Welcome back to the latest episode from our Lessons from the Playroom podcast. It’s actually been a couple episodes since it’s just been me having a dialogue and conversation with you about something that feels meaningful or relevant or something that I feel inspired to share with you and to open up conversation with you about. And this particular conversation that I’m going to have is inspired by my daughter.
We had this past week a conversation around self esteem that really inspired me and I wanted to make a podcast about it and to start a conversation about what it is, maybe offer up a reframe or maybe a nuanced understanding about self esteem, high self esteem, and low self esteem. So this topic is relevant to all of us because everyone goes through different experiences of feeling like they have high self esteem or low self esteem. And I’ll go ahead and reframe this to high self worth or low self worth.
It’s actually really common for parents and caregivers to bring their children to see us because this is one of the presenting struggles. They’re not liking themselves or not feeling good about themselves. Maybe they are a bit down or depressed because they have what parents would describe as low self worth.
Or maybe the parents themselves are also struggling because they feel inadequate or they feel like they’re not doing a good job and they are also struggling with low self esteem or low self worth. So my hope is that this conversation will normalize some things in your own experience, will offer you some guidance around working with the children that you work with and their parents and caregivers and really just offering another reframe or another way to think about this experience that is really universal to all of us. So self esteem, self worth, low self esteem, low self worth.
Let’s begin with a little bit of a reframe or let’s go into how can we understand this a little bit, the nuances this, a little bit more because it’s not accurate to say, oh, that person just struggles with low self esteem. We actually all have low self esteem and high self esteem or low self worth. High self worth.
Really? When we’re looking at this, we’re looking at. We’ll call it a cluster of symptoms that are revealing how well the person is being themselves. So I’m going to say that again that really when we’re looking at low self esteem or high self esteem, we’re really looking at a cluster of symptoms.
And I’ll explain what I mean by that in a minute. Cluster of symptoms that are revealing whether or not that person is being themselves or trying to be someone that they’re not. So here’s what I mean by that.
We all have things that feel congruent to who we are as individuals, things that we put our time and energy into, things that light us up, things that feel deeply inspiring to us. Maybe for one person it’s creating poetry, maybe someone else it’s cooking, maybe it’s gardening. Maybe it’s being a parent.
Maybe it is focusing on health and wellness and fitness in some way. For me, teaching for sure is up there. Maybe it’s traveling for someone.
But there’s these things, these things that really bring us to life when we do them because they feel like us. It’s like an extension of our greatest expression of who we are. And what’s interesting is that when we are giving ourselves permission to engage in these things, we in these moments have a corresponding set of feedback in our nervous system that actually lets us know in the moment we’re actually having what we could call a higher degree of self worth or a higher degree of self esteem.
So the symptoms are really the things that we would look at that would indicate that we had more congruency within us. So this could be anything from higher energy level to feeling more grounded in our own body or in our own being, to finding that the brain noise that we have, the shoulds, are maybe a little bit more quiet. There can even be a sense of inspiration or invigoration, if you will, when we are doing these things.
There can be a sense of being on purpose or being on track. We want to identify ourselves in these areas. We want to say, I’m a writer, I’m a gardener, I’m a parent.
Because again, it feels like us. It feels like who we are in these moments. There is an experience of high self esteem or high self worth.
It’s where you have the greatest probability of being your authentic self. It’s where you have the greatest probability of your internal sense of certainty about who you are in the world being able to be expressed outwardly. And when that happens, when we give ourselves permission to do that, there is a corresponding feeling of high self esteem or high self worth.
So I want you to pause just because I don’t want this just to be theoretical. I want you to pause and just test this out for yourself. I want you to think about something that you love doing that feels really meaningful for you.
And I want you to put yourself in your mind back into a moment where you were giving yourself permission to do this thing, whatever it was. And I want you to notice what happens in your body. I want you to notice what happened for you when you were engaging in this thing.
Maybe you were listening to music, maybe you were playing music, maybe you were spending time in nature, maybe you were writing something again, it doesn’t really matter what it is. These are the things that you identify as most meaningful for you. But I want you to notice that in those moments when you let yourself really be in the expression of that, that you have a higher probability of internal connection with yourself.
So I just want you to pause for a second and just notice that. And now what I want you to do is I want you to bring to mind something in your life where you are trying to be someone that you’re not, where you are thinking about shoulds, where outside influences are. Really creating some brain noise inside of you where you’re questioning yourself? You’re wondering why you can’t get that thing done.
