Why does low self esteem affect me now?

We might reasonably assume that what happened in the past should stay in the past because rationally we are not experiencing it now. However our subconscious contains everyone we’ve ever been, the sum total of our experiences. Plus, we’re talking about belief here not reasoning. Specifically the belief of  the child who created our self concept. This is why you might know that you are fine cognitively but you feel the opposite, often with no rational basis.

Imagine our self concept is created much like building a house. The foundations of the house are our beliefs about ourselves from our formative years. So the house that is constructed upon these foundations will be affected by them. If the foundation have a crack running through them, then the house will have that same crack.  

Worst still, because this is a ‘belief’ it is relatively impervious to logic and pervades our view of the world and our place within it. We use the belief to apply confirmation bias to our experiences. For example, if I believe at my core I’m a failure, I will largely ignore evidence that implies otherwise. I might get 99 out of a hundred questions right in a quiz but obsess about the one that I got wrong and use it as evidence of my lack of value. I might still feel a failure. We also might desperately crave what we lacked in childhood in our adult life. Approval or praise for example, but then when offered it, reject it because it does not fit with our beliefs about ourselves. Essentially a no-win scenario. These examples show the types of contradictions within us because of the primal belief we hold about ourselves.

While we’re subconsciously making these decisions about ourselves we are also using an extremely limited tool kit. Kids logic is perverse. If, for example, mum has a bad day and is angry about that, it will affect her overall mood. We might approach her with good intent to hug her or show her something we’re proud of but 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.

However, at this point in life we don’t have the capacity to say to ourselves, ‘Ahh that is mums ”stuff”. I wonder why she reacted inappropriately to me as I am blameless so nothing to worry about’. It’s hard enough to do when we are adults so 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. ‘But mum is always right so I must deserve it. I can’t connect why I deserve it with anything I’ve done so it must be that there is something that only mum or perhaps other people can see about me that means I’m the sort of person that deserves to be treated that way. That must be who I am, Not good enough in some elusive way.’ Now repeat the experience on a regular basis and the feeling becomes so ingrained we become convinced

That 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.

For example, violent outbursts perhaps 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. Other possible causes are parents that are emotionally unpredictable or manipulative, who withhold approval (nothing is ever quite good enough) 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.

You can’t predict at that point what the impact will be but when someone gets to therapy it doesn’t take long to look back and understand how we learned it. 

The problem is we tend to bury the experiences that made us feel this way pretty deep because they make us feel so uncomfortable, so they might be hard to consciously grab, we just feel it.