Low Self-Confidence & Therapy to Build Self-Esteem in London
Do you doubt yourself? Are you self-critical? If so then therapy to build your self-worth can help
Low self-confidence, poor self-belief and feelings of inadequacy are painful, frustrating and debilitating experiences. Self-doubt saps your energy and can disrupt or block your efforts to achieve happiness and contentment. Therapy for low self-confidence reduces these frustrations, doubts and blocks, helping you to value yourself more fully.
Whether it’s in the area of relationships, love and friendship, or career and worldly success, self-worth and self-esteem issues can get in your way and, over the course of a lifetime, may feed into serious emotional problems like depression, anxiety, loneliness and addictions.
How does therapy for low self-confidence and self-esteem work?
When you start seeing a therapist about your low self-confidence and low self-esteem, and take time, in the safe space of therapy, to open these issues up, often it becomes clear that low self-confidence isn’t only something you ‘have’ but something you ‘do’. It is not so much that you ‘have’ low self-esteem or self-value, but that you are not esteeming or valuing yourself at the right level.
While this is being grasped, it begins to be possible to explore, understand and make plans for effective change.
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Eleanor Roosevelt, politician and author
In therapy we explore how your habitual patterns of behaviour reinforce a certain, negative self-image, and then what steps could start to improve the self-image. Therapy will entail detailed practical work on how to take those necessary steps in a way which is sufficiently gradual and incremental so as not to evoke resistance.
That term ‘resistance’ is really a reference to the internalised critic in your ‘head’, the nasty, critical ‘voice’ in your mind that runs you down and says you are ‘not good enough’. It’s often quite a mean bully that people carry around on their shoulder or at their back, finding fault with everything they do and all that they are, knocking their confidence and self-worth at every opportunity.
That critical voice is particularly keen on making comparisons, and is always able to find negative comparisons for you to ruminate on and take to heart, diverting your energies away from meeting your own needs.
Cognitive Therapy approach to feelings of low self-confidence or self-belief
Taking a cognitive behavourial approach, the therapy will highlight the messages your self-critic gives you: negative assumptions and ideas which you may have been thinking for a long time. Then the things you say to yourself that are damaging to your self-belief can start to be replaced with more measured, realistic and positive thoughts.
In therapy, time is taken to differentiate those areas in which you seem to operate with low self-esteem, and others in which perhaps you are more self-confident. For example, it is quite common to live unconfidently in the social and personal sphere, but to have a confident, even assertive, persona when at work. That kind of differentiation is important to an understanding of who you are and how you can develop yourself from here on, whatever your age or situation in life.
The therapist may work with your dreams, because it is sometimes in dreams that the first ‘green shoots’ of improved self-confidence appear. The manifestations of low self-esteem, poor self-belief and low self-confidence in the body are also an important area of therapeutic, healing work.
Validation is a basic human need. You deserve to live with pride and dignity. Marcus uses his wide-ranging experience and different skills and techniques to help you to change the direction of your life through valuing yourself, so that you grow more empowered, satisfied in life and self-confident.
Take the first steps towards a greater confidence and self-worth
To begin to truly value yourself contact Marcus to talk about Therapy for low Self-Confidence.
Resources and articles on Self-Esteem, Self Confidence and Self-Worth
J K Rowling | In this Youtube video J K Rowling (author) describes her take on self confidence
Imposter Syndrome & Millennials | A recent Independent article looks at the rise in ‘Imposter Syndrome’ within the Millennials generation
