Why Do I Have Low Self-esteem?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

They often come to me with the following problem - I have low self-esteem, what should I do?

How to raise it? Nothing helps me …

Today, almost everyone knows what exactly low self-esteem leads to self-doubt … Our success, satisfaction with life, happiness, in the end, depends to a great extent on how we see ourselves and evaluate ourselves. In our today's world with its pace, striving for excellence, growing criteria in training, requirements to meet high standards, it is very difficult to maintain a stable, fairly good self-esteem.

In any case, our self-esteem is often tested - every time we get a job, come to a new team, try to take a higher position in society, or just get to know each other. Even self-confident people can sometimes experience periods of self-esteem crises.

But what about those who constantly doubt themselves, who suffer from insecurity and whose self-esteem is, in principle, low, and in difficult periods generally falls below the plinth?

We will try to deal with these and other issues in the series of articles that I open today.

First, let's try to understand what self-esteem is?

Most definitions in psychological dictionaries go something like this:

self-esteem:

an individual's assessment of himself, his capabilities, qualities and place among other people is a value attributed to himself or to his individual qualities

But you and I will look at self-esteem from the point of view of psychoanalysis and object relations theory.

Freud's structural model suggests that our psyche can be represented in the form of three instances:

1. I (Ego)
2. Over I (Superego),
3. It or Id.

It is the Superego that makes all value judgments about the Ego.

How are superego and self-esteem formed?

A pretty woman, a housewife, mother of two schoolchildren, who just can't make up her mind to go to work, says that she really likes to watch rhythmic gymnastics competitions on TV. When I notice that, probably, she herself once wanted to study, she, immediately wilting, says: "Well, you never know what I wanted, I have no talent …" - and she bitterly and in in a derogatory sense, he continues to talk about his mediocrity and worthlessness.

I ask if she tried, and it turns out that she never tried, but from childhood I knew that she was awkward and sports were not for her. Where does this conviction come from? When she finds it difficult to answer, I ask her: "Whose voice does it sound when you tell yourself that nothing will work out and you have no talent?" Then she remembers what her older brother and mother told her.

Self-esteem is a complex education, it includes value judgments of significant peoplefrom the environment of the early period of life, which are subsequently introjected (unconsciously taken for their own, are included in the personality as their own) and are included in the Superego.

In the formation of low self-esteem, the greatest contribution can be made by two main scenarios for the development of events.

Let's take a closer look at them.

1. If in childhood a child too often heard criticism, condemnation and ridicule in his address, or even if no one recognized or noticed his attempts to show himself from the best side, then the most probable and natural psychological defense becomes “Identification with the aggressor”.

The child needs to psychologically survive in a hostile environment, and he identifies with the critical attitude of those around him. He seems to be trying in advance to disarm his potential enemies in order to minimize criticism from the outside: "I'd rather think and talk bad about myself than others will."

This defense mechanism is built into the personality at an unconscious level, and the person actively attacks himself, sometimes showing amazing cruelty, destroying all his attempts to "rise".

This mechanism for the formation and existence of low self-esteem is very common. But there is another scenario in which the individual's self-esteem becomes very fragile and subject to strong fluctuations.

2. A child grows up surrounded by the most careful care, he himself and any of his manifestations cause violent delight and admiration. All the baby's wishes are fulfilled and even prevented. This attitude is completely justified and even necessary at a very early age.

But sometimes, for some reason, parents cannot recognize the child's need for growing up and separation and continue to overly protect him from life's reality even when he no longer needs it or does not need it so much. And even on the contrary, he needs someone who would accept his desire for knowledge of the world around him, mastering "large territories" in a benevolent way, without undue fear, encouraging his curiosity and insuring him in his experiments. If the parents (most often the mother) are afraid to “let go” of the child, then they worry about his every step, trying to “spread straws” everywhere.

For the formation of self-esteem, the attempts of adults to protect their child from disappointment in society, from the disappointment of competition are of particular importance. Such a child absorbs the feeling that all the benefits are given to him just like that, there is no need to try, to achieve something, there is no competition, even if he does nothing, he will still be the BEST.

This fairy tale ends with the very first encounter of such a kid with society - where the need to compete and his inability to compete can very painfully hit his unrealistic ideas about himself. With this mechanism of formation, self-esteem disorders are even more difficult to correct.

So

our ideas about ourselves, and hence our self-esteem, are laid down and formed in interaction with the earliest environment. The kid perceives and sees himself, as in a mirror, through the responses and reactions of his family and friends.

Now let's see what happens inside the personality with low self-esteem

We are used to perceiving self-esteem as a quantitative concept - low self-esteem, high self-esteem, overestimated. Now imagine that self-esteem is a kind of process or action, not just a quantitative concept.

This is the internal relationship of the individual to himself. Good self-esteem is the ability of one part of the personality to accept and relate without undue criticism to another part of it. With low self-esteem, this other part of the personality can feel weaker, immature, bad, pathetic. Moreover, this other part of the personality is, so to speak, central - it is the Ego or the Self.

Remember the defense mechanism we talked about today?

Identification with the aggressor. The aggressor is now inside.

With low self-esteem, a person brutally attacks his own self. Low self-esteem is an attack on himself, a destructive attitude towards his own qualities that do not correspond to the ideal. The ideal is set for himself by the individual himself and with low self-esteem it is usually overestimated, in any case, it can be very different from the real, average qualities that in society can be characterized as "good enough."

So,

we found out that inside the insecure person there is a real drama. A person can torment himself so much that feelings of shame, fear, guilt overwhelm him.

This, in turn, is reflected in how such a person behaves in society. And any sidelong glance, any, even fair, criticism only adds fuel to the fire, launching a new cycle of attack on oneself

To reduce the intensity of passions, the psyche develops new defenses

But we'll talk about this next time.

To be continued.

Literature

Z. Freud "Complete Works"

Penty Ikonen, Phil-Mag and Eero Rechard, The Origin and Manifestations of Shame

Mario Jacobi: Shame and the Origins of Self-Esteem.

Dr. F. Yeomans “Transference-focused therapy for severe personality disorders. Narcissistic personality disorder. Seminar. 2017.