Your Self-Esteem is a Record of Your History

It’s a feature of the way we’re built that we don’t generally go around asking why we feel as we do about ourselves. Our self perception strikes us as ‘natural.’ It has been with us for as long as we can remember. It seems ingrained. It is who and what we are – not something created by partial, circumstantial forces. And therefore, very consequentially, we take it as both true and beyond enquiry.

It may be neither – which is why we have good cause to lean in on one of the most fundamental laws of psychological functioning, which states that the way we feel about ourselves is an internalisation of how others felt about us during our formative years. Our self-esteem is a mirror of the esteem in which we were held by those around us. What we expect of ourselves is a reflection of what others expected from us in childhood. What we think the future will bring is shaped by what the past brought us.

It sounds a simple principle but it is an enormously hard one to keep in mind – let alone thread back through our own experience. We may understand the idea intellectually; it can be the work of much of our lives to feel its truth – and untie its legacy – in our own particular case.

The past has a habit of leaving few active traces. We register emotions without being able to follow them back to any source. But we can and should work against the forces of forgetting. We should re-historicise our self esteem. We should trace our thoughts about our likely futures back to our pasts. We should learn to sense the verdicts of other people where we have until now registered only a verdict from nature or ‘reality’.

To see how this principle of self-esteem works, we can look at its positive manifestations first.

The thought: I am a valuable, lovely person.
Indicates that: Others once found me lovely. 

Or:

The thought: Things are going to be OK for me.
Indicates that: Nice things once happened around me.

Or:

The thought: I can contribute.
Indicates that: Others once thought I could contribute. 

But it’s an exploration of the negative side of the principle that yields the greatest dividends.

The thought: I’m not good enough.
Indicates that: Other people once didn’t find me good enough.

Or:

The thought: I’m terrified I’ve done something wrong.
Indicates that: Other people once constantly accused me of doing something wrong (in other words, did something wrong to me).

Or:

The thought: I can’t do anything.
Indicates that: Other people once thought I was hopeless.

Or:

The thought: I’m an idiot.
Indicates that: Other people once thought I was stupid. 

Or:

The thought: I’m clumsy.
Indicates that: Other people once got impatient with my natural childhood inabilities and locked me into a description that deprived me of confidence.

Or:

The thought: I feel invisible.
Indicates that: I once wasn’t seen. 

All this is particularly difficult because our feelings about who we are and what might happen to us aren’t just passive elements but are in the habit of actively determining our futures. The person who feels a failure will end up failing; the person who feels a bore will end up boring. And so on. We haven’t just suffered once; we may get stuck in a loop of sadness.

The priority is therefore to stop taking our self-esteem as a given and to start to look at is the outgrowth of a period of personal experience that we have not been able to keep in mind – and that can be questioned. Once we have properly absorbed this principle of psychology, it becomes open to us to reassess our value and prospects by a more just means. We no longer need to judge ourselves through the eyes of people who were too unwell and in pain to see us properly.