Self-Esteem Therapy
You struggle with feeling not good enough or unlovable. You compare yourself to other people and question if you will ever find love, happiness, and have a family of your own. You question if your past or current partners actually care about you or love you. You feel lonely, but also think on some level you deserve to be alone because of how you were treated by others as a child or because of how former partners treated you. Due to this, you struggle with putting yourself out there both with romantic relationships and friendships. When you do date or connect with others socially, you struggle with nagging thoughts questioning every move you make and interaction you have. As a result, you avoid dating and connecting to others so you can have some relief from the corresponding anxiety and self-consciousness you experience.
You struggle with having boundaries with others and enforcing them. You put others’ needs above your own and struggle with people pleasing. You struggle with speaking up and asserting your own wants and needs. You may even find yourself being aggressive on occasion due to having suppressed and ignored your needs for so long. You have questioned if the people in your life take advantage of you and mistreat you, but struggle with trusting your own judgment and knowing how to handle such treatment from others. You were not taught how to stand up for yourself and may have even experienced being silenced and judged growing up when you did speak up.
You have questioned if you are “too much” in relationships, too emotional or too sensitive. You struggle with giving yourself grace and understanding when you are triggered. You can feel like a burden on others and as if others are better off without you being their friend or partner. You have felt hopeless that your life will get better and feel stuck on how improve it.
If you can relate to any of this, you are not alone.
Many people struggle with their self-esteem, especially those who have experienced childhood trauma or have had unhealthy relationships. Sometimes those of us who appear to be very confident and put together are actually battling their own feelings of inadequacy and loneliness. Interestingly, by sharing such concerns with a trained therapist, you can start to take their power away and the hold such thoughts have on you. Through targeted interventions, therapy can help you see yourself in a more positive light, give yourself more grace, have healthy boundaries with others, and shed the negative thinking that holds you back from both what you want and deserve in life. It may be hard to imagine such a transformation is possible right now, but I can assure you I have experienced such a shift personally and have also helped many clients accomplish this.
Together, we can improve your relationship with yourself and in turn your relationships with others.
FAQ
How can therapy help me improve my self-esteem?
Through exploring your negative self-talk and what is at the root, we can begin to put such thoughts under a microscope and together identify more balanced, accurate ways of looking at yourself. Sometimes this is achieved through more typical back and forth talk therapy and other times interventions designed to help you dig deeper are needed. For example, Internal Family Systems (IFS) or parts work therapy can help you distinguish between parts of yourself that carry pain from the past and parts of yourself that feel more grounded and whole. Through doing this, we can work through the pain from your past while also recognizing you at the core are not in those past events anymore. EMDR therapy can also be used to help you process at a deeper level and get past mental barriers keeping you in the same negative thought patterns. See the IFS-informed EMDR page for further information and also check out the IFS Institute’s website here.
My childhood and former relationships are in the past, why do they affect me so much?
Trauma experienced through our relationships with caregivers and romantic partners leaves a profound impact on us. Such trauma can affect our ability to trust, be vulnerable and give and receive love. As social beings we have a fundamental human need for connection to others. This is part of what can make experiencing childhood and relationship trauma so impactful on your life. You cannot completely avoid your need for connection and acceptance, so you are left to repeatedly be exposed to scenarios that may trigger you to think of the past trauma you have experienced.
I have felt this way for so long, how is it possible I can feel differently about myself?
People who struggle with low self-esteem have often had negative thoughts about themselves on repeat for years and in some cases most of their lives. It is a complex, challenging task to change the inaccurate, overly critical narratives you have about yourself into more balanced ones. This is why it helps to work with a trained therapist. You do not have to go through this alone. Contact me today to get started and no longer carry this heavy burden on your own.
