Core Issues Of Self Esteem

If you wish to improve the level of your self-esteem, these are the areas of your life and your reality you will want to look at.

This list is presented to demonstrate that self-esteem is a reality far more complicated than we usually assume and that changing our self-esteem is not just a matter of saying the right things to ourselves or adopting a positive attitude. It is also presented as a guide that says, “Look in this place,” and if that doesn’t seem right, there are these other places to look.

These are the things that primarily affect our self-esteem. These are the things that we need to address if we are going to improve our low self-esteem. They are not quite causes, but they are what I call the core issues involved. They are simultaneously common characteristics of people with low self-esteem and the causes of that low esteem. The conflicts these issues represent require resolution and the level of our self-esteem depends on how these issues are resolved.

1. Addictions and Compulsive Behaviors Whether the addiction is to a substance or a process, it’s all the same, and serving the same purpose. Addictions attack self-esteem because our behavior is out of control. It is unlikely we can significantly improve our low self-esteem if we’re still caught in the grip of a heavy-duty addiction. However, working on your self-esteem can help you in recovering from such an addiction. And it is that which provides hope and optimism for recovery. Self-esteem work can also help carry us beyond recovery, can help with work on cross or multiple addictions. It is also possible that low self-esteem was the reality that generated an addictive dependency in the first place.

2. Denial and Minimizing The best possible defense is refusal to admit that self-esteem is an issue or a problem. Before our self-esteem can be raised, we have to at least consider the possibility that it’s not as high as we’d like or that it’s a problem for us. Given the culture we live in, that should be nothing to be uncomfortable about –we have lots and lots of company. The second best defense is to claim you had a wonderful, healthy family. It’s really okay — people from the best of families get hurt or may not have their needs fulfilled. Few of us are perfect parents or perfect people; few of us grew up with perfect parents or perfect people. I will keep insisting that this is not about blaming anyone, this process is not about finding villains but finding ways to feel better.

3. Reasonable Craziness We were all, to one degree or another, taught to be “reasonably crazy.” That is to say, taught to be out of touch with our own reality in order to fit into the reality of this family, this society, this culture. We learn not to laugh too loud or cry too hard. Almost everything we have learned about love, money, power, sex, relationships is skewed in one form or another. Men don’t talk about feelings; women don’t assert themselves or confront — all learned distortions. Do you say what you mean, clearly and cleanly, most of the time? Do you know what you’re feeling? Can you talk about what you’re feeling?

4. Isolation People with low self-esteem often feel they are absolutely alone in the universe — that no one cares and that they really don’t matter. As a consequence, they have to do everything alone, in an emotional, personal, spiritual vacuum. Help is not available or possible for them. We are disconnected from ourselves, and we are also disconnected from other people, the community of humankind and even the spiritual dimension of our own existence, from the power in the universe most of us call God. A great deal of that isolation and loneliness is self-imposed — it is self-created and self-maintained and it can be broken. We can re-connect, to ourselves, others, the universe, and to our own spirituality.

5. Fear and Fears: Abandonment We are frequently terrorized by fear, or panic, or anxiety and so it is the prime motivator of our behavior. Sometimes we act not in order to do something which is healthy for us but to find something that will make us stop feeling so bad. We need an education about fear and our fears.

The most basic human fear is fear of being abandoned, and often, our primary fear is the fear of abandonment. The first dictionary definition of abandonment is to “leave or forsake completely and finally.” Listen to that: “completely and finally.” Being abandoned is terrifying, especially when we are a child who cannot protect ourselves. We’ll explore this much further, but if we have been or feel we have been abandoned, either literally, or figuratively, or emotionally, or mentally, or spiritually, we will respond by devoting most of our energy to protecting ourselves against that ever happening again. Codependency behaviors and attitudes are rooted in the fear of abandonment. The primary defenses against abandonment are various codependent behaviors, like trying to psych everybody out, trying to control them, and getting heavily attached to another person so that our welfare is in fact dependent on whether they are happy or sad.

6. Control We try to control our thoughts, feelings, our behavior, our environment, other people’s behavior, and events. Control seems to be the major defense against an unsafe world. It is, needless to say, an illusion, because we cannot control a great deal of what happens. What’s worse, very often what we try to control winds up controlling us. Yet the need to control is felt as an imperative, a necessity in order to be safe. It is also a fear of being “out of control” ourselves. A sense that if we let go of our control, the whole universe will fall apart. We become, as a result, hyper-vigilant, tense and totally focused on what’s going on outside of us so that we lose sight of ourselves. The attempt at control is also a form of denial of our essential vulnerability. It is also a form of denial because it is an illusion: we cannot control other people.

