Understanding Self-Esteem

When thinking about problems that one may have with their mental health I used to think only of anxiety and depression, and forget that there are other things that contribute to mental health such as stress, anger and self-esteem.

“self–esteem reflects a person’s overall subjective emotional evaluation of his or her own worth. It is a judgment of oneself as well as an attitude toward the self.”

Search the word on the internet and you will come across many definitions like the one above. When I used to think about self-esteem I thought it was solely about appearance, are you happy with what you look like, are you comfortable with your weight, do you consider yourself to be attractive. But I have come to realise that there is much more to self-esteem than anyone thinks at first glance, and that it has a major impact on my life and the things that I do every single day. My ex boyfriend used to ask me a question such as “what would you like for dinner?” and then follow it up almost immediately with ” don’t even say you don’t mind”. I always used to say you know how indecisive I am, I like it when other people make choices for me. Only in the last few days have I actually learnt that my indecisiveness is a result of my low self-esteem. Having no confidence and belief in yourself, fearing that you will make the wrong choice, makes you not want to be responsible for the choice at all. Whether its just going to affect yourself of whether its going to impact others, and that is even scarier. You don’t want to suggest somewhere to eat, just in-case the person you go with doesn’t like it, and then associates that experience with you and blames you for it. Decisions, they occur numerous times on a daily basis, and being indecisive is something that I do automatically every time and would never have thought it had anything to do with my self-esteem!

So what are the signs that you have low self-esteem? You may be well aware that you have a struggle at the moment but you may not have thought that self-esteem was something that you need to work on to help you fight. Here are some common signs that you have low self-esteem:-

Feelings of hate or dislike to yourself
Feeling worthless or not good enough
Being unable to make decisions or assert yourself
Feeling like no one likes you
blaming yourself for things that aren’t your fault
Feeling guilty for spending time or money on yourself
Being unable to recognise your strengths
Feeling undeserving of happiness
Having a negative outlook
Lack of confidence
Inability to express your needs
Focusing on your weaknesses
Feelings of shame, depression, or anxiety
Belief that others are better than you
Trouble accepting positive feedback
Fear of failure

How many of these do you experience? I think I suffer with all of them. Damn that’s pretty scary! No wonder I don’t believe anyone loves me, no wonder I always feel like I cant trust anyone, not boyfriend nor friend, and sometimes not even family. How can I possibly believe that anything will be good when I think this way?

Update with my progress- I have had my assessment and I have been put on to a wellbeing course with the opportunity to have some one-to-one counselling after I have completed it. Bad news is- there is a waiting list for the course, and its going to take a little while to complete it so I could still be a very long way from the help that I need. So in the meantime I am doing my best to self-help, I have brought a CBT book and I am just about to get to the practical part where I will learn things that I can put into practice and share them with you here. My goal for this week is to research and practice methods of raising my self-esteem, I think its a great place to start and will have a domino effect with both my anxiety and depression. Fingers crossed.

One very important thing that I have learnt this week is that to start feeling better, you need to take away the things that are having a negative impact on your health. As hard as it is to do that, you will only feed off of these things and they can very easily reverse any progress that you have made.

In my last post Is love the answer? I talked about wanting to have someone beside me through the journey, how people have caused me to feel this way and I feel like I need people to help me feel better. I do hope that there are currently people in my life, and that I will in the future meet people who will hold my hand through this struggle, but I have learnt that you are better off doing it alone than turning to someone who is unreliable, and causes your head more confusion. If they cant decide whether they want to be there for you or not, don’t accept their help at all. You need support that is concrete, people who you can turn to no matter what.

Until next time.

My trust issues – In a nutshell

If you have already read some of my blog posts you will already know about the first part of my story, if you haven’t then you can read The first trigger for a more detailed explanation of that part of my life.

So at 8 years old I had my first sexual experience, abused by a teenager over a the period of 1-2 years. I never appreciated at the time how much this would affect my adult life and you will see references to this throughout my posts.

When I was 11 or 12 I started experimenting with boys my own age, in line with all of my friends. You know, the relationship in the school playground where a kiss was a big deal and it lasted a day or a week at most.

Then when I was 13 it happened again. I started having a relationship with a man 11 years older than myself, and I admit that at the time I consented. But as I have matured I have come to understand that a 13 year old does not truly know what they are consenting to and more so should never be put in the situation where they are given the option to consent. He then, was older than I am now and I do not look at 13 year olds and see anything other than an innocent child, a little annoying at times but that’s a stage of life. He tricked and manipulated me into believing it was love and that it was right. But oh how wrong it was. Not only that but he was mentally abusive and controlling. He used to sit at the top of my road and wait for me to come home, I barely went to school and spent most of my time with him for two years. I have spent alot of time blaming myself for this, asking myself how I let this happen to me, again. I have recently learnt that revictimisation is a thing and I will come on to that in another post.

After that relationship I started going out with another boy, much closer to my age. It started well and he had a great family that treated me well but he too was not a great person. He was a drug user and he didn’t work. I found myself having to pay for his habits. He treated me with nothing but disrespect and threatened me with violence on numerous occasions and pushed me about.

I remained single for a while after this, then I met the father of my child. This story is a long one and requires its own post. He abused me mentally throughout the relationship and physically whilst I was pregnant. Not to mention the lies and the cheating.

The next relationship I had after that is my last relationship,Mystery Man . He was nothing like any of these men, but I pushed him away because my head wouldn’t let me believe he was good. Every experience that I had with relationships had been bad, so why would this one be any different right?