Where you’re questioning your energy levels dropping. You wonder why you feel so tired when you think about having to do the thing or engage in the thing. And I want you to recognize that in these moments when you’re trying to do something that doesn’t ultimately feel inspiring, or you’re trying to set goals and the goals actually aren’t congruent for you, or you’re trying to be someone that you’re not in a particular way, that your body is also then giving you symptoms and feedback.
And the symptoms that show up are actually the dysregulated expressions in your autonomic nervous system. So maybe you start to go into some more sympathetic arousal, maybe a little bit more irritable, a little more frustrated. Or maybe you go right into what often we see and we classify with low self esteem as more of a depressive place, so more dorsal, so a bit of a feeling of giving up or not good enough or can’t get it right or those kinds of things.
And I want you to see that there is very much a relationship between these feelings of low self esteem, low self worth and the dysregulated experience in your body and that they’re often very connected to a moment when you are not giving yourself permission to really be yourself. And that right there is the crux of understanding self esteem.
self esteem lower high is a byproduct of our relationship with ourself. I’m going to say that again. Self esteem lower high is a byproduct of the relationship that we are having with ourself, whether we are appreciating and honoring who we are or we are trying to be someone that we’re not.
Now, I mentioned that this conversation was really inspired by a conversation I had with my daughter, who’s almost 17. And we were talking about self esteem because as we all know, self esteem low and high is very much part of the teenage experience. And so we were chatting about it, and I asked her this question.
I said, describe to me what it feels like in you when it feels like you’re having a moment of high self esteem or high self worth. And the language that she used almost took my breath away. And here’s the essence of what she said.
She said, when I have high self esteem or self worth, it’s like I’m able to listen to myself and I can hear the quiet place inside of me that lets me know that I’m okay and that I am basically on track and I’m purposeful. And it’s where I know who I am. There’s a higher degree of knowing who I am.
And then I asked her to describe to me what it feels like when she’s having a moment of low self esteem or low self worth. And what she described was, the noise in my brain gets a lot louder. All of a sudden, I start paying attention to what other people think about me, and I try to do things to please other people instead of honoring and trying to please myself.
I start, in a sense, trying to do what I think other people expect or want from me, rather than listening to that quiet voice inside of me that lets me know who I am. I mean, it blew me away that this was her description, because she described the feeling of it so perfectly. When we are comparing ourselves to someone and we are trying to live up to that fantasy or again, we’ve ingested messages about how we think we should be and then we try to live according to those ingested standards we do.
We become more susceptible then to disconnecting from ourselves and thus lowering our self worth. Which makes sense then why we would then have a sense of low self esteem because we’re not honoring, we’re not valuing who we actually are in the moment. So that makes complete sense.
I’m going to pause here and invite a breath as you’re listening because this is relevant to all of us. I guarantee there’s some of you that right now are hearing me say these words, going, oh, man, yeah. And I invite you to let this land a little bit.
None of it is good, bad, right, wrong. It’s simply feedback. So again, self esteem is feedback.
It’s the symptom of letting us know how well we’re doing at being ourselves in any given moment. Which is why we all have high self esteem. And low self esteem because there’s areas in our lives where we give ourselves permission to be who we are.
And then there’s other areas in our life when we are pretending to be someone that we’re not. By the way, this is also why I included in when I talk about the four things that the brain is scanning for in the environment to determine whether or not there’s a sense of safety in the environment. This is why I put in as number four, shoulds and unmet expectations.
Because this idea of the shoulds or trying to be someone that we’re not literally lands as a threat inside of our own system. Our authentic self, in a sense, says, what are you doing? Why are we not loving and appreciating ourself for who we actually are in this moment? And we actually activate our autonomic nervous system into the Dysregulated state to either rev up or to shut down relative to these messages that we’re telling ourselves about who we think we should be. There’s literally like an internal conflict that gets created between authenticity and our false persona or our false self, if we want to think of it that way.
So again, it’s feedback. So can we learn to recognize that the experience of low self esteem and low self worth is really just feedback? Right? It’s feedback. It’s another way of thinking about the Dysregulated experience that sometimes we have that we carry with us.
So I want to talk now about how do we use this information clinically? How do we take this into the play space or with our work with parents and caregivers? Because as I mentioned, oftentimes parents will bring their child to us and say, oh, I want my child to feel better about themselves. They’re struggling with low self esteem. They’re struggling with low self worth.
When that’s the case, what I immediately begin to look for and immediately begin to try to assess is what is it that this kid loves to do? What is it that lights this kid up? What is it that drives this child? And by the way, I’m not going to use the word motivate because the word motivate almost implies like, I’ve got to motivate myself, I’ve got to force myself, which is very different than inspired from within. So what does this child naturally love doing does this child naturally love sports? Do they naturally love to cook? Do they naturally love to hang out with their friends? Are they really social? Do they love art? Do they love playing with trucks? Do they love playing with space? Do they love researching bugs? Do they love whatever it may be? Because if you can identify what that is, that’s the place to help the parents begin to expand the child world around. Because that’s where the child feels most like themselves, which is different than who the parent or the caregiver may think the child should be, or what they think the child should be spending their time doing or should be spending their time focusing on.