7. Distrust vs. Trust and Faith If our world is unsafe, if other people are not reliable, it is very difficult to trust. People with low self-esteem often have a high level of distrust. We don’t trust ourselves, we don’t trust the information we have or get, we don’t trust other people to be straight, honest, or there for us. This distrust is one of the major factors in creating our isolation. Yet trust is the key to our recovery and healing. If we can begin to trust, we can begin to detach from our compulsive grabbing on, to things or people, in order to get to be okay. Distrust is learned, and so it can be unlearned and changed.

8. Losses Losses are the great common denominator. No matter who we are, we have losses. Since we can’t prevent them, we can learn how to deal with them. However, in this society, we learn to get stuff but not to lose it. We may try holding our breath so we won’t have any losses in life, but since they come anyway, the issue becomes how we experience losses, and how we deal with them. As one of my students wrote in her notes: “Losses can be handled with grace and power, or we can be absolutely defeated by them.” Do we participate in our grief process and heal, or do we learn to be disillusioned, disappointed, and full of pain and suffering?

9. Family and Family Roles We may not have the slightest real idea of what our family was like if we are in full-fledged denial. In that case, we don’t know what’s really going on with us. We need to be able to look back with clear eyes and clear mind to find out what our family issues were and how we came to adopt the survival strategies we did.

10. Shame Shame is the harvest of our dysfunctional systems: culture, society, family. It is a feeling of being basically flawed, so it has been called a “being wound.”(1) John Bradshaw calls it “a hole in the cup of our soul,” and he argues that shame is the root cause of all addictive/compulsive behaviors. Given the numbers we have about such behaviors in our society & mash; 50 million incest victims, 75 million people affected by alcoholism, 15 million violent families, 60% of women and 50% of men with eating disorders, not to mention sex, relationship and work addictions, he says, “…we have a massive problem of shame in our society.”(2) Shame results from broken interpersonal bridges and the loss of honesty and trust between people. You have seen it, experienced, felt it: the bridge of connection between people is broken all the time; the issue is whether or not the breaks get repaired and the connection is restored. If they aren’t, we remain critically deficient, and we feel that way.

11. Disordered Feelings When what we experience is pain, we disassociate ourselves from the experience so that we won’t feel the pain. We psychically remove ourselves from our bodies so that we cannot feel. Feelings have components of sensation, interpretation, and expression. Feelings also have structure. We can get involved in short-circuits or substitutions. For instance, in men, the need for tenderness or cuddling may be short-circuited into a feeling of needing sex, since cuddling is frequently not a permissible desire for a man. Women may short-circuit anger or rage into tears so quickly the anger cannot be and is not experienced. In our culture, some feelings are male, some female, some are tough, some are tender. We are entitled to them all, whoever we are, and we are entitled to feel them, know them, experience them, and express them.

12. Collective Responsibility People with low self-esteem tend to take collective responsibility — responsibility for everything — far beyond the limits of their contribution or control. We apologize for things we haven’t done. We feel guilty because people who are close to us are unhappy or depressed or sad. Frequently, we have learned to feel this way in our families by having been blamed for things we did not do, like make someone angry. “Now look what you’ve done!”

There is an amazing ego arrogance in this situation — the universe does not truly revolve around us and we are not the cause of everything. But if we have been made to feel that everything is our fault, including the way other people feel, we are stuck with being held accountable for things we didn’t do and we’re not responsible for.

13. Crisis Lifestyle We are habituated to “crisis drama” as the normal way to live. We may even be addicted to the adrenaline rush that happens when we’re frightened or challenged. Once this style is accepted, we become uncomfortable with calm and peace, and we may find ourselves stirring things up all that terrifying peace and quiet with one crisis or another.

14. Disowned Inner Child In the process of our growing up, we disowned huge portions of ourselves and those realities are described as our inner child, who is dirty, smelly, rude, obnoxious, inspired, playful, creative, and powerful, and who can, as one student put it, “knock us on our butts with her power.” We are often afraid of that so-called inner child because we don’t know him or her, and because we know that child is really upset about being locked up and we’re afraid of that anger and the power. So part of us belongs to us, and part of us doesn’t. We have put away a central part of us essential to feeling whole and sane. There is a lot of energy there, and we have to keep it controlled. And we frequently use a lot of our daily energy to suppress the parts of us that we have alienated. We carry around that energy constrained and held back.

