You look terrific today. I love what you’re wearing. You have such a nice smile. I like the sound of your voice.

Many people would rather eat a broccoli-flavored Popsicle than be on the receiving end of a compliment. Are you one of them? How did you feel when you read the previous paragraph? Receiving compliments – and also giving them – is hard when self-esteem has been injured. Low self-esteem tells us we’re just plain not good enough. And we imagine that if we can see it, so can everyone else.

If I believe I’m a dull and boring person, I will assume that you agree with me. So if you tell me that you think I’m fun and interesting, something feels very wrong. Either you’re being nice to spare my feelings, you don’t know me very well, or you’re just plain lying to me. Any way you slice it, your compliment makes me uncomfortable! (more…)

Many of the partners or loved ones (POLOs) of those struggling with addiction often seem reluctant to get help for themselves. I’m not sure why that is, but I’m hoping this article provides some answers.

These beleaguered folks are often fixated on the behavior of the loved one who struggles with drugs or alcohol (or other compulsions). Of course, it’s hard not to fixate on rampantly destructive behaviors. It often seems as though families where addiction is present are always struggling to either avoid or deal with addiction’s collateral damage (financial, emotional, professional, etc). I’m coming to the conclusion that because the behaviors surrounding addiction are so darkly magnetic, a constant pull on the family’s attention, it may be hard to understand why focusing on oneself is important. (more…)

Each of us has our own unique identity made up of a combination of personality traits, personal and family history, and other attributes. But what happens inside when an identity is not celebrated by a person’s community?

In Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity (1963), author Erving Goffman uses the term “spoiled identity” to refer to an identity that causes a person to experience stigma. For Goffman, “stigma” describes the experience of moving through life with an attribute that is deeply discrediting. This attribute divides people into those-who-are-normal and those-who-are-not, thereby making those-who-are-not less worthy. Spoiled identities include racial minority, ethnic minority, sexual orientation, gender, sex, and religious identities, body size, and visible and invisible disabilities. (more…)

Which of the following statements are true?

People with high self-esteem:
A. Are convinced they can never be wrong
B. Don’t usually appreciate negative feedback
C. Think whatever they do is great
D. Couldn’t care less what others think of them
E. All of the above

Answer: None of these are true of people with genuine self-esteem! The truth is, the higher your self-esteem, the better you tolerate criticism and disappointment.

Let’s go over these again and get the real scoop on people with high self-esteem:

False: They’re convinced they can never be wrong
True: People with healthy self-esteem aren’t delusional; they know and accept that sometimes they mess up. (more…)

This article is part of a series that explores the ways that specific “clusters” of depression symptoms manifest to create different experiences of depression. The previous article in this series discussed the low-ambition experience.

Self-attack is my term for thinking mean, diminishing, insulting, and shaming thoughts about oneself. People often think of this as low self-esteem, but I think self-attack better describes what is actually going on. People who experience depression often think like this, but it is also possible to engage in self-attack and not meet the full criteria to be diagnosed with depression. Whether or not your self-attack is part of depression, this is a very painful, disabling, quality-of-life-reducing, and even life-threatening way to exist.

In fact, I believe self-attack is possibly the most common type of misery and symptom of depression. So many people frequently say things to themselves—whether they even notice or not—that diminish or shame them: “I’m a failure,” “I’m stupid,” “I’m lazy” “I’m unlovable,” (which may sound like “I’m fat and ugly”, or take other forms), “I’m a terrible parent, employee, friend, spouse…,” “I can’t do anything right,” I’ll never be good enough,” “I’m not worth what I have,” and so on.

It may surprise you that people attack themselves for good reasons. Many do it because it’s how they understand love—it’s how their parents “loved” them. Others think that shame is the only thing that motivates them. Once people learn to handle themselves this way, they practice it over and over and over, and learning to do something different is very difficult.

I often ask people who are plagued by self-attack, “What if someone were following you around all day saying these things to you?” Most people would yell at them, argue with them, stop them, fight back, or at least get away from them. But when it’s their own voice, they listen and believe it—and it’s devastating.

This can change. There are ways to change this on our own, and ways that psychotherapy can help. In either case, the key is to develop an internal parent who parents us the way good parents do.

How the Parenting We Experience Affects Our Brains
This is the most important thing to know about how to become a happy, well-functioning adult. Generally, when children are parented by caretakers who understand their feelings and needs and respond to them compassionately and protectively, children learn to respond similarly to themselves. Over time, children build skills in parenting from imitating their parents. This is how we know how to take care of ourselves as adults.

