[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Self-Esteem
Self-esteem is at the heart of our personality. We develop our sense of self-esteem from the important people in our lives. Self-esteem is built on how these people talked to us and about us, how they held us as infants, how they judged us. These adults—our parents and caregivers, our siblings, our teachers—were our mirrors. They told us who we were and what we were worth. Children start out by seeing their parents and other important adults in their lives as all-powerful and all-knowing.
If these adults mostly spoke to us warmly, if they handled us gently, if they thought we were wonderful and told us so,we grew up with a good sense of self-esteem. If those powerful people, who knew everything, thought we were just fine, we grew up to think so too. We looked in the mirror that they held up to us, and we looked pretty good. We felt worthwhile and important (Glenn, 2001). But if those people spoke to us harshly and handled us roughly and told us we were bad or stupid or a nuisance, we probably grew up with low self-esteem. If these important people thought so little of us, we tended not to think much of ourselves either.
When we looked in the mirror they held up to us, we saw ourselves as not very valuable and we didn’t have a good opinion of ourselves. Most people who had low self-esteem as children carry those feelings into their adult lives. At the extreme end of low self-esteem is self-rejection and self-hatred: feelings that we are no good and beyond hope of improvement, that we will never be able to do anything right, and that we are and always will be worthless in our own eyes and the eyes of others.....
