I used to feel frustrated with low self esteem clients. I would try to encourage them. I’d attempt to convince them they were as good as everyone else. That they were lovable, clever, attractive and worthy of success and respect. And you know what?
They would often agree with me! They knew on one level they weren’t worse than everyone else or uglier or stupider or less lovable but they would still feel as if they were. Clearly the misery of low self esteem wasn’t driven by thoughts but by something deeper. Something stronger.
In this piece we’ll look at what that something is, and I’ll give you 10 case-study examples of how it drives low self esteem.
Not merely thinking but feeling
Not merely thinking but feeling with every fibre of your being that you are stupid, ugly, inferior “damaged goods”, drains potential and turns life into a dim, dismal, distorted echo of what it could be.
No matter how positively you try to think, deep down you know you’re wrong because your feelings tell you so.
So what can we do about that?
Working with the deeper part of your client
It used to be thought, and sometimes still is, that to change unhappiness, fear or self loathing it was enough to change thoughts. But the problem with this approach is that strong emotion tends to produce thoughts rather than be caused by them (1). We feel a certain way, then create an explanation for why we feel that way.
This isn’t to say that some focus on cognitive distortions won’t help your client, because it certainly can. But just attempting to do this can often feel superficial because the torturous and strong feelings reside in the deeper and more ancient brain structures than mere ‘surface’ conscious perception (2).
Our emotional conditioning works on us even from a long time ago.
Emotional conditioning: Not just the preserve of extremist cults
We all know that emotional conditioning can be used for extreme purposes, like cult formation or radicalization of other kinds. Or making dogs salivate, if that’s your thing. But the same process, more subtly, drives true low self esteem.
Beliefs act, sometimes unconsciously, as assumptions about how the world works. Mix strong emotion with an idea and the resultant product is a belief.
Idea + Emotion = Belief
And this is because emotion tends to out power logic. It has to, because emotion, fundamentally, has to do with survival.
This is common to all animals, but without the cognitive aspect. For example, a cat can be treated badly and be conditioned to fear its owner, or even all people. But it won’t then generate beliefs from that conditioning.
The cat won’t reflect and then produce the emotionally skewed belief that it’s unlovable or that it’s worse than all other cats. It doesn’t have that level of brain function. But people create rationalizations for their emotional conditioning all the time.
So as therapists, trying to work on belief without working on emotional conditioning can be akin to rearranging the furniture on a ship that’s holed beneath the waterline.
Our client can cognitively agree with us that they’re not the worst person in the World, while still feeling that they absolutely are. And their agreement will make no difference at all to that feeling.
When treating low self esteem we need to go deeper. To the emotional conditioning that is driving the feelings of worthlessness and self hate.
And there’s another vital part of belief we need to understand.
It’s not just what people say
It’s all too easy to assume a person’s belief is simply what they say they believe but we reveal our true beliefs though our actions. If someone tells you they believe in charity but then behave in an opposite way, their true belief is revealed in their behaviour. Because anyone can say anything for any reason they want (even if they’re not aware of those reasons!).
Clients may agree with you. They may tell you they believe they “should” be positive but then act in ways which are anything but. They may tell you they believe in being kind to the self and then torture themselves like tyrants.
So let’s look at ten examples of clients with low self esteem and the emotional conditioning driving it:
1) Low self esteem caused by academic problems as a child
Alison is a kind, decent and caring woman. As a child though she always felt she was second best to her two older sisters. Both her siblings were highly academic and her parents were obviously proud of their achievements. One became a bestselling author and the other an acclaimed concert violinist.
Alison, on the other hand, is dyslexic and found school hard. Her parents always encouraged her but she felt they were disappointed in her lack of academic success.
As an adult Alison worked hard and eventually trained to become a counsellor. She is well respected and her clients give her great feedback. But she constantly feels like she’s “not the real deal.” She says she feels like a fraud and a fake. She is embarrassed to promote her practice and can’t believe anyone could really value her or her work. Every day feels like a pretence, as though she is wearing a mask and simply playing a role but not genuinely owning it.
Alison agrees she is qualified and that people say she is good at what she does. She knows she should be positive but she just can’t genuinely feel any of this.
Alison’s emotional conditioning as a child is reflecting on her feelings about herself and her achievements as an adult. In this case, the emotional conditioning took place slowly, as a ‘drip drip’ effect of her life circumstances.
