Having low self-esteem can be a common presenting issue that motivates people to seek therapy. Self-esteem is how we value and perceive ourselves. However, in popular self-help literature self-esteem is often viewed as synonymous with self-confidence.
I like to think of the distinction between self-esteem and self-confidence as this: you may have the confidence to make a speech at a conference and believe that you can deliver a decent performance. But, after you deliver it, you hear the applause from the delegates but believe that they are just being polite. You don’t really deserve the credit.
Having a persistent and harrowing feeling that somehow you will be found out for being inadequate, can potentially act like a cancerous growth which can cause havoc in all relationships whether at work, in family life, in romantic life or mixing in the wider world. It is like there is a monkey on the shoulder, an internal voice, that says you are failing in some regard, that you don’t quite make the grade. Self-doubt can potentially be a rewarding quality, since it can keep us modest and humble, but having a violent inner critic can only be toxic. The work of therapy is to identify the troublesome part of your mind, to learn about it, so that you know its history, and how and when it gets activated.
An example of a troubling voice may be that you had experienced emotional wounding in your early life. The mind might have sought to bury the discomforting memories, and the associated thoughts and feelings, but they come back at a later date in the form of triggering. Triggering is when your emotional system gets agitated by extreme emotion, think of sadness, fear, anger and guilt, and these discomforting thoughts and feelings resurface, perhaps in the form of an inner critic, or saboteur. When our fight/flight/freeze system is activated we experience discomforting physical sensations, intense thinking patterns and possibly extreme behaviours.
It may seem counterintuitive to get to know this troubling voice, to actually embrace it. After all, this voice only seems to bring discomfort, so why dialogue with it? Should we not, for instance, seek to kill that voice and try to banish it from our consciousness. The reason we should embrace it is that the things we resist will most likely persist in a potentially persecutory way. We need to resolve the inner conflict or we risk having this voice get louder and louder and thereby becoming more troublesome.
Therapy can help by offering a safe and confidential space and having someone to listen to your story. You can make sense of your emotional system, the influences of your early trauma based learning and how your survival system coped with threats. Uncovering your avoidance strategies can lead to greater awareness of your legacy behaviours so that you can enjoy greater freedom in your life and more meaningful relationships. Legacy behaviours are those that may have been relevant to cope and to self-soothe when encountering difficult situations in the past but no longer relevant today. Transforming legacy behaviours could be about letting go of past resentments and addressing your fears, healing past wounding and allowing yourself to manifest more positive qualities that are relevant and appropriate to your life today.
Noel Bell is a UKCP accredited psychotherapist and can be contacted on 07852407140 or noel@noelbell.net
