Here at Relationships Solutions Center, we believe the foundation of your mental, emotional, psychological, and physical health is self-esteem.
You might wonder, how we came to this conclusion and how we are defining and thinking about self-esteem? We believe self-esteem is defined as the level of value and worth you assign yourself. This goes hand-in-hand and has a reciprocal relationship with self-confidence – believing yourself to be competent and capable.
We have found a helpful metaphor, is to visualize self-esteem as the foundation of a house. The rooms that are built upon a strong foundation are healthy, secure and stable. Those rooms include your physical health, your level of success at school and/or work, your level of success at managing your physical living space, daily tasks of life and your relationships with others. While there are environmental factors such as financial stressors, frequent moves and/or the quality of parental interactions and relationship that help determine the strength of your foundation; there might also be biological or medical issues – yours or others (e.g. temperament, parent’s mental health, ADHD) that impact the foundation and stability of your home.
You might have noticed that we believe YOU are responsible for judging and determining your level of self-esteem. YOU have influence, power and control. This is an important concept, as we feel our job is to help you examine and understand how you see yourself in both your intra- and interpersonal relationships. We also know that self-esteem isn’t static or fixed. Our passion is to help you become aware of your ideal self-image, while exploring and creating change in values, beliefs and behaviors that align with and support your ideals.
When your beliefs and feelings about yourself and others are in a positive, healthy place, you will likely feel free to accept challenges, seize opportunities and deal with difficult situations. You are also more likely to take responsibility when you make mistakes or if things don’t go well.
Our clinicians realize there are many of you who did not develop a positive self-esteem, or you might have experienced situations that created a lot of self-doubt and loss of self-esteem and confidence. Metaphorically, this might mean your foundation was not strong or you did not receive necessary reinforcements before the rooms were built on top of it. It could also mean that some outside forces created cracks or damage.
Sometimes the cracks in foundation or damaged rooms present as symptoms of depression, anxiety or even physical/medical symptoms.
We will help you fill in those cracks and reinforce areas that need additional support. This could mean working with your current medical providers or referring you to appropriate clinicians. Other solutions involve understanding your mental health concerns/disorder, developing a lifelong plan for managing your symptoms, understanding the factors that influenced your self-esteem and working to repair challenging and reframing your thoughts, strengthening your communication skills or learning to create and maintain healthy boundaries.