It’s more about who the child is, revealing who they actually are and can we be open enough to listen and see and hold and witness their becoming? And then can we allow the child to explore whatever that area of life is even more at a greater degree in the playroom? We have such a privilege because we get little glimpse of this in a nondirective, for example, process when there’s all these possibilities of what a child could choose to play with. There’s a reason why they go towards the baby dolls. There’s a reason why they want to play with the games and the puzzles.
There’s a reason why they navigate towards the sand. And it’s clues. It’s clues about who this child is and the natural movement inside of them that’s propelling them towards what’s most meaningful in their life.
And we can use that information to bridge conversation back over with parents and caregivers in pretty significant ways. And if we take a directive approach, we can also get curious because we can then create directive interventions that also highlight these things. Right? We’re highlighting where this child feels most like themselves and is expressed in the most congruent way possible for who that child, again is versus who they think they should be.
One of the tenets in synergetic play therapy, by the way, is that the spt therapist works to help the child discover their authentic self, who they actually are versus who they think they should be, or who the outer world tells them that they should be. And it blends so perfectly in with this conversation that we’re having right now. Now, it’s not just children that struggle with low self esteem or low self worth because they’re comparing themselves to someone or they’re trying to be someone that they’re not.
This is also true with the parents and caregivers. So how can we support them when they’re also struggling with not feeling good enough or they’re feeling inadequate? The first is for us to really make sure that we are not adding to it, that we’re not adding more shoulds onto what already feels like a complicated process for them, that we are open to, also seeing and discovering who they are, that we can suspend our own beliefs about what we think good parenting is or isn’t, or right or wrong, or parenting approaches and help them become more curious about the types of approaches that feel genuinely inspiring to them and feel congruent. Because I guarantee there are so many parents that part of the challenge in the dynamic between them and their child is the parent is also parenting out of a should versus listening and trusting to their own intuition.
And then the child is also in a place where they’re also now trying to be a kid out of a should and neither person is being congruent. So how can we help parents honor who they are? How can we help them get curious about what lights them up and how they can bring that also into their role as a parent. Because every parent has something about the way they parent that can be honored and deeply celebrated.
And when we can find that, we can also help the parent recognize where they’re also experiencing higher degree of connection with themselves, where they can hear that inner voice, letting them know that they’re okay or that they can do this or whatever it is that they get when they connect in with themselves. And this is fully my belief that one of the things that children are seeking from their parents and caregivers is the ability to look into their parents and caregivers eyes and see inspiration, which is different than looking in their eyes and seeing desperation. And as a parent to access parts of the parenting that feel inspiring to them because it’s the parts that feel most aligned and congruent or finding ways that they can parent.
Maybe they love to be outside, maybe they love to cook, maybe they love to draw as well. And are there ways that they can bring in who they are more so into the parenting role? Because that’s again where the parent is going to come alive and also where they’re going to have the highest probability of being able to co regulate with their child as well. So let’s go back into where we started this conversation.
We all have low self esteem and high self esteem. It’s not accurate just to say, well, that person struggles with low self esteem because in that moment it’s really more of an expression or an extension of what’s going on with their relationship with themselves. So when you personally as the clinician or just in your own life are having the feedback and the symptoms of low self worth, I’m going to invite you to pause and really look and question where are you not giving yourself permission to be you and who are you comparing yourself to? And where are you expecting yourself to be different than who you are and to really look at why you’re not honoring yourself in those moments.
And then what would it take? What would it take for you to give yourself permission to be more yourself to do more of the things that you would love to do, because that’s where you’re going to feel the most vitality and that’s where you’re going to feel a higher degree of self worth and self esteem, because you’re honoring yourself. You’re valuing yourself, so your worth goes up. Therapists thank you so much for listening.
And maybe there’s also parents that are listening as well. I know some of you are parents, but however you are expressed in this world, whatever roles you play in this world, thank you so much for spending the last bit of time with me in this conversation and for listening and for just thinking about self esteem, maybe in a little bit of a different way. And I invite you to play around with this and to try this on for yourself and just to check out your own experience of what I am sharing, to see if it feels relevant in your own body and in your own life.
And as you’re doing, that just a reminder that you are the most important toy in this playroom. Take care of yourself. Be well. I look forward to the next time that we’re able to be together again.
