Self Image And Confidence In my over-twenty-year practice as an outpatient psychologist, I get involved with individuals with low self-esteem just about every day. It conspires with every aspect of their lives, most notably their relationships. Self-esteem impacts job performance, raises, promotions, and work locations--the bottom line being quality of life. It is a whopping big issue. I think of self-esteem as being comprised of four foundation experiences. I call them Powers. They can be found in an ebook publication I have written about how these are developed from our early overall experiences and how they show up in just about every later-life experience. There is a self-test to figure out which of the four Powers is a strength and which is a weakness. Commonly we use the stronger ones to compensate the weaker one(s). Occasionally we just focus on remediation of just one Power. In any case, once diagnosed, the psychological work begins. Confidence comes from having a good self-esteem, which can emerge from any one of the four Powers. The first Power is Worth. It more often than not reflects early-in-life experiences, largely derivative from messages precipitated from parents. It ties to religion, philosophy of the world and chronic expectations based upon "how it went" when we were very, very young. This Power, and the foundation concepts to follow from the other Powers help us deal with later life events. How we "are" in the middle of any life event largely goes back to how we "were" early on, and how our parents or caregivers took care us, or left us to the elements. Central to these experiences is the surfacing of our core experience of self. It is either worth something or dysfuntional in some way. The sense of self interacts with the environment, nearly one hundred percent in the beginning, less so as we grow up and become self-ruling. At any stage, it has value or is impacted by life events. In the latter case, there is doubt about self-worth. Lack of confidence is the subjective experience resulting from lack of basic worth. If we did not cope well in early life, or if we feel that support is lacking in adversity, then there is proportional anxiety about future events. Even in "the present," there is anxiety because lurking in the background is that ever-vague but pressuring feeling that something is incorrect. "Something will go wrong or perhaps it is just me that is wrong," are comments I frequently hear. The former is more of a response to early adverse circumstances. The latter is a direct reflection of thoughts of poor self-worth. This is only one of the four Powers, any one of which can contribute to the experience of poor self-esteem. I picked this one to initially focus on because it is the first in line, so to speak; meaning, the formation of this Power occurs earlier in our developmental timeline and usually forms the foundation upon which most of the other Powers build. In future articles, there will be discussions of the other three Powers. In short, to build confidence, first we need a foundation of self that is worth something. Put negatively, lack of confidence reflects deficits in our early environment, but more importantly, our relationship to the experiences in that early time. What we "came away with" is relatively stable even though the events that formed our impressions have passed. The core of this identity we call self, and its relative value we call esteem. Dr. Griggs
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