Cure your Emetophobia and Thrive – Chapter 4 preview..
Cure your Emetophobia and Thrive – Chapter 4 preview… Chapter Four: Self Esteem
…We all have a perception of ourselves, some sort of sense of ‘self’, a belief about who we are and what makes us that way. This self-concept includes a view of our personality as well as other factors such as physical characteristics, sexuality, interests, goals and aims, values and standards etc. If you have high self-esteem you believe that you are a worthwhile and competent person, and you like yourself. For those with low self-esteem the picture is somewhat different.
Our sense of self develops mostly unconsciously as we process and store our experiences in life. If, for example, you grow up in a family where you are constantly put down and belittled, you are likely to begin to believe that you are fairly worthless (unless you perceive other positive experiences in relation to who you are) because the majority of your significant experiences convey to you that this is the case. If you grow up in a loving, accepting family you are much more likely (although not guaranteed) to develop high self-esteem. People with a negatively distorted sense of self do not, however, need to have been regularly put down or abused by others during childhood. The source of negative experiences can be internal. In fact, many people that I have treated with self-esteem issues have come from loving, caring families and it is largely their own self-criticism that has caused them to build up such limiting beliefs about themselves.
Your self-image can change throughout your life in response to your experiences. Young children tend to have a fairly fluctuating sense of self. They have not had time to build up a permanent picture of who they are, so their sense of self varies depending upon the environment they are in. Young children are also not yet particularly discerning of the truth of the information presented to them, so are more likely to automatically believe in the reality of whatever they are experiencing in the moment. When a child has just been severely told off he may believe that he is very bad, but when he has just been praised he is the most fantastic child in the world!
By the time you get to adulthood, you have many more experiences contributing to your picture of who you are. Most people have developed a strong sense of self, positive or negative, by the time they are adults. They know exactly who they are and this does not change significantly in different environments. They have built up a solid ‘belief system brick wall’ about themselves. This can be a good or bad thing depending on how positively or negatively the self is viewed! If you have developed low self-esteem you are likely to have a persistent feeling of ‘not being good enough’. You may feel worthless, as though you are a ‘bad’ person or as though you do not deserve to be happy. Someone with low self-esteem has no trust in his/her ability to achieve the things he/she wants in life. This kind of limiting belief system often pervades all aspects of someone’s life.
Many people do have a slightly different perception of exactly who they are depending on the environment they are in and the role they play within it. You may feel a little differently about yourself depending on whether you are at work or with your family etc. Your sense of self can also change gradually over time as you take on board new significant experiences.
For some people, (usually ‘externals’) their perception of themselves is still extremely unstable, because it is almost entirely based on external events. For this sort of person, his or her self-esteem depends entirely upon the situation experienced at the time. This means that the person constantly experiences a roller coaster of emotions. If you can identify with this, then there are likely to be times when you feel fantastic, but there are going to be many times when you struggle with very low self-esteem. In an extreme case a person may fluctuate from believing he/she is worthless, stupid and pathetic one moment to thinking him/herself valued, intelligent and powerful in another. If, for example, you are at work, achieving goals, completing tasks and meeting deadlines, then you are likely to feel pretty bloody good! Alone in your bedroom after a stressful day full of sickness worries, however, you feel lonely, miserable, out of control, insignificant…
Your perception of yourself may be very different to others’ perception of you. Your self-image may indeed have become a little distorted and lacking in true perspective. You may have built up a negative picture of yourself but other people may see you as a lovely, intelligent, friendly person, although you do not see this at all.
Low self-esteem is one of the three primary limiting beliefs that you can have, because it causes you to constantly view your life and the world around you with respect to your low opinion of yourself (those shit-tinted spectacles again). It means that you build up and maintain other secondary limiting beliefs that prevent you from living life to the full.
