By: Camden Baucke MS LLP
If you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it. – Cool Runnings 1993
It’s important to consider the cross section between who you are and what you do.
You might “be” angry, but are you permanently angry? You can “be” a winner, but do you always win?
As a therapist, I’ve witnessed plenty of suffering from mixing up who you are with what you do.
It’s dangerous to perceive positive outcomes as evidence of personal worth.
When you build your self-esteem on outcomes that can disappear in a second, bad things can ensue.
In this article, I’ll talk about what low self-esteem is, what it looks like, how it forms, and how to start healing without trying to earn your way out of it.
What is Self-Esteem?
Self-esteem is a belief in the estimation of our invisible worth.
“Esteem” comes from the Latin word aestimare, which means to estimate the value of.
Essentially, it’s what you believe you’re worth when you look in the mirror.
There’s plenty of roles that can have worth, but these are different from self-esteem.
You can have worth as an employee, a student, or an athlete – but these don’t translate to your worth as a person.
That’s why getting laid off from your job doesn’t lead to becoming worthless to the world – just your previous employer.
When someone believes that their personal worth is low, leaning on the verge of worthlessness, then a variety of symptoms can come from it.
What is Low Self-Esteem?
Low self-esteem is when you believe that your personal worth is low or absent.
The bottom of low self-esteem is worthlessness.
When you believe that you’re not worth much as a person, what are you not worth enough for?
Not worthy of a break, compassion, hope, or connection?
Low self-esteem does not sit idle – it compensates accordingly.
What do you need to produce to become worthy of a break? Who do you need to appease to become worthy of compassion or connection?
Low self-esteem calls for action, although it’s typically depressing by itself.
It’s also anxiety-provoking, because no matter how much worth in roles you have, like work or school, your lack of personal worth could seem like a threat to it all.
If you’re too intimidated by trying to earn your personal worth, you can just avoid any opportunities to lose any more value.
You can isolate yourself from people, challenges, or some of life’s most rewarding endeavors.
Low self-esteem is a belief, a claim asserted as if true, in your lackluster worth, which demands compensation with achievement or avoidance.
What Does Low Self-Esteem Sound Like?
Low self-esteem is mostly audible in someone’s self-talk and “automatic thoughts“.
That means how you speak to yourself, verbally and inside your mind, can reflect your belief in your personal worth – and what you might believe disqualifies you from having any, such as:
- “I’m not good enough for this“ – This person doubts how “good” they are overall, implying that they’re not enough.
- “They probably don’t actually like me” – This person may have grounded examples of someone liking them, but doubts it because they believe their low self-worth may be more credible than how others behave.
- “I always mess things up” – This person is using a permanent description (always) for their “resume” of mistakes that implies it’s just a part of who they are.
- “Everyone else has it figured out except me” – This person believes that they are the worst exception, and are possibly “lesser than everyone else“
- “I Don’t Deserve Good Things” – This person believes they don’t deserve good things because their personal value is not worth enough to be deserving.
- “I’m just not talented” – This person doesn’t recognize that being untalented at one specific thing is different from being untalented at everything.
- “Why would someone choose me?” – This person doubts why anyone else would see them as worth choosing if they don’t believe they’re worth enough to be chosen.
- “I knew I’d fail” – This person expected their low self-esteem to result in failure, and they are self-reinforcing the idea that they and their efforts are worthless.
- “I’m a burden to others” – This person believes they are not worth enough to help and could negatively affect others by having needs.
- “I just stay quiet to not embarrass myself” – This person assumes their low personal worth will negatively influence what they say, thus they are trying to contain how unworthy they sound to others.
As you might have noticed, these statements are about (1) self (2) others & (3) actions.
Low self-esteem is obviously about the self, but other people play a vital role in what you think of yourself.
Where Does Low Self-Esteem Come From?
While there’s plenty of research on self-esteem, it is hard to describe the development of something that’s entirely cognitive and invisible to the naked eye.
I describe self-esteem as a foundational perspective of yourself, based on an intricate network of beliefs.
Beliefs, while not empirical truth, are claims about what is true.
Foundational beliefs and self-perspectives can go way back to childhood and teenage years – this is when you were discovering yourself as a unique person.
Plenty of research points towards culture, community, and family as key stakeholders that impact self-esteem development, especially when you’re coming to know yourself.
There’s a variety of issues that can disrupt self-esteem/identity development including:
- Parental Abuse
- Parental Neglect
- Bullying
- Social isolation
- Lower socioeconomic status
- Childhood trauma
- Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)
- Early exposure to interpersonal violence
Low self-esteem doesn’t come from nowhere – it often includes (1) how we learned to view ourselves (2) in context of other people’s treatment & (3) what actions we could perform to be more valuable to those people.
Why Compensation Never Fixes You
Low self-esteem is best addressed by the form of which it exists – cognition.
This means perspective change is absolutely necessary to overcome low self-esteem, something you can achieve through psychotherapy and counseling.
If you compensate for low self-esteem with actions, you won’t change your personal worth.
If you succeed, you’ll only delay recognizing an inevitable worthlessness within.
Too often I’ve seen athletes, musicians, and academics reach the highest heights of their careers just to realize they only wanted to be accepted for who they are.
You can earn worth in every role you have, but your personal worth can still seem absent.
Also, trying to fix your low self-esteem like a problem only reinforces the beliefs that make you appear like a problem.
Then you’re creating habits and forging a lifestyle around the belief that you’re worthless.
The first step to realizing the problematic nature of low self-esteem is to open yourself up to the idea that you’re not a problem at all.
How to Climb Out of Low Self-Esteem
Self-esteem is a deep and intricate topic, so again, I would recommend psychotherapy with treatment models like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), or metacognitive therapy (MCT).
For this article, I’d just like to introduce you to new perspectives in the form of questions.
Each addresses a component of low self-esteem, but I need you to give it some curiosity and imagination – give these alternatives a second to possibly be true.
1. What if you are worth more than what you provide?
2. What would change if you are actually worth more as a person?
3. How would life be different if you didn’t need to earn your worth?
4. What bad things could happen if you believe you are more worthy?
5. What good things could happen if you believe you are more worthy?
6. What would it feel like to have a healthy self-esteem?
7. What would feel wrong about having a higher self-esteem?
8. What would your work, relationships, and schedule look different if you had a healthy self-esteem?
Final Thoughts
While self-esteem can be founded on childhood events and relationships, it’s now in your hands.
You don’t have to keep living as if you’re worthless or less than.
Self-esteem is a vital component of healthy living – a safety net of personal worth when our efforts to earn our worth in roles falls through.
Feel free to try and worth in your roles – work hard at your job, school, or craft.
Just remember that when each of those fall through – you get laid off, earn a failing grade, or get a bad review, that your personal worth is not in question.
Remember that lost worth in a role doesn’t mean losing worth as a person.
Work hard, but humanize yourself – you’re not a vending machine, you’re a person worthy of compassion and care, at least from yourself.
Reflections 
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