We now know from neurological research that we are hard-wired through special neurons to imitate our parents. Our brains learn how to act in the world by incorporating the things that we see our caretakers do when we’re children. It’s a great system when we have parents who act in nurturing, protective, and wise ways. It doesn’t work so well when our parents are abusive, neglectful, unhappy, or dysfunctional people themselves.

We also see that our brains are able to re-wire throughout our lives, so if this doesn’t go well when we’re children, we can usually still change what goes on in our brains when we’re adults. This is what psychotherapy and EMDR do, but there are also ways to work on this outside of therapy.

We also know that when we close our eyes and imagine something, the same pattern of functioning occurs in our brains as when we look at something. So if you see your best friend, then close your eyes and imagine your best friend, your brain will be doing the same thing. This makes guided imagery very powerful. Anything we do that involves imagining being parented, or parenting ourselves in a nurturing, compassionate, protective, wise, functional way, can actually help build the brain structure we need to be the adults we would have been if we’d had better parents.

The Experience of Parenting Yourself
There are many ways to do this, but let’s take a couple moments to try out one. Think of a problem that is upsetting you right now—nothing too upsetting. Now imagine you have a niece or nephew, four to ten years old, who comes to you for help because they are struggling with a similar problem. With the most nurturing, protective, compassionate part of yourself in charge, what would you say to them? Write this down.

What would you do for them? What do you think you could give them that would help them feel a little better? Try expressing your understanding of their feelings and needs. Normalize what they’re experiencing. Show them compassion. Offer forgiveness if they need it. Offer solutions or ways to get solutions. Offer to stay with them through the process. Comfort them any way you can imagine.

Of course, this exercise is just a beginning. But once you learn to do this, and can do it with yourself, you have access to one of the most powerful tools we as human beings have to be happy and functional.

Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy can help with this process in many ways. For example, my clients usual begin to heal when I treat them with respect, am very genuinely interested in them and amazed by who they are, reflect what I see as I come to understand what they’ve had to overcome and how, and encourage them without shaming them. Being consistent and compassionate, listening carefully and responding with insight,  is what parents are supposed to do with children so that they can develop into happy adults. Many parents don’t or can’t do it well—usually because their parents couldn’t do it with them.

By being treated this way, people learn to treat themselves and others that way. They learn to expect healthy relationships where they are treated with a similar respect. It helps people express the feelings they haven’t felt safe to express and to feel more capable of coping with painful feelings. It builds self-esteem and confidence. In this environment, depression usually recedes.

Self-attack is very destructive, but can be overcome by developing a compassionate, nurturing, protective parent inside.

If you’ve ever been lucky enough to spend time with a pair of friends who both enjoy a healthy self-esteem, you’ve noticed how positive their relationship tends to be.

High-self-esteem friendships have the following qualities:

• The relationship is based on mutual affection and respect.
• Competition is low and support is high.
• Interactions are positive more often than negative.
• Disagreements don’t put the friendship in jeopardy.
• Apologies are heartfelt on both sides.

High self-esteem always includes esteem for others, too. Unlike arrogance, conceit, egotism, or self-centeredness, which are sometimes mistaken for high self-esteem, authentic self-esteem celebrates our shared humanity. People with genuine self-esteem make those around them feel good.

Since it promotes connection and closeness between friends, high self-esteem friendships are nurturing. The bond of self- and other-esteem makes both friends feel safe and comfortable.

Unfortunately, safe and comfortable is not how people feel when their self-esteem is injured. In fact, those with low self-esteem typically operate on a perpetual setting of unsafe and uncomfortable. You might think this would mean that they would leap at the chance to be friends with people with high self-esteem, because the high self-esteemers could help them feel safe and comfortable for a change.

This is not what happens.

What happens is that people become friends with those whose self-esteem most closely matches their own. So folks suffering with low self-esteem tend to attract others with the same problem. Similarly, like that old saying, “The rich get richer,” people with high self-esteem stick together. Here are these lucky people who already enjoy the pleasures of high self-esteem, and they get to have nurturing, satisfying, close relationships with their friends.

Meanwhile, those whose self-esteem has them constantly questioning their own worth, feeling unsafe and uncomfortable in relationships, stick to what is familiar by having friendships in which they can never feel truly safe and comfortable. By safe, I’m talking mostly about psychological safety rather than physical safety. But regardless of the kind of safety, we all seek familiarity. If we grew up feeling unsafe and uncomfortable, we’d keep getting drawn into situations that help us stay with what we know—in this case, lack of safety and comfort.

