Name: What Self-Esteem Is
Uploaded: 2025-07-20T18:18:38.000Z
Duration: 3 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It's a feature of the way we're built that we don't generally go around asking why we feel as we do about ourselves.

Our self-perception strikes us as just natural.

Modal verbs - A2

It's been with us for as long as we can remember.

It's who we are, not something created by partial circumstantial forces.

And therefore, we take it as both true and beyond inquiry.

But it may be neither, which is why we have good cause to lean in on one of the most fundamental laws of psychological functioning, which states that the way we feel about ourselves is an internalisation of how other people felt about us during our formative years.

Our self-esteem is a mirror of the esteem in which we were held by those around us.

What we expect of ourselves is a reflection of what others expected from us in childhood.

What we think the future will bring is shaped by what the past brought us.

It sounds a simple enough principle, but it's an enormously hard one to keep in mind, let alone thread back through our own experience.

We may understand the idea intellectually.

It can be the work of much of our lives to feel its truth and untie its legacy in our own particular case.

The past has a habit of leaving few active traces.

We register emotions without being able to follow them back to any source.

But we can and should work against the forces of forgetting.

To see how this principle of self-esteem works, we can look at its positive manifestations first.

The thought I am a valuable, lovely person indicates that others once found me lovely.

Or the thought that things are going to be okay for me indicates that nice things once happened around me.

Or the thought that I can contribute indicates that others once thought I could contribute.

But it's the exploration of the negative side of the principle that yields the greatest dividends, a sense that I'm not good enough indicates that other people once didn't find me good enough.

Or I'm terrified I've done something wrong indicates that other people once constantly accused me of doing something wrong.

In other words, did something wrong to me.

Or I can't do anything indicates that other people once thought I was hopeless.

Or I'm an idiot indicates that other people once thought I was stupid.

Or I feel invisible indicates that I once wasn't seen.

All of this is particularly difficult because our feelings about who we are and what might happen to us aren't just passive elements, but they're in the habit of actively determining our futures.

The person who feels a failure is going to end up failing.

The person who feels boring will end up boring others and so on.

So we haven't just suffered once, we may get stuck in a loop of suffering.

The priority is to stop taking our self-esteem as a given and to start to look at its origins as an outgrowth of a period of personal experience that we've not been able to keep in mind and that can be questioned.

Once we've properly absorbed this principle of psychology, it becomes open to us to reassess our value and prospects by a more just means.

We no longer need to judge ourselves through the eyes of people who were too unwell and in pain to see us properly.

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What Self-Esteem Is

constantly

stick

perception

properly