2) Feeling unlovable after parental abandonment
Vicky loved her father deeply. When she was 5 years old he left the family. She can still recall sadly watching him walk away with his suitcases down the street. Her mother had kicked him out because he was alcoholic.
In her forties Vicky says tearfully she feels “unlovable.” She has ended a string of promising relationships as soon as she felt she was getting close to these men. She says she knows why she finds is frightened of getting close, of loving, but that knowing the reasons still doesn’t change the feelings of panic she feels when someone seems to like her. She says it goes “too deep” and she feels helpless and hopeless.
Vicky’s emotional conditioning came about though seeing her beloved but chaotic father leave the family home. She had loved him deeply but he died shortly after that. She now feels that loving relationships must be destined to “die”.
3) Self criticism learned as a child
Clive was always small for his age. His parents had been extremely protective of him as he was so shy growing up. At school he was often laughed at by the other children. They would call him names and he even recalls that some of the teachers seemed to find this funny. He was also, on occasion, physically bullied by other children and nothing he did or said seemed to make any difference.
Despite this Clive had become a successful entrepreneur. He is happily married but his wife and others notice how he continually puts himself down and always seems self critical. He feels pessimistic as though he is continually about to “lose everything” despite having made plenty of money and having a loving wife and good friends.
He says he thinks he puts himself down as a way of pre-empting other people hurting him. If he does it first maybe they won’t do it. He is still haunted by memories of being bullied at school, of being the “weird kid.” Despite being intellectually capable, he just can’t think his way out of his feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.
Clive’s emotional conditioning came out of a survival response which had out served its purpose and now causes more problems. Putting oneself down before others do is akin to a dog rolling on its back to show it is non threatening.
A strategy born of fear that may have had limited usefulness now makes life harder than it need be. The fear of being about to lose everything is, says Clive, very similar to the feeling of waiting to be bullied.
4) Lack of love leading to disregard of self
Karen has always been the unofficial carer in any relationship. It’s always been about the other person. How they are? Whether they are happy? Whether she is or not is irrelevant, especially to herself.
She has continually put her own needs last or, more accurately, nowhere at all. She neglects her own appearance and hates spending money on herself as she doesn’t feel she is “worth it.”
Growing up, her mother was a cruel narcissist who had no apparent interest in Karen other than to boast of anything she managed to achieve. Karen’s father died when she was nine years old. When Karen was nineteen her mother became ill and Karen was the primary carer. She has much older siblings but they had long since left home.
Karen cared exclusively for her mother which blocked her from developing her own life. Her mother died when Karen was thirty three, and Karen lived on in the same house until she had to sell it as her mother hadn’t left a will. She had spent her life caring for her mother whose self absorption precluded any consideration of Karen’s own needs.
She knows she neglects and isolates herself. She barely knows how to ask for help. She feels she has wasted her life and doesn’t know how to start living. She understands that she is not unintelligent or ugly “from an objective point of view” but Karen feels she is both “stupid and hideous” whenever she is around other people.
Karen’s emotional conditioning came from the high “emotional temperature” her mother always maintained as Karen was growing up. The histrionics, fits of anger and rage and sulks all shaped Karen’s emotional conditioning. Nothing was ever about Karen so Karen came to feel she was nothing.
5) Relationship insecurity caused by being left
David is insecure in the extreme. His first wife, whom he “loved beyond words” left him “out of the blue” and he says he’s always been seen as “second best” by women, even when he was at college.
He is in a new relationship which was going well but the more deeply involved he has become the more insecure, jealous and pessimistic about the prospects of this relationship he feels. Every man in the street seems a better bet than him for his new partner, at least in David’s mind.
He just can’t understand why this woman could possibly want to be with him. He has started saying this to her and constantly seeks reassurance. He says he knows he is being irrational and needy and feels it’s all to do with his first wife, but feels powerless to change.
David suffered a severe emotional shock when his beloved wife left him. Emotional shocks serve as powerful conditioning elements causing the mind to overgeneralize negatives. David also has the belief that women see him as a “loser.” He mentioned he felt this way before he was married so other emotional conditioning needs to be considered. It’s clear these beliefs have been derived from emotional pain.
6) Low self esteem from sexual abuse
Julia was sexually abused as an adolescent over a period of three years. She feels that as an adult she cannot be intimate with anyone because she is “damaged goods” and wouldn’t want to “inflict all her baggage” on anyone else.
Sometimes when she meets new people she feels they must know what happened to her. She feels as if they can see through her and must somehow see the shame she feels.
