Not feeling confident in yourself and your abilities affects every aspect of your daily life. You constantly fear making mistakes, leading to problems in your career, home life, physical health, socialization and relationships. At the root of these problems are your inner voice and negative thinking patterns. But you can overcome your low self-esteem through counseling and methods like cognitive behavioral therapy. Greene Psychology Group in Raleigh, NC helps clients just like you build positive self-esteem through self-improvement counseling so you can live a fuller life.
How Low Self-Esteem Begins
As a child, each of us learns that our words and behaviors hold weight when interacting with other people. Through correction by adults and others around us, we also learn how to behave according to society's standards. But sometimes the lines blur between these corrections being for our behaviors versus correcting who we are as people. In other words, we start feeling we are not right or accepted, instead of seeing our actions were not right or acceptable.
This feeling of being "wrong" can lead to underlying shame. If you have ever thought to yourself, "I am not good enough" or "I do everything wrong," you have experienced low self-esteem. Poor self-confidence creeps into your psyche slowly, gaining power over time. It can become an ever-present voice in your head, one you hear whenever you want to try something new or be bolder in your life.
Negative thinking can also lead to depression, anxiety and behavioral health problems like eating disorders. When dealing with low self-esteem, you are also more likely to develop unhealthy habits like smoking or substance abuse.
Negative Thoughts and Destructive Self-Talk
Negative thoughts are not necessarily damaging on their own, until they become a pattern in destructive self-talk. These thoughts can repeat on a daily basis, lowering your self-esteem and influencing your decisions in relationships, work and how you manage your own life. In fact, thinking negatively about yourself can seriously affect your well-being.
There are multiple types of negative thoughts. They include:
- Blame - Holding yourself accountable for things you cannot control
- Catastrophizing - Visualizing bad things for your future
- Denial - Not believing you have earned compliments or achievements
- Overgeneralizing - Exaggerating one event as having far-reaching consequences
- Polarizing - Seeing things as only black or white, good or bad
- Projecting - Interpreting neutral interactions with others as affirming your own negative thoughts
- Rehashing - Punishing yourself for the past by repeating visualization or discussion of events over and over
Realizing you have negative thought patterns that affect your well-being is your first step in overcoming them. You can lay these thoughts and feelings to rest and rebuild your self-confidence through self-improvement counseling.
How Self-Improvement Counseling Works
Self-improvement counseling starts with you talking to your therapist about the struggles you face in daily life. By sharing your thoughts and feelings, you develop a trusting relationship with the therapist that enables you to improve your self-view.
Ways self-improvement counseling works include:
- Developing new coping skills
- Setting goals and working toward them
- Learning better self-awareness
- Understanding yourself better
- Understanding your needs
- Gaining empathy in your struggles
- Building compassion for yourself
- Increasing self-motivation
Developing all of these skills and deeper understanding of yourself in turn improves your self-esteem. In self-improvement therapy, you learn how to see yourself in a more positive light and relate to yourself better. You let go of needless shame and negative self-talk, growing in self-acceptance. These are all skills that you carry with you from therapy to your everyday life, enabling you to continue your path of self-improvement even after therapy ends.
Self-Improvement Counseling at Greene Psychology Group
When you feel ready to overcome your negative thought patterns and damaging self-talk, Greene Psychology Group in Raleigh, NC provides self-improvement counseling. This therapy includes evidence-based methods like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Your sessions can take place in-person at our Raleigh office or anywhere in North Carolina through teletherapy. Call us today at 919-205-5339 to schedule your first visit.