Some comments from a university journalist regarding self-esteem, insecurity and the effects which she saw as promiscuity, abusive relationships etc.

Good for you, I’m glad you’re looking into the area. I’m happy to respond. I’m quite precise on some points so I don’t like loose assertions.

I urge you to ask why you are writing the article. Is it to help people improve their lives? Is it to gain readers? Is it to help them understand the status quo or past? I’m only really interested in the first one.
Without defining self-esteem, a debate about can easily be about prejudice and judging others.

Many people use it incorrectly as meaning “You are acting in ways that ways that do not reflect my values”. That strikes me as intolerance rather than low self-esteem.

Nathaniel Branden, the writer of several books on self-esteem defines self-esteem as “the disposition to experience oneself as competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and as worthy of happiness.” These challenges of life including finding and keeping a job and caring for oneself.

This is a long way from giving each child a medal to make them feel good about themselves. You have to experience life to feel that you can meet its challenges.

More on good and bad definitions of self-esteem

http://www.overcoming-low-self-esteem.com/tag/self-esteem-is-not

To make strong statements that self-esteem makes you healthier, wealthier, happier and a better Christian/ Muslim/ believer, one should have large scale studies to back up those statement. The definition of self-esteem should be clear.

As for treatments for low self-esteem, if you are measuring treatments or interventions, there should be control participants to compare against and neither participant nor facilitator should know whether the treatment or the placebo is being applied. That might work for aspirin, but it can be difficult in a talking cure.

Some challenge the idea that self-esteem is a good thing. Much of this seems to be based on a warped and poor definition of self-esteem.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=exploding-the-self-esteem

I offer people a coaching service to raise their self-esteem, i.e., to help them raise their sense of competence to meet the challenges of life and their sense of being worthy of love. I see these things as self-evidently worthwhile or indeed, I leave it to the client to determine that they are. If they want self-esteem in order to be happy, they are better off doing coaching focused on being happy, their true goal. For my clients, self-esteem is the concept that they are after.

More on N. Branden

http://www.overcoming-low-self-esteem.com/category/theme/six-pillars-of-self-esteem-nathaniel-branden

Do they?
It’s possible to feel that we are worthy of love and competent to move home and find a job and then also sleep around, get into the wrong relationship and do badly in our job. We can feel awful about ourselves and useless at times, but happen to be very good at reviewing legal documents. Self-esteem is a broad, long-ish view of ourselves and doesn’t necessarily have direct impact on our behaviours and relationships.

I see insecurity as different to self-esteem in ways such as you can feel insecure about your job due to the economy but feel that you are a competent person worthy of love.

You could search for Twitter quotes about self-esteem. People on twitter talk openly about low self-esteem.

I can help people raise their self esteem. People don’t even seem to think it can be raised, never mind setting aside time and money to work with a coach.

You haven’t asked about the solution or way to improve one’s life if one is insecure or has low self-esteem. We can spend endless time thinking of excuses and explanations about why and how there is something wrong with us. I believe that any treatment should be focused on the client’s goals and building strengths and resourceful states or feelings.
Are you interested in writing about “Clean Language” as a coaching treatment for insecurity and low self-esteem? I could explain it to you or give you a session. I’m currently working with someone to see if I can raise someone’s self-esteem with three hours of coaching.
Would you do a follow up article on the effectiveness of Clean Language coaching?
How do you measure self-esteem? One widely used method is the Rosenberg scale. It asks about how the participant feels about him/herself, if their see their good qualities and whether they have much to be proud of.

http://www.wwnorton.com/college/psych/psychsci/media/rosenberg.htm

Self esteem and age

http://scienceblog.com/377/global-self-esteem-study-yields-no-feel-good-results/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-esteem

Kind Regards,
Brian Birch

It doesn’t always equate to self-esteem, but this seems a related area.

A woman on a plane I was on recently was verbally aggressive with her child and cursed at her.  I told the cabin staff and told the woman I’d report her if she persisted.  She got indignant but eventually went quiet.  Part of her defense was my lack of clear legal authority and we had no reference to social care guidelines.  So I’ve looked up the NSPCC website which talks about emotional abuse in the following ways.  For me it also links to other types of abuse such as bullying and (psychological) domestic violence.

