The Truth About Self-Esteem

Anyone walking a spiritual path hears the same advice early on: you have to love yourself before you can really love anyone else. Raise your self-esteem. Think well of who you are. It all sounds sensible, and it sounds simple. Then real life shows up, the ordinary daily grind of it, and you find out how much harder the thing is to do than to say.

My own self-esteem was awful for most of my childhood and all through my teens. Somewhere in my late teens I decided to climb out of the depression I kept sliding into, and the first target I picked was that battered sense of self-worth. I read the positive-thinking books. I wrote lists of things I liked about myself. I drew little encouraging pictures of the future I wanted to visualise. I worked on my self-talk. Every textbook method, every trick the self-esteem experts swore by, I used it.

And my life turned around? No. It got worse.

For a few days at a time I would feel genuinely good. Yes, I'd think, I've finally cracked it. Then I'd drop off Cloud Nine and land back in the same pit, except the pit was deeper now, because on top of everything else I felt like a failure. These were foolproof methods. They had worked for countless other people. They did nothing for me. So now I carried the old hatred of myself plus a fresh layer of proof that something was broken in me specifically. There seemed to be nowhere left to turn.

After that I kept trying in fits and starts. I'd find some new strategy, get excited, work at it for a while, see no change, and quit. On the wagon, off the wagon, a thousand times over, and never actually moving.

So is my self-esteem still in the gutter? I can answer that with a huge grin and a flat no. Here is what changed it.

I figured out that I am not one person, one thing, one identity. I am two.

Before, I treated myself as a single unit. Which meant that whenever I looked at something I'd done badly, there was exactly one party to blame. When I couldn't keep a relationship happy, the only conclusion available was: what is wrong with me, I must be a bad partner, a bad person, something is rotten at my core. The feeling that came with that was sadness and despair, but mostly shame. I hated being me. I'd watch other people reach things I believed I never could, and instead of being inspired I just wanted to be them, because trying to get where they'd gotten felt pointless.

Then I noticed the two of me. One part is what everybody sees: my place in the world, how I move through it, how I act, how I talk to people. I call that the doing self. The other part has been there unchanged since the day I was born. It's almost impossible to put into words, this part, but it's the thing that makes me me. The essence. I call that the being self.

Once I saw the split, my whole idea of self-esteem turned over. Here is what I worked out.

The doing self, the temporary one that shifts and changes, was the one actually doing the bad things. But the being self, my permanent essence, was the one taking all the blame.

The being self deserves unconditional love and respect, because it is the centre of who a person is. That love doesn't move depending on whether I've behaved well or badly. Picture the way a good mother loves her child whether he's being naughty or sweet. That's the love the being self is owed.

The being self is the real me. The doing self is the face I wear out in the world.

Everyone's being self is good, innocent, whole, made in the image of God, if you like. It wants only good for itself and for everyone else.

Everyone's doing self, by contrast, is a mess. It lies, cheats, puts on acts, gossips, slanders, insults, belittles, laughs at other people.

My shame came from one specific mistake: believing the doing self was who I really was underneath it all.

To stop the shame, I had to get the behaviour of my doing self lined up with what my being self actually wanted, regardless of what I felt like doing in the moment.

So the work turned into two jobs instead of one. I had to love the being self and remind it how good and innocent and pure it was. And I had to love the doing self too, but differently, by encouraging it to improve and reach for better actions, even when choosing the right thing was the harder road and I really didn't want to.

What had been happening before was that the two sets of messages got tangled, so I came away convinced I wasn't good enough at the very core. That was never true. I was terrified the badness lived at the centre of me, when really it was only behaviour-deep. And behaviour is a habit. Habits break.

It was brutal at the start. After all those failed attempts I was sure I'd never see a real result. I stuck with it anyway, and it wasn't long before I started to feel better about myself for real. My relationships got better as well. I don't feel shame looking in the mirror anymore; I feel glad it's me looking back.

Back when my self-esteem was in ruins, I was actually conceited and loud about it, putting on a show of thinking I was wonderful. These days I don't need the performance. I'm quietly sure of who I am. You can get there too. - Imani