Too often you find yourself feeling insecure, searching for safety, security, love, and acceptance. It doesn’t matter what you do, deep inside you just don’t feel worthy or loveable. It affects your personal, social and your intimate relationships, as well as the way you go about life.

Whether you call it self-confidence or self-esteem, you are talking about how you view yourself. Judgements about yourself.

Low self–esteem is a thinking disorder where you view yourself as inadequate, unlovable, and/or incompetent. Once you have this negative belief about yourself, every thought is viewed from this perspective, producing more false assumptions about our self and the world in general, leading to self – defeating behaviours

Symptoms of low self esteem

• Unsure of yourself in social situations including dating
• Comparing yourself and feeling inferior to others
• Not trusting your ability to make the ‘right’ decisions
• Negative Childhood experiences
• Lack of success in personal and/or professional life or feeling like an imposter if you do have success
• Looking at your failures rather than your achievements

What doesn’t help

A popular self-esteem building practice is positive affirmations. Giving yourself praise such as “I am worthy of love,” or “I will soon have great success.” However….

Compliments and positive feedback that could improve feelings of self-worth have little effect when your self-esteem is low because you feel unworthy of the praise and get more stressed out trying to achieve the affirmation and end up feeling worse about yourself.

Ironically the people that seem to benefit from positive affirmations the most are people that have high self-esteem already because they believe the affirmations they recite to themselves to be true.

 

 

What does help

• Counselling is a very effective treatment that can help you identify distorted thinking patterns (negative beliefs and assumptions you have about yourself and others)
• Understanding the source and challenging the negative beliefs and assumptions
• Replacing limiting behaviours with behaviours that will help you succeed, even if it means stepping out of your comfort zone
• Developing a toolbox of effective coping strategies

 

I came through devastating childhood events with very low self-esteem and doubted I would ever feel good enough to deserve good things in life. I am here to tell you however that people with low self-esteem can rise above the negative influences of childhood.

Changing ingrained ideas can be difficult but it is a process that I am honoured to help you navigate successfully. If you are ready to change I invite you to contact me and I look forward to meeting with you to answer any questions you may have for me.