Thoughtful Thursday: Self-esteem
What is self-esteem?
Self-esteem is an individual’s subjective evaluation of their own worth. If self-concept is what we think about the self, self-esteem describes the positive and negative evaluations we attach to aspects of our self-concept.
Understanding low self-esteem
Low Self-Esteem (LSE) is a negative sense of self.
This can be due to certain life experiences that have led the person to think negatively about themselves. Ex: rejection, mistreatment, neglect, etc.
Due to these experiences, it may have made sense for the individual to have negative self-evaluations at that time (adaptive function). Ex: having low expectations of self led to less disappointment when these standards were not met.
However, these negative self-evaluations may then generalize to all other experiences and stay for longer than useful such that they become maladaptive.
Due to this generalization, it starts affecting how individuals interact with the world which can lead to a lower quality of life. Ex: If John believes he is bad at something, he may never do that, losing the potential of a positive experience.
Furthermore, it can contribute to the onset and maintenance of psychological issues which makes it a risk factor.
Individuals often find themselves in a vicious cycle as depicted below:
In terms of personality disorders, people with avoidant personality disorder (APD) report low self-esteem, primarily associated with the feedback received from interpersonal interactions. People with borderline personality disorder (BPD) also report low self-esteem. Other personality disorders may also have self-esteem involved in different ways.
Treatment
It has been observed that treatments such as dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) achieve great success in dealing with low self-esteem co-occurring in personality disorders. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is also commonly used to treat low self-esteem although DBT might be more ideal when a personality disorder is present.
Understanding the thoughts involved in low self-esteem can be helpful in coping with it more adaptively. This can mean understanding the link between past experiences and current beliefs, how this belief functions in daily life, what triggers negative self-evaluations, how it is responded to, and so on.
Question
Do you think self-esteem affects the way you interact with the world? How?
Any other thoughts about the topic?
References
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3066431/
Social psychology by Smith, E. R., Mackie, D. M., & Claypool, H. M. (2015)
https://www.psychologytools.com/resource/cognitive-behavioral-model-of-low-self-esteem-fennell-1997/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00698/full
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18564322/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20187169/
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@sereneButton43
Thanks for posting this!
1) Do you think self-esteem affects the way you interact with the world? How?
Yes, just thinking of a couple examples from different points in my life:
- If I have a self-evaluation along the lines of, "Everything I have to say is poisonous and will hurt people", then it's a lot more likely that I'll completely withdraw, distrust/dislike myself, distrust/dislike other people, feel like I have nothing worthwhile to contribute to the world, feel depressed/meaningless/apathetic, etc. The effects are pretty far-reaching.
- If I have a self-evaluation along the lines of, "I am someone who has worthwhile or helpful things to say", then I'm more likely to speak out more, voluntarily insert myself into situations, seek out opportunities to interact with people, etc. based on believing that I might be able to have positive, meaningful, helpful experiences by doing that.
2) Any other thoughts about the topic?
I feel like it's really important/helpful what you've mentioned that these thoughts develop out of life experiences, because that sort of implies that they low self-esteem is understandable and makes a lot of sense.
Like, if someone gets treated by garbage for years by all the people around them who are supposed to be caring/loving/supportive, it's pretty reasonable that they might come away feeling like "I am garbage". 😊 Or at the very least, "Even if I'm not garbage, everybody is going to treat me like garbage."
I've also found it helpful for me to have the mindset that it's okay for me to dislike myself. Otherwise, what I find sometimes happens for me is that "self-esteem" becomes another measuring stick or impossible standard that I use to judge myself, like "I'm bad because I have low self-esteem and that's bad/unhealthy/maladaptive/etc."
@QuietMagic That description also reminds me of the idea that our self-evaluations sometimes help increase our circle of influence. By starting to appreciate our ability to influence things, we're able to make changes gradually to reach a desirable outcome.
and yeah, it is important to know that low self-esteem makes complete sense due to the ideas we end up with because of our life experiences. :)
@sereneButton43
I love that "circle of influence" concept from LDP (thread). That's something that's been swirling around in the back of my head ever since.