For the purpose of the child protection system, the Department of Health employs the following definition of emotional abuse:

‘Emotional abuse is the persistent emotional ill-treatment of a child such as to cause severe and persistent adverse effects on the child’s emotional development. It may involve conveying to children that they are worthless or unloved, inadequate, or valued only insofar as they meet the needs of another person. It may feature age or developmentally inappropriate expectations being imposed on children. It may involve causing children frequently to feel frightened or in danger, or the exploitation or corruption of children. Some level of emotional abuse is involved in all types of ill treatment of a child, though it may occur alone’. (Department of Health et al, 1999, p.5-6)

Garbarino et al’s influential work defines psychological maltreatment as ‘a concerted attack by an adult on a child’s development of self and social competence’ (Garbarino et al, 1986, cited in Iwaniec, 1997, p.372). They propose five categories of damaging caregiver behaviours:

• rejecting: behaviours which communicate or constitute abandonment of the child;
• isolating: preventing the child from participating in normal social interaction activities;
• terrorising: threatening the child with severe punishment, or deliberately cultivating a climate of fear or threat;
• ignoring: where the caregiver is psychologically unavailable to the child and fails to respond to the child’s behaviour; and
• corrupting: caregiver behaviour which encourages the child to develop false social values that reinforce antisocial or deviant behavioural patterns (Garbarino et al, 1986 cited in Tomison and Tucci, 1997).

Hart et al build on Garbarino et al’s typology above, identifying six categories of adult behaviour towards children considered to be emotionally abusive:

• spurning: both verbal and nonverbal degrading and rejecting of a child;
• exploiting/corrupting: encouraging children to develop behaviours that are self-destructive or mis-socialising;
• terrorising: includes behaviour that threatens or is likely to place the child or child’s loved ones in danger;
• denying emotional responsiveness: ignoring a child’s attempt to interact, or interacting without emotion;
• isolating: involves caregiver behaviours that prevent a child from interacting with children or adults outside the home; and
• mental health, medical and emotional neglect (Hart et al, 1995 cited in Geffner and Rossman, 1998, p.2).

NSPCC Emotional Child Abuse
Contacting the NSPCC Helpline

We worked through a mock-session where she “played client”.  She felt it was exploratory and it clarified her goals.  She helpfully gave some tips for further development.

I will probably explore the demand for CL services (self-esteem/other, coaching/ training; funded/ voluntary).  If anyone is interested in exploring this with me, let me know.  I’m thinking of focusing on, say 6 months + after the domestic violence has finished and other have helped with practical issues.

For some reason I feel the need to clarify that I don’t have any experience of domestic violence;  I’m interested in useful ways to use Clean Language.

Here are some links I’ve placed here, mostly as a note to myself.

http://www.hiddenhurt.co.uk/Articles/survivor.htm

http://www.womensaid.org.uk/domestic-violence-survivors-handbook.asp?section=0001000100080001

http://www.wadv.org/Survivors.htm

http://www.ivillage.co.uk/relationships/challenge/survive/articles/0,,181942_654729,00.html

When twitter often put a hashtag code in their messages such as #ifyoureallyknewme, it allows us all to find messages with a common theme. This hashtag interests me because some of the people using it seem to feel to feel bad about themselves.

Look at a few anonymous messages

• #ifyoureallyknewme you’d know I have very low self-esteem, and no confidence.
• #ifyoureallyknewme .. you’d know, i’m not always who i choose to show you. #reallove try get pass my strong persona.
• #ifyoureallyknewme you’d know that i’m not really the person you see on the outside. I wish people could see past my waterline.
• #ifyoureallyknewme you would know tht I’m actually a really sensitive person..but ppl mistake tht for weakness..so I never show it
• #ifyoureallyknewme I care about everyone else before I care about myself.
• #ifyoureallyknewme You would know I sometimes feel like a loner and that noone cares about me.
• #ifyoureallyknewme you’d know that I wished I was better looking :/ I always think I’m not pretty enough -_-
• #ifyoureallyknewme youd know not to ask me whats wrong with me. Ill give you a list if youd like.

I sense low self-esteem, caring for others first, hiding who you are, not feeling you are enough and being overwhelmed.

What would it be like to

• be able to be comfortable with who you are;
• accept that this is what you’re feeling and thinking;
• to remember and be able to list things that make you like yourself and be proud;
• to find ways to be self-assertive, self-accepting and feel okay about what’s happening;
• be able to be honest and accepting of what’s going on;
• show more of yourself to others and be resilient against hurt;
• expect good things for yourself.

I’m a Self-Esteem Life Coach and I help people feel better about themselves and to feel able to cope well with life’s challenges.

