Quote:
Originally Posted by gloamingone
How do I grow my self esteem? I was abused and neglected as a child, so I never learned that I had value beyond what I could do for other people. My T is too busy to see me more than every three weeks, so even though she wants to work on this, it's just not working.
I feel completely useless, a total failure. I know I should be able to tell myself what is good about me, but for the life of me, I don't know what it is.
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I've seen some interesting stuff in some of the positive psychology / happiness work that might be a helpful starting point.
One of the areas that apparently helps grow happiness (so not exactly self esteem per se, but probably relatively close) is accomplishing goals.
Are there things you have accomplished in life? Things you're working towards now?
This topic is really important to me right now, I'm in my mid-40s and I've kind of determined that self-love/self-esteem/self-acceptance is maybe my biggest challenge, the thing that's holding me back in many areas of my life.
I started working on this a bit earlier this year, working through Brene Brown's first book "I Thought It Was Just Me But It's Not". I was doing it alone, in a journal, and ended up dropping the project because I had a different big project that suddenly needed my attention (plus, the work was HARD!) but now I'm ready to go back to it.
And this time I think I'm going to do some of my work online so I can have some accountability for my process (& keep moving forward instead of finding excuses for why I can't) - perhaps I'll do that here on this forum, perhaps a blog... Unsure right now, but I'll likely get started back with this book in a few weeks.