[sillycat]

I just need to write this down, so I apologise if this is in the wrong place!

I have recently realised that I have been suffering from low self esteem for a number of years, I think since childhood really! I am seeing all the ways it affects my life, I have gone through periods where I would tell lies so I would appear more interesting to other people to doing some very crazy things so I would seem interesting and I have recently noticed that I would also try to mimic other peoples lives, for example if I read a book and I liked the main character, I would then try to mimic her personality traits in my life, the same with shows and such like!
I realised that I have done all this as well as keeping my interests to doing things that I think other people will be able to think I am 'cool' or something. It seems that a lot of the choices I have made it is all about how it will look to other people when I tell them about it, all ways of making me feel like I am 'in'.
Obviously I know that I can not fix this just by knowing it is there, but it feels so nice to sort of understand a little bit of why I am this way! I don't know the exact reasons for it and to be honest I am not exactly sure that I NEED to, I believe it will stem from having ginger hair (here it is kind of socially wrong!) so i was always 'different' from the other people and also I think I am just a lot more sensative and I think it is a kind of natural thing and I was never one for talking about my feelings and kept everything more bottled up, so i think it all stems from that but you know, now that I understand all this I am really going to work at changing it for the better.

Does anyone have any particular ways of doing this? Are there any books which can be of help?

Thanks!!

[Stevejavson]

Hi sillycat, the method that works best for me is practicing gratitude and humility. It doesn't exactly raise self esteem directly, but a more positive attitude really makes it an easier process. There's nothing wrong with mimicking, it's a great way of picking up some good traits .

As for your comments regarding your concern about how others perceive you, I think you'll be very interested in a sociology theory called the "looking glass self".

As for fitting in, don't worry about it too much. We humans have a tendency to exaggerate in our minds how others perceive us.

[FooZe]

Originally Posted by sillycat

... I have recently noticed that I would also try to mimic other peoples lives, for example if I read a book and I liked the main character, I would then try to mimic her personality traits in my life...

I remember some time ago, when I wasn't at all sure what kind of person I wanted to be, looking to other people (living, historical or fictional) whose traits or thinking I admired and trying to copy them -- a piece or two from this one, a piece or two from that one. I eventually discovered two problems with that approach. One (probably the less important) was that the pieces I was collecting didn't always fit together well and didn't usually fit me that well. The more important problem I discovered was that none of the people I admired seemed to have gotten the way they were by copying anyone else.

Does anyone have any particular ways of doing this? Are there any books which can be of help?

I'm not quite sure where you're starting from. I can't come up with any good entry-level books at the moment. If you don't mind having to stand on tiptoe some of the time to grasp where the author is coming from, here are a couple I often found myself inspired by:

On Becoming a Person, Carl R. Rogers. Affordable and well worth having around, IMO.

Motivation and Personality, Abraham H. Maslow. Incredibly expensive, but you may be able to get it through a library. I found Chapter 12 ("Self-Actualizing People: a Study of Psychological Health") the most interesting -- but YMMV.