You don’t need to have very low self-esteem for it to have a profound effect upon your other belief systems and your life, just lower than it could or should be. Just about every single emetophobe I have met/treated, has been a fit, healthy, attractive, slim, bright, focused woman – traits you would normally associate with a person having high self-esteem…
You may be surprised that I am describing low self-esteem as just a belief! As I said earlier, many people tend to think that self-esteem is a fairly rigid and inflexible part of our ‘make-up’, maybe something genetically predisposed, like the colour of our eyes or hair, or whether we are left, or right handed, but it is not. We often believe that the amount of self-esteem we have is entirely dependent on our upbringings: how much love, nourishment and security we receive from our parents and the society around us, that it is fixed at the point we become adults, and it doesn’t change once we have grown up. This is also not true. I have indeed taken people through therapy who have suffered a terrible childhood and had very low self-esteem, but I have also taken people through therapy who experienced a wonderfully supportive and loving childhood who also had low self-esteem. Equally, there are people who have had an awful, abusive childhood that have relatively high self-esteem. It is not about the reality of a person’s forming experiences that matter, but rather their perception of them, and how they ‘process’ them (more about this later). In other words, what they believe about them.
Think about it – you have a view of yourself as a certain type of person, who has a certain type of friend, who does a certain type of job, who likes certain types of food, who knows what you are capable of, and what you are not capable of. This is EXACTLY what a belief system is! A friend suggests going into town tonight to see a show, and you think to yourself ‘that’s not really my type of thing.’ You talk to friends who are going skiing, and you think, ‘I’d love to do that, but I’m not that type of sporty person.’ These are all beliefs. Beliefs are not facts, they are just what we believe.
Low self-esteem is not having a great opinion of yourself, not liking yourself very much, believing that you don’t ‘deserve’ the great things in life. This is just a view, a belief; it’s not a ‘fact’.
Trouble is, like any belief, we look for ‘evidence’ that supports and nurtures it because we feel safe and comfortable in the knowledge that our life is predictable and makes sense. All new information is seen through ‘belief system tinted spectacles’. All new experiences are interpreted so that they make sense to us, i.e. so that they fit with our belief systems. This is why many limiting belief systems are often maintained, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Think of a person with anorexia, who weighs only five stone (32 Kg) and who believes she (and 90% of anorexia sufferers are female according to my clinical experience) is fat. Her friends, family, doctors, psychiatrists and nutritionists ALL tell her that she is life-threateningly thin, but she believes she is fat, so she ‘IS’ fat. These clashing experiences are interpreted in a highly distorted way so that instead of contradicting the belief system they reinforce it.
You might find it incredible that it is possible to back up a negative self-image with positive experiences! But people do so all the time! When people with low self-esteem do well in exams it’s just that they have been lucky. When they receive compliments, they assume that these compliments are not really meant and people are just being nice. When they have a lovely time out at a party they feel guilty because they should have been doing something else far more important. If you think about it, I bet you can conjure up many times where you have twisted your own positive experiences in the same sort of manner.
In reality, you have had trillions of experiences in your life: some good, some bad, some happy, some sad, some you regret, some you wished you could do again and again. You have enough experiences to corroborate just about any belief system you care to adopt. Anyone can think back through their life and think of something they wished they hadn’t done or said, something that ‘proves’ to them they are a bad person. Or they can think back to a time when they helped an old lady across the street, which confirms to them that they are a good person. Or a time that they really worried that their partner was having an affair, which confirms for them that they are a paranoid person. How much self-esteem you have, how much self-worth you have, how ‘good’ you think you are is all just a belief.
This is good news, no, GREAT news, because it means that you can change it if you wish. You can change your view of yourself, you can change what you believe about yourself, you can change your level of self-esteem. Until you do though, you will view every experience in life through the rose-tinted (or shit-tinted) spectacles of your self-esteem beliefs. How long does it take to build high self-esteem, even if you are doing it from scratch? About two weeks!
Let me say that again, just for clarity – it only takes about two weeks to build yourself good self-esteem, even if previously it had always been low.
Two weeks to build a good level of self-esteem, am I mad?…
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