Chapter 2

Understanding the Impacts of Low Self-Esteem

In This Chapter

Exploring the negative effects of low self-esteem

Looking at the consequences of not making changes

Realizing the many hindrances low self-esteem causes in your life is the first step to identifying why it’s so important to make changes. If you’re one of the many people who battles a sense of low self-worth, it’s helpful to recognize some of the patterns you live with every day.

This chapter describes the many impacts of living a life that lacks self-respect. You can see these consequences in the negative attitudes you suffer through, the relationships you either avoid or damage, the promotions at work you miss out on, and even the problems with alcohol and drugs you may be experiencing. By being absolutely honest with yourself and identifying your problems, you’ll be able to more rapidly overcome them.

You may not see all these unpleasant impacts in your life. You may recognize only a few. But even those few are keeping you from living a life of fulfillment, accomplishment, and joy. You deserve better!

Discovering the Consequences of Low Self-Esteem

A feeling of low self-worth is accompanied by thoughts about yourself where you see yourself as “less than” and “not good enough.” In order to lessen these thoughts, you try certain behaviors, all aimed at making you feel better about yourself.

But they don’t work. In fact, you find that a negative spiral is set into motion: You have low self-esteem, your thoughts reflect an image in your mind of a person who is lacking, you try to be competent and accomplished, but your low self-esteem causes you to fall short, and this then leads you to a feeling of lower self-worth.

Recognizing what happens when you feel insignificant

If you have a sense of low self-respect, you may feel like you don’t matter. Although you may be in a crowd of people, you feel alone and that you don’t belong. You feel alienated from others and disconnected even from people you’re close to. It’s like you’re in an audience watching people happily conversing and relating to each other, and you’re just observing the show, on the sidelines and feeling lonely once again.

You feel invisible. You always find yourself at the outer edge of groups, where no one really wants to talk to you or be your friend. Even if you have friends, you feel that they take advantage of you and don’t see you as being as important as any of their other friends. You feel you give to them, but you don’t see that you get the same in return. They don’t remember your birthday. They never call you to go out. When there was a death in your family, no one sent you a card or called you to offer condolences.

So you become withdrawn because you’re tired of making the effort to be with people. In fact, you’re tired of life in general.

In addition, you don’t have any purpose to your life. You don’t have anything to offer that’s valuable. You have no reason to dream because your dreams don’t come true. You may have a humdrum job, but that’s all. You come home, watch television, and go to bed. You’re invisible and insignificant.

Darren is a man in his 30s. He has a college education, but finding a job in his field is difficult for him. He sends out resumes and makes phone calls, but nothing comes through. Very few of the companies he sends his resume to even respond. His wife belittles him about not being able to find a job and offers no compassion or assistance, and she mainly ignores him while they are both home. He talks to a couple of his friends, even cries in front of them. But neither of them hugs him or gives him any encouragement. Darren feels alone, that no one is helping him, that he is invisible to everyone in his life.

Exploring the negative impacts of low self-esteem

Feeling insignificant can lead you to the point where you don’t even want to get up in the morning and face the day. Why make the effort? No one is going to notice anyway. No one cares.

If this describes you, it’s time to make the change to have more awareness of your value. You can’t wave a wand and take these feelings away in a moment. But as you read this book, do the exercises, understand yourself more deeply, and follow our instructions, you’ll realize that inside yourself is a marvelous person who is just waiting to jump out — a person who’s excited to be alive, loves to get up in the morning, and enjoys a life of success and happiness. That can be you!

Becoming Aware of the Consequences of Doing Nothing

If you do nothing — if you continue to have a low opinion of yourself — your life may very well get worse.

The negative consequences of a poor self-image can lead into a downward spiral of lower and lower self-esteem, a less productive life, and even to self-destructive behavior.

You don’t want that. That’s not who you really are. In this section, we describe the many features of a person with low self-respect, but keep in mind that you don’t have to live with any of these. You can improve yourself.

Continuing the feelings of fear and shame

If you continue on your present path, your feelings of fear and shame will continue and, in fact, may become stronger. Fear leads to feelings of helplessness, that you can’t control your life.

Sometimes when you’re fearful, you may experience shortness of breath, your heart pounds quickly, you feel dizzy, your knees are wobbly, and your stomach is nauseous. It’s difficult to have the energy to deal with life in a positive way when your body is reacting this way.

You fear others will ridicule you and laugh at your mistakes. You’re mistrustful of others, always watching to see who’s paying attention to what you do. You doubt that you can achieve anything, so you don’t even try. You fear failure, and you fear rejection. You withdraw as much as you can from others because you don’t want to experience their judgment.

Or you feel you must show others how successful you are so they won’t judge you. Everything has to look perfect — your career, family, appearance, car, house.