If you’d like to hear more about what I do, please

1) sign up to my email list on the form on the top right on this website.  I won’t spam you or sell your email address.  I’ll offer blogs, videos and other messages to help you understand what’s going on and make whatever changes that you’d like.

2) Follow me on twitter and facebook.

I help people raise their self esteem; are people who are losing weight interested in this?

If you think yor self-esteem is affecting you weight loss, call me for a free consultation.

My focus is helping you  raise your self esteem, regardless of your weight.

Weight and Self-Esteem

From Loose Women

The media, self-esteem, motherhood, and body image. Oh, and of course, witches.

“Star Syndrome” is an article in today’s Evening Standard magazine about self-esteem and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  It has many superficially convincing stories about children and adults regarding themselves more highly than the facts allow and placing themselves the rest of us mere mortals.

It’s a good topic for debate. How should we rate ourselves?  But unfortunately author Helen Kirwan-Taylor doesn’t really define her terms consistently. Indeed, she defines self-esteem and then treats the term as something different.  She quotes W Keith Campbell, Professor of Social Psychology at the University of North Carolina and co-author of “the Narcissism Epidemic; Living in the Age of Entitlement” as saying “It’s way beyond self-esteem.  People are confusing self-esteem, which means thinking you are a person of worth, with narcissism.  Narcissists think, ‘I’m special‘ “.

Now this agrees with Nathaniel Branden who equates self-esteem with your immune system; it’s a good thing of which you can’t get too much.  How can you think you deserve happiness and are worthy – too much?  Thinking you’re better than other people is something different.  You can’t be too protected from disease and you can’t believe too much that you deserve to live, to love, to be loved and be happy. Nathaniel Branden’s book, “The six pillars of self-esteem” is a  top-6000 selling book on Amazon.com and he has written several other self-esteem books.

One of Branden’s six pillars of self-esteem is “Living Consciously” which is basically being aware of what is happening and to behave accordingly.  He advocates realism, honesty, admitting mistakes and seeking out the truth (page 69).  Melanie Fennell in “Overcoming Low Self-Esteem “, another popular book, says “This book is not about the power of positive thinking, or about encouraging you to become as unrealistically positive about yourself as you were unrealistically negative.  It is about achieving a balanced, unbiased view of yourself…“.

So far we have

1) it’s about valuing yourself

2) it requires you to be realistic.

The ES magazine article basically takes issue with people over-valuing themselves and being unrealistic.  Fair enough, but that’s not them having too much self-esteem.  Call it narcissism or inflated self-image if you like, but self-esteem is a particular thing and it requires realism.  Branden makes the point that bravado is likely to be linked to low self-esteem.  It seems that if you are not realistic, you’ll have low-self esteem, but you may put up a considerable front.

Another quote from Robyn M Dawes that “Self-esteem is not always a force for good, it can actually be hurtful” clearly requires a clear definition of self-esteem and does not use the reasonable and popular ones above.  The writer probably got it from this website and it includes the note that “Hawkins argues that Baumeister and other critics confuse self-esteem with egotism, which is not the same thing. Rather, he said, healthy self-esteem ‘comes from being personally and socially responsible.’ “.

So let’s say yes to realism, a sense of self-worth and being aware of all the things that go into making that an undiluted and positive thing. We need a term for the positive experience of ourselves that justifies our existence, the extension of our existence and increasing the offering we give; and self-esteem is that term.  Let’s not get overly concerned with ourselves, our feelings or trying to better other.

Quotes from Nathaniel Branden and his book “The six pillars of self-esteem”.

- No, it is not [possible to have too much self-esteem]; no more than it is possible to have too much physical health or too powerful an immune system. Sometimes self-esteem is confused with boasting or bragging or arrogance; but such traits reflect not too much self-esteem, but too little; they reflect a lack of self-esteem. (page 19)

- It would be hard to name a more certain sign of poor self-esteem than the need to perceive some other group as inferior. (page 12)

This is my answer to a Yahoo Answers forum question:

I’m a self-esteem life coach and I find it an interesting question.

Let’s first answer it

Not all girls feel like Angelina Jolie and not all guys feel like Brad Pitt. Expectations can be out of control.

Guys may like feeling less judged or they might take advantage. They might find vulnerability makes them feel strong or they might want someone who is more sure of themselves. I think it’s best if there is awareness and honesty in who we are, what we want and what we offer.

