No client has ever come to me with healthy self-esteem. The ‘symptoms’ they present with are varied, but extremely common: Can’t get ahead financially (real success has always alluded them), can’t find a loving, compatible and suitable life partner, mood fluctuations and dysregulation are common, people-pleasing/codependent behaviors (always buying another’s acceptance, admiration or love), a cornucopia of physical ailments and personality disorder traits~ and these are just the tip of the iceberg.
The core of this problem relates to how we’ve been conditioned and programmed by the woman who gave birth to us, to see and feel about ourselves since infancy. Core trauma wounds are due to our inability to have received the adoration we needed and deserved throughout our childhood, and this molded our sense of Self. In essence, we grew-up believing we had no real value, based on deficits we grew up accepting and accommodating as “normal” when we were little kids.
None of how faulty we were forced to see ourselves in childhood has any validity or truth, but very few humans can view themselves as good enough or genuinely lovable. What IS valid, is that most of us were handed a distorted picture of who we are, from our earliest days of life onward, and we accepted and adopted it.
Have you ever seen your physical image in a carnival’s warped mirror? These mirrors are bent, so they reflect back to you a bizarrely misshapen representation of yourself~ an apt metaphor for how and why so many of us grew up with a grossly distorted sense of our lovability and worth. We felt defective and ashamed as children, simply because our parental units didn’t know how to cherish and love us~ and our natural assumption about ourselves matched how they reflected us in their words, actions and attitudes.
How many kids have parents who are delighted to see them when they enter a room? How many of us experienced an attitude other than annoyance, disdain, impatience or indifference in the physical presence of our parents?
If you beat and scream at a puppy for peeing or pooping on your living room carpet, it’s not only going to grow up afraid of you, it will never understand why it’s being harshly punished. Puppies and kittens have no more control over the muscles that hold-in their excrement, than human infants do. This is why diapers were invented!
As an animal and person physically develops, certain muscle groups gain strength, mobility, balance and control. We don’t automatically presume an infant can run before its leg muscles develop enough to stand upright after becoming adept at crawling. Learning to walk involves a lot of falling down, until we gain the strength to hold ourselves upright, and balance our body weight. It’s a very intricate process. So is potty training, incidentally.
A Narcissist presumes their child can understand and know everything it took the parent to learn by the ripe old age of 35 - 40. As absurd as this sounds, no statement has ever been truer about narcissistic individuals.
Aside from the fact that the one who needs the least sits in the driver’s seat of control within their relationship interplay (or so we may think), this can also be why our narcissistic traits have us repeatedly choosing romantic partners and friends whose emotional development is sorely lacking. We relish the sense of one-upmanship, hyper-competency and empowerment we get to reinforce for ourselves within those dynamics.
Have YOU ever fallen in love with for someone for their “potential?” Sometimes taking another at face-value is a good and healthy self-preservation tactic. Sometimes it’s not, because we fail to look more deeply into the object of our affection, to discern how compatible a fit they might be for us. Do you hold lovers to lower standards than you do your closest, most trusted and valued friends?? Ya might wanna work on changing this.
The point of this essay, is helping you understand why and how every single decision and choice we make during our lifetime, is directly influenced by our sense of self-worth~ or lack of it. Neither is consciously recognized, particularly if we find ourselves lacking, or never good enough. We have no other frame of reference besides how our parents treated us, to have acquired anything close to an accurate self-view.
Reprogramming tools to heal the little girl or boy within us, are essential to help us break-out of our self-effacing paradigm. The inner voice most of us carry that’s shaming, guilting, critical and abusive to us never leaves, until we’re inclined to clean house emotionally, by learning to regard ourselves as truly unique and worthy of love, just as we are.
You were a perfectly lovable, bright, curious, adorable child. You simply grew up seeing only a distorted reflection of yourself in bent carnival mirrors all over your house. You never got to see YOU in an accurate way. This takes some time to rectify and heal, but it can be done with a bit of self-discipline and conscious daily effort.
If you’re determined to do this work on yourself, new habits will gradually replace faulty old ones you’ve had lifelong~ and happiness, contentment and joy will finally be huge assets to your daily existence.
Amen, and God bless you.