But that’s not all. A sense of low self-esteem can lead to a feeling of shame, especially if you’re criticized by others. You feel utter humiliation and anguish. Whether the criticism is accurate or not, you have a sense of inadequacy because you feel unworthy.

Shame can also come from feelings about events from your early past, mistakes you’ve made, or poor social behavior. It makes no difference what events led to your shame; it’s a wrenching feeling that’s hard to leave behind.

As with feelings of fear, you want to shrink and hide to get away from these painful feelings. To keep others from finding out how bad you feel inside, you wall yourself off from them and create barriers so you don’t have to be with anyone. When you have to be around other people, you may belittle yourself first so that others won’t say anything hurtful. Or you may put other people down to elevate your own feelings. Either way, it’s not healthy.

Going into guilt and depression

You may feel guilty about something you did wrong or some harm you caused another person. Guilt also comes from not doing something you should have done, such as not helping someone enough. You can even feel guilt from doing something better than another person.

If you have a feeling of low self-worth, you’ll see yourself as a bad person who needs to be punished. You’ll think you can’t be forgiven for the awful thing you did or didn’t do. Even if you ask for forgiveness, you won’t truly believe the other person when it’s offered. You’ll continue to berate yourself for what you did wrong.

Feeling insignificant and not wanting to get out of bed can be symptoms of depression. Keep in mind that depression can be caused by chemical imbalances that are typically treated with medication. If you feel this may be the case, please consult with your physician. Depression can also be caused by how you think about yourself and the world, so combining both medication and therapy can be the best way to go.

Depression is very common in people who have low self-esteem. If this describes you, you take things personally in a negative way and do everything you can to verify your negative self-concept by seeking condemnation from people you know. You think about your incompetence and inadequacies as well as focus on the negative things people say about you. All of this leads to a dark mood, which encourages others to think poorly of you, so you in turn feel rejected by others.

If you feel depressed, you probably don’t feel like socializing. But even then, you’re down on yourself for not having many friends.

None of this feels much fun, does it? If you think that, you’re correct. Living in this dark world truly affects your quality of life.

Maintaining social phobias

As we mention earlier, if you lack a sense of self-worth, it’s very likely you don’t want to be around other people. This is partly to hide yourself from people and partly because you’re so anxious about being around others. You’re very afraid that you won’t do well dealing with other people and that you’ll be terribly embarrassed.

You’re afraid of being judged, so you either avoid social situations or endure them with an intense internal discomfort. You’re worried about what others will think, so you’re uneasy being around them to begin with. You may be so nervous and afraid of rejection that you avoid people and social situations as much as possible. You’re sure no one will like you, so why put yourself out there?

Now consider this: How are you supposed to make friends and be a friend to others if you feel and act this way? It’s not possible. You can’t have a life filled with love and companionship if you’re so afraid of other people. Low self-respect certainly isn’t good for you.

Donna works at a high-powered company, and when she is asked her opinions at her team’s meetings, her heart races, her face turns beet red, and she becomes breathless. Her voice becomes very soft, and she shifts around in her chair. Her teammates are hesitant to take her seriously. Outside of work, she feels awkward around people, so she rarely goes out of her house. As a result of her social phobias, over the years, Donna has become more and more withdrawn.

Not addressing body image problems

Do you think and talk a lot about your body image, your weight, and food? Do you diet or think about dieting most of the time? Are you sensitive to comments about your body? Do you think some part or parts of your body don’t look like you wish they would? Do you compare yourself with others and fall short? Do you constantly think your body isn’t good enough?

If you answer “yes” to one or more of these questions, your lack of self-worth is harming the way you see your body and deal with body image issues. Having a poor body image means that you see your body in a negative light. When you look at yourself, you see only the flaws and highlight everything you feel is wrong with your body.

You may not see any point in putting time and effort into taking care of your body — eating in a healthy manner, exercising a few times a week, and dressing yourself nicely. In fact, you may have so much loathing for your body that you don’t even like to look in the mirror anymore.

This unhealthy way of relating to your body image can lead to destructive eating disorders, such as starving yourself, anorexia, binge eating, and bulimia (binging and purging). This sort of behavior can even be life threatening if treatment isn’t sought.

Having poor relationships

Having low self-worth is directly related to creating poor relationships and may even lead to losing close ones. Because you’re insecure and doubt that anyone could actually love you, you need confirmation of others’ feelings for you, and you need to be totally accepted by them. Even if your partner sees you in a positive light, you greatly underestimate that and devalue your partner’s opinion.

