Claire Djali
Counselling in Cheam and Sutton

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 and is a big step on the road to a good level of self-esteem.