Low Self-Esteem: Where It Comes From & How to Rebuild It
Understanding the roots of low self-esteem, the inner critic, and how counselling can help you build a more accurate and compassionate view of yourself.
Key takeaways
- Low self-esteem isn't a personality trait—it's a learned pattern of beliefs about yourself, usually rooted in early experience
- The inner critic that tells you you're not good enough isn't telling the truth. It's repeating something it learned a long time ago
- Low self-esteem often drives other problems: anxiety, people-pleasing, perfectionism, difficulty in relationships, burnout
- Genuine self-esteem isn't about confidence or positive thinking—it's about a quiet, stable sense that you're okay as you are
- Counselling can help you trace where these beliefs started and build a more accurate, more compassionate view of yourself
There's a question I ask quite often in first sessions: "What would you say if a friend described themselves the way you just described yourself?"
The answer is almost always the same. A pause. A small, embarrassed laugh. "I'd tell them they were being ridiculous."
You already know, on some level, that the way you talk to yourself isn't fair. That the standards you hold yourself to are ones you'd never impose on anyone else. That the voice in your head—the one that says you're not enough, not doing enough, not worthy enough—is harsh in a way you'd never tolerate from another person.
Knowing this doesn't make it stop. That's the frustrating thing about low self-esteem. It isn't a logic problem. You can't reason your way out of it, because the beliefs didn't get in through reason. They got in much earlier than that.
What self-esteem actually is
Self-esteem is, simply, how you feel about yourself. Not how you think about yourself on a good day when everything's going well—but the deeper, quieter sense of your own worth that sits underneath everything else.
People with healthy self-esteem aren't perpetually confident. They have doubts, bad days, moments of insecurity—everyone does. The difference is that these experiences don't fundamentally shake their sense of being okay. They can fail at something without concluding they are a failure. They can be criticised without feeling destroyed. They can sit with imperfection without the floor falling out.
Low self-esteem is different. It's a pervasive, often unconscious belief that you are somehow less than. Not as good as other people. Not worthy of love or success or happiness—or at least, not without earning it constantly. It colours how you interpret everything: a compliment gets dismissed, a criticism gets absorbed, a success gets attributed to luck, a failure gets attributed to who you are.
It's exhausting. And because it operates largely beneath conscious awareness, people with low self-esteem often don't recognise it as a pattern. They think the critical voice is just... accurate.
Where low self-esteem comes from
In my experience, low self-esteem almost always has roots in earlier life. Not necessarily trauma in the dramatic sense—though sometimes that's part of it—but in the messages you absorbed about yourself during the years when you were forming your understanding of who you are.
Early family dynamics
Children are meaning-making machines. They take what happens to them and draw conclusions about what it means about them. This is developmental, not a flaw—it's how human brains are wired to learn.
If a parent was critical, demanding, or emotionally unavailable, the child doesn't conclude "my parent has limitations." The child concludes "I'm not good enough." If affection was conditional on performance—good grades, good behaviour, being helpful—the child learns "I'm only lovable when I'm achieving." If a parent was preoccupied with their own difficulties, the child learns "my needs don't matter."
These conclusions get formed before you have the cognitive capacity to question them. By the time you're old enough to think critically, they've become the water you swim in. You don't examine them because you don't even see them as beliefs. They just feel like how things are.
School and social experiences
Bullying, exclusion, academic struggles, being the "wrong" kind of kid—all of these leave marks. The playground is where many people first learn to feel inadequate, and those lessons can be remarkably sticky.
Being consistently compared to siblings or peers, being labelled ("the quiet one," "the difficult one," "the sensitive one"), or not fitting the template of what was valued in your school or community—these experiences accumulate. Each one is a small deposit into a growing fund of evidence that something about you is wrong.
Cultural and societal messages
Self-esteem doesn't form in a vacuum. You absorb messages from the wider culture too—about your gender, your body, your ethnicity, your class, your neurology. Social media has intensified this. The constant exposure to curated versions of other people's lives provides an endless supply of comparisons, and comparison is one of self-esteem's most reliable destroyers.
For women in particular, the cultural messages around worth are deeply tangled with appearance, caregiving, and being "nice." The self-esteem issues I see in female clients are almost never disconnected from these wider expectations.
Neurodivergence
This is something I want to flag specifically, because I see it so often. Adults with undiagnosed ADHD or autism frequently carry profound self-esteem wounds—not from the condition itself, but from years of being told they're not trying hard enough, not fitting in, not meeting expectations that were never designed with their brain in mind.
If you grew up with an unrecognised neurological difference, the shame you carry may not be about a lack of confidence. It may be about years of operating in a world that told you your best wasn't good enough. That's a different problem, and it needs a different response.
How low self-esteem shows up
It doesn't always look like what you'd expect. Sometimes it's obvious—the person who constantly puts themselves down, who can't take a compliment, who always assumes the worst about how others see them. But often it's more subtle.
Perfectionism
If your self-worth depends on getting everything right, perfectionism becomes the strategy. Not the healthy kind of high standards—the grinding, anxious kind where anything less than flawless feels like evidence of your inadequacy. The kind where you procrastinate not from laziness but from fear that the result won't be good enough. The kind where you finish something and immediately focus on what's wrong with it.
People-pleasing
When you don't believe you're inherently valuable, you try to earn your worth through being useful. You say yes when you mean no. You anticipate other people's needs before they express them. You avoid conflict because being disliked feels existentially threatening, not just unpleasant.