If this sounds at all familiar to you, here are some tips to help you break the cycle of unfulfilling friendships and low self-esteem:

Try not to take disagreements personally. If your friend doesn’t agree with you, or has a strong opinion that’s different from yours, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong, or even that he/she believes you’re wrong. It’s just as likely that your friend is worried that he’s/she’s wrong, and his/her strong language is just a mask to hide that fact. Refuse to feel smaller than your friend. Try not to be too sensitive to what he/she says.

Take the risk of losing the friendship if necessary. When you are continually stood up, ridiculed, or criticized, take the risk of letting your friend know how you feel, and why. If they value the relationship enough to change how they treat you, you’ll have improved your friendship. If they don’t have enough respect for themselves or you to respond appropriately, you will not have lost anything when you walk away.

Do not put up with verbal abuse. Create a boundary that is fixed, firm, and final, and share that boundary. For instance: “If you make a remark about my body one more time, I’m going home.” Be prepared to have your boundary tested, because it will be. Make sure you follow through with exactly what you said you would do, 100% of the time. If you don’t follow through, you must accept some responsibility for the treatment you continue to receive.

Realize that having a friend is not always better than having no friends. The best friend you have, or should have, is you. Yes, it’s a cliche: Be your own best friend. But like all cliches, it’s based on something true: as long as you’re there for yourself, you’re never alone. Having a friend who brings you down instead of building you up is more harmful than having no friends for a while.

Explore the possibility of sharing more of yourself. Sometimes our relationships are psychologically safer than we realize. That is, with some friends it might actually be okay to let our guard down a bit, and share your more intimate, vulnerable sides.

• If you normally listen rather than talk, try talking about how you feel to a friend with whom you feel comfortable.
• If you normally talk about, but don’t typically show, your emotions, try showing them.
• Allow your tears to come if they want to.
• Don’t stop talking when your voice shakes.
• Let a friend see you sweat when you’re nervous.
• Notice when you’re not being yourself around your friend.

You are normal. You are okay. You’re interesting and valuable exactly as you are. There is nothing wrong with you. Look to your friendships to help convince you of these things. Lose or change those friendships that don’t.

What do you do when you feel bad? You may clean your house, take a walk, or binge on sweet or salty foods depending on who you are and what habits you’ve developed. Does whatever you do make those bad feelings go away? If so, for how long?

Your feelings – good, bad, or ugly – represent your reactions to experiences. When you disown feelings, you disown yourself. This hurts your self-esteem. Let’s take a closer look at why.

By definition, you can not esteem someone who you are unfamiliar with. Self-esteem requires some knowledge of who you are and what you’re about. In other words, to have healthy self-esteem, you need a measure of self-knowledge. The more aspects of yourself you are aware of, the better you know yourself.

When we try to avoid to feeling the way we actually do,we are performing a kind of psychological gymnastics. We are maneuvering around inside ourselves in an attempt to distance ourselves from the pain. Cutting ourselves off from the pain rejects the part of us that is feeling pain. It’s a sacrifice similar to cutting off a leg caught in a trap in order to save the rest of our body.

Nobody wants to feel badly, which is why we try so hard to feel happy most of the time. When we can’t avoid feeling unhappy, we often try to contain any damage by “getting over it” quickly, or trying to talk ourselves out of an underlying feeling of loss. Some common examples are:

• “He was no good for me anyway.”
• “I should be glad I still have my health.”
• “She’s in a better place now.”

This is adaptive behavior that attempts to minimize emotional pain. Unfortunately, such attempts sometimes succeed too well in the long term. We isolate our hurt selves. We become fragmented in the process and keep ourselves from the healing we need.

At a deep level, we are aware of this banishment of our hurting selves. We know that we’re keeping something from ourselves. This knowledge itself must be hidden. Losing connection with the pain worsens as we lose trust in ourselves. There are too many secrets. We might even have lost self-respect because of what we dimly perceive as a lack of courage. We are afraid to repair the rift and invite all those suppressed feelings back into our awareness.

Feeling separated from ourselves erodes self-esteem, just as a collection of “No Trespassing” and “Keep Out” signs might erode the goodwill of one’s neighbors. Self-esteem requires that we embrace every aspect of ourselves. We need self-awareness and self-acceptance to feel whole. What many call “wallowing” is an opportunity for both awareness and acceptance of ourselves. Constructive wallowing is not for the weak or the idle. It takes courage and fortitude.

