Self-esteem is essential for psychological survival. Without some measure of self-worth, life can be enormously painful, with many basic needs going unmet. One of the main factors differentiating humans from other animals is the awareness of self: the ability to form an identity and then attach a value to it. In other words, you have the capacity to define who you are and then decide if you like that identity or not.
The problem of self- esteem is this human capacity for judgment. It’s one thing to dislike certain colors, noises, shapes, or sensations. But when you reject parts of yourself, you greatly damage the psychological structures that literally keep you alive. Judging and rejecting yourself causes enormous pain. And in the same way that you would favor and protect a physical wound, you find yourself averting anything that might aggravate the pain of self-rejection in any way. You limit your ability to open yourself with others, express your sexuality , ask for help, or solve problems. To avoid more judgments and self-rejection, you erect barriers of defense. Perhaps you blame and get furious, or bury yourself in perfectionistic work. Or you turn to alcohol or drugs.
It’s about healing the old wounds of hurt and self-rejection. How you perceive and feel about yourself can change. And when those perceptions and feelings change, the ripple effect will touch every part of your life with a gradually expanding sense of freedom. Hundreds of researchers have quizzed thousands of people of various ages and situations, trying to see what causes self-esteem, who has the most of it, how important it is, how it can be increased, and so on. Studies of young children show clearly that parents’ style of child-rearing during the first three or four years determines the amount of self-esteem that a child starts with. After that, most studies of older children, adolescents, and adults share a common confusion: what is cause and what is effect? Does high social status cause high self-esteem, or does high self-esteem help you gain high social status? These are classic chicken- and- egg questions. Just as eggs come from chickens and chickens come from eggs, it seems that self-esteem grows out of your circumstances in life, and your circumstances in life are powerfully influenced by your self-esteem.
Which came first? The question has serious implications for your success at raising your self- esteem. If external circumstances determine self- esteem, then all you have to do to improve your self- esteem is to improve your circumstances. The fact is that self- esteem and your circumstances are only indirectly related. There is another intervening factor that determines self-esteem 100 percent of the time: your thoughts. For instance, you look in the mirror and think, “Boy, am I fat. What a slob.” This thought clobbers your self-esteem. If you looked in the mirror and thought, “Well, all right, it looks good to wear my hair like this,” the effect on your self-esteem would be the opposite. The image in the mirror remains the same. Only the thoughts change. In such a case, you don’t change the circumstances, only how you interpret them. Does this mean that circumstances have nothing to do with self-esteem? No. Obviously, in the area of social status, bank vice presidents have more opportunity to feel better about their careers than cab drivers have. This is why a study of 100 vice-presidents and 100 cab drivers will “prove” that the higher status job leads to higher self-esteem. What is overlooked among the statistics is that there are some vice-presidents who slaughter their self-esteem by telling themselves, “I should have been president of my own bank by now. I’m a loser,” just as there are some cabdrivers who feel good about themselves because they think, “So I’m just a cab driver—I’m putting bread on the table, the kids are doing good in school, things are going just fine.”
Proven methods of cognitive behavioral therapy can be used to raise your self-esteem by changing the way you interpret your life. It can show you how to uncover and analyze the negative self-statements you habitually make. You can learn how to create new, objective, positive self- statements that will foster your self-esteem instead of undermining it.
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