I don’t blame myself for having trust issues, for not believing that there is good in the world and that if there is I’m not deserving of it. It is perfectly okay for me to feel that way with everything that I have been through. What is not okay, is letting those bad experiences stop me from having any good ones. Okay, so me and life did get off on the wrong foot. I didn’t have a great childhood, if you can even call it one at all. People often use the saying ‘ start as you mean to go on ‘. That’s how I have been living inside my mind, believing that my life will go on in the same way that my childhood did, that it will continue how it started. It doesn’t have to be that way, I don’t have to give up on myself, I can choose to have an adult life that is far from the life I experienced as a child. Some people will have no idea what I have been through in life, some people will know and hold my hand as I battle my mind for this change and others will give up on me.

It doesn’t really matter who or how many people fight with me, and how many desert, as long as I believe in myself, and I continue fighting for myself. I love the history of the Tudors and I feel kind of reminded of an uprising right now. Some of the men that would go to fight would originally form part of the kings army, but if they felt that he was more likely to loose they would switch sides so that the potential new king would favour them in future. The people that are truly loyal to me, that want to see me come out of this battle with my head alive, that love me enough to go through anything with me, they are the ones by my side. The ones that give up on me, or that half-heartedly offer to be beside me, those that will only choose their side as the side that’s winning. Your army is stronger without those people, those that may turn on their own.

As of now, I am putting my trust issues into flames and letting them burn away into ashes. From today I will choose to believe that I have had all of my negative experiences and that the next one will be a positive one. I will continue learning ways to control my own brain, to overcome self-doubt and most importantly to love myself. By the time I choose to allow myself a relationship, I will be the girl that I dream of being, and I will have confidence in believing that I am worth more than the experiences I have already had.

I WILL trust again.

I am so excited, to start choosing to be the girl of my dreams.

Until next time.

Mystery Man

I wanted to use this post to focus on some of the positive things that my mind has neglected over the last 9 months.

I first met my ex boyfriend at work, I was a newbie and out trainer brought him into one of our sessions to talk to us about the job. I hate to admit it, but it wasn’t love at first sight. I had never before been attracted to a guy with his appearance, I thought he was very funny, chilled out and just fun! Honestly, I thought he was too “cool” to even consider a girl like me, Mr Popular who would want Mrs Popular on his arm. I was wrong, and that at the beginning should have been enough for me to realise my worth in his eyes. After a few more weeks of being out of training and coming out onto the floor I was placed in the same team as him. We used to banter a bit, nothing that I would really consider too flirty just have a laugh and a joke. I will never forget the excitement I felt when the notification popped up on my phone to say he’d followed my Instagram. I actually burst out loud with words and I didn’t know why. Its one of the most positive memories I have of the last 12 months. I was so ridiculously happy but I didn’t even like the guy in that way, or did I? Maybe I was just overwhelmed that somebody as cool as that actually wanted to know me.

Things moved pretty quickly from there, we talked all day and all night. We told each other all of the amazing things we wanted to do with our lives and he fell in love with the girl that he saw in those first few weeks. My dreams and aspirations, my morals, the love I have for my son, and the positive energy I had about me. If only he had seen me 2 weeks before that I was feeling just as I am now, not eating, low mood, a mess. He asked me recently how I hid this side of me so well at the beginning and honestly I don’t have answer to that. I wish I could do that all day everyday, then I wouldn’t loose so many good things. I still have the same dreams and aspirations, I am still that same person I have just lost grip of that positive energy. Anyway, enough about me.

Our first date was better than anything I could have asked for. He took me out for dinner, we talked for hours, so long that we were the only ones left in the restaurant and they had to throw us out. He walked me back to my car and sat with me a little longer, we talked about other planets and aliens, the sun and the moon. We exchanged a kiss but nothing more. He was respectful, we want on a few more dates before anything sexual happened. I had never experienced actually dating before, and what a difference it made. He is the kind of guy that will hold the door open for you, he will tell you to sit down when your running around trying to ten things at once, he complains if you try to pick something up that’s heavy and says let me do that for you. He will come back with random things from the shop for you that he knows you like. He always said thank you if you did something for him, always said your food was nice if you cooked for him. I will never forget the first time we went on an outing with my son. He wanted to push the pram everywhere, he wanted to help with everything. When we met with his friends that day he spoke of my son with such excitement and pride it was almost as if he was his own. That really touched my heart and it will never leave me. He was an amazing father to my son and someday he is going to be an incredible father to one of his own. He always took me to do nice things, like the cinema or greyhound racing. My 21st birthday he really pushed the boat out, its not even about money but thoughtfulness. A trail of rose petals and 21 red roses waiting for me. That was one of the best days of my life and most certainly the best birthday I have had. Sometimes I think he’s just going to turn up at my door with a bunch of flowers, hold me tight and tell me that our love is too strong for him to walk away, but then I remember how far I have pushed him.

The most important thing for me was the way he looked into my eyes, nothing compares to his gaze locked on mine. The most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. The way he held me in his arms, the sense of security and the warmth of love coming from his heart was incredible. We used to kiss all the time, we always said we couldn’t stop kissing each other, like we were just drawn to one another. Like magnets. And although I failed to see it at the time, he did very often put my thoughts and feelings first, and tried to shelter me and keep me safe. Too bad that he couldn’t protect me from my own head.

I have never really experienced a broken heart like this before.

I hope there is a way to heal it.

Until next time.