Women and Self-Esteem

What do Womens’ Self-Esteem and Sale Prices have in Common?

Do you recognize any of these?

Social shyness
Anxiety and emotional turmoil
Lack of social skills and self-confidence
Depression and/or bouts of sadness
Less social conformity
Eating disorders
Inability to accept compliments
An inability to see yourself 'squarely' - to be fair to yourself
Accentuating the negative about yourself
Exaggerated concern over what you imagine other people think
Self-neglect
Treating yourself badly but NOT other people
Worrying whether you have treated others badly
Reluctance to take on challenges
Reluctance to put yourself first or anywhere
Reluctance to trust your own opinion
Expecting little out of life for yourself ¹

What is Self-Esteem?

One online dictionary defines “self-esteem” as “a realistic respect for or favourable impression of oneself; self-respect.” Another website defines it as “What our unconscious believes to be true about how worthy, lovable, valuable and capable we are.” ²

Why Women have Lower Self-Esteem

selfesteem I recently read that women are in a sense “trained” for low self-esteem.

Studies show that girls--especially smarter ones--often have severe problems with self-esteem. They consistently underestimate their own ability. When asked how they think they'll do on different tasks--whether the tasks are untried or ones they've encountered before--they give lower estimates than boys do, and in general tend to underestimate their actual performance.

A psychologist, Lois Hoffman, described a developmental sequence that leads girls to become adults who need excessive support from others. The little girl has a) less encouragement for independence, b) more parental protectiveness, c) less cognitive and social pressure for establishing an identity separate from Mother, and d) less mother-child conflict, which supports separation.

Not surprisingly, the child engages in less independent exploration of her environment. She continues to be dependent on adults for solving her problems, and this means she may need her affective ties with adults at all costs, including the cost of her independence and self-esteem. ³

Women worry more and are generally more anxious than men for a variety of biological reasons. Two parts of the brain (amygdala and anterior cingulate gyrus) are intimately involved with processing fear, anger and analysis of emotional events. These are several times larger in women than in the average men. Women are also smaller and more vulnerable – and being more vigilant helps them to survive. Female hormones alter a women’s brain to be more sensitive to signs of threat and danger. ⁴

All the above factors combine in a beautiful “story” about why we as women are more prone to lower self-esteem. Sounding pretty grim?

How is Self-Esteem Formed?

Healthy self-esteem comes from learning that we can accomplish by ourselves, that we can rely upon our own abilities, and can trust our own judgment. Girls are often not given enough opportunity to learn these things. Eventually they come to believe that they can't succeed in meeting life's challenges on their own. Without this belief they eventually become women who have difficulty with low self-esteem. ³

As growing children, we all encounter situations where we get the message “I can’t”. The facts are not as important as how we perceive a situation. A Dad who jokes “Maths are for boys, why don’t you stick to art?” because he can see that his little girl suffers through maths, might mean well. The message in her mind and body however, is “Give up – you can’t do it anyway”. Instead of encouraging her to try until she gets it right, the message is “I’m dumb and stupid and don’t have any value”. Every child receives a different message - one child might be completely ok and another might be devastated and aquire a limiting belief through this experience.

Your Unique Journey to your Current Self-Esteem

Think back to you childhood for a moment. Whether you’re a man or a woman, ask yourself the following. How often…

was I told “Don’t stay out after dark?”
did my parents warn me about “the dangers” out there?
did my parents set curfews?
did my parents warn me not go too far, in case I lose my way?
did my well-meaning parents NOT give me a chance to make my own mistakes?
did my well-meaning parents take over and “help” me to get something done, instead of me trying and failing and trying again?

Think back to school, sport, friends, family, church… What messages did you receive as a child? Did you ever get the feeling that …

“I’ll never make it anyway”“
“I’ll never be good enough”
“No matter how hard I try, I can’t do it”
“If you can’t get it right first time, there’s something wrong with me”

How many times did you hear these words from your parents?

“I don’t want you to make the same mistake that I made”
“I don’t want you to make a mistake because I love you and I want the best for you”

Did you have a Dad who thought he was being a great Dad by not letting you get your hands dirty? Did your Dad always act like a kind of “Guardian Angel”, taking over where you struggled?

Were you abused in any way, whether physical, emotional or sexual? Abused children grow up believing that they have little or no value – that they’re just an object that can be used by others.

Not for one minute am I being judgemental about the way that we were brought up. Our parents were doing the very best they could with the knowledge, understanding, education and resources available to them in the moment.

That does not mean that they did a perfect job. Our childhood has everything to do with how we are being as adults, how much self-esteem we have, and how we function in the world.

So… your childhood is over. You can’t go back and change how you were brought up, and you realise that your self-esteem hovers between 0 and 1 on a 10-point scale. What do you do?

How NOT to Increase Self-Esteem

It’s proven to be completely ineffective to “talk” someone positive. Telling someone with low self-esteem over and over that they are valuable and worthwhile actually increases resistance. Research has shown that positive affirmations worsen the mood of those who already have low self-esteem.

Paradoxically, being “too nice” to someone with very low self- esteem can drive them away. People need to develop better self-esteem gradually, through “proof” in the real world. Just being repeatedly told (by someone who doesn’t know you that well) that “you’re wonderful” has never been found to work in lifting low self-esteem. ⁵

How to Effectively Increase Self-Esteem

If it’s our life experiences that created our current self-esteem, doesn’t it make sense to go back to those memories and see what keys they hold? self-esteem-quotes

I’d love to introduce my favourite tool to work with low self-esteem. It’s called EFT and it’s short for Emotional Freedom Techniques. A very effective way of using EFT is to combine it with a method called “Matrix Reimprinting”.

These two tools provide us with a way that we can revisit the scenes of our childhood, take the negative charge out of them and replace old, unhappy memories with more empowering, functional scenes.

Using traditional EFT is almost like we would watch a movie and taking all the negative charge out of it. With Matrix Reimprinting, we can step onto the stage and change the characters and how they act. It’s not important to describe here exactly how this works. The important thing is that real transformation can occur when we take the negative charge out of our childhood scenes AND rewrite them in a positive, empowering way.

What starts to occur is that our entire inner world can be transformed - and thus, our outer world too. Through a gentle process of taking the "zzzt" out of the childhood memories, we can start to see ourselves in a totally different light. We can "chop down" the emotional trees in our diseased forest and plant healthy trees of self-respect, self-esteem, and self-confidence. It can occur virtually painlessly and in far less time than you thought.

Contact Liesel or Laurie for more information on EFT Workshops, EFT Private Sessions or how to learn Matrix Reimprinting. The next Matrix Reimprinting course in South Africa is taking place in October 2011 and the requirement is to have completed EFT Level 1 and EFT Level 2.