You may have dreams of the perfect mate who will make your life wonderful, but even if your partner is loving and loyal, you don’t believe the relationship can be good. If you’re not good enough, how can you believe someone would choose you? So you test your partner, requiring a demonstration of his or her devotion to you. And even if your partner comes through every time, you belittle your mate because you know the relationship will ultimately end anyway. When it does, you chalk it up as one more indication that you’re not lovable.

Because you’re not naturally lovable, you may feel you have to claw and fight for a mate, being consumed with the thought of attracting someone. You work hard to snag the object of your affection, intensely pushing to get a relationship going quickly.

In fact, your insecurities may draw you to relationships where chances are good that you’ll be left or cheated on. Because it’s happened so many times before, you expect it, and you’re not at all surprised when it happens again. In order to protect yourself, you hold back from fully committing yourself, or you become jealous of your partner, making accusations and creating emotional scenes.

Having a disloyal partner may actually represent excitement to you. You’re bored and indifferent if the relationship is too dependable.

Another thing that you may have experienced is losing yourself in your relationship, being totally submissive. You have such a low sense of self-worth that you depend on your partner to control you. You lean on your partner to tell you what to do, how to think, and who you can see. This type of control can easily lead to abuse since this is what you inwardly believe is all that you deserve.

Or you must have a perfect relationship to show everyone that you’re worthy. So you demand complete control over your partner, leading to your partner resenting you.

You desire to have a healthy, fulfilling relationship, but because of your low opinion of yourself, it’s not likely. Creating a healthier level of self-esteem will help you find the right person and experience an affectionate, respectful relationship.

Having low self-confidence

Self-esteem and self-confidence are related, but they’re not exactly the same thing. Your self-esteem defines how you feel about yourself. Your self-confidence describes how much you believe you have the ability to accomplish things in the world.

If you have low self-esteem, you probably also have low self-confidence. You don’t feel you’re worth much, so you don’t desire much for yourself or have the motivation to fulfill any goals. The thoughts in your mind — “I’m no good,” “I’m going to do a terrible job,” and “I dislike myself” — all lead to having little belief in yourself.

Staying stuck at work

Your low self-esteem can lead to many things that stunt your career:

• You’re less likely to do well in interviews.
• You’re less successful in your work.
• You’re less likely to get promotions.
• You’re less likely to get raises.

A lack of self-respect leads to anxiety and apprehension during interviews. Your voice shakes, you can’t remember your best accomplishments, and you can’t look the interviewer in the eye. Do you think you’ll get the job?

And even if you can fake the interview well enough to get the job, you may very well do poorly. You may become a supervisor, but because of your low self-esteem, you don’t know how to deal respectfully with your subordinates and coworkers. You may even end up being a bully to people you supervise.

If you think you’re poor at speaking up and getting your point across in meetings, you won’t be seen as a leader. If you’re reluctant to take on challenges and feel you’re not up to the task of taking initiatives in your job, you won’t get promoted. If you lack confidence in your own talents and abilities, and in fact you downplay your talents, you’ll be seen as ineffective. You’ll sabotage your success, even when success is possible.

Because of your fear of rejection, you keep to yourself in the office, tiptoe quietly when you have to move about, and speak softly when you’re spoken to. You don’t have the nerve to make an appointment with your boss to point out a problem with something he did. You keep to yourself, keep your head down, and keep doing your work.

You get a mediocre job and do mediocre work at that job, which ultimately limits your potential in the types of jobs you get and the work you’re asked to complete.

And getting a raise? Probably not. You’ll get one only if everyone else does. Other than that, don’t count on it.

Relying on alcohol or drugs

Your lack of self-respect keeps you from finding success and happiness because you don’t feel worthy of enjoying these rewards. In order to cope with this situation, you may turn to drinking alcohol and/or using drugs to escape your feelings of low self-worth. But of course, this only leads to further unhappiness.

Partaking of alcohol and drugs may at first increase your self-confidence and improve your social skills, at least temporarily, because you’re less concerned about what other people think of you. But over time, the following things may very well happen:

1. You develop a tolerance for the substance.
2. You form a dependence.
3. You’re addicted.
4. Your feelings of low self-worth become even worse because now you’re addicted to something that you can’t shake yourself from.

In your notebook, write down the following items, leaving space between each one to note how true it is for you and how you experience it:

• Feeling insignificant
• Being fearful
• Feeling shame
• Feeling guilty
• Being depressed
• Being shy around people
• Having body-image problems
• Not being able to form close relationships
• Losing close relationships
• Having low self-confidence
• Being stuck at work
• Relying on alcohol and/or drugs

Now that you’ve explored all the negative impacts of low self-esteem, don’t you think it’s time to change direction and reach for a better life? Change doesn’t usually happen quickly or easily, but it can happen. It comes from your desire to turn course and be that person with high self-worth. You’re not powerless!