Do You Feel Vulnerable? Fragile Like a Piece Of Glass? Your Self-Esteem Needs Strengthening

With all that a midlife crisis can thrown at you, your self-esteem is bound to take a drop. You might not feel so confident and feel lacking in many ways. Add to this a relationship break-up, time off from work for illness or a breakdown and you are probably going to feel as low as you might ever think you could get.

The trouble with a mid life crisis and all that goes with it, possibly a relationship break-up, infidelity, depression or adjustment disorder, is that it leaves you broken. That is probably going to be the place you will stay until things get better and you take some steps to building yourself up again.

Self-esteem is important for our mental health and wellbeing. We cannot function as positive people and have a successful fulfilling life if our self-esteem is low, or vulnerable at any time.

So how do we get some self-esteem back again? Here are some of the more popular reactions people have to a low self-esteem:

What People Typically Do To Resolve A Low Self-Esteem

Typically people look for quick fixes, physical fixes, and materialistic solutions.

Trouble is, they are only quick fixes. They don’t last. Sure, you may choose some cosmetic surgery that will last you ten years, or a car that will last you five. But what you are missing, what you are hiding is that you need to deal with your self-esteem issue from the inside – out, not the other way around.

What you need to do is look at yourself as a person, the whole person. Take some time to think about what it is about you that is so bad, so unattractive.

List these things and look at them as individual points to be worked on.

So for example, maybe you feel you look ugly. Question this. By who’s standards are you saying this? How much does this matter? Does it affect your daily life so much? Are the people who are around you so shallow that you feel your attractiveness is such an issue? Isn’t it time you replaced these people with others who really understand and appreciate you for who you really are?

On that point, who are you really? Do you really know? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to express yourself and be happy with just being you? With no mask? No make up? No pretence and act to make you look and feel important?

Look at people around you as you go through your daily life. Look at those who put across their importance and their status to you through their car, their jewellery, their voice, and their job. Are they telling you in so many ways, “I am important” ask yourself: why do they need to make such an effort to impress on you this? If they were really that ‘important’ or valuable to the human race, wouldn’t it be clearly obvious once you had met and got to know them?

Those that try too hard to impress try too hard because they have a low self-esteem.

Those that don’t try are more genuine and real people. They don’t need to try because they don’t need others to be impressed with them. They are happy with who they are irrespective of how others see them. They have a value to themselves that leaves them content and have a strong sense of self and a strong self-esteem.

So you see, even confident looking people can sometimes be hiding a low self-esteem.

How To Build Your Self Up From A Low Self-Esteem To An All-Time High

How hard and down on yourself you have been throughout your entire life. Have you ever been positive about yourself?

Have you ever had a strong sense of your own self worth. You might need more help than just working things through yourself.

Perhaps your parents or a particular parent was hard on you, never giving you encouragement or praise, or worse knocking your down or even abusing you.

People who have been brought up in a critical and non loving way like this can often find that their identity has developed to match the critique of their critical parent.

At mid life, if not earlier, it is a good time to reconsider your self worth and work through this with a good experienced counsellor who can help you review and reset your self worth and so build you a strong and reliable self-esteem.

Additionally, maybe its time to consider why you feel strong some days and others, or in certain situations, feel completely vulnerable. This is normally due to having an overly narcissistic personality. This could be helpful to you to understand what is really going on for you. We all have, or should have for our own self-preservation, an element of us that is narcissistic. Yet too much is not healthy for you and can leave to a very disrupted life.

The description narcissistic’ tends to be used to accuse someone of very selfish behaviour. However if you are of a particularly narcissistic nature, you will possibly not understand what is going on for you since you have been brought up in a particularly emotionally hostile environment that has driven you to cope with the world around you in this way.

You need to identify the voice inside you that harshly criticizes you. Fight back, tell him/her that they are wrong. Ask yourself who is this person? Is it really part of me or a voice that others have put on me, perhaps my parents were or are critical of me, perhaps that’s the voice I hear. Perhaps its time not to listen to that anymore because it doesn’t do me any good and it is not useful to me anymore.

