Low self-esteem, unworthiness & emptiness
In my private practice, I often work with clients who suffer from a low self-esteem, unworthiness or as they describe ‘emptiness inside’.
Self-esteem is how we value and perceive ourselves. It’s based on our opinions and beliefs about ourselves, which we start developing from the time we are born, throughout our adolescence up until early adulthood.
It matters who we are surrounded with when we are growing up and whether people who look after us can mirror our feelings and can respond empathically to our needs rather than look away or punish us for having them.
If there is a disruption and when our feelings and needs are not mirrored by our caregivers we start developing so called a false self. This is our survival response to the environment which doesn’t seem to be truly seeing us for who we are.
Developing a false self take us away from our true, core and authentic self- that place in which we can value and like ourselves for who we are, we can make decisions and assert ourselves without any fear of being punished, we can recognise our strengths, show kindness to ourselves, believe we deserve happiness, move past mistakes without blaming ourselves, take the time we need for ourselves, feel able to try new or difficult things etc.
Unworthiness or emptiness can be understood as a weak relationship with our true self which is the essential being of a person, one’s ego, awareness, an individual's own reflective consciousness. In other words, when we allow false self to control our life we end up with a lack of self-esteem.
The difficulty is that for the most of our life we might operate on the autopilot not being even aware that we are run by the false self. We are locked in thinking that this is what it is, we can’t change and we are going to feel this emptiness and unworthiness inside us forever.
However, we need to remember that we have developed this false self in order to save ourselves from the non-empathic and non-responsive environment. Secondly, we need to know that we can never lose the core and true, authentic self. It is still within us, only one step away from us but we need to work on finding that connection back to the self and strengthening that relationship which has gone dormant.
Not being whole does not mean we are broken. We just need to find way home and restore our connection with true self.
Therapy can support us with re-building and healing that connection with our true self.
