Self Therapy: Self-judgment and self-rejection can be extremely damaging. We may find ourselves taking fewer risks, withdrawing more from social relationships and even avoiding making new friends and entering new environments.
Research has shown that self-esteem is a strong indicator of the degree to which "our need to socialize is met or threatened". Self-esteem is vital for psychological health and its absence can lead to many basic needs going unmet.
Feeling depressed or generally bad about ourselves is often the product of our inner critic. Therefore, capturing self-criticism in action can help.
With your eyes closed, take some slow, deep breaths.
Relax your body by releasing tension in your shoulders, legs, abdomen, face, neck and shoulders.
Notice where in your body you feel tension.
Focus on that part of your body and be fully aware of how it feels.
Listen to your thoughts that go with your feelings focused on that body part.
What are these thoughts telling you?
Try to remember when these feelings started.
What was your critic saying at that time?
Doing this exercise regularly will help you as the inner critic to become more familiar with the content of these inner attacks.
What is Self-Esteem?
Researchers have long studied what self-esteem is, how it first emerges in childhood and how it changes throughout our lifespan, but many conclusions have been reached in the last decade.
 Self-esteem is a subjective construct that is well suited to measurement through self-report. It does not necessarily offer an objective reflection of a person's competencies, characteristics or even how others see them.
Researchers distinguish between external and internal self-esteem. Extrinsic relates to how an individual assesses his or her own worth, while intrinsic self-esteem indicates feelings of value in a single area, such as physical appearance, relationships and intellectual ability.
With Nişantaşı self-therapy, once you know how your inner critic can be damaging and when it typically occurs, it is possible to challenge it.
It may seem a bit awkward to talk to yourself as your critic, but learning to reject negative behaviors is incredibly valuable.
When you observe yourself as a critic at work, try the following two ways of talking.
Ask yourself, what am I doing to counter the attacks of my inner critic?
For example:
I avoid socializing with new people.
It's one of the thoughts you are constantly stuck with: I feel that people at work don't respect me.
Combine your notes in these areas with statements you can use to convey to the critic:
I can't afford it; it's negatively affecting my social life and damaging my career.
Affirmation of value!
In order for the critic to combat negative beliefs, especially those that are deeply held, you must learn to replace your voice with "a positive awareness of your own worth".
This is not an easy action. You need to challenge long-held beliefs and recognize that you are valuable as a human being.
I am valuable because I breathe, feel and am aware.
I feel pain, I love and I try to survive, I am a good person.
Your goal is to create a statement that feels authentic to you that you can use to replace your inner critic.
How Does Self-Esteem Develop?
Although research suggests that intrinsic self-esteem is influenced by both genetic (about 40%) and environmental factors, exactly how it emerges early in life remains unclear.
While one proposes that self-esteem emerges as the child forms beliefs about their abilities in certain areas, another suggests that it develops from early experiences of meaningful interpersonal relationships. Self-esteem research recognizes the importance of the family environment, including the quality of the parental relationship.
As Nişantaşı self-esteem therapy, I foresee that it will be very useful for you to establish these bonds with your children in the best way. It is very important to be with our children at these times, to be able to analyze what they need with their postures and attitudes.
Developing Self-Esteem
The cognitive model associated with Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) suggests that dysfunctional thinking is present in all psychological disorders. A person's emotional state and behavior can help when they "learn to evaluate their thinking in a more realistic and adaptive way".
Although there are many tools and techniques to improve self-esteem, cognitive restructuring techniques have proven to be quick and highly effective.
It recommends "the exploration of chronic self-talk, the systematic confrontation of cognitive distortions, and the development of a more accurate and compassionate self-evaluation" to raise the client's sense of self-worth.
How Stable is Self-Esteem?
It varies across situations and age; most research suggests that it is low in childhood, increases during adolescence, reaches a maximum in adulthood, then declines in old age. However, relative to others, it remains relatively stable throughout our lives, and evidence supports the idea that self-esteem is an enduring personality trait.
Unless we focus on changing it, if we were insecure as children, we are likely to be so in adulthood.
What affects the development of self-esteem?
We are all different in how our self-esteem changes over time. Many of these individual differences are influenced, sometimes indirectly, by the following factors;
Gender and ethnicity
Social relations
Socio-economic status
business success
Stressful life events
Cultural context
For example, the effect of gender on this self-esteem is small and typically declines as adolescents move into adulthood. Any effect of gender on self-esteem is also likely to be indirect. In some cultures women are given lower status and in some cases women are treated differently in work and educational settings.
Social relationships have a significant impact on our self-esteem. "Self-esteem is an internal monitor of the extent to which an individual's need for socialization is satisfied or threatened.
The therapist can actually start by exploring their client's thoughts.
What were you thinking or saying to yourself at the time? It can help if the client gives a name to the inner critic. Giving the voice an identity means that it can be externalized and experienced as an external factor instead of 'I'.
The client should also be introduced to the healthy voice of the realistic thinker (the "accepting" or criticizing "rational point of view").
By helping the client to see the duality, it is possible to challenge their harshest critics (themselves) using their healthy voice.
Then, the client should be helped to understand why they use their critical voice and how it might appear to protect them.
For example:
What did the critic say when you met new people?
What do you think the critic was trying to protect you from?
How did the critic do this?
Perhaps the critic was preparing you for rejection or protecting you by encouraging you not to engage.
Once the function of the critic is better understood, it is possible to ask the client what they would have been forced to experience if the critic had not stopped or limited them.
How would the critic help you in this or similar situations?
What do you fear will happen if the critic is silenced?
The client should be able to teach what strengthens the inner critic and how some of their important needs can be met in healthier ways.
How to Increase Self-Esteem
When we learn to shut down or reject our inner voice that criticizes us, we can stop the cycle of self-sabotage and regain control before it damages our self-esteem and sense of self-worth.
More importantly, research suggests that therapy can increase clients' sense of self-worth; they begin to see themselves as more deserving and capable.
Besides cognitive restructuring, which we will discuss below, many techniques can help defeat the inner critic, including
Identifying strengths While certain virtues, such as humanity and temperance, are associated with good self-esteem and a positive self-view, recognizing and repeatedly using our strengths can support how we see ourselves.
Self-acceptance While recognizing our positive qualities and enduring strengths is vital for self-esteem, it is crucial to adopt an attitude and language that is non-judgmental and accepting of ourselves and others.
Specific focus issues are inflexible rules and shoulds.
Our unchanging sense of right and wrong is often rooted in cultural, parental and peer expectations.
Perfectionism.
Reframing mistakes requires learning to reflect on mistakes without the painful qualifications that lead us to believe we have failed.
Excessive vulnerability to criticism "The trick to handling criticism is not to let it make you forget your self-esteem"
Assertiveness. Low self-esteem can prevent us from asking others what we want.
Over time, the client can learn to confront the distortions they encounter each time. By challenging them during self-esteem therapy, it can become easier to combat them and achieve success in real-world scenarios.
It will be possible to contact us from any region for self-esteem therapy support in Istanbul. We can support you by offering therapies in every region, and we are making progress for the right sessions and services for you in every sense.
Discussing each issue in therapy and exploring and practicing strategies to help reframe our beliefs can be extremely effective in managing and improving self-esteem.
Goal Setting for Self-Esteem
Goal setting is invaluable in all aspects of our lives. The Goal Setting for Self-Esteem worksheet can help you to capture aspects of your life that you currently feel bad about and set goals to fix them or reduce their impact.
In conclusion, we encounter many factors throughout our lives that determine our self-esteem. What is important is our internal response to these external stimuli and how we evaluate these situations.
Dr. Burak KAYA
20.07.2022
