Factors affecting Self-Esteem and Confidence

With low self-esteem and confidence you feel depressed and hopeless. You see life negatively. You see yourself as a victim. You treat other people as potential enemies and sooner or later they treat you badly or let you down. This further lowers your self-esteem and confidence both.

When your have high confidence and self-esteem, the world feels like a good place, full of friends, potential pleasures and opportunities. Other people in general respond to your positive attitude, so that, even when you don't get your way, you feel good about yourself and them. This reinforces your self-esteem and stimulates your inner growth.

Childhood Experience Affects Self-Esteem Negatively

Children in our culture do not enjoy power or high status, and therefore may still be subject to many common experiences that can undermine their self-esteem. These include, in particular, violence, loss and neglect.

Violence

A child may experience violence in many ways, all of them damaging. They may be subjected to corporal punishment, where a parent or other adult deliberately inflicts pain on them and does not allow them to fight back.

The violence does not have to be dramatic to be damaging. Indeed, dramatic violence that happens over a short period may attract attention and lead to changes in the family situation that will remedy it.

Another form of violence is institutional prejudice. A child may see a much-loved parent insulted, spat at or assaulted in the street, or doing work well below his or her capacity. These experiences amount to an attack on that child's self-esteem and confidence.

Loss

The death of a family member - of a grandparent, for example - or the sickness of a mother, especially if she has to go away to hospital or a convalescent home - are obvious examples of loss that can affect a small child. But more ordinary events - such as moving house especially to another city, the birth of a new sibling, the death of a loved pet - can all be experienced as devastating losses by a child. As such, they have to be acknowledged and mourned.

Neglect

Emotional neglect is also harmful like that of physically neglected. There are many things even loving and well-meaning parents often do that can act against their children's need to feel loved and wanted.

Leaving very small babies alone for hours at a time, to cry them to sleep. The more often, and the more lovingly, a baby is touched in its very early life, the more self-esteem he or she will have as an adult.
Preferring one child over others. This can happen without the parents realizing they are doing it.
Not noticing the child's emotional needs.
Discussing decisions that involve the child in front of the child, but without including him or her.

Heal The Past and Get High Confidence

Even if we had to bury a childhood hurt, such as neglect or violence, at the time, we can still find healing for it in adult life. The basic process is the same: to find a way of telling the story, to make sense of it, to be comforted, and to digest it all.

Through the expressive arts, such as dance, music, sculpting, painting, creative writing, poetry.
Form a support group. Perhaps you can find others seeking help with their past through a local community centre, bookshop, religious organization, or adult education class.
Tell your friends that you are attempting to face some old childhood wounds, and enlist their help.
Keep a journal. Use it to explore your memories and relate them to difficulties you are having now.

Build Up Self-Esteem

Take care of your physical health. Make sure you have good food, relaxation and enough sleep. Try to do moderate exercise every day, and a little of vigorous exercise three times a week that raises your heartbeat and makes you sweat. Have a massage whenever you can. Nothing is better for increasing self-esteem and beating stress.

Learn to enjoy your own achievements. Learn something new. It doesn't really matter what it is, whether it's car maintenance, or speaking Russian or flower arranging.

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