Low self-esteem – the journey from self-criticism to self-love
You are not your achievements, your appearance or your mistakes. You are life itself, expressing itself through you.
Many people go through life with an inner voice that constantly tells them they are not “enough”. That they must achieve more, be smarter, more beautiful or more perfect to deserve love and a place in the world. Low self-esteem is not just a thought – it is a deep inner feeling of inadequacy that holds us back from living the life we were made for.
As your therapist, I help you look behind this mask of self-criticism, so you can rediscover your inherent worth, which has never been gone.
How does low self-esteem feel?
Low self-esteem colours your experience of yourself and your relationships:
- The inner critic: a constant stream of judgemental thoughts that focus on faults and shortcomings.
- People-pleasing: an excessive need to keep others happy to avoid rejection.
- Comparison: a feeling of always being “behind” others.
- Fear of taking up space: a tendency to make yourself small and not express your own needs and boundaries.
These patterns are often defence mechanisms we learned early in life to protect ourselves, but they end up becoming the prison we live in.
You are not your story
From a spiritual perspective, many wisdom traditions remind us that our true worth is not something we have to earn – it is something we are.
Low self-esteem often arises when we identify completely with our outer form – our appearance, our achievements, our past or other people's opinions of us. But all of this is only the surface. Beneath all these layers there is a deeper core of being which, by its nature, is already whole and valuable. When we begin to let go of the stories the mind tells about not being good enough, a deeper inner calm gradually arises.
Through life, many people have built emotional protection around the heart to avoid the pain of not feeling good enough. But this protection can also shut out joy, spontaneity and life energy.
Developing healthy self-esteem is therefore often about letting go of old impressions and inner beliefs and discovering that you are not your thoughts – you are the awareness behind them. When this realisation begins to settle, your relationship with yourself changes.
A holistic rediscovery of yourself
In my practice we work with self-esteem from a holistic and spiritual perspective. We do not only look at changing thoughts, but at creating a deeper transformation in your relationship with yourself. Among other things, we work with:
- Healing the child: we give attention and understanding to the parts of you that once learned they were not good enough, and make room to heal these old wounds.
- Awareness training: you gradually learn to observe your inner critic without identifying with it, so its voice loses its power.
- Accepting the body: we work on feeling the body as a safe and valuable home rather than a place to be judged or controlled.
- Spiritual grounding: we find our way to the part of you that is unchanging and always valuable – your authentic self.
You are not your achievements, your appearance or your mistakes. You are life itself, expressing itself through you.
From my work
Low self-esteem may be the clearest example of what happens when we are not free to be ourselves. We learned early who we had to be in order to be loved. The work is finding our way back to who we were before we learned it.
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