Self-Esteem Therapy

Do You Ever Feel Like You’re Just Not Good Enough?

Are you struggling with low self-esteem? Do you find yourself endlessly comparing yourself to other people? No matter what you’ve achieved and how gifted everyone says you are, does it feel like you just can’t accept yourself? 

Deep down, you may feel plagued with a sense of “not-enough-ness.” All you can think about is the “shoulds” of life—who you should be instead of who you are, what you should accomplish instead of what you’ve already done, etc.

Because you don’t feel comfortable in your own skin, your happiness may depend on how other people see you. As a result, perhaps you find yourself lapsing into people-pleasing behaviors. You may go to extreme lengths to make sure everyone loves and accepts you. 

If this is how you feel, I encourage you to pursue self-esteem therapy with me. My goal is to help you embrace your gifts, allow for your imperfections, and accept who you are. Joseph Campbell, one of my favorite writers, once said: “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”¹ I want you to realize this for yourself. 

Our Culture Of Comparison And Achievement Is The Real Culprit Of Low Self-Esteem

Low self-esteem is simply a reality of human existence. We all suffer from it at some point in life. Today, however, our culture of comparison and achievement has made the problem much worse. 

Social media has created a culture of “compare-and-despair”—our feeds are littered with pictures of people who seem happier, sexier, and richer than we are. And advertising culture is always telling us that we’re not good enough—our skin is too flawed, our houses are too small, and our cars are too cheap. No wonder that so many of us struggle to accept ourselves.

Low Self-Esteem Often Starts In Our Childhood 

Oftentimes, low self-esteem begins when we’re very young. Even if our parents or caregivers were kind and loving, they may have unconsciously tried to mold us in their own image. Our childhoods are often filled with messages of “be this, be that,” instead of “be who you are.” Naturally, this leads us to believe that we’re better off as someone we’re not.

No matter how strong or resilient we are, these messages stick with us and affect our mental health. They make it hard to trust our own voice and intuition. Self-esteem counseling can help you find your voice again and gain confidence in who you are.

Self-Esteem Therapy Is A Chance To Rewrite The Narrative About Your Life 

We live in a society that’s obsessed with individualism, and this makes it hard to work through mental health issues. On our own, we are all confined to the echo chamber of our own thoughts. And no matter how intelligent we are, our thoughts are not objective. When we tell ourselves that “I’m no good” or “I’m not worthy of love,” we often take these sentiments as fact and don’t question them. 

Therapy for low self-esteem is a chance to look at the programming you received as a kid and reevaluate the messages you took as truth. I want to help you disrupt the negative thoughts and beliefs that have been ingrained in your psyche and replace them with thoughts and beliefs that are affirming and empowering. The goal is to rewrite the narrative about your life and create a more nurturing relationship with yourself.

What To Expect In Sessions

When it comes to low self-esteem, your history is important. Together, we’ll explore the questions: where did you get the message that you’re not enough? Who do you think is enough? Who do you turn to most when you feel down about yourself? Who makes you come alive and feel most at ease in your own shoes? These questions will form the bedrock of our work together. 

Additionally, self-esteem therapy can help you learn to value observation over judgment and acceptance over control. So much of our lives are spent doing instead of being and resisting instead of letting go. In counseling, I want to help you pay less attention to your thoughts and your ego and embrace a quieter, more spiritual dimension of self. You will learn to experience the world in a meditative state of awareness instead of always judging or trying to rationalize everything. When you do this, it becomes easier to accept yourself and focus on life as it is rather than how it should be.

Tailoring Your Treatment Plan

A lot of self-esteem counseling is about exploring your “buttons”—the unconscious triggers and stressors that provoke your low self-esteem. Together, you and I will look at who or what installed those buttons (parents, cultural messages, etc.) and how you can take responsibility for them. After all, your buttons will get pushed no matter what—the best you can do is be aware of them and respond to them in a healthy way. Instead of saying “You make me feel like I’m a bad person,” you will learn to take responsibility for your feelings and recognize that other people do not control them. 

In a way, self-esteem counseling is like couples therapy, but with yourself. It’s a dialogue between your Ego and your Self, between the messages you’ve been programmed to believe and the truth about who you are. My goal in counseling is to help you sort through these messages and embrace the ones that help you deepen your self-love. You are beautifully and uniquely you—I want therapy to show you that.

You May Have Some Concerns About Self-Esteem Therapy…

  • It’s one of the great ironies of life that success does not buy you happiness. The messages you internalized about yourself did not arise because you didn’t have a great career or a beautiful partner. They arose because of the way you were raised and the environment you grew up in. “Success” is not a shortcut out of this issue. The only way to address it is to do the deeper work of unpacking where your self-beliefs came from and how they impact your life today.

  • We learn to protect ourselves by not being vulnerable or showing emotion, because self-esteem teaches us to ‘hide’ who we are. But to really explore low self-esteem, we have to let go of the adaptions and defenses that keep us from being vulnerable. Leaning into our feelings goes against what we’ve been taught, but it’s the only way to truly heal from negative self-beliefs.

  • While low self-esteem usually begins in childhood, that doesn’t mean you had bad parents or a horrible upbringing. Your parents may have been very kind and loving, but perhaps they were very different from you and struggled to understand or accept one part of you. For instance, maybe they were very career-driven and success-minded, but you’ve always been more creative and reflective by nature. This may have taught you that you were different from other people and had to adjust your personality to relate to them. In this way, self-esteem often has little to do with whether the people in your life are ‘bad’ or ‘good.’

You Are Beautifully And Uniquely You

If you want to improve your self-confidence and embrace your authentic and beautiful self, I encourage you to pursue therapy with me. To get started, you can email me or call 310-707-8070 for a free 5-10-minute phone consultation. I provide counseling for people in the South Bay area of Los Angeles.

¹ Campbell, Joseph. Selected and edited by Diane K. Osbon. A Joseph Cambell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living. Joseph Campbell Foundation, 2011. Page 15.