When success doesn't fix low self esteem
Some people’s worst nightmare is reaching success and finding out it is not all that.
It may sound like a cliche, of course money buys happiness, it buys shelter, good healthcare, good food. But aside from covering the essentials and some more, achievement is often not the cure to low self esteem. Even worse, when people reach their goals and still struggle, they may feel even more hopeless.
As Matthew Perry, star of Friends, famously put it:
“Now, all these years later, I’m certain that I got famous so I would not waste my entire life trying to get famous. You have to get famous to know that it’s not the answer. And nobody who is not famous will ever truly believe that.”
So what then? If success does not fix the mysterious problem, if positive self talk feels like a scam, if meditation is boring and daily affirmations feel like daily torture, where do we go from here?
What is there left to do?
Why high achievers develop low self esteem
In the last 100 years something astonishing happened. We now know about the brain and the psyche more than we had known for centuries. Sure, there were many roadblocks on our way here, including cultural biases and prejudices that always make their way into any science, social or not, but we have reached a point where we have found the red thread to what makes us more inclined to think, feel and behave in a certain way.
Research first in psychology, and then in neuroscience, found the following. Your sense of self is not something you are born with. You are born with a brain, but the way the brain develops is highly relational.
What does that mean?
Your sense of self emerges when your own mind is discovered through the mind of your caregiver. Your caregiver’s ability to connect, love, empathize, understand their own states and the states of the newborn all shape the brain of the newborn.
As researchers like Allan Schore and Peter Fonagy show, the child’s sense of self is shaped by how well the caregiver can attune to emotions, soothe distress and reflect the child’s inner world.
When a parent sees the child as a separate psychological being, the child develops:
coherence of self
positive self image
stable identity
belief others can be good and safe
belief they are good and safe
an overall sense of safety with regards to the environment
a relationship model that emphasises attunement, presence, safety and care
This also happens through behaviours such as attunement to the child’s needs, creating a safe space for the child, being comforting when the child is in distress and being encouraging of their pursuits and exploration.
These experiences create both a brain that is structurally more able to self regulate and representations of themselves that are positive.
How negative self perception develops
When caregivers are overwhelmed, emotionally unavailable, unpredictable or unable to understand the child’s inner world, children borrow the skills and, so to speak, the brain of the not so functional caregiver.
Without emotional visibility, children develop what Daniel Brown calls pseudo maturity, an adult-like competence that hides an undeveloped inner self. Their confidence cannot be built based on who they are because the parent rejects that or does not understand what the child is. Instead, it is built on competence alone.
The child learns that by becoming something, they achieve the right to be something, which in many cases is what the parents believe about themselves as well. Hence the borrowed mind.
There is only one problem. The child and now the adult attempts to solve a problem that does not exist. Low self esteem related to your sense of self that does not improve with competence is not caused by poor competence but by flawed representations in the brain of what the sense of self is.
The more you try to prove yourself worthy by becoming more and more competent, the more you are shown that no amount of competence is fixing the problem. And perhaps because you think that is the only solution to the problem, dread settles in and helplessness.
For example, some of my clients lead teams, run companies, or make six figures, yet panic when they receive a short text like ‘We need to talk.’ Their competence is sky-high, but their internal map still whispers they are not enough.
Healing the root cause of low self esteem
Healing self esteem is not cognitive, it is relational. Your mind was contained by a mind growing up that did not lead to a positive self image. That is it. You do not have to earn it. Good self image at the baseline is not earned, it is relationally acquired.
Competence is earned, and guilt over things we have done can sometimes be a good thing because it teaches us what to do and what not to do. But shame, shame about who we are at our core, is not guilt, it is not a true representation of our actions or our history. It is a state that cannot be pinpointed yet it stays still, and is the wound of the insecure attachment to your caregiver.
Fortunately, we can slowly re wire those pathways based on new relational experiences that challenge old beliefs and their meanings.
These new relational experiences have to have the following features:
are safe
are able to slowly allow you to come out of your shell and speak your mind
are corrective and able to show you new perspectives
are corrective by allowing you to express negative emotions in a completely new and safe environment
are able to guide new representations in your brain (this can be done via Ideal Parent Figure Protocol or coherence therapy techniques)
are mirroring your own internal states and respond appropriately to them
are done in relation with a securely attached practitioner
Most of this sounds like what a friend or a partner can do, however, there is a little caveat.
It may sound counterintuitive that something so deeply personal, your self esteem and your view of yourself, can be significantly changed by someone outside of you, but in reality our psyche was always the recipient of the environment. With the addition that as adults, we are no longer helpless toddlers and we can now choose, by our own will, to take steps in the right direction.
Want to learn to embark on a journey of self discovery? Go here to learn more about me and how I help my clients change their inner map to change their life.
References
Brown, D. P., & Elliott, D. S. (2016). _Attachment disturbances in adults._ Norton.
Dana, D. (2018). _The polyvagal theory in therapy._ Norton.
Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. L., & Target, M. (2002). _Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self._ Other Press.
Heller, L., & LaPierre, A. (2012). _Healing developmental trauma._ North Atlantic Books.
Porges, S. W. (2011). _The polyvagal theory._ Norton.
Schore, A. N. (1994). _Affect regulation and the origin of the self._ Erlbaum.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). _The body keeps the score._ Viking.
Walker, P. (2013). _Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving._ Azure Coyote Press.
Wallin, D. J. (2007). _Attachment in psychotherapy._ Guilford Press.