Some sayings might be well-intended, but that doesn’t make them true, let alone easy to hear. Case in point: “You can’t find love until you learn to love yourself.” The people who come to me for help tend to hate that thought. “If I knew how to love myself more,” they say, “I would have started long ago. In fact, I wouldn’t even be in therapy if I had that figured out.” Improving self-esteem seems to some to be an impossible task. But each time, as we explore it together, similar themes come to the foreground. After years of figuring it out with people from all sorts of backgrounds and at all levels of self-confidence, I’ve come up with a few main components of esteem work. Here are the key
We are an “if only” society: “If only I were thinner, smarter, more popular, etc., then I’d be happy.” It’s easy to be tempted by this line of thinking. However, it’s not the lack of problems in our lives that matters, but rather how we respond to the problems we have. From terrible troubles (abuse and neglect) to relatively smaller ones (bullying or minor illness), and from huge stresses (divorce) to slight ones (traffic jams), some people are better at bouncing back from setbacks. The good news is you can teach yourself to be more resilient. Let’s look at everyday stresses to practice how to approach them constructively. If you get a bad Yelp review, or your car is dinged in a hit-and-run,
