How do we deal with self-esteem issues when they stem from cultural messaging?
Dr. Shelly Harrell says that many clients carry these implicit beliefs about who they
are and what they deserve.
Here, Shelly focuses on how to get to the roots of these beliefs, and offers several
approaches that she uses to help clients work through them.
Family members and sometimes society, we get messages of less value and less worth.
Negative stereotypes about different racial ethnic groups or people with different sexual
orientations. Stereotypes.
Nobody is free from stereotypes.
Right?
I think the extent to which those social stereotypes become internalized and people begin to believe,
"Well, maybe I'm not as smart," or "Maybe I'm not as attractive” – when we use external
standards beauty or, again, internalize negative stereotypes, that can play a role in that
sense of not being good enough.
There are layers of social comparison – what we may internalize from family, but also what
we may internalize from the world around us through negative stereotypes.
All of that contributes.
So, we’ve got to help clients tease that out.
Where does this come from?
I teach at UCLA in the summertime, and I teach in a program that's for transfer students
– students who are coming from community college and been accepted into UCLA as a four-year
university. They come in as a junior.
A lot of these students are students from historically underrepresented groups — Latino
and African American students.
And they come to UCLA sometimes feeling like, "I don't belong here.
How did I get here?"
This sort of impostor syndrome is maybe a broader term that all of us can relate to
with that impostor syndrome.
Part of what I work with them on is, “Where do you get that message that you don't belong
here?” And we try to deconstruct that.
Where does that come from?
Why do you believe that?
Sometimes it is a matter of raising consciousness that, "Oh, this does come from my believing
the stereotypes that are out there about my group.
And how much I've taken that in and think that it's true that I don't belong here."
So again, the process of understanding where some of those messages may come from, whether
it be family or society, messages of deficit and negative attributions.
Some other things I think about in working with people who feel like they're not good
enough, there's been a lot of research and the development of interventions around this
notion of self-compassion, and I think that's powerful work and, I think, very important.
Being aware of the extent to which we judge ourselves and we actually believe those negative,
harsh voices in our minds that say we're not good enough and being able to help clients
access a sense of compassion and forgiveness and kindness directed to themselves, I think,
is really, really important and powerful work.
Out of this CBT frame, I'll often say to clients, "Don't believe everything you think."
We can have thoughts and identify where those thoughts come from and recognize that they're
there, without believing them.
We can't always make them completely disappear, but we can alter our relationship to those
harsh judgments and critical places that keep us, perhaps, in that sense of not being worthy,
not being valuable, not being good enough.
It’s a notion of not believing everything we think, but having compassion for those
thoughts being there in the first place.
It makes complete sense that you would have that thought.
It makes complete sense that, given the family environment or given the sociocultural environment,
that would somehow enter into your consciousness.
It is understandable.
But, we can work on how much you believe that and how much you believe that to be true.
As Shelly said, it’s not always about eliminating these comparison standards.
It’s more about acknowledging them and shifting the way we deal with them.
And now I’d like to hear from you.
What approaches have you used in working with clients who feel “never good enough”?
Please leave a comment below, and thanks for watching.