How our self esteem is shaped

We are born with some basic character traits but much of our self view is developed in the formative years of our life, about the first seven years. This is because we start out as essentially a blank canvas deciding and defining who we are by using the world around us like a mirror, learning about ourselves primarily by what is reflected back in the behaviours and attitudes of the people we are most exposed to. This is a particularly vulnerable time because we’re utterly dependent on our parents or carers and tend to believe anything they tell us, but more importantly interpret how they behave towards us as meaning something about ourselves. In short, our parents are like gods at this point in our lives and everything they say or imply about us must be true.

While we’re subconsciously absorbing this we are using an extremely limited tool kit. Kids logic is perverse. If for example if mum ahd a bad day and is angry, it might affect her overall mood and interactions. We go to hug her, unaware of her mood and she snaps at us or rejects us in some way instead of responding how we were expecting her to. This is a shock because we haven’t done anything wrong and we are being punished. It’s unfair and we feel shame.

We feel shame because at this point in life we don’t have the capacity to say to ourselves, ‘Ahh mums celarly had a bad day and is angry because of that. She didn’t mean it. So I am blameless with nothing to worry about’. We will probably feel hurt or be upset, the reasoning in our subconscious being something along the lines of… ‘I am being treated badly even though I have done nothing to deserve it.’ but then our childs logic kicks in and makes sense that isn’t there, along the lines of. ‘Mum is always right so I must deserve it. I don’t know why, so it must something about me that only mum or perhaps other people can see about me. My subconscious chooses to believe it means I’m the sort of person that deserves to be treated that way. That must be who I am!’

Now repeat the experience on a regular basis and the feeling becomes so ingrained we start to believe it ourselves.

That also might be a drip feed (persistent criticality for example) that slowly carves the feeling of inadequacy into our amygdala (where our emotional memory and conditioning live) but the same effect can come from a few extreme or traumatising events.

There are infiniate examples but some more obvious ones might be: violent outbursts where the response is disproportionate to whatever has happened, maybe the loss of a parent or them abandoning us, abusive or bullying behaviours, we blame ourselves believing we deserve it using that perverse child logic. But it could be parents that tell you they love you but emotionally distant, unpredictable or manipulative, or are frequently critical or create specific conditions around your acceptability. This is a particularly common experience with parents who might suffer from personality disorders, mental illness or addictions. But also every parent, trying their best or sometimes not.

You can’t predict at that point what the impact will be but when someone starts therapy it doesn’t take long to understand how we learned it. Childhood might only immediately have memories of sunshine and roses. Or maybe you had a difficult time at school or in a group of friends or with siblings.

The problem is our subconscious tends to bury the experiences that made us feel this way pretty deeply because of the shame we assoicate with them, so they might be hard to initally remember them. But more on that later. Next we look at why this continues to affect us and how.