How do I raise my self esteem?

“My problem is that I love myself very little. I have low self esteem. They all tell me. They also tell me that I have to upload it, that I have no reason to feel that way. But this sinks me more because I don't know how to feel different. How do I raise my self-esteem?

This may be something someone in therapy says. Often, when we feel bad, it is easy for other people to accurately diagnose us, "what happens to you is that you have very low self-esteem." They may be right. However, just saying something like that to someone can have the effect of making the person feel even worse. We are telling you that not only do you have low self-esteem, but why don't you raise it!

But it is that asking someone to "raise their self-esteem" is like asking them to fly by pulling their own shirt collar. Yes, okay, it is preferable to have high self-esteem, but do we have some lever inside that we can turn to raise or lower our self-esteem?

In my view, the problem of self-esteem is not so much how to raise it, but rather what or who lowers it. Very young children do not have self-esteem problems. Rather, they don't have them until others (in the family, at school...) treat them in such a way that their self-esteem begins to drop. Self-esteem is nothing more than the esteem we receive from others, which becomes self-esteem when we internalize it and make it our own. If we receive esteem, we will have self-esteem, and if not, no.

It is a self-esteem that comes from within . If we have received enough appreciation from people around us – an unconditional appreciation , that does not depend more than on who we are – we will feel that we are worth it no matter what , we will feel that we deserve to be loved and valued by others without having to do anything special. It is nothing more than the message that those people who have valued us will have given us, which will be reflected in us in a good feeling of valuing ourselves, of confidence that we can approach others from our value and our uniqueness.

However, what happens very often, unfortunately, is that we are continually subjected, and from childhood, to external evaluations. Other people make us understand that our value is not unconditional but conditional: it depends on what we do, or what we are, or what we have. These people will attribute the right to judge us and decide if we have value or not, if we are worth it or not, based on their own criteria, external to us. They will tell us that we do not have value by ourselves, without more, but that we need a plus.

If I have been told, and I have believed, that my value depends on the value of what I do, I will have the feeling that my self-esteem will depend on my performance. If I give up, I'm worth it, if I don't give up, I'm not worth it. To feel my worth I will need to be an athlete, be a very good student, be a successful businessman, have skills as a lover and give a lot of pleasure to my partners, be sharp and brilliant in my observations, or, in general, do whatever makes me want to. They said it has value. A part of my self-esteem will depend on how capable I feel of doing these things and how well they turn out. It will therefore be a very fragile self-esteem: I will always feel haunted by the fear of not being so good or good, that someone who does things better than me will appear, reveal that I am a fraud, and make a fool of myself.

If I have been told, and have believed, that my value depends on the value others place on me, I will feel that I am at the expense of being valued or valued by others, often comparing myself to other people. To feel my worth I will need to "feel pretty", be healthy, have a "good character", be young (or appear to be), be thin, be nice and "likeable", be little confrontational, think the same as others, and, In general, try to be everything that others like me to be. I will want to “be good” and “be good”. My self-esteem, however, will always be insufficient and will always be on the verge of collapsing, because I will never be able to meet everyone's expectations. I will never be forever young, I will never be forever healthy, I will never be always liked or always in a good mood – I can only try to pretend it, paying a heavy price for it.

If I have been told, and have believed, that my value depends on the value of my possessions, I will feel that I need to have things so that others see my own value and like me. I will seek to be loved by loving my things. I will need to have money, a good house, a brand name car, take expensive trips, have lots of different and high-quality clothes, have a husband who is a "good catch" or a wife who is a "flowerpot", and, in general, I will want to have things that seem to me to have value in the eyes of others. I will need the whole world to see all this that I have. Let it be noticed Consequently, my self-esteem will be something that I feel can be stolen from me at any time, the moment my possessions are stolen (or lost). If I stop having things of value, I will stop having value myself.

So, going back to the topic at the beginning, what can we do in therapy to help people "raise their self-esteem"? In my opinion the first thing is to find what keeps it down. If a person's self-esteem is low, that leads me to ask myself and explore with them things like, for example, what messages have you received in your life that tell you that you are not worth yourself, but what you do, for " to be good/o” or to have things? Who has sent you those messages in your story? Who keeps sending them to you? If it seems to you that no one tells you but that "you tell yourself or yourself", to what extent do you need to continue believing them or being loyal to them? What do you want your own values ​​to be? Who has valued you in your life unconditionally?

I can think of a thousand more things to explore. But in any case, what you would not do at any time is leave the person alone telling them that they have to raise their self-esteem. I do not think that's possible. We need the others.