Most of us have or still struggle with low self-esteem – feelings of unworthiness, devaluing our abilities, or even feeling that we have no value, potential, gifts, or anything special or unique about us.
We may cover these feelings and pump ourselves up with all kinds of compensations and attempts to prove to ourselves and others that our feelings of inadequacy are not true.
These efforts may work for a while but inside we know and feel that they are a pretense and basically false. We may then fall into self-sabotage, collapse, and depression. This is an almost universal story that we all have to deal with.
Andrew, a successful musician, has been hit very hard by the corona virus epidemic which has wiped away his business. Without receiving the external appreciation and financial support that he was used to, it sent him into a downward spiral in which he began to deeply question his abilities, his creativity, and his value as a person and lover. Now, he realizes that his wound of unworthiness was always under the surface and this crisis brought it fully into his everyday reality.
Our compensations can be very subtle and deceiving, shielding us from facing our wound of shame. For instance, Anna desperately longs to be in a committed relationship with a man but is discouraged because she claims that she simply can’t find “the right one.” She insists that the men she meets are not evolved enough for her. It is difficult for her to see that her search for “the perfect partner” is a cover for a deep wound of unworthiness. When we don’t feel that we deserve to be truly loved by someone, we often find excuses on the outside not to open and let someone in.
Sometimes we may be aware of our low self-esteem, but we can’t find our way out. Raymond feels and truly believes that he is unattractive and doesn’t have what it takes for a woman to be interested in him. He doesn’t put any value in his high intelligence and the fact that people continually tell him that he is loving and a lot of fun to be with. He thinks that these are useless qualities and not something that a woman would want.
His inner critic is so powerful that there is little space to see that this is what he learned as a child from his mother who constantly compared him unfavorably to his older brother and from his father who was mostly absent and seemed to care very little about his two children.
Our self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-identity comes directly from the experiences and reflections we received as a young child.
It is based on three basic ingredients:
· A healthy dose of unconditional love; warm, reliable, and consistent presence; attunement to our feelings, a secure and calm environment free of violence and conflict, and loving reassurance when we feel frightened or afraid.
· A healthy dose of sensitive support, guidance, and inspiration to find and develop our own uniqueness, to follow our truth even if it is different than our parents or culture, learning to realistically evaluate our strengths and limitations, being taught values based on loving life rather than success or failure, and knowing that we can learn from our mistakes and keep going.
· Witnessing our caretakers having a positive attitude to life, seeing that they share love, and are able to deal with disappointments, adversity, and pain in a graceful, spacious, and gentle way.
If we received this kind of conditioning, which is quite rare, then we have a higher chance of developing a healthy sense of ourselves; able to see and trust ourselves, others, and life realistically but positively.
We are then able to express our creativity and face disappointments and hurdles without being derailed and we are able to deal with our insecurities, failures, rejections, and losses with emotional balance.
But when any of these three qualities of positive conditioning are missing or inadequate, our life becomes very different.
Then setbacks can throw us into depression, addiction, or rage, we can easily sabotage love or creativity, we have a hard time trusting ourselves, others, or life, we can be plagued by anxiety and fear, and we develop a toxic shame-based identity.
We are then unable to see ourselves or others realistically. Instead, we either idealize or devalue others or ourselves.
We can project negative qualities on other people or become fully convinced that we will never make it, that we have no value, and that we are fundamentally unlovable. To not feel these painful feelings we then often cover them with pretense and compensations to convince ourselves and others that we are okay.
Most of us suffer from this to a greater or lesser extent or it may become more evident at certain times in our lives when we are being challenged by setbacks or loss.
The point of inner work is to recover the self-love, trust, natural confidence, and energy that we have lost.
We have a specific approach in the Learning Love Work that we are going to outline here.
1. The first step starts when we begin to see that something is not functioning in our life. This can be a dissatisfaction in our romantic life, a low level of life energy, lacking motivation, noticing chronic destructive behaviors, a very harsh inner critic, not feeling fulfilled in our creativity, or generally not feeling connected to our body and life. Also, we are ready to stop blaming outside circumstances or persons for these dysfunctions. (It is a crucial moment in our lives when we finally stop believing that outside forces are controlling us, and we are ready to take responsibility for what is happening in our lives.)
2. The second step happens when we begin to have the insight that our troubles come from the way we experience ourselves. And we start to recognize a basic lack of self-esteem, a chronic negative self-image, deep toxic shame, and disconnection from our true self.
3. As this insight deepens, we start to observe our compensations for our underlying low self-esteem. This includes the ways that we have been trying to build ourselves up, basing our value on approval and appreciation, covering our insecurities with distractions, accomplishments and addictions, constantly comparing ourselves to others, feeling rage when we don’t get what we want, or easily feeling judged or criticized. We may notice that we are very focused on achievements and recognition and having an unrealistic overblown image of ourselves which can easily fall into collapse or depression when we lose, fail, or don’t get the appreciation or success that we seek.
4. The next phase of the journey of recovery, we call the “inner going’ – identifying and feeling the depth of our low self-esteem. It can be the most challenging and often needs guidance by a sensitive but inspiring teacher or therapist, one who can help us understand the origin of our low self-esteem, how it shows itself in our lives, and how to recover what we have lost. It takes courage to feel how deep our shame-based identity is and how long it has been there.
David has difficulty with opening to a woman because he feels that he is not “man enough”. In dating situations, he feels so inadequate that he gets confused and has trouble expressing himself or even knowing what he thinks or feels. Then he becomes more convinced that he is a loser and makes excuses to leave. It is a true nightmare for him. Furthermore, he compares himself to his best friend who is very confident with women and has no trouble attracting and communicating with them.
In his work with us, we have uncovered how his self-respect was crushed by a physically and emotionally abusive father who regularly shamed and beat him. It is important in our recovery to identify how our budding self-esteem was derailed and for that, we need to vividly re-experience whatever it was that caused the shame-identity.
But it is even more important to identify how our inner critic continues to fortify our shame by becoming clear what it continues says to us in terms of “you should or shouldn’t” and “you are or aren’t.” Once we can accurately identify the voices of our judge, we can see how much we still believe them and can then begin to form our own opinions, values, and direction based on our inner wisdom.
If we keep believing the voices of the judge, we are continuing to shame and disrespect ourselves and protect those who shamed us in the past.
5. The final aspect of the journey, we call “the outer going.” It involves taking solid risks and steps to restructure our lives and our behavior in a way that begins to make us feel proud of how we are living. It involves moving in the direction of living our true self, one that honors our gifts, passions, and heart; beginning to live according to our own values.
In David’s case, he is slowly realizing that his judge is the voice of his father who shamed him for being weak, afraid, and too sensitive. He also sees that he doesn’t want to be like his father or the kind of man he was and begins to embrace the way he is as a man. Strangely enough, he is also noticing that the kind of women he finds attractive and interesting don’t judge him for how he is, on the contrary, they find his openness and sensitivity attractive.
The “outer going” part of the recovery of our self-esteem involves taking small risks to go against what we have believed and how we have behaved in the past. These smalls steps undermine the voices of our inner critic and go against the values that we inherited as a child. They help us begin to develop and live by our own intelligence, consciousness, and truth.
We have attempted to paint in broad strokes the basic steps of recovering our self-esteem.
We each have our own journey but, in our experience, it is one that we all need to embark on in order to restore our inner connection and find meaning, love, aliveness, and creative flow.