In addition, there is all the bad stuff that scares us — our impulse to violence or lust, the bad thoughts, bad feelings, all those things we learned were unacceptable –attached to that inner child. Talk about abandoned and rejected! It’s as if we are walking around seriously off-center. We need to reclaim and own that part of us again and claim our power, it is our divine right.

15. Authenticity/Identity To survive, many of us created a false self, and in so doing, we abandoned our inner child. But then the question becomes: Who are we? And how can we know? We can examine our False Self and begin to reclaim our Real Self. We can begin to see we turned the world upside down, making the abnormal normal. If you grow up having to hit yourself over the head with a hammer for ten minutes every day, not hitting yourself with a hammer every day will feel abnormal and doing it will feel right. We can look at the issue of achieving separation, our separate, individual identity, and we can learn there is a serious and genuine difference between our Ego and our Self which we can know. We can, in other words, chose to be a person.

16. Our Rights and Needs We can learn the difference between my problem and your problem, my feelings and your feelings. We can create and maintain healthy boundaries and overcome the enmeshment with other people that we have experienced. Our personal needs got buried, and may now be lost, unknown, and unfamiliar. We can give up guilt, and we can give up compound guilt (what I call “guilt on guilt,”) which is the guilt we feel because we have felt guilty. (“Oh, God, I shouldn’t be feeling this way.”) We don’t have to feel guilty because we don’t feel good or aren’t bouncing off the wall with happiness. We can recognize that to need something may make us vulnerable to not getting it, but we are vulnerable in any case and that hiding our needs does not make them go away. We can recognize that communicating our needs to others can give them a weapon to use against us, but that if we don’t express our needs, there’s no chance at all — zip — they will be fulfilled. We can, in other words, refuse to accept being addicted or compulsive or codependent.

17. Thought Disorders People with low self-esteem get involved in magical thinking which has nothing to do with reality, like “If I love someone hard enough, they’ll never leave me.” Our thoughts are so controlled by our needs that we don’t think, can’t think clearly at all. We are so invested in a False self we can’t be honest. Many of us have a ruthless Inner Critic who just beats the hell out of us most of the time. We slip into grandiosity in both directions: “Everybody loves me. Everybody hates me.” Either/or, black and white thinking is what that’s called. We also compulsively worry or obsess about things, as if this kind of self-torture will make things okay. Thus the AA Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

18. Conflict Resolution People from dysfunctional families are generally not permitted to have conflicts, or other differences or disagreements. They are also not allowed to have needs that are different from the family’s, and so conflict is not permitted. Since we can’t have conflict, we never get a chance to learn how to resolve conflicts. It is important to get past the denial that says, “I agree with everything you say/do.” We can learn it is okay to be threatened by disagreements or another’s anger and it’s also okay to fight. When people don’t know how to resolve conflicts and they get into a fight, their very survival is on the line, and their instinct is to defend and also to attack to the death — to hurt as badly as possible in order to win. It’s important to learn how to fight fair, so that fighting becomes a problem-solving tool in your relationships rather than an all-out war that blows everything up. It is possible to get to a place where we can recognize differences, where we can allow differences, where we can settle differences, even if it means we agree to disagree.

19. The Most Basic Choice Einstein’s genius notwithstanding, I do not think that the most important question for a human being is whether or not the universe is friendly. I think the most important question is whether or not I am going to choose to live or die. We think survival is a biological imperative, and it is, but there are many ways to live, and there are many ways to die, not all of which terminate the biological organism. There are essentially four different choices around this question, and only one of them really works. But people with low self-esteem, people who are addicted or compulsive are working toward lifelessness.

20. Forgiving Forgiveness is necessary in two directions: toward oneself for not being who we sometimes wish we were, and toward others for having injured us. Sometimes we are so hurt, so injured, the idea of forgiving is mind-boggling, as if the universe would tremble if we did. But forgiveness is the first step toward love, which we say we want, and it is really and simply only the releasing of resentment. Forgiveness doesn’t wipe the slate clean as if all that bad stuff didn’t happen; it merely says we’re not going to carry around the resentment about it anymore. It is in fact possible to forgive, no matter what you may think at the moment, and it will be your choice. It is also something we do for ourselves, not the other person.

