Self-Esteem, Confidence & Self-Criticism
The way we see and speak to ourselves can have a powerful influence on how we experience life.
Learning To See Yourself In A Kinder Light
You might appear confident or capable to other people while privately questioning yourself. Perhaps you replay conversations, worry about what others think of you, compare yourself with people around you or focus much more easily on what you believe you've got wrong than what you've done well. A critical inner voice can become so familiar that you barely notice it. Thoughts such as “I'm not good enough,” “I've let people down” or “everyone else seems to manage better than me” can begin to feel less like thoughts and more like facts about who you are.
Our view of ourselves doesn't develop in isolation. Experiences such as criticism, rejection, bullying, difficult relationships, feeling different or feeling that acceptance depended on behaving or achieving in a particular way can influence the beliefs we develop about ourselves. Over time, we may also develop our own rules for feeling acceptable or good enough. Perhaps you feel you need to keep everyone happy, avoid making mistakes, achieve highly, cope without asking for help or put other people's needs before your own.
These rules may have developed for understandable reasons. They might help you avoid criticism, rejection or the feeling that you've disappointed someone. The difficulty is that they can become exhausting to live by. When you can't meet the standards you've set for yourself, familiar feelings of self-doubt or not being good enough can quickly return. You may also notice that criticism seems to stay with you while positive experiences are much easier to dismiss. One mistake can feel like proof of everything you already believe about yourself, while the many things you manage, achieve or bring to other people's lives barely seem to count.
Living with this kind of relationship with yourself can be exhausting.
Taking the first step
When self-doubt has been with you for a long time, you may even find yourself questioning whether your difficulties are important enough to bring to therapy. You don't need to arrive feeling confident, knowing where these beliefs came from or knowing exactly what you want to change. We can begin by understanding the relationship you have with yourself, how it may have developed and how it is affecting your life now. I offer a free 15–20 minute introductory call where you can tell me a little about what has brought you to therapy, ask any questions you may have and see whether working together feels like a good fit.
How can therapy help with Self-Esteem & Self-Criticism
Therapy can give us space to understand how you came to see yourself in the way you do, rather than simply trying to convince you to “be more confident.” Together, we can explore experiences that may have shaped your beliefs about yourself and notice how those beliefs continue to influence everyday life — how you respond to mistakes, criticism, compliments, relationships, new opportunities and other people's expectations.
We can also become curious about the rules you may have learned to live by. Perhaps you feel you need to get things right, keep everyone happy, avoid disappointing people, cope on your own or continually prove that you're good enough. Understanding where these patterns came from can help us recognise what they may have been doing for you, as well as what they may now be costing you.
We can begin noticing when your mind automatically gives more weight to information that supports a critical view of yourself while overlooking experiences that don't fit with it. This isn't about replacing negative thoughts with positive ones. Instead, we can work towards developing a fuller and more balanced understanding of yourself. Our work may also involve gradually doing things differently — expressing your needs, developing boundaries, allowing room for mistakes, trying something you might previously have avoided or learning to acknowledge your achievements rather than immediately dismissing them.
Alongside this, we can explore a more compassionate way of responding to yourself, particularly during the moments when your inner critic is at its loudest. The aim isn't to turn you into a different person or expect you to suddenly feel confident all the time. It is to loosen the hold of beliefs and expectations that may have shaped how you see yourself, while making room for a broader and kinder understanding of who you are.
Frequently Asked Questions About Confidence & Self-Criticism therapy
Confidence often relates to how capable we feel in a particular situation. You might feel confident at work, for example, but much less confident socially or within relationships. Self-esteem is more closely connected to the way you see and value yourself overall. This means someone can appear very confident or successful while privately struggling with self-doubt or feeling that they're not good enough.
Being self-critical can develop for many different reasons. For some people, being hard on themselves has become a way of trying to avoid mistakes, criticism, rejection or disappointing other people. You might even feel that self-criticism is what keeps you motivated or prevents you from failing. Therapy can help us understand where that critical voice may have come from, what it has been trying to do for you and whether it is still helping you in the way you believe it does.
When we already hold a particular belief about ourselves, our attention can become very good at noticing information that seems to confirm it. A critical comment or mistake may feel immediately believable, while praise is dismissed as someone “just being nice,” luck, or something that doesn't really count. Therapy can help you notice this pattern and begin making space for information about yourself that may previously have been difficult to take in.
A compliment can feel uncomfortable when it doesn't fit with the way you currently see yourself. You might dismiss it, explain it away, change the subject or immediately think of reasons why the person is wrong. Rather than forcing yourself to believe positive things, we can explore why accepting them feels difficult and gradually develop a more balanced picture of yourself.
It can be. If feeling accepted or valued has become closely connected to keeping other people happy, saying no, disagreeing or expressing your own needs may feel uncomfortable. You may worry about disappointing someone, being rejected or being seen differently. Therapy can help us explore these fears and the expectations you place on yourself, while developing boundaries and making more room for your own needs.
Sometimes our sense of worth becomes connected to what we achieve or how well we perform. You may feel that mistakes aren't simply things that happen but say something about you as a person. This can lead to perfectionism, over-preparing, procrastination or avoiding things altogether when there is a possibility you might not succeed. We can explore where these expectations have come from and begin separating your worth as a person from how perfectly you perform.
Comparison can easily become a way of measuring our own worth. We may compare the parts of ourselves we feel most uncertain about with the parts of somebody else's life that appear successful, confident or put together. Therapy can help you notice what happens when you compare yourself with others and gradually bring the focus back towards your own values, needs and experiences.
When beliefs about ourselves have been around for a long time, they can feel like part of who we are rather than something we learned. Therapy can help us understand where these beliefs may have come from, how they have been reinforced over time and whether they still reflect the whole picture of who you are today. Change doesn't require suddenly believing something completely different about yourself. It can begin with becoming a little less certain that the critical story you've carried is the whole story.