In my over-twenty-year practice as an outpatient psychologist,

I hear from individuals with low self-esteem virtually every day. It

conspires with every aspect of their lives, most notably their

relationships. Self-esteem collides with job performance, raises,

promotions, and work locations--the bottom line being quality of life.

It is a full-sized topic.

I think of self-esteem as being built of four foundation

experiences. I call them Powers. They can be found in an online ebook

I have written about how these are developed from our early overall experiences and

how they show up in just about every later-life experience.

There is a self-test to glean which of the four Powers is

strength and which is a weakness. Commonly we use the stronger

ones to compensate the weaker one(s). Occasionally we just focus on

remediation of just one Power. In any case, once diagnosed, the

psychological work begins.

Confidence comes from having a good self-esteem, which can emerge

from any one of the four Powers. The first Power is Worth.

It customarily reflects early-in-life experiences, largely derivative from

messages derived from experiences from parents. It ties to religion, philosophy of

the world and chronic expectations based upon "how it went" when we

were very, very young. This Power, and the foundation concepts to

follow from the other Powers help us deal with later life events.

How we "are" in the throes of any life event largely relates to how

we "were" early on, and how our parents or caregivers nurtured us,

or left us to fend for ourselves.

Central to these experiences is the surfacing of our core

experience of self. It is either worth something or dysfuntional in

some way. The sense of self interacts with the environment, nearly

one hundred percent in the beginning, less so as we grow up and become

self-ruling. At any stage, it has value or is often hurt by life events.

In the latter case, there is doubt about self-worth.

Lack of confidence is the subjective experience resulting from

lack of basic worth. If we did not cope well in early life, or if

we feel that support is lacking in adversity, then there is

proportional anxiety about future events. Even in "the present,"

there is anxiety because skulking around in the background is that ever-vague

but pressuring feeling that something is incorrect. "Something will go

wrong or perhaps it is just me that is wrong," are comments I

frequently hear. The former is more of a response to early adverse

circumstances. The latter is a direct reflection of thoughts of

poor self-worth.

This is only one of the four Powers, any one of which can

contribute to the experience of poor self-esteem. I picked this one

to initially focus on because it is the first in line, so to speak;

meaning, the formation of this Power occurs earlier in our

developmental timeline and usually forms the foundation upon which

most of the other Powers build. In future articles, there will be

discussions of the other three Powers.

In short, to build confidence, first we need a foundation of self

that is worth something. Put negatively, lack of confidence reflects

deficits in our early environment, but more importantly, our

relationship to the experiences in that early time. What we

"came away with" is relatively stable even though the events that

formed our impressions have passed. The core of this identity we

call self, and its relative value we call esteem.

Dr. Griggs