Successful people with good self-esteems ignore and blank out any self-doubt. They develop a way to ignore the knocking down of one’s self and make efforts to keep reminding themselves that they can achieve what they want to achieve.

Abuse: make steps to protect yourself from emotional or physical abuse. Easy for me to say but don’t forget, most abusers are cowards and are fighting their own low self-esteem. Work out a way to get some respect, make it hard for them to take control of you. Look for ways to remove them from your life as much as possible or all together. Whoever they are and what ever their role in your life is, they are not doing you any good. They are doing you harm. Remove them and you remove your pain.

Successful people with good self-esteems will not accept others praying on them and find that those that try have little affect. Bullies and abusers often will not try to prey on a person who has a good self-esteem because it is obvious they will not win in breaking them down. They will look for people who look weak. They will look for those with a low self-esteem that they can prey on to feed their own emptiness.

Stop trying to be so perfect. Perhaps your upbringing taught you that you can only be the best. That is wrong. Being the best is fine for the competitive spirit.

Successful people with good self-esteems balance perfection against other goals, which ensures that the real value of an objective is met as opposed to seeking something that perhaps has little value.

I believe we should all strive to not to be the best but to be our best.

If we don’t make number one, work out why? Is the number one the wrong place for you? Are you looking at the wrong target for yourself? Should you be looking elsewhere to excel at something you are really passionate about? What else can you who can you get to help you make your own personal number one.

Once a failure always a failure. Failure can have its toll on us, it gets under the skin and changes our expectations of events to come so that it can get to a point where you are expecting, and preparing for failure.

Successful people with good self-esteems see failure as a positive lesion in what to avoid the next time they try something. For sure the next time they do it, they will probably avoid the same mistake and get better at what they are trying to do. Never give up, they say, keep on trying until you have mastered it.

Now is the time to reinvent yourself.

Now is the time to reinvent yourself. Find your niche and work out what it is that you do well and do better than most around you. Perhaps its time to re-skill to boost your self-esteem, fuel your motivation and get your self excited again.

So whatever it is, find yourself something, a new way of life, a new career or even a hobby that is going to give you that drive and motivation. This is going to give you a better self-esteem that having an affair or wearing younger people’s clothes (if you can fit into them!!). This is going to make you a success again. Your own view on your self worth will be boosted. For sure, many will also think and say the same. The change in you will be noticeable and many will tell you.

Visualize what success and a sound self-esteem looks like to you. Avoid dreaming about you on hot beach with expensive jewellery or driving down the freeway with the latest convertible.

Think about how it must feel to walk into a bar holding your head up high thinking, “yes, this is me, I am comfortable with who I am, I am loved by those who really know me. I am worthy of love and am a good friend to those that deserve me”

We need to feel good about ourselves and we also need to feel that others see good in us too.

That doesn’t mean we all have to go and take a month off to fix broken bridges and help run medical centres in impoverished lands (although if more people did, the world would be a better place!). It doesnt mean we need the approval of others to the point where we change our characters to fit in with their own outlook on life. Its about being genuine, being who you really are and finding that people like and accept you for who you really are.

By doing good things for others we can get a great feeling of having made a positive impact on someone’s life and also can see, possibly, the effect of those good things, and gain some positive feedback from the person themselves.

It means that we need to integrate as humans. Integrate into each other’s lives and be there for each other. Provide some happiness to each other.

Be considerate and feel good about being considerate and helpful to others. Holding open a door for someone who might find that door harder to open than ourselves. Small things like this can help others and help us to feel better about ourselves in the process.

More Thoughts On Having A Low Self-Esteem:

Low Self-Esteem? Why Do We Knock Ourselves Down & What Can We Do To Stop It Happening? (Pt1)

Low Self-Esteem? Why Do We Knock Ourselves Down & What Can We Do To Stop It Happening? (Pt2)

Tell me about your own self-esteem story. Post it below.

Guy

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Filed under: Depression, Self-Esteem & Anxiety, Mid-Life Crisis

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