Build Your Self-Esteem with These 3 Simple Exercises
Self-esteem is one of the most central concepts in all of psychology. Having a positive self-esteem is critical to an individual’s mental health. One of the main criteria for a psychiatric diagnosis of depression is having a low sense of self-esteem. In the throes of a depressive episode, people question and doubt themselves and feel, in the worst cases, that they don’t deserve to continue living.
Theories of personality psychology put low self-esteem squarely in the middle of the neurotic, or poorly adjusted, psyche. Freud, among others, believed that we’re so driven to avoid confronting our weaknesses and flaws that we’ll engage in any number of mental shenanigans (a.k.a. defense mechanisms) to keep them out of conscious awareness. The humanistic theorist Carl Rogers proposed that children who fail to develop a healthy self-esteem become neurotic adults. He proposed that as adults, these individuals constantly fear being exposed to the criticism that they suffered when their parents communicated to them that they were deficient. Alfred Adler, author of the term “inferiority complex,” similarly proposed that the neurotic is constantly “striving for superiority” to compensate for inner feelings of low self-esteem.