How Therapy Helps Rebuild Self-Esteem and Self-Worth

Self-esteem and self-worth can impact all areas of life, including relationships, careers and physical health. With the help of a therapist, you can assess your self-esteem, set and reach positive goals and improve your overall well-being. Therapy for self-esteem can dramatically improve your mental health.

What Is Self-Esteem?

Self-esteem refers to how you perceive yourself, your value and worth. It is based solely on your perspective, even if it is not realistic.

For example, you may think you are the most productive worker, even though your co-workers meet higher quotas. Or, you may think you are a terrible athlete despite having won tournaments and awards. Your perspective can also be accurate and well-founded.

Most people form a perception of themselves based on various factors, including:

Intellect
Performance at work
Physical appearance
Athleticism
Social skills

Self-esteem is also closely tied to experiences throughout life, including successes and failures. In addition, self-esteem motivates self-care, shapes your attitude towards life and allows you to respond to social acceptance and rejection.

If you have high self-esteem, your overall life experiences are likely to be better, encompassing both mental and physical health, and you tend to have higher life satisfaction. However, low self-esteem may reflect more challenging circumstances and lower life satisfaction.

In addition to high and low self-esteem, some people may have an unhealthy level of self-esteem. Someone with overly high self-esteem often feels they are superior to others. They exhibit traits of arrogance and entitlement and tend to criticize others without recognizing their own faults.

Having a healthy self-esteem is essential, and can reduce your risk for experiencing depression, anxiety, eating disorders, addiction, and more.

Signs of Low Self-Esteem

Self-esteem can be viewed as a spectrum, ranging from low to high. Each person differs in their location on the spectrum due to varying life experiences.

Someone with low self-worth may exhibit the following:

All or nothing thinking; it is either good or bad
Focusing and dwelling on the negative aspects of life
Turning positive accomplishments into negative ones
Assuming the worst, even if there is no evidence
Turning negative feelings into facts rather than changing the negative feelings
Assuming everything negative has to do with them
Feeling inferior to others
Finding it challenging to make decisions
Seeking approval from others
Being overly critical of themselves when they make mistakes
Having unhealthy relationships

Someone with low self-esteem may put themselves down and struggle to accept compliments. They also fear failure and avoid taking risks.

Root Causes

You are not born with self-esteem; it is something that is learned. The root causes of self-esteem vary from person to person. However, there are risk and protective factors that may be common among people with both low and high self-esteem.

Risk factors of developing low self-esteem often begin early in life, including the following examples:

Having a dysfunctional home environment
Parent/child conflicts
Experiencing mental, physical or sexual abuse
Being bullied
Living in a violent home, neighborhood or community
Having a lack of positive friendships
Being exposed to drug and alcohol misuse

Low self-esteem can develop at any time after childhood, too. Being in unhealthy relationships, having negative job experiences and a lack of self-care can impact your mental health.

How It Affects Mental Health

Mental health refers to the connection between thinking, feeling and acting. Your thoughts influence your emotions and behaviors. What you think about yourself is crucial for your overall well-being.

Mental health can impact:

Coping with stress
Physical health
Relationships
Community contributions
Productivity at work, school and home
Reaching your goals

Having unhealthy self-esteem increases the likelihood that you will develop a mental health disorder, like depression, anxiety or ADHD.

Specific symptoms that correlate with low self-esteem include hopelessness, poor appetite and sleep disturbances. Some evidence suggests that low self-esteem contributes to antisocial behaviors, aggression and poorer physical health.

On the other hand, having healthy self-esteem leads to satisfying friendships, relationships and careers and is a predictor of happiness.

Self-Esteem Therapy Approaches

You can improve self-worth at any stage of life, and some therapies can help you achieve success.

Work with a licensed mental health therapist who utilizes the following evidence-based therapies to build self-esteem:

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

CBT is a form of talk therapy in which you and your therapist focus on recognizing your negative thought patterns and changing them to more positive ones.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy for self-esteem includes education about how it occurs and impacts your mental health. It also teaches the importance of self-compassion. Your therapist will assess your self-esteem, and together, you will create realistic goals for improvement.

CBT is an umbrella for numerous therapies based on its principles. They can be adjusted to fit the needs of children, adolescents and adults. They can also be implemented in individual or group settings.

Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT)

CFT is a form of cognitive-behavioral therapy for self-esteem that focuses on reducing shame and negative self-criticism.

It is based on the theory that compassion helps people regulate emotions, feel safe and comforted and soothe themselves. CFT has been found to reduce negative symptoms of depression and eating disorders.

It can help individuals with low self-esteem focus on positive mental health outcomes, such as problem-solving, personal satisfaction, autonomy, interpersonal relationships, self-control, and attitude.

Steps Toward Self-Acceptance

Achieving self-acceptance and enhancing self-esteem involves several steps. It starts with becoming aware of your thought patterns and replacing them, identifying the sources of your low self-esteem and learning self-compassion and other skills to help you maintain healthy self-esteem.

You do not have to tackle these steps alone. There are many qualified therapists in your area to help you throughout the process. Explore Therapy.com’s national directory to find a qualified treatment provider in your area.

Self-Esteem Therapy FAQs

What is Self-Esteem?

Self-esteem refers to what you think about yourself and how you perceive your own value. People can have either low or high self-esteem. Some people may have an unhealthy level of high self-esteem.

Do I Have Low Self-Esteem?

There are numerous symptoms of low self-esteem, and they vary from person to person.

Some examples include being a negative thinker, focusing on your faults more than your strengths, having unhealthy relationships and struggling to make decisions due to fear of being wrong or failing. The best way to know if you have low self-esteem is through an assessment from a licensed therapist.

What Contributes to Self-Esteem?

Low and high self-esteem are built by the experiences, situations and circumstances you have encountered as a child and throughout your life.

People with lower self-esteem have likely had negative experiences growing up, like living in an unhealthy home with a dysfunctional family life. People with higher self-esteem were likely to receive positive emotional and physical support from family and friends.

How Can I Improve My Self-Esteem?

Improving self-esteem begins by identifying the areas of your life that contribute to your unhealthy thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

Working one on one with a therapist to improve self-esteem, you can learn to implement skills that boost your self image, such as practicing affirmations, engaging in self-care and cultivating self-compassion.