Self-esteem and stuff I’ve learned about it
Nearly forty years ago I was taken to a self-development workshop by a new boyfriend (and yes, I did think maybe he was inviting me to join a cult, but he was hella cute, so I went along anyway). And for the next ten years I became immersed in the process of discovering how my brain played tricks on me and what I could do about it. Resulting in me teaching self-esteem courses, and generally having a better life.
And now I’m a writer in a wonderful community of writers, and I see how often the amazing people around me doubt themselves, or underestimate their talent, or struggle with ‘criticism’, and I feel for them. So, for you guys, and for anybody else for whom this is any kind of an issue, here’s a distillation of stuff I’ve leaned over those forty years. Hope it makes you stop, and pause, and think about being kinder to yourself.
Belief systems and how we create them.
When we are born, we use a part of our brain that has remained unchanged since we were cavemen. It is where our basic survival instincts are managed and is often referred to as the Primal or Hind brain. As cavemen, we just need to stay alive so we can continue our species. So, food, water, warmth, shelter, safety, awareness of danger â these are the things that matter. And getting these needs met is pivotal.
Once a child has got the hang of feeding itself, mobility, and basic language, the primal brainâs next concern is keeping the body alive to grow to reproductive age. It must now also learn the rules of what is safe and what is dangerous. So, along with all the physical basics, the Primal brain becomes alert to clues about what is harmful/painful and what is safe/pleasurable.
It does this many by applying these criteria â am I safe, loved and valued? These may seem more advanced than youâd expect, but to a caveman brain, a baby that has value is more likely to grow to adulthood and less likely to be abandoned.
How it works is like this: any time the child is in a situation that one or more of those criteria is thin on the ground, the primal brain will immediately assess the situation and make judgements calls to protect the child in the future. Is this a situation that must be avoided? Is there a lesson here that should be learnt?
The goal of the primal brain is to stop that event occurring again, or to make navigating it as easy as possible. It all sounds like a good system, right?
But wait. Three things crop up here that are worth noticing.
1) The brain hates helplessness.
Helplessness equates to being the victim in the situation, and therefore the caveman baby will be more likely to die.
The brain wants to find a solution that gives agency to the child. That way is safer: thousands of years of evolution have proved it to be so.
But because it isnât the reasoning frontal cortex, it’s thought processes aren’t always rational. It canât, for instance, accurately assess a situation like this; âmummy and daddy are arguing because money is short, and the car just broke again.â It just doesnât have that capacity.
No. The primal brain joins the dots like this: if this situation is my fault, then I can change my behaviour and fix it. If I have agency in the cause, I can prevent reoccurrence. So, it will conclude something like âmummy and daddy are scary, and Iâm frightened, and if I was less stupid/clumsy/bad they would stop shouting and love me again.â
This is genuinely the best it can manage.
Consequently, bit by bit, the primal brain invents ârules of behaviourâ, which get embedded and usually follow this pattern: this happened because I am too XYZ, so I must now behave differently, ensuring I am safe/loved/valued again.
2) The Negative bias.
If things are going fine, the primal brain can step down and not worry. It is negative experiences that are more likely to threaten the safety of the child. Ergo, the primal brain is hard-wired to actively look for and focus on negative experiences. Negative experiences ‘stick’.
3) These rules are created in the primal brain, which is also sometimes known as the Instinctive brain.
These basic âsurvivalâ tools are considered absolutely paramount and not to be messed with. Survival depends on NOT standing around making thoughtful and considered decisions when the sabre-toothed tiger is about to pounce. So, our reactions to trigger situations will follow these rules instantly, without running things by our reasoning frontal lobes first. Most of the time we won’t even know it’s happened until after the event.
To recap…
Any childhood experience that held any sense of threat or pain or sadness helped create a rulebook of how the child (then teen, then adult) must behave so that it could âsurviveâ successfully. Be less this, more that. Do this more often, donât behave like that. This is good, that is bad.
And because the primal brain didnât need to focus on the good stuff so much, many of those rules were about perceived ânegativeâ traits and things that were âat faultâ with the person. That was the way it was programmed, to ensure the childâs safety.
Plus, to really make that rulebook effective, when any situation activated a belief, the reaction would be instant and without fore-warning.
In todayâs more advanced and sophisticated society, this creates adults with accusatory belief systems that focus more on the negative, and which are not always helpful or wanted. In fact, they are often debilitating, stunting and unsupportive. We almost never measure up to the rulebook our primal brains have written for us.
But remember…
However full of these thoughts we are, it is never our fault for having them. It is not a character failing. It is not a weakness. They are part of an evolutionary process that is millennia old.
There is not a single person on this planet who doesnât have this kind of roadmap to some extent. It is impossible to survive childhood (unless youâre born a sociopath or psychopath) without your primal brain building a rulebook of this sort.
It did its job. It kept you alive. It doesnât know that society is very, very different now and the rules to navigate it are no longer the same as in caveman days.
What can we do about it?
Itâs all very well knowing that we have that inner voice in our heads, and understanding how it got there and what its purpose is, but what do we do about it? Well, as adults, we can use our frontal brains to help mitigate and disassemble these thoughts, freeing ourselves from unwanted and unhelpful behaviour patterns.
The first thing to focus on is spotting that itâs happening. Sometimes it is quite obvious â that âvoiceâ can shout quite loud â but often it is more insidious.
So, what then? The clue is in your feelings. Any feeling that is less than happy or comfortable is a sign that one of your beliefs is operating.
Now, itâs important to notice the difference here between feelings and thoughts.