True wallowing is not like sinking into a warm bath; it’s more like getting a bikini wax. If you want the smooth results, you’ve got to endure the uncomfortable process. Just as it’s said that there’s a price for beauty, there is also a price for self-esteem. If it were easy to come by, more of us would have it. The price of self-esteem is full awareness and a willing embrace of our emotional pain.

Only by fully experiencing our pain can we reunite with the cut-off parts of ourselves that carry our deepest hurts. Through allowing ourselves to have our true feelings without self-criticism, we can know our whole selves and experience the courage of our intent to be who we are. This is the essence of self-esteem.

People often speak as if self-esteem were based on a self-evaluation of your skills and talents. We’re encouraged to think about the things we’re good at in order to improve our reputation with ourselves. Liking certain things about ourselves is certainly valuable. But, as many people who suffer with low self-esteem can tell you, knowing you perform well at something can’t replace the inner peace of healthy self-esteem.

Even thinking of things you like about yourself – your sense of humor, your generosity, your reliable nature – often just feels like a mental exercise that never really touches your baseline level of self-esteem.  Rather than thinking of self-esteem as the result of an evaluative process, think of it as the natural state of all human beings at birth.

No one is born with low self-esteem. At birth, we are not yet aware of all the wonderful and significant things about the person we are. And yet, we still manage to feel just fine about ourselves as a little bundle of needs demanding to be met. The question of self-worth is not on our radar when we enter the world.

As babies, under normal circumstances, we enjoy taking in the sights, sounds, textures and smells around us. When we’re hungry or wet or scared, we cry. We don’t consider whether we are worthy of being fed or receiving nurturing. We only know that we want it. In other words, we come into this world pre-programmed with self-acceptance. Then comes childhood.

It would take a saint, a social vacuum, and the perfect alignment of stars to raise someone without the child ever feeling badly about them self. Consequently, most of us emerge from childhood feeling inadequate. Our natural esteem for ourselves is eroded or injured as we grow into adults – in some of us far more than others.

Though we may not think about it consciously, some of us live with a familiar level of discomfort inside. We criticize our thoughts, feelings and behavior before others can beat us to it. This is low self-esteem. While low self-esteem originates in an accumulation of early experiences of feeling “bad,” it is perpetuated in the present by a constant stream of internal self-criticism.

When working with clients who are suffering with low self-esteem, I often note that the problems that bring them to therapy are exacerbated by self-criticism. The process of unrelenting self-criticism often comes in the form of negative self-talk. Such critical thoughts are often a re-creation of the original caregiver-child relationship.

Negative self-talk reduces the heart’s ability to heal from emotional wounds. Thus, it may be helpful to think of high self-esteem as the opposite of self-criticism. People who enjoy high self-esteem do not engage constantly in criticizing themselves. This is not to suggest that high-self-esteem folks think everything they do is great.

On the contrary, those who enjoy higher self-esteem hold themselves to personal standards, and regularly evaluate how they’re doing. The difference is that, when they (inevitably) disappoint themselves, they don’t conclude that they’re “bad” or unworthy. They simply acknowledge their errors and make a note to try harder next time.

If you feel you suffer from low self-esteem, pay attention to how often you criticize yourself in your mind. If you’re like many people, you may be barraged so often with self-criticism that you don’t even notice it consciously! It’s like the operating software on a computer; it runs all your programs invisibly in the background.

To replace your operating system with one that serves you better, promise you’ll be kinder to yourself in your mind, and then do it. Root out and expose the critical voice inside that won’t cut you a break. Also, seek out relationships with people who help you feel accepted and appreciated. A good therapist will engage with you in this kind of healing relationship, providing you with a model you can build on in the future.

You can not change what happened to you in the past, but you can change how you treat yourself in the present. If you’re not accepting and esteeming yourself today, you deserve better treatment from the most important person in your life: you.

This is a continuation of last month’s article, “Are You Your Own Worst Enemy?” After learning to identify self-destructive behavior in ourselves, we can explore why we do it and the possible motivations behind vicious cycles of attacking ourselves. It may come from past trauma, abuse, neglect, or a number of other things that may have caused low self-esteem. Below are seven reasons people attack themselves.