The cost is that you gradually lose track of what you actually want, think, and feel. Your sense of self becomes organised around others rather than around you.
Overachieving
Similar to perfectionism, but with a specific flavour: the need to prove yourself through achievement. Qualifications, promotions, productivity—each one provides a temporary hit of worthiness, but it never lasts. There's always the next thing to achieve, the next bar to clear. And underneath the achievements, the belief remains: without all this, I'm nothing.
I see this particularly in my clients who were praised primarily for performance as children. The message was clear: you're valued for what you do, not who you are.
Difficulty with boundaries
If you don't feel entitled to your own needs, you won't defend them. Low self-esteem makes it hard to say no, hard to ask for what you want, hard to express displeasure when someone crosses a line. You might not even recognise the line until well after it's been crossed.
Staying in situations that aren't good for you
Jobs that undervalue you. Relationships where you give more than you receive. Friendships where you're always the one adjusting. Low self-esteem can make you tolerate conditions that someone with a firmer sense of their own worth would walk away from—because deep down, you're not sure you deserve better.
The inner critic
I want to spend a moment on this, because it's central to how low self-esteem maintains itself.
The inner critic is the running commentary that evaluates everything you do and finds it wanting. It tells you that you're stupid, lazy, boring, ugly, too much, not enough. It compares you unfavourably to everyone else. It takes your worst moments and presents them as representative. It dismisses your strengths and amplifies your flaws.
Here's what I've come to understand about the inner critic after years of working with it in sessions: it's not your enemy. It's a defence mechanism. At some point—usually in childhood—you learned that being self-critical kept you safe. If you criticised yourself before someone else could, it hurt less. If you kept your expectations low, you wouldn't be disappointed. If you pushed yourself relentlessly, maybe you'd finally be good enough.
The inner critic was trying to protect you. The problem is that it's still running the same programme decades later, long after the original conditions have changed. And instead of keeping you safe, it's keeping you small.
Understanding this doesn't make it shut up. But it can change how you relate to it. Instead of believing everything it says, you can start to recognise it as a voice—one voice among many, and not the most reliable narrator.
The difference between self-esteem and confidence
People often use these words interchangeably, but they're not the same thing.
Confidence is about what you can do. It's task-specific and situation-dependent. You might be confident in your professional abilities but not in social situations. Confidence fluctuates. It can be built through competence and practice.
Self-esteem is about who you are. It's deeper, more stable, and less dependent on external circumstances. It's the baseline sense that you're a worthwhile person, regardless of what you achieve or how you perform on a given day.
You can be highly confident and have low self-esteem. Plenty of successful, accomplished people are quietly convinced they're frauds. And you can have solid self-esteem while being genuinely uncertain about a new skill. The two things operate at different levels.
What most people actually want when they say they want "more confidence" is better self-esteem. They want to stop the constant internal questioning of their own worth.
How counselling can help
I'll be honest: rebuilding self-esteem isn't quick work. These beliefs have been with you for a long time—often since before you could talk—and they don't shift overnight. But they do shift. I've watched it happen many times.
What we'd do together depends on what you bring, but typically the work involves:
Tracing the roots
Where did these beliefs about yourself start? What messages did you absorb growing up? This isn't about blaming your parents—most of the time, they were doing their best with what they had. But understanding where the critical voice came from helps you see it as learned rather than true. That distinction matters enormously.
Noticing the patterns
Once you start paying attention, you'll see your self-esteem operating everywhere: in the compliment you deflect, the boundary you don't set, the apology you didn't need to make, the success you explain away. Awareness is the first step to interrupting these patterns.
Working with the inner critic
Not fighting it—that tends to make it louder. But learning to recognise it, understand its origins, and gradually reduce its authority. Some clients find it helpful to give it a name. Others prefer to notice it and let it pass without engaging. There's no single right approach.
Building a more accurate self-image
Low self-esteem isn't realistic humility. It's a distortion—one that filters out positive evidence and amplifies negative evidence. Part of the work is developing a view of yourself that's actually accurate, which includes your strengths, your value, and the things about you that other people can see even when you can't.
Practising self-compassion
This is the one that makes people wince. If you've spent your life being hard on yourself, the idea of being kind to yourself can feel indulgent, embarrassing, or just plain wrong. But self-compassion isn't about lowering your standards. It's about treating yourself with the same basic decency you'd extend to someone you care about. It's a skill, and like all skills, it develops with practice.
The pace is yours. Some sessions will focus on the present—what happened this week, what patterns showed up. Others will go further back. Both are useful.
A starting point
If you've read this far and recognised yourself, that recognition is already something. Most people with low self-esteem have normalised it to the point where they don't see it as a pattern—they just see it as who they are.
It isn't who you are. It's what you learned. And what you learned can be unlearned—not erased, but loosened, questioned, gradually replaced with something more truthful.
If you'd like to explore this, I'm here.
About the author
Nadia Wilkinson is a BACP registered counsellor (Member No. 394901) and HCPC registered Educational Psychologist specialising in supporting adults with self-esteem, anxiety, ADHD, autism, and emotional wellbeing. She offers online counselling across the UK.References:
- Mind: Self-esteem
- Fennell, M. (1999). Overcoming Low Self-Esteem — a self-help guide based on cognitive behavioural therapy
- Neff, K. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself
- Gilbert, P. (2009). The Compassionate Mind