A feeling is a physical sensation or an emotion (and note that numbness or a sense of not feeling anything, is also part of this).
Everything accompanying that feeling is a thought.
These thoughts will include all that negative chat that pulls down our sense of self-worth.
And it’s worth noting that sometimes the thoughts will disguise themselves: sentences that begin âI feel that youâŠâ or âI feel as if IâmâŠâ are usually thoughts.
It helps to write them down so you can take a good look at them. Preferably when you are right in the moment.
Because the next thing is to get your frontal lobes to start doing some adult evaluation of the story these thoughts are weaving.
This is the time to verify if what the beliefs are telling you is valid.
Here’s an example.
Does your oh so helpful brain tell you you SHOULD have done something else?
This is a very common clue word that a belief is running. Everyone has âshouldsâ.
But ask yourself if your âshouldâ thought is really true.
If, for example, it says you should have known something. Well, letâs verify that.
If this was knowledge that you knew very, very well, were there other stress factors at play that might have made you misjudge the situation?
Or was it something you just figured out because of this incident, in which case how could you have known beforehand? Did the other people involved give you all the clues necessary to know this in advance? Or was it just a culmination of things that led to you making a mistake?
The âbeliefâ isnât equivocal or measured â it is certain you SHOULD have known. But, thinking about this with more perspective, is it really an inalienable truth? Or just something that, with hindsight, you wished youâd thought to do?
And this verification is important, vitally so.
Because when we believe we absolutely should have acted differently, then we include add-ons. And these add-ons come from that protective-brain desire to have agency in the situation, by claiming the problem as our fault. And it will run something like this: because I should have known better, then it must mean Iâm stupid, or selfish, or lazy, and people are better off when Iâm not there, etc.
And these are the kinds of thoughts that bring our hearts and souls total misery.
But when we verify things, we gain perspective.
The truth of the situation may turn out to be this: I didnât realise this would cause such difficulty as I was doing the best I knew how. But now I understand more, and Iâll know better for next time.
OR, actually, thereâs no way I could have known that this would escalate. And although I wish Iâd done it differently, I couldnât have predicted how things would go.
Verified thoughts.
THESE thoughts are much kinder. They allow for us to make mistakes, to learn as we go, to accept our humanity.
They donât attack our sense of self-worth the way the unverified beliefs do. They acknowledge the complexity of a situation, and invoke our wisdom and experience.
Beliefs are rulebooks, remember. Designed to try and keep us from experiencing âdangerousâ (ie. upsetting or difficult) emotions. The beliefs want us always to be âsafeâ.
And so they will be full of things that start with words like this: –
I must beâŠ
I should neverâŠ
I should alwaysâŠ
I canâtâŠ
No one will love me if IâŠ
Life will be hard if I âŠ
People will think IâmâŠ
Itâs not okay toâŠ
These lists of things we must measure up to can be endless. And exhausting. And the crucial thing to remember about them is they were created when we were tiny, by our un-reasoning brain. The chances of them either being correct or relevant now is infinitesimal.
And so, using our common sense can be the start of the dismantling process. And the start of us treating ourselves with forgiveness and empathy.
But there are pitfalls.
The brain thinks the beliefs are cast in stone, and will try to adhere to them like Moses on a mountain.
Your brain will âtweakâ what you think it told you so that it sounds entirely reasonable: –
âYes, but being kind and thoughtful to others is a good thing. I donât want to be selfish and thoughtless.â
This is a trick.
If you write down exactly what youâre thinking when that belief has been activated and you are right in the thick of it, youâll notice itâs actually saying something more like this: –
âYou MUST be kind and thoughtful to others, AT ALL TIMES, or everyone will see just how thoughtless and selfish you really are.â
As you can see, that is not quite the same thing.
Being kind and thoughtful is great. But is it appropriate in every situation? No. And the accusation that you are not worth anything UNLESS you are kind and thoughtful is just cruel. No one deserves to be told that.
In summary.
The thing about a belief system is this â although it is doing a massively important job in getting us from birth to adulthood, it is also cloaking our sense of self-esteem.
As a new-born baby, our sense of self-worth is through the roof (as it should be). We KNOW we are the most important person on that planet, and we will scream for our needs to be met without thought or consideration for others. We wouldnât survive as a species if we didnât.
But, as we get older, that screaming becomes less welcome to others, and bit by bit, we start internalising the social rules we now have to live by.
By the time we are in school we already have a list of should and musts and must-nots as long as our arms.
And each of them carries the additional weight of thinking weâre of less value if we donât follow those rules.
Even with the most conscious and loving parents in the world, there are other influences in the world where we will pick up these ârulesâ.
And slowly, our sense of self-worth gets covered.
So, by dealing with our belief systems, and choosing which to adhere to (yes, fire burns, sharp stuff cuts, all that is good advice) and which to discard (no, Iâm not obliged to be the only person on the planet who never makes a mistake) we can start uncovering our sense of self-worth once again.
We donât have to build it â we just need to remove the stuff that is stopping us seeing it and accessing it.
So, that is the gist of why itâs good to use verification as part of the process of dealing with unhelpful beliefs.
I think positive affirmations are great, but they wonât make much of a dent if the opposing beliefs are allowed to run unchecked.
But used as part of a truth-telling process, after you’ve uncovered the lies you tell yourself, they can help your compass point true North again.
And for us writers, it can help us separate criticism of our work with criticism of ourselves. It has helped me develop a rhino-thick skin in the face of criticism, feedback and rejection – all of which are part of the job. I hope it helps you too. xxx
