthier boundaries, and increase feelings of self-love and self-worth.