Healing your Emotional Self
Self-esteem is how you feel about yourself as a person—your overall judgment of yourself. Your self-esteem may be high or low, depending on how much you like or approve of yourself. If you have high self-esteem, you have an appreciation of the full extent of your personality. This means that you accept yourself for who you are, with both your good qualities and your so-called bad ones. It can be assumed that you have self-respect, self-love, and feelings of self-worth. You don’t need to impress others because you already know you have value. If you are unsure whether you have high self- esteem, ask yourself: “Do I believe that I am lovable?” “Do I believe I am worthwhile?”
The primary cause of your low self-esteem or negative self-image probably goes back to your childhood. No matter what has happened to you in your life, your parents (or the people who raised you) have the most significant influence on how you feel about yourself. Negative parental behavior and messages can have a profound effect on our self-image and self-esteem. This is especially true of survivors of emotional abuse, neglect, or smothering as a child.
Inadequate, unhealthy parenting can affect the formation of a child’s identity, self-concept, and level of self-esteem. Research clearly shows that the single most important factor in determining the amount of self-esteem a child starts out with is his or her parents’ style of child-rearing during the first three or four years of the child’s life.
When parents are neglectful, critical, and unfair, and provide harsh discipline and inappropriate limits, the children they shape are insecure and self-critical, and they suffer from low self-esteem.
Having a strong inner critic is another factor in creating low self- esteem, and it usually goes hand in hand with low self-esteem. Your inner critic is formed through the normal socialization process that every child experiences.
Your inner critic’s voice is the voice of a disapproving parent—the punishing, forbidding voice that shaped your behavior as a child. If your early experiences were mild and appropriate, your adult critic may only rarely attack, but if you were given very strong messages about your “badness” or “wrongness” as a child, your adult critic will attack you frequently and fiercely.
Exercise: Your Core Beliefs
Think about the way your parents treated you as a child. Based on this treatment, what false beliefs and unreasonable expectations of yourself and life do you think you developed? Completing the following sentences will help you see clearer.
Example: When my father __________ (“ignored me”, “criticized me”), it led me to believe that I __________ (“am unim- portant,” “am incompetent”).
Make a list of the beliefs you developed due to your parents’ treatment of you when you were growing up, using your answers from the sentence-completion exercise and the preceding examples of negative beliefs.
Make a separate list of the unreasonable expectations you have, based on the ways your parents treated you and your early childhood experiences.
It may seem to us that our negative beliefs and unreasonable expectations of ourselves and about life are permanently installed in our brains and that changing our minds about these negative beliefs is near to impossible. But the truth is that it is possible to change even the most negative, unhealthy, and destructive beliefs. In the next two chapters you will be offered more exercises and activities that will help you in this process.
Changing your core beliefs can take a great deal of time and effort, but it is definitely worth it. By doing so you will be able to alter your view of yourself and the world in a significant way.
Coaching is an effective method which helps clients question their core beliefs and how they see the world. Within a coaching session, I help my clients break free from those limiting beliefs which were created in childhood, in order for them to increase their self-confidence and change their life. Are you ready for that step? Are you ready to take control over your life? If the answer is yes, I invite you to book you first free coaching session with me. Send me an e-mail at stoycheva.coach@gmail.com