Beat Low Self-Esteem With CBT

Lead a happier, more confident life: a cognitive behavioural therapy toolkit

Stephen Palmer, Christine Wilding

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780340991510
• eBook ISBN: 9781444129175
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

Beat Low Self-Esteem with CBT will give you the skills you need to overcome a lack of self-esteem, making it easier for you to deal with tough times and leaving you a happier and more confident person. A complete program for changing your self-image, it takes you step-by-step through every aspect of confidence, with exercises to accompany each stage and short-term 'personal assignments' that will give you long-term benefits and lasting results.
NOT GOT MUCH TIME?One, five and ten-minute introductions to key principles to get you started.
AUTHOR INSIGHTSLots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on
the author's many years of experience.
TEST YOURSELFTests in the book and online to keep track of your progress.
EXTEND YOUR KNOWLEDGEExtra online articles at www.teachyourself.com
to give you a richer understanding of CBT.
FIVE THINGS TO REMEMBERQuick refreshers to help you remember the key facts.
TRY THISInnovative exercises illustrate what you've learnt and how to use it.

1. Great self-esteem: what is it?

In this chapter you will learn:

• what self-esteem – or lack of it – is
• the possible origins of your own low self-esteem
• how your ‘Personal Fault Finder’ deceives you
• the value of self-acceptance
• how to set goals to improve your self-esteem.

What is self-esteem?

What do we mean when we talk about self-esteem? You will probably agree that it includes some, or all, of the following:

• the ability to enjoy life to the full
• the ability to cope with life’s ups and downs
• feeling good about ourselves
• feeling that others, in general, like us
• having a positive attitude
• having good social skills
• the willingness to give new things a go
• the willingness to take risks
• the ability to make difficult decisions
• the ability to achieve life goals.

Self-esteem can best be described as having confidence in your own abilities and values. It does not mean thinking that you are the best at everything, but feeling comfortable with yourself even when you are not. It is accepting yourself, with all your strengths and weaknesses, while still taking opportunities for self-development.

In simple terms therefore, self-esteem means having trust and faith in yourself. Before you can do this however, you need to like and value yourself. You also need to be able to accept yourself as you are. The ‘catch 22’ situation here is that, if your self-esteem is low then these are tall orders.

A MEASUREMENT

Self-esteem is, in essence, a measurement. We rate ourselves against a variety of criteria, and the result is an estimate of our personal view of our value or worth. The problem is that we tend to rate ourselves very inaccurately and very harshly. This in turn leads to low self-esteem, since based on our negative perceptions, we continue to undervalue ourselves. Worse is to come – once a person believes something to be true, he or she will start to act as if it were. The person will start to gather evidence to support this erroneous belief, while at the same time discounting evidence that fails to support it, thus strengthening the negative view of his or her personal value.

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Insight

This is the self-esteem trap. Many of us fall into it. We measure our self-esteem through subjectively rating ourselves – usually harshly and negatively. We need to be aware that this can lead us to live with low self-esteem based on unhelpful information and reasoning – not truths or facts.

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Exercise

Think about a time when you felt really confident – perhaps you had done something well, or someone had praised you.

• Did you need a particular achievement to give you this positive feeling?
• Can you remember having such a feeling without having excelled at anything special or receiving any particular positive input?

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Childhood origins

Where does our low self-esteem come from? Are we born with it? Is it genetic? Do we learn it? Have life events simply conspired against us so that we feel everything we do goes wrong, and we never get that lucky ‘break’ that would give our confidence a boost?

Most people suffer from some element of low self-esteem. Problems usually develop when our self-esteem plummets so low that it starts preventing us from doing things: ‘I’m not trying for the job promotion – I’ll never get it anyway’ or ‘I didn’t invite so-and-so to go out with me – they would be sure to say no, and then I’d feel even worse about myself’.

Where does this come from? Finally, a chance to blame the parents! Parents often feel that criticism encourages their child to be aware of their weaknesses and therefore try harder to improve.

Parents may feel that their own views, built on knowledge and experience, are to be passed down to their offspring. So a child may learn that what they think is ‘wrong’ while what someone else (their parent) thinks is ‘right’. For example: a father who says ‘You idiot’ when his son makes an error will scarcely recollect saying it, while the child absorbs the idea that he is an ‘idiot’.

We can see how the low self-esteem habit can develop – and this is in caring and well-adjusted households. Now consider how many children grow up in households where they are regularly vilified, ridiculed and abused.

Then there is school to contend with. Woe betide you if you:

• wear glasses
• have red hair
• are slightly overweight or undersized
• wear the wrong make of trainers
• don’t belong to the right gang
• struggle with maths and are admonished by the teacher in front of your classmates
• are poor at sports and always come last in competitive events.

Can you begin to see how hard it is for any of us to grow up feeling particularly good about ourselves?

