Do you often hang these words on your lips?
"I'm useless"
"I can't do anything well"
"I don't deserve it"
"Am I doing something wrong"
Even if you get good grades in your studies and work, you can't accept the praise of others, and you feel that it is just luck. Often acquiesce to the negative evaluation of oneself by others.
Ever thought you're in a state of "low self-esteem"...
When we are in "low self-esteem", we will always look at our lives in a negative way, thinking that we cannot face the challenges in life. Persistent negative thoughts can cause negative emotions, which in turn can affect your state of mind, making you vulnerable and sensitive, and the cycle repeats.
Low self-esteem usually arises from childhood:
Negative feedback when dealing with parents, teachers, friends.
Negative information disseminated by the media
Stress and difficulties in life: illness, bereavement.
Excessively high standards of oneself
Negative personality
In low self-esteem situations, we want to flee social spaces while refusing to accept new things or people. I just want to stay within my "safe range" and be afraid of difficulties and challenges. Although, avoiding challenges and difficulties in the short term will make you feel safe. But in the long run, it can backfire, reinforcing underlying fears and doubts, and telling you that the only way to live is to escape. At the same time, persistently low self-esteem increases the risk of depression and anxiety.
Source: Unsplash
If low self-esteem makes us stand still and carry our weight forward, having a healthy state of self-esteem can break this deadlock. A healthy state of self-esteem motivates you to reach your goals and be able to face a negative life. Even if life is not satisfactory, you can find surprises from small corners. When we get along with people, we can also set reasonable margins and maintain healthy intimate relationships.
How is low self-esteem formed?
If you want to save your low self-esteem, you need to know how low self-esteem is formed.
The level of a person's self-esteem is related to a person's experience of satisfaction or frustration in relationships with others, as well as the feeling of being appreciated or rejected by others in interpersonal interactions.
At the same time, the gap between a person's "goals and wishes" and the actual "success and achievement", that is, the degree of realization of self-ideals, also affects a person's self-esteem.
Know that the way we see the world and others is carried out by a set of inner representations of the inner world. And this pattern of representation comes from the whole relationship with important others that is internalized in the process of a person's growth, including the feelings, concepts, and so on in these relationships.
Many people with low self-esteem have experienced many negative experiences of being ignored, frustrating, and fearful and angry in the early stages of growth, such as the neglect and dissatisfaction of nurturers for their own material needs and emotional needs. Therefore, they will establish in their hearts a way of looking at themselves: they are not good enough, they are not worthy of being understood, they are not worthy of being loved.
When they encounter situations where they need to seek help from others, they will start to suppress themselves: they should not rely on others, let alone seek help from others, which means their own incompetence and vulnerability. The stronger the force of this repression, the lower a person's self-esteem becomes.
Under such a personality background, it is difficult for us to imagine that people with low self-esteem can improve their self-esteem level through the realization of self-ideals.
On the one hand, the low self-esteem model makes it difficult for them to achieve achievements and successes in the way they see themselves and others; on the other hand, even if they have achieved some success, the low self-esteem model will make them think that these successes do not really belong to themselves, but rely on some luck.
It sounds like a life with low self-esteem is like being stuck in a swamp, trying to struggle out, but sinking deeper and deeper into the mire.
How to solve low self-esteem?
1, self-help rule 1: pay more attention to their own advantages
So why, on earth, do we feel like crap in the face of failure?
To figure this out, the researchers did an interesting experiment on a whim.
They divided the volunteers into high- and low-self-esteem, told them that the test had failed, and then asked them to describe their social skills.
It turned out that people with high self-esteem rated their social skills much better.
Schematic diagram of Experiment 1, Author: DR
The researchers then used the volunteers' good activities to "seduce" them, and the high self-esteem people quickly let go of the task at hand compared to the low self-esteem people, so as to alleviate the pain of failure.
Schematic diagram of Experiment 2, author: DR
The mystery of the high self-esteem is solved!
It is their focus on their own merits and coping strategies for some things that make them feel better, which makes them have a higher sense of self-worth.
In the future, when we encounter difficulties, we may as well learn from high self-esteem and be a "narcissistic" person:
"This time I failed, so what, I have so many other advantages!"