21. Relationships and Intimacy If we don’t have a very good relationship with ourselves, it is not likely we’ll be able to develop a good one with anyone else. Intimacy demands that we not only stand close to someone but that we be close to them, not only that we know ourselves but that we are in ourselves. Intimacy is about both giving love and receiving it, and true intimacy is not possible without both. There are a lot of love-givers, but not quite so many love-takers. True intimacy is also based on honesty, which means we cannot allow our False Self to control us or our relationship.

22. Completing Many of us have a whole host of unfinished business behind us — things that we are waiting for other people to complete for us. We wait for a lot in life: for apologies, for love, for the important person in our life to wake up and realize how great we are, for healing, for our parents to finally realize we are separate and good people even though they may not like our partner or what we do for a living, etc., etc., etc. We can do two things: learn how to complete, and learn how to be willing to complete.

23. Letting Go We sometimes say we’ll forget some slight or injury, but then we never really let it go. Often we wind up defining ourselves in terms of our enemies, our hurts and injuries, and so a gentle process of redefinition is necessary. Letting go is not passive but the act of releasing and we do have to do it, and sometimes we have to learn how. We also, as in the several examples above, have to be willing to let go.

24. Competence Competence is both a fact, and a conviction or belief. First, we really do have to be able to do something — say drive a car capably. But then we also have to believe that we can drive a car capably. But competence is also a belief in ourselves that says “I CAN handle this.” It means we give ourselves a chance to learn those real world tasks and skills we haven’t had a chance to learn. It also means we begin to realize that there are ways to protect ourselves which we possess now but did not have when we were children.

25. Power People with low self-esteem have given their power away to others or to the past. Most of us have a terrible time with the idea of power — it is highly coveted and yet something we fear. Is it power over or power to do? We can reclaim our personal power, and though it may be scary, we can acknowledge our responsibility and our effectiveness.

26. Will, Intent and Purpose Using John Bradshaw’s definition of will as “desire raised to the level of action,” we can reclaim our will. We can claim our right to want something, we can claim our right to act in order to get or achieve what we want. We can claim a will, an intent, a purpose for ourselves and answer the question “What am I doing here?” to our own satisfaction. If we view the aspects of our lives — our relationships, careers, jobs, activities — from the point of view of our will, our intent, and our purpose, does anything change? If you had an illness and were given a year to live by your doctors, what would you do? Would it be different?

27. Doing It It’s not enough to think about it, dream about it, and plan it, scheme and plot. Finally, the time comes when it is necessary to do something, it is necessary to act. It is necessary to take the plunge, to jump off the diving board. This can be very difficult for someone who has never learned that what they do will make a significant and positive difference. Doing something is especially difficult if we’re terrified to fail. We act as if failing is a major catastrophe, when it isn’t that big a deal. The issue is not whether we fail, but what we do with it.

28. Personal Spirituality Don’t confuse spirituality with religion. People with low self-esteem drive themselves away from others and experience a profound isolation and lack of connection. In my view, spirituality is the recognition that there is something larger and grander than we are, and this recognition is the result of being committed to life and living, of maintaining and nurturing our consciousness and our connection with the universe and God. People with low self-esteem tend to neglect this dimension of their lives, and it comes naturally and unfolds as change occurs.

29. Self-Management We manage a home, a checking account, a business, our car, but we shy away from the idea of managing our selves. When I suggest this notion, many people resist the idea, as if managing our selves will take all the fun or spontaneity out of life (as if we’re having so much already, huh?) If we learn how, there are a number of areas we can manage: our moods, our minds, our memories, our feelings, our expectations. People with low self-esteem tend to refuse to manage themselves and so along with all the other victimization they experience, they participate in victimizing themselves. These are the layered, complex issues involved in self-esteem. How these issues are dealt with, the freedom they provide or the prison they create, determine a great deal of how we feel about ourselves. If you feel competent, for instance, if you feel personally powerful, if you feel able to handle whatever comes, your self-esteem level is likely to be quite high, even though you may still experience fears, know losses, and be human.

Nobody is perfect, but everyone is worthy. Believe in yourself!

From my Heart to your Heart, God Bless, Tina

________________________________________ (1)John Bradshaw: Bradshaw on: The Family, p. 2 (2)John Bradshaw: Bradshaw on: Healing the Shame that Binds You, Health Communications, Inc, 1988, p. 67