If you read any self-esteem building book, you will find that the focus is on how you believe that there is something wrong with you, and if you change that assessment of yourself then your self-esteem will be bolstered. And to get there, ‘they’ focus you on positive self-affirmations, and looking at the messages that you received growing up and changing those so that they are more empowering.
That’s cool, except that what do you do if every time you feel any negative emotion you think there is something wrong with you irrespective of what that negative feeling was in response to?
We Never Leave Home Without It
Emotions are an anxious person’s stock in trade, like a builder has building tools with them, a chef, cooking utensils, someone with anxiety runs the gauntlet with every negative emotion identified by psychologists.
Now here’s the tricky part.
The way we know we are feeling anything is because we first make a mental assessment of what happens around us, and we label it. So if you are standing in a long queue for the checkouts at your local supermarket, you will have a variety of responses to it, which give rise to your feelings.
So you might hate standing and waiting, therefore you’re much more likely to feel angry, annoyed, or irritated by standing there and waiting. But if standing there waiting is neutral to you, and you have your phone and you can play games on it while you wait, then you’re more likely to feel just okay about the whole experience.
And what happens next is if you find yourself doing the same event over and over and getting pretty much the same type of experience from it, then you will build up associations to it, which will shortcut any thoughts you have about it and you’ll go straight to feelings. So if you dislike queues, you only have to see one and then you’re triggered into a bad mood. If for you queueing has been neutral, then you’re not likely to have too much of a negative response unless you’re in a mad rush and you really need to queue to be short.
And then it gets more complicated.
How To Build A Phobia
So then let’s say you start to build up a phobia of queueing. Every time you even think about shopping you go all funny and start to feel anxious, angry or irritated, and this starts to impact on you going shopping, and you start to avoid it.
This is when you’ll reach out to someone to help you ‘cope’ with how you feel about queueing. And that’s all well and good and pretty much where you’d contact me
BUT
Now here’s the kicker.
Now I Know There’s Something Really Wrong With Me
What if you think there is something wrong with you for having the emotion in the first place irrespective of what caused you to feel upset, or angry or irritated …?
In the above scenario, you would be feeling as you felt because you built up a negative association to queuing, but what I’m asking you to consider now is, what if you think there is something wrong with you JUST BECAUSE YOU FELT A NEGATIVE EMOTION?
When I first saw this it stunned me.
I thought that I felt that there was something wrong with me because I didn’t like how people looked at me in social events, or I didn’t like being the centre of attention, or I didn’t like having to say no. These are all common events and some people are okay with them and some aren’t.
What I realised is that yes I felt angry because of my association with queuing, but I believed there was something wrong with me for feeling a negative emotion in the first place.
Do you get how significant this is to the building of self-esteem?
If Being Upset Upsets You Because You Were Upset, Here’s Why
It’s like being upset about being upset, even though you might be upset that your family pet had died, and so you were justified in being upset, you were more upset for having negative feelings of regret, remorse, sadness, or other negative emotions, for instance.
And this is what a lot of the self-esteem building therapies miss, they concentrate on the event that gave rise to your feelings, but miss the subtleness of you thinking there was something wrong with you, just because you feel any negative emotion.
And missing this subtleness answers the question as to why some people can spend months or even years trying to build their self esteem and still feel that there is something wrong with them, because the ‘helper’ didn’t catch that they were focused on how having a negative emotion means that there is something wrong with them, because they had wrongly assessed that other people didn’t have negative emotions, they seemed to have it all together and so there must be something wrong with them to even feel angry or upset or paranoid.
Do you understand what I’m trying to convey to you here?
If you believe deep down that there is something wrong with you and you’ve been working to build your self-esteem for a while now, then look at how you feel about feeling negative emotions and what that means about you, this could be the breakthrough you’re missing.
And as always, I’m here to help you catch all those nuances in our emotional tapestry of life.
Here’s to ‘Oh so that’s why I feel like I do’ moments
Speak soon
Elaine
