The term self-esteem is used to describe a person’s overall sense of worth or value. It can describe how much you appreciate and like yourself which can include your appearance, beliefs, emotions and behaviors. It can also describe how you believe others perceive, receive or accept you.
Most people need to feel useful, often above being loved. This ties into the understanding of their purpose. Without purpose they can become lost, life is meaningless, they often feel rejected by society, dismissed and devalued. This can then lead to worthlessness that evokes depression.
A lack of self esteem is extremely debilitating, it affects everything, our work and careers, relationships, our friendships, home life and it affects our relationship to the environment. Sometimes it is hidden or overridden, creating a need for grandiosity, tyrannical behaviour or the opposite abdication or shut-down, shyness and inferiority.
A lack of self esteem can mean that we are deeply engulfed in a story of the victim, it means that we are unable to step forward in our life and reclaim 
some of the innate wisdom and knowledge that our purpose holds for us. A lack of self esteem would be seen in many different ways. It might be that we don’t feel good enough, it might feel that we are unable to present ourselves in the world as we really feel we should be able to, it might be that we cannot believe that anyone would find anything good about us.
Another area is that the self esteem is so hidden, that we over indulge ourselves in behaviours like grandiosity or entitlement. Ignoring the pain that we really feel, we overcompensate with tyrannical behaviour, believing we deserve more than others, blaming, controlling and manipulating, putting others down in order to make ourselves feel better.
Whatever our lack of self esteem creates within us, it keeps us from life’s ‘real authentic’ opportunities and walking away from those opportunities is not going to serve us or others.
I know what it’s like to have a lack of self esteem, value, self worth, it’s part of my own journey where to reclaim those parts of myself wasn’t easy.
So I recognise how difficult it might be for others.
This has become a passion of mine, in order to be the person I want to be, it means that I must help others to reclaim what is theirs. When I began to understand what had happened to my esteem, my self-value, I recognised how much I needed to attend to the wound that I came into the world with. This wound was mine to acknowledge, was mine to receive, and was mine to learn to love. I recognise that others have similar wounds or the same wound, and it’s become my work to help those people explore it in a way that is not ‘revisiting’ the wound creating fear or trauma, but it is trying to understand it so that it no longer sits in the driving seat of our lives. And what would that mean? Well it means that the wound is not controlling our lives. It is not making us react in certain ways and it is not allowing us to live in a world of self-pity, which inevitably diminishes us.
When we can become really useful in the world, which means that we know what we’re here for, whatever our purpose is, then that self esteem can be lifted and personal and professional purpose becomes the Golden key towards our Sovereignty.
People need to be useful above being loved, if we’re not being useful and we’re not making use of our innate purpose we can start to feel that lack of self worth and devalue ourselves and then feel guilty because of it.
Self pity can be like a drug, we become addicted to it, it can take us to dark places in ourselves that make it impossible to come back to the light. When we engage in that self pity we are opening the doorway to the victim, that victim will judge us, it will fill us with dis-ease and it will constantly undervalue who we are. And yet it can be extremely familiar, preferring to stay with that darkness rather than look at life with new perspectives and take different actions.
As soon as self-pity walks through our doorway, it is imperative that we look for the reason for it being there, then we begin to put together a task or an action that will replace that feeling of pity or victim hood.
Once this task or action is in place it can become a much more useful habit, that prevents us from going down to that level of dysfunction at other times.
Only in this way can we really begin to understand how important it is for us to adopt and live in the understanding that we have a particular expertise, that we must accept the deal of being who we are and the creative talents that we have and it is imperative that we step more fully into those talents embody them and share them with others. If we do not share these with others and we sell ourselves short then those people who would benefit from us will have to go to others who might not have the profound influence or support or depths of understanding that we have and we become a failure to our talent because we are not helping those who really need our support.
My work is very much about helping people to reclaim their self worth and to develop a stronger sense of self-esteem and value. In turn they learn to value what their purpose is.
It is no good simply knowing what your purpose is. You need to feel its worth and value it, just as you learn to value yourself.
Caroline Carey
On offer is a program of creative embodiment to reclaim self-value, self-worth and self-esteem. https://middleearthmedicine.com/calendar/webinars/
Photo by Alexandr Podvalny
