What is self-esteem?
The ability to value yourself, take yourself into account, treat yourself well, and trust yourself. We learn this ability when, as children, we are valued, considered and treated well by the significant people in our environment and when we have good models to learn from.
Psychotherapy can help us raise our self-esteem. How?
Many times, if this fails, we try to fill this gap with the external factors on which we base our feelings of self-appearance, money, a good job, friends, etc. However, external factors are labile and may be short-lived. Money and beauty can be lost. Self-confidence must be intrinsic and relatively stable. In therapy, we can and even should build or restore it because, without it, our perception of the world is often distorted and contributes to creating psychological distress.
Self-esteem is usually the foundation of almost all psychological problems. Low self-esteem can trigger various disorders such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders or personality disorders.
How do we work on self-esteem in therapy?
Our approach is relational psychodynamic psychotherapy, for this reason, we work on self-esteem through relationships. Both the therapeutic relationship and the relationships created by the patient outside the space of therapy. By offering a new relational experience, we can change early relational patterns and work on attachment. On the other hand, we use mentalization-based therapy (MBT) to help patients become more aware of how others influence them and how they affect others, to dismantle the vicious circles that are created. and affect how we see ourselves – our self-esteem.