If you’re looking for therapy for low self-esteem, you might already feel tired of battling your own thoughts.
Low self-esteem doesn’t always look obvious from the outside. You might be doing well at school, university or work, you might have friends, you might seem “fine”. But inside, you’re constantly questioning yourself.
You overthink conversations, compare your body and feel like confidence is something you’ll finally have once you look different.
For many teenage girls and women, self-worth becomes closely linked to appearance. I often hear, “If I could just change this part of my body, I’d feel more confident.” In the majority of cases, that means wanting to be smaller/thinner.
But self-esteem isn’t something that can be fixed by shrinking your body, buying new clothes, or spending longer getting ready. True self-esteem actually runs much deeper than that.
What Low Self-Esteem Really Feels Like
Low self-esteem can show up as:
✨Hiding your body in baggy clothes
✨Avoiding social situations because you feel self-conscious
✨Feeling confident one day and completely flat the next
✨Believing other people are somehow “better” than you
✨Tying your worth to how you look or what you achieve
A lot of the young women I work with tell me their social confidence is affected by how they feel about their body. They feel the need to hide, to make themselves smaller, both physically and emotionally. And honestly it sounds exhausting.
The “Pillars” of Self-Esteem
In sessions, I often use a metaphor called the pillars of self-esteem. Imagine your self-worth is like a temple, it needs strong pillars to hold it up.
If your confidence is resting on just one pillar, like appearance, that’s a lot of pressure on something that can change so easily. It leaves your temple vulnerable, with a chance it could all come tumbling down. Because inevitably, our bodies change, trends change and other peoples opinions change.
When we can build more pillars to hold up our temple, things can start to feel steadier.
Those pillars might include:
✨Your morals and what you value
✨Your relationships
✨Your resilience
✨Your sense of humour
✨Your kindness
✨Your interests and passions
The goal here isn’t to ignore appearance completely, in fact my enjoyment of makeup is certainly one of the many things that supports my self-esteem. But it’s to help stop appearance being the only thing holding everything up.
Real confidence grows when your sense of worth comes from multiple places, including how you feel about yourself and how you treat yourself.
Why Changing Your Body Doesn’t Create Lasting Confidence
It makes sense that many women and girls believe confidence will come once their body changes. We’re constantly surrounded by societal messages that suggest exactly that, not just on social media, but from friends, family, school, TV etc.
But even when someone reaches a goal weight or changes how they look, the “not enough” feeling often doesn’t disappear. That’s because self-esteem is rooted in our core beliefs, the deeper ideas we hold about who we are and whether we feel worthy.
This is something I’ve experienced personally too. I spent years struggling with body image and self-esteem, feeling like when my body changed, confidence would arrive with it. But it never did, not matter how my body looked. Self-worth is something I had to work to build, and still work on to this day, because it didn’t come with a smaller body, new clothes or a relationship.
What I wish I’d known when I was younger is this:
How I felt had nothing to do with how my body looked.
But it had everything to do with how I felt about myself.
And that’s the kind of work we do in therapy.
How Therapy for Low Self-Esteem Can Help
In our face-to-face sessions in Burscough, we can create space to explore:
🩷Where your self-doubt began
🩷The beliefs you hold about your body and your worth
🩷The pressure you feel to look or achieve in a certain way
🩷The voice in your head that tells you you’re not enough
We work on strengthening your self-esteem pillars, building a stronger and kinder foundation underneath you.
For teenage girls and women especially, having a private, supportive space to talk about body image and confidence can feel like relief. You don’t have to pretend you feel good about yourself, because you can be honest about how hard it feels.
If body image, disordered eating or an eating disorder is something you’re currently struggling with, you might also find support and information through Beat, the UK’s eating disorder charity:
https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/
A Gentle Invitation
If you’re based in Burscough, Ormskirk or the surrounding areas of West Lancashire and are looking for therapy for you or your daughter for low self-esteem, you’re very welcome to get in touch or book in a free consultation.
You don’t need to feel confident before starting therapy. You just need to be open to building something stronger.