How our self esteem is shaped

We are born with some basic character traits but much of our self view is developed in the formative years of our life - about the first seven years. This is because we start out as an almost blank canvas deciding and defining who we are by using the world and people around us like a mirror, learning about ourselves primarily by what is reflected back in the behaviours and attitudes of the people we are most exposed to. This is a particularly vulnerable time because we’re utterly dependent on our parents or carers and tend to believe anything they tell us. Most importantly we interpret how they behave towards us as meaning something about ourselves. This is because the blank canvas that is our self conecpt and the god like authority we invest in our parents at this point of our development means everything they say or imply about us must be true. We have nothing to counter with at this point and are almost completely dependent upon them.

Our subconscious absorbs our interpretation because at this point we are have an extremely limited tool kit. Kids logic is perverse. So mum or dad has had a bad day and are feeling angry about whatever that unrelated thing is. We will approach them in the way we normally do but they might be short or abrupt with us. This is a shock because we haven’t ‘read the room’ because we’re not equipped to do so yet and we are not aware of having done anything wrong but feel punished for no reason. It’s unfair and we feel shame.

We feel shame because at this point in life we don’t have the capacity to say to ourselves, ‘My parent has clearly had a bad experience and that has influenced their mood negatively. They didn’t mean to be abrupt so I have nothing to worry about and should continue as normal’. Humans are deeply social animals so rejection hurts and we might become upset, the reasoning in our subconscious being something along the lines of… ‘I am being treated badly for no good reason that I can percieve.’ Then our childs logic kicks in and makes sense that isn’t there, along the lines of. ‘My parent is always right so I must actually deserve it. I don’t know why, so it must something about me that only my parent can see about me. I quietly (or sometimes noisily) believe that I’m the sort of person that deserves to be treated that way. That must be who I am! I can’t see it but it must be there somewhere otherwise why would I be treated this way. Parents know everything.’ It’s the self judgement based entirely on an invisible quality that others can see about me and is evidenced by how I’m being treated.

Now repeat the experience on a regular or extreme enough basis and the feeling starts to become so ingrained we give the belief automatic credence and never question it.

It also might be a drip feed (persistent criticality for example) that slowly carves the feeling of inadequacy into our amygdala (where our emotional memory and conditioning live) but the same effect can come from a few extreme or traumatising events.

There are infiniate examples but some more obvious ones might be: violent outbursts where the response is disproportionate to whatever has happened, maybe the loss of a parent or them abandoning us in some way, abusive or bullying behaviours, etc. etc. We blame ourselves believing we deserve it using that perverse child logic. It could be parents that tell you they love you but who are emotionally distant, unpredictable or manipulative, or are frequently critical or create specific conditions around your acceptability. This is a particularly common experience with parents who might suffer from personality disorders, mental illness or addictions. But also every parent, trying their best, or sometimes not.

You can’t predict at that point what the impact will be but when someone starts therapy it doesn’t take long to understand how we learned it. Childhood might only immediately have memories of sunshine and roses. Or maybe you had a difficult time at school or in a group of friends or with siblings.

Our subconscious being the great defender of our ego tends to bury these experiences pretty deeply because of the pain of the shame, so the inception point might be hard to initally remember until we do a bit of digging. But more on that later. Next we look at why this continues to affect us and how.