2. Self-help rule 2: Focus on the areas you value
In fact, the field we value determines our self-esteem and sense of self-worth, and it (the field of importance) has a "tall" professional name - "self-worth combination".
In today's society, we are hijacked by consumerism, facial anxiety, and so on, and the outside world tries to use anxiety to motivate us to do what they want us to do. We must learn to interfere, listen to our own voices, do things that really make us feel valuable, and grasp the sense of self-worth in our own hands:
"No, it doesn't matter to me, it doesn't make me feel valuable. People are not perfect everywhere to have a sense of value. ”
You may not believe it, but the national wife Gakki (Niigaki Yui) will also feel that she has no value.
In "We Can't Be Beasts", Gakki, the wife of the nation, is a small clerk.
In order to become an irreplaceable person in the eyes of others, she seeks perfection in front of her lovers, works hard in front of her boss, and tries to become a perfect person in the values of others. So she took over all the unreasonable requests of her boss and did all the dirty work.
When she tried to protest with a "resignation" one day, the boss knocked her down with a single sentence, "Employees like you can be exchanged."
She found herself working so hard that it didn't give her a sense of value, she was just a "worthless pawn."
With the help of her friends, she finally realized that it was the eyes of others that bound her tightly, and that the things she had previously considered important were not really important. Relieved, she chose to resign, said goodbye to her boyfriend, and finally ushered in a new life of satisfaction.
Gakki's sense of self-worth returns because she has regained areas of real importance.
3. Self-help rule 3: Abandon uncontrollable value evaluation standards
A friend said that she felt that her self-worth combination lies in others, and the evaluation of others is where her sense of value lies: "I feel that my sense of self-worth is sometimes like riding a roller coaster, when others praise me, it is fine, and when others criticize me, it is like falling into hell." 」 ”
Learning to eliminate uncontrollable factors can improve and stabilize our sense of self-worth:
"This field will take my sense of self-worth a roller coaster, and I should try to weed it out."
Because whether it is the evaluation of others, success or appearance, these are all things that we cannot control, because we cannot guarantee that we will always be accepted, maintain beauty or win the competition.
Psychologists such as Crocker point out that incorporating these uncontrollable factors into our self-worth portfolio can make our sense of self-worth rise and fall, and make us more prone to anxiety and depression.
4, self-help rule 4: learn to look for external causes
Studies have found that people with low self-worth tend to be kind, even soft-hearted: they always like to look for reasons for their own mistakes and help others find reasons for their mistakes. People with high self-worth will look at the problem more objectively: this matter is not my insufficient responsibility, or it is not my responsibility alone.
Weiner's attribution theory found that people who attributed failure to their own abilities were more likely to reduce their self-worth.
Learning to look at problems objectively may be a little difficult for us who have been advocated for many years to find our own reasons. But ask the people you trust around you about the reasons for the failure, or do a "brainstorming": whether right or wrong, quickly write down other possible reasons on a piece of paper, and then rate the former and the possibility of failure due to their own ability.
After objectively analyzing the reasons, perhaps we can also confidently say: "This is not a problem of my ability, there are other reasons." ”
In the American drama "You'rethe Worst", the heroine Gretchen grew up under the strict requirements and constant denial of her parents, she was lively and fearless on the surface, but in fact she suffered from a very serious depression, and a sense of low value surrounded her every minute. After another episode of depression, her boyfriend encouraged her to undergo psychotherapy.
She told the counselor that she felt terrible.
Unexpectedly, the counselor told her that this was the reason for her parents: she did not become the good child her parents expected, because her parents' requirements were too impersonal and unreasonable, not because she was a bad and useless person.
Gretchen woke up like a dream, reasonably attributing her "failure" to her parents, and gradually walked out of the clutches of depression, and no longer thought that she was a worthless person.
Gretchen's courage and actions to justify the mistake brought her out of the haze of low self-worth. We can also enhance our self-worth by looking for causes other than ourselves.
Final words
Finally, I would like to send a passage from the famous psychological counselor Bi Shumin in "I Am Important":
"Yes, I am important. Each of us should have the courage to say that. Our status may be humble, our identity may be small, but that does not mean that we are unimportant.
Important is not synonymous with greatness, it is the promise of life of the heart. ”
Each of us is valuable.