Enhancing self-esteem is 80 percent about completing your past
 and 20 percent about designing your future.

Noted psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D. defines self-esteem as “the disposition to experience oneself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness.  ”To live a life marked by competence, fulfillment, contentment and accomplishment, you need high self-esteem.  Healthy self-esteem sets a foundation for developing respect and empathy for others. It gives us the basis for accepting responsibility for our actions and for gaining satisfaction from our achievements.  Those possessing healthy self-esteem are more likely to both create dreams and pursue them intentionally.  By believing in their ability to accomplish these ideas, people with high self-esteem motivate and challenge themselves to grow and risk as they fully experience life.  They don’t allow the inevitable challenges and criticisms to discourage them from pursuing their worthwhile goals. People with healthy esteem possess the ability to love themselves — a prerequisite to love and be loved by others. In every way, a healthy sense of self-worth is a necessary requirement to leading an empowered life marked by positive self-direction, trust, responsibility and accomplishment. 

We often see low self-esteem associated with criminal activities, drug and alcohol addiction, poverty, violent behavior, eating disorders, educational dropouts and low socio-economic status.  Those lacking self-esteem don’t do themselves any favors, but often display aggressive, egotistical, harmful and defensive behavior along with a lack of empathy.  Healthy self-esteem goes far beyond only possessing a good physical self-image. Too many confuse self-esteem with vanity, arrogance or self-centeredness. In fact, such qualities typically indicate a lack of healthy self-esteem. Physically attractive people may also have self-esteem issues. Having authentic self-esteem means feeling good about how you see yourself, as a happy person of high intrinsic value and contribution, able to produce a worthwhile result in your life and others. People possessing this quality have confidence not only in themselves but also in their ability to influence others in a positive manner. They act decisively and show respect for others by taking responsibility for their actions rather than casting blame, avoiding risk and fearing failure.

As humans, we are all magnificent by nature. We possess the ability to overcome obstacles, achieve meaningful accomplishments, honor our most important values, attain happiness and contribute our special, unique gifts to others. In short, we can take responsibility for making our lives work optimally.  Unfortunately, through the course of experiencing life’s challenges, we often lose sight of these facts. From birth and continuing throughout our lifetimes, we encounter countless experiences that can either enhance our self-esteem or erode it. The process of diminishing our self-esteem begins with a simple observation that we somehow do not measure up.  We judge ourselves as different and deficient in some way.  We decide that we don’t belong. From this point, our lives unfold in accordance with our expectations.  These expectations directly relate to how we feel about ourselves. Either we are worthy of all the good things life can offer or we deserve pain and suffering because we lack value.

When we judge ourselves harshly, we dramatically diminish our ability to merit love and achieve the success and abundance the world reserves for those most valuable. When we base our actions upon the belief that we lack what it takes to deserve rich relationships, material wealth and happiness, we trigger those very things we fear most: As our self-esteem insidiously continues to diminish, we find ourselves incapable of directing our lives and fortunes productively. Resignation sets in like dry rot, killing our spirits. This ensures that deeming ourselves as undeserving will viciously cycle into results consistent with this expectation and reinforces our sense of worthlessness. The lower our self-esteem drops, the less likely we are to act in a way that will generate positive feedback to elevate our deteriorating self-worth.  For most human beings, for a certain time after birth, life is good. Our parents meet our every need while providing us with the love and security we come to depend upon to develop into self-assured, well-adjusted individuals. Early in life, we learn to attach a value to the identity we create for ourselves. In this book, we will explore in detail how something happens during this process of self-discovery, sometime between birth and adolescence, to have us begin the process of judging ourselves harshly.  Whether an event occurs or someone makes a remark, somehow we decide that we do not measure up in some way.  This psychological trauma or series of traumas can range in severity from an abusive experience to a simple misinterpretation.

For some, it may involve sexual or physical abuse or the experience of being abandoned or terrorized. It may start with a simple spanking or be as extreme as a beating.  Something happens that plants the idea that they are not worth loving.  The event need not look severely traumatic to anyone else. To be damaging, it just needs to disturb the inner peace and identity of the person experiencing it.

In any event, the result is the same.  We start to compare our essential self to others and to feel bad about who we are in that comparison. This negative self-opinion begins distorting our relationship to others. Seeing ourselves as inadequate, we now respond differently to daily situations. Our results match our distorted self-image.  This reinforces our feelings of unworthiness by providing us with concrete evidence to justify them. In short, we have created a self-fulfilling prophecy. The label we affix to describe our condition further compounds our feeling of inadequacy.  Our self-esteem suffers more. So before we know it, we have built into our lives as fact that we are not good enough and are surely unworthy of love, abundance and happiness.  This self-judgment brings with it enormous pain. Because our inherent human nature has us instinctively seek out pleasure and avoid pain, we alter our behavior in an effort to avoid further rejection. Barraging our internal conversations with constant criticisms and dire warnings, we protect ourselves from potentially painful relationships and avoid communication, interaction and risk.  We give up on our dreams and lower our expectations for fear of being hurt.  We settle for less and then justify our actions to protect us from further harm. Resignation and the slow, subtle death of our spirit, with the resulting loss of vitality, inevitably result from our worsening self-opinion.  Loss of self-esteem can pervasively infiltrate every aspect of life or it can be limited to particular situations or circumstances.

The latter occurs when you determine that you are inadequate in some domains but not others. Perhaps, you might feel good about how we saw ourselves in the first place and further erodes our ability to connect with others. The more the self-sabotage occurs, the less able we are to interact effectively.  Don’t lose hope.  We can reverse the downward spiral of progressively diminishing self-esteem. By identifying how we have lost confidence in ourselves, we can stop the erosion of our self-image.

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 Copyright © 2003 by Dr. Joe Rubino.  All Rights Reserved.