If you grew up in a verbally abusive home, you may be struggling with a low self-esteem. This is a common result of verbal abuse, and it tends to really affect the way a person thinks when he or she becomes an adult. If your low self-esteem is causing you to feel depressed, sad, and lonely, now might be a good time to seek adult counseling. Changing the way you feel about yourself will improve your self-esteem, and this could help you have a more satisfying and happy future. The trick to this is finding out how to change your feelings about yourself. Here are some tips that may help you with this.
Understand Where Self-Esteem Comes From
Self-esteem is a belief about yourself, and it dictates whether you view yourself favorably or unfavorably. Throughout your entire life, you will receive messages that either help this or hurt it. Growing up in a home that was full of verbal abusive will commonly cause a person to have a low self-esteem in adulthood. The constant criticism, badgering, and degrading can leave deep wounds in anyone's soul, especially a child's.
If you can understand and believe that your low self-esteem was rooted deep inside of you during childhood, you may have a better chance of breaking free from these chains.
Change What You Tell Yourself
The only true way to boost your self-esteem is by changing the messages you send yourself. This may sound too simple to be true, but it is the key to improving your self-esteem. Any types of negative messages you send yourself will only cause you more harm, so you will need to start telling yourself the right things. Here are some practical tips to help you with this:
- Believe the compliments you hear – When people praise you for things you do, believe them. Instead of thinking that they are probably lying, take what they say for real and watch your self-esteem grow little by little.
- Look for the positive in every situation – When something does not go exactly how you had planned it, do not look at the situation with negativity. Instead, find the positive in the situation and cling to that.
- Let go of past failures – You also need to stop living with regret. Everyone has regrets in life, but no matter what you do, you cannot go back and change these things. It is better to simply accept that they happened and move on.
- Start hanging around positive people – The people you hang around with can help or hurt your self-esteem. Choosing to be around people who are positive may help you feel this way about yourself.
Changing the way you think of yourself is not something that happens overnight, but it can happen. You will have to put forth the effort required to make it happen, and you might have an easier time doing this by seeking help from a counselor. To learn more, contact an adult counseling center in your area today.
