Your Personal Path
We are born into a life which has a trajectory connected to it. You may be encouraged to stay on and within the parameters of that trajectory by parents, your education and social pressures. Certainly during younger years, you're likely to adopt this given path without much thought.
But what if it's not the right path for you personally? You will have been born into a particular socioeconomic setting, cultural, racial and ethnic group, time in history and geographical location.
But what if your own personal aspirations don't fit with the expected norms of the groups you have found yourself in?
You may not even realise that you have been constrained by these. You may be aware you've had choices along the way, and feel that these have given you the space to be yourself. And that may be the true for you. But it may also be that the options you've chosen from have been confined to choices clearly already set for you.
Ultimately, this can lead to a deep inner satisfaction. What is your own personal path? Have you ever explored it?
Understanding, Development and Maintaining of Self-Esteem
What is self-esteem?
Self esteem can, in most respects, be interchanged with the term self-worth.
What do you think you’re worth?
How we rate our own worth depends on many things.
As complex beings we have the starting block of our genetic inheritance and many experiences behind us.
How dependent are you on having a good day, for your self-esteem to be high?
We are all blown by the wind. A good day and we will give our self-esteem rating a higher value than on a bad day.
And life brings good and bad days. The difficulty is, that if your base level of self-esteem is particularly low, then you will be much more dependent on the happenings of the day for your self esteem. You can end up at rock bottom quite easily. The ups and downs will be exhausting and this emotional exhaustion can, in itself, wear down your self-esteem.
If you 'base' level of self-esteem is higher, you will be able to weather storms more easily, be less dependant on the happenings of the day for how you feel about yourself.
How did your self-esteem come about? What led you to think you were worth something? Or nothing? What is your intrinsic worth? And how do you know that?
Let's start from the beginning: Emerging from the womb your genetic make-up gave you potential, but what did it tell you about your worth? Very little. You began to find that out by how you were treated. Were you fed? Were you cuddled? Were you nurtured and cared for? Were you abandoned?
As you grew into a child understanding language, did you hear good things about yourself? Were you told you'd done well?
Babies and children are quick learners, and they can interpret the messages of nurturing or neglect very easily.
What do you know about your early days and years? What does that tell you about how much worth you were afforded? Whether your achievements were observed, noted, acknowledged and given a 'well done'.
What clues does that give you about how you feel about yourself now?
As a counsellor, I listen to what my clients say, but my job is not just to listen, it is to try to understand.
Particularly if I can begin to understand the unconscious beliefs that lead to you feeling the way you do about yourself, hopefully I can help you on that journey of understanding.
We all have our own belief system. We absorb any experience that reinforces those beliefs, but disregard those comments and experience that do not fit with our current belief about ourself.
Clients will tell me, "I always thought I was......"
"I always thought I couldn't.........."
"I always felt......." (most commonly "I was different" or "I didn't fit in")
"I always thought there was something wrong with me/not normal about me"
"Am I normal?"
All these questions point to a lack of appreciation of the value of our uniqueness. Almost as though being unique is a deficit. Learning to recognise our own individuality as something special is a big step on the road to a good level of self-esteem.
Empathy plus Resilience building
It is an understatement to say we are 'often hearing about the current mental health crisis, - especially among younger people'.
The need for counselling is promoted, especially by my professional organisation BACP.
The reason for this apparent crisis is put down to, for e.g. the impact of covid, too much time on a screen etc.
Without a doubt, in times gone by, we were encouraged to suffer in silence. And many did suffer greatly as a result. Whether then, it's that we are in a time of particular crisis, or that we know more about people's suffering now, is debatable.
Pendulums swing, and nowadays 'suffering in silence' is not recommended, nor working our own way through difficulties, but in contrast, always let everyone know how difficult life is for us.
The result is not always positive for the sufferer. Difficulties are not overcome, but sometimes compounded upon as a result of an unnaturally high level of introspection, sometimes leading to inertness.
Counselling at its best will encourage resilience as much as it provides empathy. It will challenge the perspective of the client as much as it offers compassion and understanding.
Coming from the 20th century, I remember it often being said that the best way to help yourself was to help others. I think this wisdom has got lost somewhere in the mix, and would be a great ethos to be spreading, especially amongst young people.