What Causes Low Self-Esteem and How Can We Improve It?

Guest Post by James Mulholland

Table of Contents

Labels & Self-Esteem: How Many of These Words Have You Worn?

What Exactly is Low Self-Esteem?

I’m sure we all know what low self-esteem can feel like…self-doubt gnawing away at us, anxiety sparking off at the mere thought of doing something outside of our comfort zones, reflecting back on our life, comparing it to others, and coming away feeling demoralised.

Whether these moments are chronic and debilitating or relatively situational and easier to shrug off, they form a normal part of human experience.

For many of us, though, they can have severe impacts on our day-to-day lives and general well-being, to the point that we’re desperate to do something about it.

Low self-esteem can involve these kinds of themes:

Common Signs of Low Self-Esteem

It’s important to note our self-esteem isn’t always ‘generalised’ and impacting everything we encounter in our lives.

For example, we can have absolutely crippling social anxiety but be confident in our abilities at work.

There are usually some interesting subtleties that explain why some things set off a lot of self-doubt and discomfort while others don’t (unsurprisingly, figuring this out together in therapy can be helpful).

Other times, it truly does feel like the doubts and criticism are all-consuming, affecting every part of our day-to-day life

Why Might We Suffer from Low Self-Esteem?

Typically (but not always, as I’ll discuss just below), difficult earlier experiences form negative beliefs about ourselves and our place in the wider world.

Personality and temperament factor in too, as well as learning traits from our parents or other important people in our lives.

Very common causes:

• Feeling like we don’t fit in – perhaps, from my personal experience, one of the most common reasons. Growing up, if for whatever reason we don’t mesh well with the people around us (especially our peers in school), it can leave us feeling different, and difference when we’re younger is usually a bad thing. Factors such as neurodiversity (autism, ADHD, learning difficulties, etc.), sexuality, gender identity, race/religion/cultural differences can all play a part. Frankly, anything that leaves us feeling different from others and like our true self isn’t accepted has significant implications on our self-esteem

  
  

• Experiencing punishment/abuse/neglect – whether from parents or caregivers, peers or authoritative figures like teachers, our developing brains are influenced by the narratives others are telling us. Someone with undiagnosed dyslexia might have been told, “You need to improve your spelling or you’ll never amount to anything” throughout their school life. These kinds of experiences stick with us and help to form our own sense of ourselves (which typically are incredibly skewed and inaccurate now, if they were ever true to begin with)

  
  

  

  The Long Shadow of Growing Up: Childhood Messages May Still Be Shaping Your Self-Esteem

• Feeling unable to meet expectations – pressure to achieve certain standards, compounded by having siblings we’re compared to, is a common experience. Others’ expectations can become internalised, so we start to encompass those standards and critique ourselves in similar (or worse) ways, e.g., “I only got 80%, so clearly I should have worked harder”. What we don’t always do is consider whether the expectations are fair and realistic – should anyone be expected to achieve these high standards ALL the time?

• Insufficient praise/encouragement – sometimes a lack of positive feedback about ourselves can be a factor. Perhaps our parents were incredibly modest, perhaps they were always busy working and didn’t give us enough quality time, maybe we weren’t always pushed or forced to do things outside of our comfort zone (which would have developed our confidence in the long term). We may have had a naturally quiet and reserved personality, which made doing certain things much harder than usual if we didn’t have external influences in our lives pushing us forward and boosting us up

How Treatable is Low Self-Esteem?

Low self-esteem is incredibly common AND incredibly treatable!

‘Official’ statistics are hard to come by, but recent surveys suggest anywhere between 20 and 86% of us self-report as lacking in confidence.

As therapists, we’re certainly no strangers to low self-esteem, both personally and professionally!

Even before specialising in self-esteem therapy, I would estimate a good 3/4 of the people I worked with had difficulties relating to confidence.

A barrier to even getting started working on low self-esteem is typically the belief:

“This is just me, though, I’m the problem, how could therapy fix that?”

Choosing Between Self-Blame and Self-Compassion

I feel it’s key to allow ourselves to consider the possibility that perhaps the low self-esteem is MAKING us feel that’s the case, that our long-held negative, critical beliefs are convincing us we’re not good enough, nothing will change, even if we tried we’d end up failing – which are all common themes with low self-esteem to begin with!

Know that you’re certainly not alone – very few people will approach this type of therapy feeling confident it will ‘work’.

Instead, I’d always encourage you to work on remaining as open-minded as possible. After all, the only guarantee is that if we don’t try, it certainly can’t work!

Strategies for Improving Self-Esteem Ourselves

Here are a couple of things we can do to start working on our confidence, linked to key Cognitive Behavioural concepts and techniques:

Evaluating the ‘Validity’ of Our Thoughts and Beliefs

Because we think it, it must be true, right?

I couldn’t possibly be overly critical towards myself, could I…? We all know we’re our own worst critics!

There’s often some skewed thinking and reasoning going on somewhere for those of us who are prone to low self-esteem.

If you know this is your Achilles’ heel, you should be aware you probably can’t trust your judgement about yourself all of the time!

Sharing a personal example: throughout my younger years, I’d regularly hold myself back from applying for certain jobs because I was convinced that I didn’t have what it took and would just end up being rejected anyway, which would only make my confidence worse.

And so, what happens in those situations?

I didn’t apply for other roles, so I didn’t progress and then…I reflected that my life was stagnant: "I’m clearly not good enough to achieve anything better".

If this sounds at all relatable, then trust me, I get it!

However, is that actually true?

If I’m choosing not to apply to protect myself, then technically, THAT is the first unquestionable obstacle to me progressing.

I may end up being rejected, yes, but I also might not.

