(Where a word or phrase is underlined, you can follow the link to another Clinical Guide for a fuller explanation of that topic. Feel free to follow them as your questions arise—they're designed to help you build a fuller understanding at your own pace.)
Related Clinical Guides
CLINICAL GUIDE 4
(if you have any questions at all having read our clinical guides simply call on 07702155267 and we would be pleased to help).
WHY DO I HAVE SUCH LOW SELF-ESTEEM AND FEEL SO ANXIOUS AROUND OTHER PEOPLE?
A trauma informed clinical guide to the underlying childhood reasons and attachment patterns to explain the life inhibiting joy destroying experience of believing that you are inferior to others.
What lies at the heart of this view of myself?
Having a fear that we are never good enough in any part of ourselves may feel like key hopes for life, for your life, may never be available; this is amplified in our Clinical Guide 3 which can be found here. To be able to feel contentment, fulfilment, even joy from life, when we may feel that we are never that person who anyone wants to be with, can condemn us to an internal sense of loneliness, isolation and perhaps helplessness.
We may even wonder despairingly what is wrong with me, how can I change to be that person everyone will like, or respect or value. We may exist in a terrible place where we lose hope, feel that we have no meaning to anyone and wonder whether life is pointless.
In a world which is existentially built on relationship how do we have meaning when we do not believe that we can, meaningfully and authentically, deeply connect with another and believe in that connection or even the possibility of that connection.
At the heart of this anxiety we believe at The Cheltenham Centre for Relationship and Trauma Therapy (CCRTT) that you may never have known your true authentic self; that somehow rather than life leaving you with a sense of your self that was secure, confident and affirmed you have been left full of doubt every part of yourself and in that doubt perhaps there is a conviction that you are, you will always be, on the outside and never with everyone else on the inside.
Why do I feel like this – why me?
It would be possible to think of this sense of being valueless and worthless as a contemporary plague. There is no doubt that the world in which we live is set up to leave us feeling somehow inadequate within ourselves.
So many look to enhancing themselves externally, e.g: by going to the gym, having cosmetic surgery, facials, body art, fashion, etc, because that is how we can become or give ourselves a better chance of being acceptable and valuable to others. The tragedy is that we can get caught in the trap of conditional acceptance to ourselves: I can only be worth something if I conform to someone elses standards and, to heap irony on tragedy, we can only guess at those standards and therefore add jeopardy to the risk we already feel when being with others: the classic pattern of social anxiety.
You may feel that you are constantly searching for some way of being or appearing that will leave you feeling confident and acceptable without even thinking about it. You may well not be able to remember when you did not feel like this: you may well have been that shy youngster who always felt awkward, the one who was always picked last at school; perhaps you were bullied. You may well feel that this is just simply who I am: this is how I was born and I will always feel on the outside, that shall never be able have any confidence in myself.
One of the reasons that this is a tragedy is that we were not born with this conviction that we are somehow inadequate and second rate, boring and uninteresting, tongue tied and unattractive. Minds and personalities are shaped in relationship and meaning throughout life exists in relationship: we live in a relational world. These convictions about ourselves come to exist from our earliest experiences of others and our conclusions of or own worth based on those experiences.
How we are shaped by early life experience.
When we are born we have no idea who we are: we are like a sponge waiting for the water of our experience to bring us into conscious lived existence. Our early life relationship experiences are the waters that nurture us into who we become and shape our view of ourselves, and beliefs about ourselves, in the world.
Our early brains are like a blank canvas waiting for the paint of experience to create our self-image. The creative experience is created in relationship and from the moment we are born our minds are making millions of connections/ second creating what are known as neural pathways.
These unique connections form the basis of our world view. They are our only experience of relationship at that point and are effectively hard wired into our unconscious memory. These connections tell us: this is what your world is like and how it is and will be for you. You may have felt that your world is and always be like this and it is hardly surprising that your conviction is so strong: the infant does not have the same capacity to process experience as an adult and so does not question any experience rationally.
The infant processes experiences through its emotional response largely based on whether there is a consistent and reliable soothing response or one is that is unreliable and perhaps angry or otherwise leaves the infant feeling unsafe. Developmentally we conclude through childhood that we cannot be loveable, or worthwhile, or worthy of affection and affirmation because otherwise those closest to us would respond like that; the child tends to look internally for reasons and concludes that there must be something wrong with him/her which we consider in greater depth in our Foundation clinical guide.
The early life environment tends not to change and so the patterns become reinforced. Our negative view of ourselves both originates in early life but is also compounded by relational repetition. Our beliefs about ourselves, equally, are laid down and reinforced in our early years such that by the time we reach adulthood they have become absolute convictions.
So how come my adult cannot shake off my early life experiences?