1. Imitating Parents
We all learn how to take care of ourselves from imitating how our parents or other caretakers take care of us. When parents or caretakers attack children emotionally, verbally, or physically, children learn to attack themselves like their parents do. Practicing over and over, people become good at self-attack and carry the skill into adulthood. It becomes an integral part of regular daily life, almost like breathing.

2. Method of Discipline
Often caretakers don’t teach children how to set limits, or boundaries, how to structure themselves, or reward themselves. These skills are needed for discipline (which is sticking with things that are hard in the present, in order to achieve a longer-term desire). If people do not learn these skills, their way of disciplining themselves can be to attack themselves, when they don’t do what they think they “should.” For example, “Stop being lazy and stupid and do your homework.” Or, “Don’t eat that pie, you’re a fat pig!” This method of shaming can provide some rudimentary support for getting through obstacles to something one wants, but it causes a great deal of destruction in the process, and often backfires—causing rebellion against the “discipline.”

3. Lack of Information about their Value
When children don’t feel valued by their caretakers, they naturally conclude they have no value. This conclusion colors the way they see themselves in every aspect of their lives. The message that they have no value becomes a pretty constant “voice” in their thoughts that follows them into adulthood. This conclusion that they have no value can come from caretakers overtly shaming kids.

But it can also come from neglect, or lack of love or attention. Children who don’t get what they need emotionally gather that they must not have deserved it. This can even happen when there is no abuse involved. For example, children who are adopted into a loving family may determine that they had no value to their birth parents, and therefore aren’t worthy of much from others they encounter.

4. Preserving Parents and Power
When caretakers are brutal, absent, or unable to meet the emotional, needs of their children, the children have a choice to conclude either that there is something wrong with the parent or caretaker who is causing pain the child experiences, or there is something wrong with “me” (the child) for causing the caretaker’s behavior. For the child to conclude it is the parent, generally means acknowledging that the parent isn’t competent to take good care of their children.

For a child, not having a competent caretaker is life-threatening. So children generally do anything to avoid believing that their parent is unable to take care of them. This leaves children with the only other conclusion they can come to, given their limited experience, and great need—that there is something wrong with themselves. This preserves the belief that the parent is safe to depend on, and has the added advantage of allowing children to believe they have some control in their painful circumstances.

If I, as the child, believe I caused the abuse, then I can also believe that changing my behavior will stop the abuse. If I am a helpless victim of my caretaker, there is very little hope for my life to improve. So, most children attack themselves when their parents are hurting them to preserve their positive image of their parents, and to give themselves an illusion of control over the hurt, abuse or neglect.

5. Guilt
Sometimes children blame themselves for anything that goes wrong in the family (illness, death, mental illness, accidents, injuries, divorce, etc.) for various reasons. Common motives for self-blame include misunderstanding, attempting to feel powerful, being blamed for the problem by someone else, or, on occasion, having something directly to do with what went wrong. Children can carry that guilt into adulthood, punishing themselves with self-attack about much more than the original problem.

6. Imitating Peers
Sometimes people are repeatedly shamed, but not by parents or caretakers. Instead, siblings, and/or peers may be responsible. This can also turn the child’s belief system into one that legitimizes the bad treatment. They take on the belief that they deserve it. When they come to this conclusion, they have learned to continue this attack inside themselves.

7. A Way of Coping
Children who are overwhelmed with their feelings and are not given any skills for handling them have to scramble to use whatever resources they have to deal with these feelings on their own. Sometimes one of these resources is self-attack. Rather than feeling sharp, intense or disorienting emotional pain, children can convert these overwhelming, confusing feelings into a focused activity.

In multiple cases, self attack presents itself as a way of coping that seems to bring matters under the child’s control. When this happens, there is actually some comfort associated with self-attacking thoughts, just as there can be comfort in starving or cutting oneself. This is one reason cognitive-behavioral therapy alone often doesn’t work—people can not afford to give up thoughts they depend on to comfort themselves.

People attack themselves as a method of self-defense, coping, or due to the fact that we all, especially as children, are hard-wired neurologically to imitate those around us. In therapy, we find the origins of the self-attack and the purposes we use it toward. We then look for ways to provide the same functions without the negative consequences self-attack brings with it.

In some cases of rewiring, Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) is a helpful option. In other cases, imitating the therapist offers a transitional alternative to the results of imitation of critical parents. However we get there, all of us ultimately have to become nurturing, compassionate parents to ourselves. That is the goal of childhood and good parenting, just as it is the badge of happiness and adulthood.