What if I’m underestimating my capabilities?

The technique of ‘Cognitive Restructuring’ can be helpful for considering the possibility that our negative self-beliefs might not be 100% truthful.

Not Every Thought Deserves a Free Pass—Check the Evidence First.

One version is called ‘Taking our Thoughts to Court’ and involves the following steps:

• Step 1 – put your thought in the dock – write down the negative thought that’s currently bothering you. Example: "I know I’ll be rejected from this job interview because I’m not good enough".

  
  

• Step 2 – prosecute the thought / try to prove it’s true – next, write down all the evidence you can think of that suggests the thought is accurate. Try to consider factual information only, just like in a real court. Someone saying they ‘just think’ the defendant is guilty won’t cut it; we need proof! This is much harder than you might think, and generally, your ‘evidence’ will be shaky. Example: "I’ve been rejected for jobs before" (Objection – that doesn’t definitively prove you’ll be rejected this time!)

  
  

• Step 3 – defend the thought / come up with evidence it isn’t true – next write down everything you can think of that could suggest that the thought isn’t wholly accurate. This may also be tricky, depending on how you’re currently feeling and how resistant the belief is to being challenged. But try to think, "if this was someone I loved, what arguments could I come up with?". Example = "I do meet all of the essential criteria on the job description".

  
  

• Step 4 – create the judge’s final ruling – so, considering the prosecution and defence’s arguments, what is the most likely conclusion? This does not have to be ‘rainbows and unicorns’ positive – CBT loves to opt for realistic, not overly optimistic (and this will be far more palatable for you too!). Example = "So there’s no actual proof I’ll definitely be rejected. If I do it, isn’t proof I’m not good enough. I know the job market is a nightmare right now, with so many people applying. I’ve been rejected before and managed to bounce back. I’ll keep applying in the meantime, regardless".

Monitoring Positive Events

Another process to start pushing back against is our natural tendency to focus on information that fits our negative self-beliefs, whilst simultaneously ignoring more positive information.

So, a strategy, and one that won’t necessarily sound all that easy to do, is to start paying way more attention to the positive information going on day-to-day!

Shift Your Focus. Build Your Case for Self-Worth

An example to illustrate this: perhaps one of my most common negative thoughts is “I’m not a good enough parent”.

I’m sure I would be able to tell you a dozen reasons as to why I felt that was true.

My task would be to start monitoring, either as it happens, or reflecting back on the past day, what I did that day that suggests I WAS a good parent.

The sorts of things you’d say constitute good parenting, like spending quality time together, taking the kids to school, helping with homework, making their dinner, getting them ready for bed, etc.

The things which, when we’re feeling so critical of ourselves, are easy to dismiss as “oh well, that’s the bare minimum, everyone should be doing that”.

Are they not important things, though?

If they were missing from a child’s life, would they not matter?

Would you say other parents weren’t good for doing the same things?

Let’s be fair to ourselves and judge by the same standards we would judge others.

This can be hard to do, but this exercise is important for starting that process off – paying attention to other information within our lives, practicing allowing ourselves to give ourselves credit, sitting with the discomfort of challenging our long-held negative beliefs

What Therapy Would Involve When You’d Like Some Guided Support

Low self-esteem can be challenging to work on by ourselves for a whole host of reasons.

Primarily, we’re just far too consumed by our lifelong beliefs to be able to consider other perspectives without them feeling alien and uncomfortable.

Have you ever tried telling yourself positive affirmations before, like:

• “I am enough”,

• “I am loved”,

• “I am important”?

  
  

If you’re anything like me (and practically everyone I’ve ever worked with), you’ll end up with a bad taste in your mouth while your negative beliefs remain thoroughly un-intimidated by our attempts at usurping them!

Having the space in therapy to explore and make sense of why we feel the way we do can be beneficial all by itself.

No wonder we feel this way when life has thrown these challenges at us.

Being able to link our doubts to specific life events can be very validating.

It also enables us to explore what sense we made of these events at the time, often as young children, and what sense we would make of them now, as adults.

Being gently encouraged to consider alternate perspectives is a key part of the therapy process in general.

How might our opinion change if we were to replace someone we cared about with ourselves?

For example, “If my closest friend was unemployed right now, would I genuinely be thinking ‘wow, what a complete waste of space you are'?"

Working on behavioural change is also important.

Every Step We Take in Therapy Helps Build the Bridge Between Self-Doubt and Self-Belief.

What we often find is, whilst the more logical, perspective-shifting approaches are very helpful in theory, there’s still that sense of “ah but what if I’m just kidding myself that I’m actually more capable than I’ve always thought?” and so the best way to disprove these kinds of doubts is through action!

We’d be working together to create opportunities to discover, in as comfortable a way as possible, whether our old negative beliefs may be false or if our newer, more helpful perspectives may be correct.

Although this kind of experiential work can be a little daunting, the benefits can genuinely be incredible.

It’s so much harder to doubt real experiences than mere theoretical concepts.

Our old negative beliefs will start to tremble under the weight of the evidence we end up mounting!

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About the author: James Mulholland is a Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist accredited by the British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP), providing truly tailored CBT and Life Coaching across the UK and Michigan, USA.

Specialising in treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Low Self-Esteem, with coaching also offered for working on life transitions (parenthood, bereavement, etc.), work-related stress and relationships. He has significant experience working with neurodiversity, autism spectrum, and LGBTQ+-specific challenges. 

Website: jmpsychcoaching.com Email: jmpsychcoaching@gmail.com

If you have any questions or reflections about anything discussed in the article, don’t hesitate to get in touch with James! And if you want to explore the possibility of specialist self-esteem-focused therapy, please reach out to him to book a free 15-minute consultation

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