Tips & Tricks for Repelling Self-Esteem

Getting esteem from someone else never creates self-esteem. ~Pia Melody

When I was growing up, my mom worked as a jr. high school guidance counselor. Friends would meet me, learn what my mom did for a living, and then ask if I had pep talks on self-esteem all the time. I don’t know if self-esteem was at the forefront of my mom’s work with her jr. high students, but the term is pretty pigeon-holed.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Rather than thinking about a person who feels good about themselves, “self-esteem” usually conjures up affirmations, juvenile exercises or practices, and other tools and techniques that seem like won’t work. Whatever it might mean for them to “work.”

What would having good self-esteem look like? What would improving it do? If you could.

Oxford Languages says that self-esteem is

confidence in one's own worth or abilities; self-respect.

Pia Mellody has done plenty of research on and provides training for building self-esteem. She has books on creating self-respect in order to unclench from dependent relationships. Pia provides hands-on activities to change the way you relate to yourself and the people in your life. She talks about self-esteem stemming from our awareness of our inalienable and unvarying worth and says it is not subject to the vagaries of the judgment of others.

Therefore, it makes sense that, though others may contribute to our self-esteem by giving feedback on our abilities, in order to qualify as self-esteem, it must be there no matter what feedback we get.

The esteem we receive from others is other-esteem, and it varies according to those from whom it is received ~Pia Melody

So many of us, lacking our own sense of self, depend upon the evaluations of others in order to know who we are. In order to believe we are okay.

How do we gain security in ourselves, so that compliments or positive feedback are icing on the cake, not what we need in order to keep going?

Many things can contribute to feeling good about yourself and your abilities. And there are plenty of things that distract from it. I’ll share a few that I see often in my therapy practice.