When we try and make sense of how we are who we are, we will inevitably use our adult brain to try and make sense of our present experiencing. Where we constantly feel anxiety and dread that we will inevitably be judged negatively by others it may well feel like there is nothing we can do about it: I have always felt like this and I can never shake off the dread of judgement. No-one values me, sees me, contacts me and I feel alone and so I must be worthless.
There is a real difficulty in being trapped by our conviction formed by our adult experiencing and processing. As our adult we try and process experience but it is on the basis of this conviction that we feel like a nothing: it may be difficult to contemplate any other perception of ourselves.
This is really not very surprising when we consider that these beliefs were set up in our infant world which was not capable of processing the negative experiences through its thinking brain, the pre-frontal cortex, because that part of the brain is not adequately formed in infancy. The negative experiences are laid down as memory and form the basis of our mind and brains’ interpretation and anticipation of the world in which we come to exist as an adult. Small wonder that it feels like this is ‘just who I am’; we consider this in more detailed developmental terms in our main clinical guide.
These convictions need not be cast in tablets of stone – they can be re-wired.
However, this is not how it has to be because we now, as adults, are able to process our experiences and to reconsider our worlds and who we are in them: we can challenge our memory consciously and cognitively in the present and re-programme our convicted assumptions about life an others and so lay down different more helpful assumptions based on re-wired neural connections.
The very fact that you are reading this and have got to a point where life may have become so uncomfortable, socially anxious, hopeless, miserable, lonely that you feel there has to be something different or better is the beginning of change.
Thankfully Neuroscience has come to our rescue with the evidence that our neural connections can change and our brains can be re-wired, known as Neuroplasticity. In giving ourselves consciously and cognitively different experiences, which we consciously process as different, and then consciously note the outcomes we can re-process, re-wire, our experiences.
At present the assumptions upon which your way of being is probably based were formed in early childhood and have not been questioned but simply endured and accepted that this is how I feel, have always felt and will always feel. However, if we consciously question our responses, challenge them and then survive the risk of doing something differently we can begin the process of engaging our adult brain to challenge and re-process our infant assumptions.
This is risky to our brain because doing anything that challenges the brains assumptions is interpreted by the brain as a high risk threat. Our brain hates change. If what is familiar is challenged then it will feel under threat and the threat response in the form of adrenalin and cortisol will be triggered.
Why is this important: because you may feel worse before you feel better; you may feel more anxious and shaky from the additional adrenalin and cortisol; this experience is considered in depth in our main clinical guide. However, if you consciously create a different experience and cognitively process that as beneficial for a period the new neural connections based on your new way of being will be laid down and the old ones based on your infant experience will be pruned away.
This process is where you purposefully meet Psychotherapy to walk with you through this process of change.
So what is the process of Psychotherapy and how will it help?
One of the key elements of Psychotherapy is to think about the experience of early life. In understanding the origins of our problems, we can create the foundations of choice by identifying feelings clearly and then challenging existing conclusions and unhelpful behaviours and replacing them with different ones.
Taking each of those elements in turn:
- The therapist will work with you to think about, in as much detail as possible, your wide early life experiences through your childhood and into adolescence. We do this by asking you to try and imagine your experience not from the perspective of an adult but of the infant who experienced the life circumstances we review. In doing so we uncover some of the circumstances that may have led you to your current conclusions about life and your life patterns. There may be some ‘light bulb’ moments: ‘ah’, no wonder I feel like this if that happened to me’.
- In identifying these patterns, we look at the relationship between feelings and behaviour: the importance of feelings being an accurate reflection of present circumstances rather than being informed by assumptions made in early life. Our behaviour is dependant on our feelings and so needs to based on present days circumstances.
- In changing our behavioural response to a different assessment of the actual threat in the present we cognitively note the response. We risk believing a different narrative about ourselves and note how we feel afterwards and what happened in the present. There is a more detailed explanation of the underlying neural processes in our Foundation clinical guide..
- Note: this process of change is not swift but it is rewarding in enabling you to be the person you were truly born to be.
What now?
There may well be echoes or even roars of resonance with how you feel about life or with various elements of what you have read. Perhaps you have spent years trapped believing that these patterns of social anxiety and low self-worth are just how my life is and there is nothing or little you can do about them.
Perhaps now you owe it to yourself to embark on the therapeutic journey of change; you are worth it. You need not continue to live within the limited life that you may endure now.
At CCRTT we believe in the capacity of everyone to change. We are here to help you now to start your journey and to stay with you as the journey unfolds towards your true self.
If aspects of this guide reflect your own experience, psychotherapy can help you understand how these patterns developed and, importantly, how they can begin to change.
We offer psychotherapy both in person in Cheltenham and online throughout the UK. If you would like to discuss whether this approach feels right for you, I would welcome you to get in touch for an initial conversation and would be very pleased to receive your enquiry through our contact form or simply call 07702155267.