Her feeling of “impurity” has stopped her seeking work, being open to meeting a partner, or even owning a pet!
She sees herself as sullied and little more than a “used up” object. None of these, she says, were actual thoughts until she verbalized them, they were “just feelings below the surface” of her mind.
Julia was emotionally conditioned through the fear and terror she experienced when dreading and actually being sexually assaulted.
She was conditioned to feel she was just a “lump of meat” to be used and abused, not a person in her own right with needs of her own. She has learned helplessness and feels she has little power in situations where she could actually exert much greater influence.
7) Parental messages leading to adult difficulties
Kathy is a therapist who has been in practice for 7 years. She’s had many chances to promote her business but when it comes to it finds she just can’t. She had the opportunity to talk about what she does at a local college but turned it down. She is loathe to give out leaflets or talk about what she does when asked by strangers. She feels she is “boasting” or pretending to be something she is not.
Kathy doesn’t even like to promote herself online. She had counselling and says it’s pretty clear where this comes from. Her father had been a strong personality and he had always told her and her brother never to show off, never to “think you’re better than others.” Her father had seemed jealous and even bitter whenever Kathy had achieved any success at school or in the hockey she used to play.
Even though her father has been dead many years, Kathy still feels as though she shouldn’t “show off” or that to be successful is somehow disloyal to him. She has good insight but the feelings persist.
Kathy has been conditioned through the repeated emotions of shame and guilt to feel that any self promotion is conceited showing off. She was put down a lot as a child and emotionally she has conflated success with conceit.
8) Victim status caused by trauma and bullying
Louise is prone to terrible guilt. She feels guilty whenever she even thinks about asking for anything at all. She feels shameful and inferior to “just about everyone.” She was bullied as a child and has been bullied and manipulated as an adult. She has recently come out of a highly abusive relationship and feels her self esteem is at rock bottom.
She says that when she was six years old she walked in on her mother having sex with a stranger. Her father never knew about this and Louise’s mother put a huge amount of pressure on Louise never to mention it to her father, which she never did. Both her parents are now dead but she can’t seem to shake this feeling of shame and guilt even though she has rationalized it over and over.
Louise’s emotional conditioning results from the confusion, guilt and fear of having to “not have a voice”, as she puts it, when being told she mustn’t breathe a word of her mother’s infidelity.
9) Difficulty making decisions due to childhood criticism
Kyle’s father and mother were academics. As far back as he can remember they were encouraging of him in some ways but they always seemed to find fault whenever he expressed an opinion. He has found his adult life packed full of decisions he just couldn’t take for himself.
“I feel like I have to ask permission for everything!” he laments. He says he just can’t trust his own opinion or feels if he makes a decision it must be wrong. He has been manipulated and lied to in relationships. He feels that’s partly down to him not being able to say no to people but also not trusting his instincts not to get involved with those who would use him.
Kyle has been emotionally conditioned to feel that if it’s his decision it must be the wrong decision. It now feels too much of a risk to trust his own judgment. His current self doubt comes from repeatedly feeling embarrassed or just “wrong” whenever he tried to put his own ideas into practice.
10) Poor self image from negative early comparisons
Judy is an attractive woman in her late thirties. She finds it hard to look in a mirror though. If she is ever complimented she feels the compliment giver is trying to trick or deceive her in some way, perhaps in an attempt to get something from her.
As a girl, Judy never felt as attractive as her best friend who became a local beauty queen. She was in love in her teens but the boy she was with gave her up to go with this best friend. Judy doesn’t think the memory of that time still affects her but breaks down and cries:
“I know I’m not ugly but I feel that I am!”
Judy’s belief that she is ugly is quite clearly emotionally conditioned. On one level she doesn’t believe it, but at a deep level she does. It seems the severe shock of betrayal was in part the activating agent for her current disgust with her own appearance. Her sense of outer ugliness has spread to herself as a whole and she feels “bad” in every sense.
Dealing with low self esteem at its source
It has troubled me for years that the way we try to treat low self esteem is so simplistic that it can leave those suffering low self worth feeling less understood and more isolated, no matter how well-intentioned the practitioner, educator or parent may have been.
If our client’s emotional conditioning was powerful (as with the examples I’ve given here) then we have to know how to use techniques which can help heal the deeper effects of that conditioning. Simply trying to appeal to their rationality will often not be effective.
(1) Emotional Hijacking: What happens to your brain when you lose control? Psychology Spot..
(2) The Emotional Brain, Fear, and the Amygdala. Joseph LeDoux.