Now, this is the bit I find interesting. I’ll assume you are the girl and you’re asking about yourself.

Is the most important thing what guys think? Some of them you haven’t even met.

Is the only worthwhile way of rating yourself the way guys rate you?

Is it as simple as turn on and turn off? Are there only two categories to fit into?

If you live your life this way, there are multiple problems.

- a guy you don’t know can say something that puts you in the wrong category;

- your rating and category can change without your control and quickly; and

- you may never really knw what all the criteria are; how they rate you.

We’re told “we’re worth it” only if we buy L’Oriel products and live up to impossible celebrity lifestyles.

If you build your self esteem, you’ll be able to say

- I’m enough as I am

- I’m doing everything I realistically can and that’s okay.

- I’m doing what I can to build the relationships I want to and that’s enough

- I know what I want in life or am in the process of figuring it out

- I can tell the difference between my feelings, people’s intentions and what I should do.

- I trust my own decisions

- I am or am doing my best to become who I want to be and I respect myself.

- What people say to me and how they treat me is not directly related to what I’m worth because I decide that, not them.

- As I become who I want to be, I will offer more in relationships and become more attractive and find someone that I want, not just someone who wants me.

Isn’t the big question:

Does a girl with low self esteem want to raise her self-esteem?

What is self-esteem? This definition is from Nathaniel Branden and his book “The six pillars of self-esteem”. It is the book I recommend when I’m helping people who are overcoming low self esteem. Here are the main ideas from the book.

- Self-esteem has two interrelated components. One is a sense of basic confidence in the face of life’s challenges; self-efficacy. The other is a sense of being worthy of happiness: self-respect. (page 27)

- Self-efficacy is not the conviction that we can never make an error. It is the conviction that we are able to think, to judge, to know – and to correct our errors. It is trust in our mental processes and abilities. (page 34)

Self-respect entails the expectation of friendship, love and happiness as natural, as a result to who we are and what we do. (page 37)

Here are the Six Pillars of Self Esteem from the book by Nathaniel Branden, used in overcoming low self-esteem. The Six pillars are Personal Integrity, Living Consciously, Self-Responsibility, Self-Acceptance, Self-Assertiveness, Living Purposefully.

A brief expansion of these pillars for overcoming low self-esteem is:

Personal Integrity: Live according to your beliefs and values

Living Consciously: Be realistic, have an active mind rather than passive, be willing to see and correct mistakes.

Self-Responsibility: accept that “no one owes me fulfilment of my wishes” (page 107)

Self-Acceptance: When we fight a block it grows stronger. When we acknowledge, experience and accept it, it begins to melt. (page 99)

Self-Assertiveness: My life does not belong to others and I am not here on earth to live up to someone else’s expectations. (page 121)

Living Purposefully: When we behave in ways that conflict with our judgement of what is appropriate, we lose face in out own eyes. (page 144)

Quotes from Nathaniel Branden and his book “The six pillars of self-esteem”.

- No, it is not [possible to have too much self-esteem]; no more than it is possible to have too much physical health or too powerful an immune system. Sometimes self-esteem is confused with boasting or bragging or arrogance; but such traits reflect not too much self-esteem, but too little; the reflect a lack of self-esteem. (page 19)

- It would be hard to name a more certain sign of poor self-esteem than the need to perceive some other group as inferior. (page 12)

- High-self-esteem people can surely be knocked down by an excess of troubles, but they are quicker to pick themselves up again. (page 18)

- If my aim is to prove I am “enough”, the project goes on to infinity – because the battle was already lost on the day I conceded the issue was debatable.

- When we live consciously we do not imagine that our feelings are an infallible guide to truth. (page 71)

I coached a client on overcoming low self-esteem to help her at a job interview.  If someone doesn’t think she deserves a job and is worried about it, the challenge is often one of self-esteem, not just confidence in good interview preparation.  Click on the video, set outside Westminster Abbey in London, near the coaching session, for more details.

Join my mailing list to hear more information (fill in the form on the top right of the website).  Please comment or contact me to let me know if this video helped you in overcoming low self-esteem.

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PhilosophersNotes on YouTube comments Six Pillars of Self-Esteem book.

Are you in an adversarial relationship with yourself?  Find out what this relates to.

This is a great book to help you in overcoming low self esteem.

Nathaniel Branden quotes.  These will help you in overcoming low self esteem.

Ask me questions if you want to find out more about overcoming low self esteem.