Self-Esteem, Self-Awareness and Identity

Some people arrive knowing exactly what is wrong. Others arrive saying something closer to: I don't really know who I am any more. Or: I'm doing fine on paper, so why do I feel like this?

Underneath a great many of the things that bring people to counselling — anxiety, low mood, difficulty in relationships, staying in situations that hurt, never quite being able to rest — sits the same quiet question: what do I actually think of myself, and where did that come from?

What we are really talking about

These words get used as though they mean the same thing. They don't, and knowing the difference usually tells you where the work needs to happen.

• Self-concept — the picture you hold of yourself. The story you tell yourself about who you are.
• Self-awareness — what you actually understand about yourself: what drives you, how you come across, and why you respond the way you do.
• Self-confidence — your general belief that you can manage what life puts in front of you.
• Self-efficacy — the narrower conviction that in this situation you have what is needed. Your sense of personal agency.
• Self-esteem — how you feel about yourself, and the value you place on who you are, independent of how you perform or what others think.
• Self-worth — the umbrella over all of it. When self-worth is healthy, the rest are working together rather than against each other.

Most people who say “I have low self-esteem” turn out, on closer look, to be describing something more specific. That is useful, because specific things can be worked with.

Two different problems

In some places, not others. You may be confident and capable at work, and feel small and inadequate in your closest relationships. Sure of yourself on the sports field, anxious in a room full of people. This kind moves with the situation.

Everywhere, all the time. When low self-esteem stops being about circumstances and becomes part of how you experience yourself, it follows you into every room: a deep, steady sense of being inadequate, unworthy or not quite enough, often while your life looks perfectly fine from the outside. People in this position tend to stay stuck in insecurity and self-defeating choices even when things are going well.

Both are workable. They are not worked with in the same way.

Where it came from

Self-esteem is built through three channels: the feedback we get from the people who matter to us, the comparisons we make with others, and our own interpretation of our thoughts, feelings and actions.

The foundations go down in childhood. A child raised by caregivers who are consistent, encouraging and emotionally present takes in a message: I am lovable. I am capable. I matter. A child raised around criticism, neglect, inconsistency or emotional absence takes in a different message — one that keeps speaking long after the original circumstances are gone.

That distinction matters more than anything else on this page. What you are carrying was learned. It was not a flaw you were born with, and it is not evidence about your worth.

You are not stuck with it

Self-esteem is not a fixed quantity. It is shaped and reshaped continuously by how we think, behave and relate — which means it can be rebuilt in adulthood. You are never too old to give yourself what your earliest caregivers could not.

It takes time, honesty and consistent effort. It is entirely possible. In adulthood people learn to:

• Feel genuinely positive about themselves and their abilities
• Take healthy risks, and trust their own instincts
• Care less about others' opinions and more about their own values
• Offer themselves the patience and compassion they would offer anyone else

What I know of this myself

My own sense of who I was did not survive my accident. After a paragliding accident in my early thirties, my identity and my self-esteem were not merely shaken — they were crushed, and for a while entirely depleted. Much of what I had built myself on was simply gone.

What followed was the work of figuring out who I now was. Not recovering the old version of myself, which was not available, but rebuilding on strengths I had never recognised in myself before, and eventually on an entirely new career.

That experience is the reason I say what I say on this page. A personal crisis, for all the damage it does, is also an opportunity for rediscovery and growth — and the self-esteem rebuilt on the other side of it tends to be sturdier than the one it replaced, because it was assembled knowingly rather than absorbed from other people. It also supports the two things that sit either side of it: a clearer identity, and a more honest awareness of yourself.

Part of what makes it sturdier is that it changes your relationship with your own realities — with what is actually so, rather than what you would prefer. That is the ground the Approach page describes. From there you meet difficulty with more ego strength: a firmer, more assertive sense of self to navigate hard experience with, rather than being navigated by it.

When your identity changes

Some people come to this work because of how they were raised. Others come because something happened — an injury, an illness, a divorce, a retrenchment, a bereavement, children leaving, a career ending — and the person they had been no longer fits the life they are now in.

That is a different problem from never having felt good about yourself, and it deserves saying separately. The question is not only how do I feel about myself, but who am I now, and what is worth building on? It is unsettling, and it is also one of the most productive places a person can be, because the material is live and the old story has already lost its grip.

How we would work with it

Much of it is the slow, ordinary work of noticing the patterns that erode your sense of yourself, and deliberately replacing them. Three things tend to do the heavy lifting.

Honest, nurturing feedback. From people you trust, who are grounded and genuinely care about your growth. Ask them what they see in you. Their reflections start updating a story that is often decades out of date.

Honest comparisons. If you are going to compare yourself with others, and most of us do, compare like with like: people at a similar stage of life, with similar experiences and starting points. The most useful comparison, though, is with the person you were yesterday. We are trying to improve, to grow, and to do the best we can with what we have — not to arrive at perfection. Measuring yourself against lives you know almost nothing about is one of the quickest ways to erode your own footing.

Judging yourself with compassion. When you evaluate yourself, do it from the part of you that recognises your inherent worth and your potential. You have given life your best shot. That deserves tenderness, not contempt.

Alongside that, counselling gives you somewhere to bring the material you usually keep private — the parts of yourself you are aware of but would rather not show, and the parts operating below your own awareness. Bringing more of that into the light is what makes freer, more intentional choices possible.

What changes

When this work goes well, the difference shows up in ordinary behaviour rather than in how you describe yourself:

• Starting conversations, and letting people in
• Addressing conflict instead of avoiding it
• Saying what you need, and holding your boundaries without a fight
• Asking for and accepting help without guilt
• Choosing relationships with people who treat you with respect
• Taking setbacks as information rather than as confirmation that you were right about yourself

Where this often overlaps

Damaged self-esteem rarely arrives on its own. It runs alongside addiction and dual diagnosis, it is often what a young person is actually struggling with beneath the behaviour that worries their parents (help for youth at risk), and it is bound up with the relationships we build. We can work on it as its own piece, or as part of something larger.

Practical details

Sessions are fifty minutes, in person at my practice in Stellenbosch or online by Zoom, in English or Afrikaans. The fee is R800 a session in South Africa, or $65 internationally. More answers are on the FAQ page.

Getting in touch

Send me a message by email, WhatsApp or the contact form. You don't need to have it worked out before you write. “I don't feel good about myself and I don't know why” is a perfectly good place to start.

← Return to Hello