Understanding & Treating Low Self-Esteem
And why high self-esteem isn't the goal
Author’s Note: This piece is developed from a session I gave online in November 2023. If you’d like to watch the video of this, including the writing exercise and Bioenergetic workout, you can find it in my Vimeo Store here.
Something that I find fascinating about treating low self-esteem is that it involves delving into what I consider to be the single most overlooked area of human psychology - that relating to status. The need to both acquire and demonstrate status is a huge aspect of human and primate psychology. Yet we have barely begun to study it.
Relating to this, a vast industry has arisen over the last decades around self-esteem. All manner of coaches, particularly from the US, offer books and courses intended to get you to improve your self-esteem and to thus get better results from life - more money, more attractive partners, more wealthy or successful friends or a better role at work.
The content of these courses itself, whilst not without therapeutic value, I find fairly mundane. It mostly consists of simple “status hacks” to get people to see you differently - fashion labels, hanging out in more elite environments, tricks to con attractive people into finding you more attractive, this kind of thing.
One thing that the success of these courses points to is the sheer number of people who struggle with low self-esteem. I actually think that in our culture the condition is largely ubiquitous. And, in my travels around the world, I don’t see anywhere much different. So what really is self-esteem and why might we choose to keep ours low?
Self-esteem is a kind of rating that we give ourselves as to our value as a human being, especially compared to others. It’s not so much a number rating, rather it is evident in the choices that we make in life and the beliefs that we have about ourselves.
A person who habitually chooses lower than average, in diverse fields such as quality of partners, attractiveness of clothing, quality of friends or job satisfaction, likely does have low self-esteem. The real giveaway however is the belief that we are “not good enough” to get anything better for ourselves.
But why would anyone believe such a thing?
There are in my experience two key reasons why we adopt low self-esteem:
the intrinsic desire to “fit in” with society, in order to get needs met
the desire to feel safe psychologically
Let’s take a closer look at these two.
As mammals, we are social beings. We will seek friends, partners and a role in society. Doing so is natural to us and is established in our DNA. But many human cultures tend to demand a high level of conformity of behaviour in order to facilitate acceptance. We have to be not too different from others. We soon learn not to stand out too much from the crowd. If we want to be accepted, we have to be “normal.” To maintain this “normality,” many cultures have developed this “crabs in a bucket” mentality. If someone starts to reach up and try to climb out, the others will pull him or her back down. You are likely familiar.
Relating to the need to feel safe psychologically, what I really mean is this sense that we “need to keep our head down” in life. This defence is not so much about being attacked physically. Rather it is about not risking exposure to extreme emotionality. There are two things which tend to drive this fear of intense feelings:
emotions repressed during childhood. We learn to work around our repressed emotionality in life and thus become fearful of getting into a situation where we might become either angry, vulnerable or both.
our nervous system learning, around aged two, that outgoing expression and especially anger were dangerous, when we first started to express.
So, to sum up, adopting the beliefs and behaviours of low self-esteem is essentially a protection - a protection that can help us to secure a place in society and that can help us to not come into contact with repressed emotions.
In many ways, adopting this front of low self-esteem is not really “our fault.” Nevertheless, in order to change it, we will need to take responsibility for our current state and take appropriate action.
So, what is the solution to low self-esteem?
The solution is two-fold - a body element and a mind element.
For the body element - we need to make our body into a fit vessel that can support us to feel safe to be more extrovert, to allow us to feel vulnerability and to have a sense of being more grounded. To achieve this, the following areas of the body are especially relevant.
having a chest that is not tight, that feels open and capable of holding vulnerability and sadness.
feeling our spine and our lower back sufficiently to have the sense of being constantly supported within ourselves.
having the feeling of fire in our belly, to be confident with anger and expressing boundaries.
For the mind element, there are two basic strategies, one relating to how we think others see us, and the second to how we see ourselves -
How We Think Others See Us: We need to break the contracted self-image that is low self-esteem. This means that we need to look for and make behavioural changes in our daily life that will be evident to the people around us. This could include:
wearing better quality or more showy clothing
going into better quality eating places or shops
modelling other behaviours associated with successful people - standing up straighter, being on time, practising self-confidence and walking the talk
When following the first two, remember to breathe and to feel your body as you’re out and about.
How We See Ourselves: We need to demonstrably take better care of ourselves, as a means to show ourselves that we have higher self-worth. This could include:
getting and following better healthcare advice
taking more care of our body and fitness
taking any needed steps to develop our career
It’s a strange thing but actually taking actions associated with better self-care leads definitively to better self-esteem, as opposed to only thinking better things about yourself. Often, changing external behaviour actually leads to inner change, rather than the other way around.
Something that you may have noticed in all this is that it’s useful to use behaviours associated with success or high self-esteem to displace low self-esteem behaviours. However, something that I’m coming to understand is that this doesn’t necessarily mean that high self-esteem is the desirable end-state when treating low self-esteem.
I feel confident to assert this because, often hanging out in the rich area of the city where I live, Istanbul, it seems clear to me that most people who always publicly demonstrate high self-esteem are simply rigid. They have to always be seen a certain way and feel scared, in fact often terrified, to let down the mask.
So what is the desirable end-state relating to self-esteem? I think that it is a feeling of confidence around simply being yourself. It’s important to be comfortable with these so-called “high self-esteem” behaviours, so that we know that we are not still in some type of unconscious protection. But once that is done, the real direction is to feel confident to explore who we are out in the world, with sensitivity but unrestrained by what other people or society in general might think of us.