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Insight

Low self-esteem tends to develop during our childhoods. Even where we have had a relatively happy time of it, we can still absorb, and carry with us into adulthood, negative thoughts about ourselves through parental criticism.

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Think about the lessons you learned in your childhood. For example, if you are shy with strangers, think about the opportunities you had (or did not have) to talk to adults in such a way that you felt an ‘equal’ rather than simply a child. If you find it hard to stand up to people, think about how your parents reacted if you ‘rebelled’ in any way. Look at the characteristics you consider personal weaknesses, and see if you can find a point in your childhood where these ideas might have begun.

This may help you to understand how your low self-esteem gradually developed.

Adulthood: time to tackle low self-esteem

What we would like you to recognize is that the corrosive power of low self-esteem comes largely from external circumstances. This is natural.

A concept that will help you overcome this is self-acceptance. When you adopt the idea of self-acceptance, you begin to value yourself in spite of what others think. In the examples we gave you previously, low self-esteem has developed, in the main, due to the negative views and comments of significant others in our lives. If we can develop enough resilience to value ourselves in spite of what others may think, we will begin to feel much better about ourselves.

This is a journey to be learned in adulthood by most of us, and requires us to work to change the view that we have of ourselves that we have carried from childhood. In Chapter 2 you will learn exactly how to banish these negative thoughts that may have haunted you for a long time.

A WOBBLY BIKE

Self-esteem is a rickety bicycle in that it wobbles a great deal. If your mood drops, so can your self-esteem and vice versa. You can also feel especially confident in certain areas of your life – super confident even – and yet hopelessly inadequate in others. Some people say to us: ‘I am completely confident in my workplace, but seem unable to sustain any sort of personal relationship and feel a total failure in this area.’

NEGATIVE SELF-RATING

Low self-esteem can result in depression and having thoughts that you are ‘worthless’ or even that you are a ‘bad’ person. We tend to define these negative responses by using a comparative rating system. For example, we may decide that someone we know is our idea of a ‘perfect’ person and we compare ourselves very unfavourably against this paragon. We also tend to give ourselves ‘global’ ratings, for example: ‘So-and-so is a much better person than I am’, rather than specific ratings ‘So-and-so is more attractive than me, but I can play the piano better’ which would be more realistic.

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Insight

Developing the idea of liking ourselves ‘no matter what’ will give us a much stronger base for self-esteem than being dependent on our achievements and external feed-in.

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Can you identify any personal characteristics or behaviours where you genuinely believe, ‘This is me and other people can like it or lump it?’ Think about these characteristics for a moment. Are you more confident when you take this view? If so, these are genuine beliefs. If not, you are probably masking low self-esteem with defiance.

WHAT MAINTAINS LOW SELF-ESTEEM?

In our daily lives, most of us experience many events that make us feel good about ourselves. We get good jobs, enter into loving relationships and create reasonably satisfying lives. So why does low self-esteem plague some of us?

The answer is the beliefs that we have about ourselves that have developed over many years. The mistake we make is to confuse these beliefs with facts.

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Insight

We cannot stress strongly enough the importance of grasping this point, and keeping it in your mind. We can change beliefs, but we cannot change facts.

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CASE STUDY: Melissa’s story

Melissa was a bright student at school. However her home life was poor, with an absent father and a mother who escaped her own inadequacies by drinking heavily. When drunk, she became abusive and Melissa bore the brunt of this, for the simple reason that she looked very much like her absent father. When she tried to study at home, her mother told her that her father was stupid, and therefore so was she, so what was the point of studying?

Melissa managed to keep her mother’s beliefs at bay until she got low grades in one of her tests. For the first time, she began to wonder if what her mother told her was true. She then feared her next test, as she realized that – in her own perceptions – perhaps she was rather stupid. Because of this anxiety, Melissa struggled with her next test and did poorly. Melissa now took this as proof that her mother was right. There was no point in trying, as it was a waste of time. Sadly Melissa consequently failed at school and achieved very little in her adult life. However, in Melissa’s mind this correctly refl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Meet the authors
• Only got a minute?
• Only got five minutes?
• Only got ten minutes?
• Introduction
• 1 Great self-esteem: what is it?
• 2 Thinking your way out of low self-esteem
• 3 The perfection trap
• 4 Defeat low self-esteem by developing self-acceptance
• 5 ‘It’s not my fault: life is against me’
• 6 Increase your self-esteem through assertiveness
• 7 Act your way to good self-esteem
• 8 Body image
• 9 Becoming an optimist
• 10 Self-esteem and relationships
• 11 Developing emotional strength
• 12 Developing as a person to increase self-esteem
• Appendix A: professional assistance
• Appendix B: alcohol dependency and abusive relationships
• Taking it further
• References and further reading
• Index