Why do I feel like I’m not good enough? Understanding self-esteem

Not feeling good enough or struggling with low self-esteem can affect anyone, even people who look successful. So what can be done to understand and change the problem, and how can therapy help with this?

Many people secretly don't feel good enough and suffer in silence, finding it either too hard to talk about or suspect that they might be the problem. If we don't share our thoughts, it can keep us feeling isolated and stuck.

Not feeling good enough can affect all areas of someone's life. It can impact who you become friends with, who you choose to date, whether you get promoted at work and whether you are able to set goals for yourself and how you work towards them. 

So why do many people struggle with not feeling good enough, and what can they do about it?

How self-esteem is formed

We collect ideas about who we are and how people perceive us from many different places, so you won't be surprised to hear that childhood is an important period for learning who we are. How we are treated as children and how we start to understand the world around us set up patterns that can be lifelong and are often used automatically.

In therapy, we can begin to disrupt this automatic thinking and start asking questions:

• Where did we learn this?
• Does this benefit or hurt us?
• What could we do differently?
• What gets in the way of doing things differently?
• Where do we get stuck?
• What does this remind us of from our past?
• Where else does this problem show up?

Therapy might have a reputation for 'blaming your parents' for your problems, but I prefer to think of it as 'understanding what happened and why'. For some people, their parents did significant damage, but for many people, it wasn't intentional or even dramatic.

Parents who were overwhelmed, dealing with their own traumatic childhoods, sick or out of work, low on resources or money, likely found dealing with small children very difficult and didn't always get it right.

Having parents who argue a lot, are critical, or have high expectations of your achievements can teach a child that love is conditional. Do well at school, and you're good, but if you're struggling, that's just not good enough. Earning love means being successful, and if you're not successful, the tap gets turned off.

Parents who didn't understand their emotions or know how to manage them were unlikely to have been able to help you with yours. That's not deliberate either, but knowing what you're feeling and managing how you feel are critical skills that people need to do well in life.

Reconnecting with your emotions

It's not too late to start now, even if you haven't known much about how you felt in the past. Reconnecting to your feelings can give you important information about what you want or don't want, what you want more or less of. Although a lot of people avoid their feelings, they can act like a compass, helping us to decide which direction we should go in.

Not feeling good enough can create all kinds of behaviour that might cause you problems:

• Maybe you can never say no to your boss, even though you've got more than enough work.
• Maybe you're fielding calls from your mother 5 times a week, even though she's never got a good word to say about you.
• Perhaps you're hellbent on being a better parent to your own children, but still find yourself repeating the critical words you heard as a kid or worse, overreacting to small things your children do.
• And then there's the ruminating of wondering if you're normal and why you can't just stop this by yourself.

Why can't I change this by myself?

People find it hard to change by themselves for a few reasons. Some people underestimate the potential to change their behaviour, assuming that their behaviour is fixed or that they can't change at their stage of life. You might have heard from others that your experience was 'normal', so just assume you should be OK with it. Probably the most common barrier is not knowing what to look for or how to stop perpetuating the problem. 

How therapy can help you create lasting change

A therapist can help people learn what to look for in their own thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Once you understand what to look for and have a better idea of how to deal with your emotions, the process becomes much easier. Thereafter, it's mostly about practice, persistence and support. You aren't stuck where you are now; you just need to understand where to start and how to move forward. Therapy can give people guidance on how to do this and feedback on what needs to stay and what needs to go.

We can start by looking into your background. Not to judge but to understand where your information about yourself and the world came from. You'll see how your past is affecting your present by connecting your past experiences to today. So if, for example, you had a passive-aggressive mother, you might have learned how to smooth over awkwardness and bite your tongue, hoping not to make the situation worse. This might be related to the behaviour you tolerate from your partner (even though you don't like it) or the fact that you find it hard to take up space in meetings at work.

You can learn how to identify your feelings and feel them so that you're not weighed down by your past. This makes it easier to stop overreacting in the present. Sometimes people went through really difficult situations as children or young adults and didn't really feel anything. This might seem normal to them, but over time, as they go through more and more experiences, they often find it harder to ignore what happened to them and are less able to shrug off difficult experiences or feelings. Over a lifetime, people accumulate many stresses, and unless they have an outlet for these feelings, this can become overwhelming.

Having a framework to understand emotions helps people start to organise their thoughts better. Before we can learn to change our behaviour, we first need to understand what's happening and why. Many people skip this step and then wonder why they can't maintain the new behaviour and blame themselves for being lazy or unmotivated.

Underneath, however, old patterns or difficult emotions are driving the unwanted behaviour. Until we learn to unpick what is happening and why, we're often left confused and feeling bad about ourselves, which exacerbates the problem and keeps us stuck.

Your self-esteem and how you think about yourself affect many aspects of your life, often unconsciously. It's not too late to start unravelling unhelpful messages and installing new ones that allow you to see real changes in your life.