Self-Esteem and Trauma: The Inner Critic, Self-Worth, and the Quest for Love

Written by Roland Bal

Self-esteem reflects an individual's overall subjective emotional evaluation of their own worth. It is the decision made by an individual towards the self — and when that decision was forged inside a traumatic environment, the verdict often comes back negative long before you ever had a say in it.

You cannot love someone else before you love yourself. I know this sounds cliché, but let's explore this a little further.

You might have said to yourself at some point in time "If only this person was nicer to me," or "If I had felt more supported in that particular situation, I would have been fine." "I would have been able to show a better part of myself."

We project our inward state outward and expect a resolution to happen by the grace of someone else's action. We often get hurt further, though, rather than find a resolution. The reason that outward strategy fails is that the wound it is trying to address was never out there in the first place.

How Trauma Affects Self-Esteem: The Search for Love After Being Hurt

When as a child or as an adult you suffer constant and relentless abuse by being put down and belittled, that can be very disheartening. Especially when you went through that as a child and that psychological abuse persisted for a length of time.

Out of that hurt, you compensate, and you either hold on to it or move to the opposite of that pain. If you have been made to feel unworthy and useless you might have either taken that on and drowned in that feeling, or you actively attempted to reach the opposite of that feeling which is wanting to be worthy, loved, accepted, honored, and to feel adequate. Most likely you will move between those two states of collapse and activation on a rotating basis.

This rotation is exhausting because both poles are reactions to the same underlying wound. Collapse says, "they were right about me." Activation says, "I will prove them wrong." Neither state lets you simply rest in your own worth. The activation feels better — it gives you energy, momentum, achievement — but it is just as conditional as the collapse. Take away the next achievement, the next validation, the next person's approval, and the collapse returns underneath it.

If you have been made to feel unworthy and useless you might have either taken that on and drowned in that feeling, or you actively attempted to reach the opposite of that feeling which is wanting to be worthy, loved, accepted, honored, and to feel adequate.

That search for the opposite of unworthiness, when maintained on an unconscious level, always projects itself outward. It could express itself as wanting to be right or perfect, constantly wanting to improve your body image, an obsession with how people see or perceive you, wanting prestige and recognition, being overly studious, overly pleasing, or unnecessarily getting into arguments and fights.

The trouble in all of these actions is that your attempt to find the solution outside of yourself will always turn out to be insufficient in the end, because that very search for perfection is a compensation and an attempt to avoid the very pain you are experiencing on a deeper level.

Childhood Trauma, Self-Esteem, and the Inner Critic

When you become aware of your projection out of lack of self-esteem and see that you created it out of a need for survival, out of necessity, you can ask yourself, "What is the opposite of that projection?"

When you are looking for acceptance in whichever way you are projecting that outwardly — what is its opposite?

Is it that — on a deeper level — you are experiencing a sense of non-acceptance, feeling a lack of self-esteem, or unworthiness?

As an exercise, can you hold yourself there for a moment and tap into that hurt of inadequacy and unworthiness? Not by drowning and losing yourself in it, but by allowing yourself to feel the pain of it.

While doing this, most likely memories will start to flood in about when and with whom these feelings were present. Now see if you can let those thoughts come and go but without giving over-importance to them. Stay connected with meeting the hurt and the sensations in the body by allowing the pain to be felt.

You might find that there is a person or several persons in your past who were insistently giving you that feeling of inadequacy, feeling of worthlessness, and the feeling that you were unloved, and over time you have internalised that voice — it has become your own inner critic. The inner critic is not really you. It is the voice of someone else that you took on because, as a child, you had no way to separate their opinion of you from your sense of self. You absorbed it as fact. It became your default narration, running quietly underneath every decision, every relationship, every moment of hesitation.

Working Through the Layers of Low Self-Esteem and Trauma

Again, when you see this process you are able to achieve a little distance, a little less identification with a pattern that has become so automatic and hardwired in your thoughts and nervous system.

That little space you create in that moment of insight is important because you can build on that. You can see that you weren't stupid; you just weren't given the tools to flourish and stimulate your intelligence in an all-around way.

As you keep working with these emotional patterns and connecting with the deeper layers of them, you will start to differentiate between what is genuinely yours and what you have taken on through your environment and education. That differentiation is the actual work. Self-esteem is not built by repeating affirmations on top of an inner critic that disagrees with every word. It is built by giving back what was never yours in the first place — the verdict, the voice, the belittling — and discovering what remains when those are no longer running the show.

Once you clear some of the pain that relates to this theme and the specific persons involved within a therapy setting, it becomes time to start voicing your anger and boundaries. Expressing and voicing boundaries, again first in a safe therapeutic setting, assists in giving back what isn't yours to carry any further and will effectively reestablish your self-worth, self-esteem, and will help to diminish fear and anxiety.

This is slow work. The inner critic does not pack up and leave because you noticed it. But each time you catch it, name it as not-yours, and stay with the underlying feeling instead of obeying the voice, you weaken its hold. You reclaim a little ground. Over time, the ground accumulates.

How is your self-esteem? Leave a comment below.