Self Esteem: Simple Steps to Build Your Confidence. Gael Lindenfield

low self-esteem is to try to rush headlong to No 7 – ie FORGIVENESS. This is a habit which they have probably had since early childhood. Maybe at that time the ‘goodies’ required for other stages were not available, or perhaps they needed the safety and approval that FORGIVENESS can undoubtedly bring in the short term. If you find yourself tempted to skip or rush, remind yourself that this habit cannot begin to compete with the long-term boost to your self-esteem which genuine Emotional Healing can bring.

      Before reading through the following guide to the strategy, take a little time to reflect on some of the minor and major emotional hurts you have received in the course of your life. If you can select one or two of your own unhealed emotional wounds to use as examples, the following guidelines will make much more sense for you. But remember, when choosing, that these wounds come in all shapes and sizes and that what will feel like a wound to one person at a certain time in life will be ‘water off a duck’s back’ to another at any time. (If your memory needs a little jogging you could reread the list of examples of knocks to self-esteem in our childhood – here – and our adulthood – here.)

      It is often a good idea to choose one relatively minor hurt and another which is likely to require more sophisticated action. To illustrate the strategy I have chosen two very different examples from my own childhood – but don’t forget that yours could be taken also from much more recent adult experiences.

Every	Exploration
Emotional	Expression
Cut	Comfort
Can	Compensation
Produce	Perspective
Creative	Channelling
Fruit	Forgiveness

      Example A

      Disappointment arising from not being selected for the school tennis team

      Example B

      Hurt from being inadequately loved by a parent

      At the end of each section I will offer some appropriate action for each example, and I suggest that you do the same for the wounds which you have selected.

STAGE 1: EXPLORATION

      Our first task is to explore the nature of our hurt and openly acknowledge what we perceive to have happened. The natural way children seem to do this is by first thinking through what happened and then telling someone about the experience. For example ‘Mum – I didn’t get selected for the team today, but Jane did.’ Other ways children spontaneously explore their hurts include play-acting what happened, or painting a picture or creating a story about it.

       There is no coming to consciousness without pain

      Carl Jung

      By the time we reach adulthood, very often our immediate reaction may be to repress these natural healing responses and put what happened to the back of our minds. In fact, there could sometimes be a very good reason for doing so (for example we are too busy writing a letter of complaint or trying to find another job), but often our ‘good reason’ is far from positive (for example a determination to smile sweetly through all manner of adversity, or a belief that no one has time to listen to us).

      Unfortunately, once a hurt has been relegated to the back shelves of our minds, that’s very often where it stays. Even those of us with immense ‘psychological know-how’ are often tempted to leave troublesome memories well alone, especially when the practical issues relating to the problem have already been solved.

      In the past few years there have been heated battles raging in the both the courts and the media about the validity of memories relating to childhood abuse which emerge during therapy. The concern is that some therapists may be digging their unscrupulous way into the subconscious world of suggestible clients and planting false recollections. Theoretically this is of course possible, but I do not think it should worry the very vast majority of us who want to explore and heal from our emotional past. So, in fact, it may be just as important to talk about our perceptions of what happened when we were hurt, and about our imagined explanations, because they may have been just as emotionally damaging as any ‘real truth’. The paralysing fear that we feel if we think we are going to be hit is not very different from the fear we feel before we actually are