Low self-esteem starts in childhood I believe (I am not a psychologist so this is just my musings). We need to experience and learn as children that ‘who we are’ is ‘okay’. If we receive negative messages in those formative years (or we don’t get messages at all), I think the potential for low self-esteem is established.
If those strong foundations aren’t well established, we also don’t have that buffer zone when someone says “you are an idiot”, “you aren’t pretty enough”, “you aren’t ..whatever”. I also think over emphasising the positives can be just as bad too. If a child is built up to think they are perfect, wonderful, never make a mistake and are not allowed to fail at anything, they never learn how to cope with the times when they do stuff up. We all do. Life isn’t perfect. Things go wrong. So, we have to learn a. who we are is okay and b. it is okay to not always be right or perfect.
How to recover from it? Start to understand who you are and why you are the way you are? I don’t mean ‘blame your parents’ or anyone else either. In some cases, they may very well have been responsible for not doing a great job and it’s okay to acknowledge their part in who you developed into but there does come a point when as adults we have to say ‘this is my life, and I am responsible for how it goes from here on in’.
How to heal? Start to work on not listening to that negative voice in our head and focus on hearing the positives is a good beginning to self-healing. Be kinder to ourselves about the less than perfect aspects of our lives and be proactive about making them better. Don’t blame everyone else for our own crap. Take responsibility for how our life is from today. Join the gym and ask for help to reach our physical goals, take classes that help us to improve our education and chances of doing whatever it is we want, help other people so we start to recognise the good aspects of our lives instead of always focusing on the negatives. Get rid of toxic people and situations that drag us down. Take ownership of our own life in other words.