In my over-twenty-year practice as an outpatient psychologist,



I get feedback from associates with low self-esteem about every day. It

does something to every aspect of their lives, most significantly their

relationships. Self-esteem collides with job performance, raises,

promotions, and work locations--the bottom line being quality of life.

It is a massive subject.

I think of self-esteem as being built of four foundation experiences or dimensions. I call them Powers. They can be found in an online publication

I have written about how these develop from our early family experiences and

how they appear in just about every later-life experience.

There is a self-test to figure out which of the four Powers are strong or weak. Often we use the stronger ones to compensate the weaker one(s). Every so often we just focus on

remediation of just one Power. In any case, once diagnosed, the

psychological work begins.

Confidence comes from having a good self-esteem, which can emerge

from any one of the four Powers. The first Power is Worth.

It usually reflects early-in-life experiences, largely resulting from

messages precipitated from parents. It ties to religion, philosophy of

the world and chronic expectations based upon "how it went" when we

were very, very young. This Power, and the foundation concepts to

follow from the other Powers help us deal with later life events.

How we "are" in the middle of any life event largely relates to how

we "were" early on, and how our parents or caregivers nurtured us,

or left us to fend for ourselves.

Central to these experiences is the surfacing of our core

experience of self. It is either worth something or dysfuntional in

some way. The sense of self interacts with the environment, nearly

one hundred percent in the beginning, less so as we grow up and become

self-directed. At any stage, it has value or is often hurt by life events.

In the latter case, there is doubt about self-worth.

Lack of confidence is the subjective experience generated from

lack of basic worth. If we did not manage well in early life, or if

we feel that support is lacking in adversity, then there is

proportional anxiety about future events. Even in "the present,"

there is anxiety because lurking in the background is that ever-vague

but pressuring feeling that something is incorrect. "Something will go

wrong or perhaps it is just me that is wrong," are comments I

frequently hear. The former is more of a response to early adverse

circumstances. The latter is a direct reflection of thoughts of

poor self-worth.

This is only one of the four Powers, any one of which can

contribute to the experience of poor self-esteem. I picked this one

to initially focus on because it is the first in line, so to speak;

meaning, the formation of this Power occurs earlier in our

developmental timeline and usually forms the foundation upon which

most of the other Powers build. In future articles, there will be

discussions of the other three Powers.

In short, to build confidence, first we need a foundation of self

that is worth something. Put negatively, lack of confidence reflects

deficits in our early environment, but more importantly, our

relationship to the experiences in that early time. What we

"came away with" is relatively stable even though the events that

formed our impressions have passed. The core of this identity we

call self, and its relative value we call esteem.

Dr. Griggs