Of the many concerns that have arisen in the course of efforts at impacting youth dysfunctions, self-esteem has been identified as a most important variable of focus. Much has been said and written about this aspect of human existence and often it has become usable as a by-line or ‘catch all’ term used to portray the internal influence in an individual’s behavior.

As I become involved in working with troubled youth and their families, I needed to address the self-esteem of my clients to help them recreate the quality of their lives. I read quite a bit of material on self-esteem and attended workshops that I thought would help me pin down how I could directly engage this aspect of personal circumstance in my work. This has been frustrating. I find that so much of my work (and field) is qualitative, not quantitative, and thus pragmatic intervention strategies can be elusive or feel overly simplistic and cumbersome. Some have really made sense professionally but seemed to miss connections with the world of my clientele.

How I can be more influential in my client’s inner world? This is a question that is of the utmost importance in my approach to my work as a counselor and a trainer. For me, especially now that I conduct so many seminars, it has become important to look more to life experience than to the literature to better understand the dynamics of self-esteem that has helped me impact clients. I have found that there are meaningful concepts and approaches towards my clients that I can sustain and over time observe to be influential in an individual’s or group’s (family’s) self-esteem.

The first real point of understanding for me was that I came to view self-esteem within individuals and groups as a process. Self-esteem is not a fixed entity that having taken a certain profile is rigidly fixed and difficult to rebuild. Rather, I have come to view self-esteem as an ongoing, fluid process that will come to follow a certain direction. The direction taken in one’s self-esteem process results in self-image conclusions that then feed back into the self-esteem process. Low self-esteem is a self-esteem process that has come to follow an avenue of negative expectations. Positive self-esteem is the opposite. I perceive self-esteem as something to reorient, not rebuild.

Self-esteem is the process of using life information about one’s self to position one’s self in relation to important people and tasks. This process results in conclusions that form one’s self image. Importantly, viewing self-esteem as a process means that it is not necessarily affected by single life events, positive or negative. Rather, it is reflective of data gained, interpreted and stored over time. The self-esteem process is part of a larger system of a person’s coping mechanisms. As such, one’s process of using life information about one’s self is typically biased in the direction of predominant mood, habits and relationships. This is particularly true for children and adolescents, who are clearly externally motivated and very likely for adults, despite adult potential for more of an independent directedness.

This process of using life information is potentially complicated by a number of variables. Self-esteem is affected by the type, source, quantity and quality of life information, habits of expectation, the nature and consistency of important external influences, the degree of personal security within the individual’s group affiliations. When we wish to impact someone’s self-esteem, these are forces with which we compete. Thus, the idea that someone’s self-esteem will improve with an increase in life successes may not prove accurate if success is experienced in a context lacking the congruence of these competing variables.

The direction of one’s self-esteem process is well established by preschool age. Given its early origins, it is very private and can be very irrational. It can be observed by those with a trained eye and asked about by those with a trained eye and asked about by those with the ability to share with individuals their private, inner workings. It is apparent to me that this inner process of gathering and using information about one’s self is an interactive, interdependent process between several components of personal functioning. Specifically, there seem to be ongoing interactions between personal values, thought patterns and emotions that result in self-esteem directedness and self-image conclusions. In my mind this is analogous to a private three-party conversation held within individuals—an internal committee. In my approach to client involvement, I have come to perceive that I need to become involved with this committee if I am to be influential in a client’s self-esteem orientation.

I have to be allowed inside the client’s private world. The most powerful way of doing this is by fostering positive emotional experience between myself and my clients that reflects back on the client and will be sustainable over time, even after we have terminated contract. This requires a degree of intimacy that can be difficult to achieve, especially if time shared is limited. Establishing such intimacy requires being someone who is safe and validating. There must be consistent enthusiasm from me toward my client and about my role with them. The positive flow of my own self-esteem process is very influential in the context that will be built between us. As I become more a part of their inner world, it is important that I help them experience that they have real and positive effects on me; that they possess a positive potency in our relationship.

In assessing someone’s self-esteem process, assessment of interpersonal potency is very useful. Interpersonal potency is so important, especially for adolescents who strongly resist being put in positions of ‘child-like’ helplessness. A person’s ability to make things happen is measured and qualified by the outcomes associated with their efforts. This is a vehicle by which life events can have impact. In children, adolescents and even adults, there is the tendency to perceive one’s self in the direction life efforts seem to take: i.e. failure, upsets, disappointments, conflicts, reward, love, bonding, approval, etc. All these become ascribed onto one’s elf and a direction for the self-esteem process can be set. “I am helpless,” or “I am the family screw-up,” are self-image statements reflective of the direction of a self-esteem process. Self-image conclusions serve to reinforce this direction in the use of future life information. Thus, an established direction can become a habit of expectation. The value system stores negative expectations that set up anxieties and frustrations. These engender negative self-dialogue that then reinforces the negative expectations of the value system. This is the basis of the self-esteem process. This is what we have to become a part of if we are to impact the self-esteem of those in our care.

The older the individuals with whom we wish to have influence, the more established the direction and momentum of their self-esteem. The more established and flowing an individual’s self-esteem, the more difficult it is to impact. Young children can be more readily influenced in their use of life information than someone older who has become ‘hardened’ and more skeptical of ideas or experiences that go against the flow of their self-esteem. Thus, to impact the self-esteem direction within adolescents and adults, my enthusiasm and the positive context between us must be sustained for long periods of time. It is important to facilitate a persons’ experience of progress; progress that they can experience as resultant from their efforts and creativity, not mine. Group work can be helpful in fostering this process as the feedback between group members can serve as usable ‘peer’ input. This significantly broadens the scope of inputs the internal committee processes and raises the likelihood of challenging established self-image conclusions.

Family therapy is powerful in impacting the direction of self-esteem flow, as family members, particularly parents, are typically the most powerful forces in a client’s self-esteem origination. Helping a client clear up early dysfunctional family self-image conclusions and, even more beneficially, helping them positively recreate their role within their family can make significant impacts in the flow of self-esteem more immediately than other strategies.

Self-esteem processes, even negative ones, provide a basis for interpersonal security. How we perceive ourselves is the basis for where we believe we stand with the world around us. From this position we will choose our perspectives of other people and life involvements. We will choose our action or inaction in accordance with how we interpret our potential for effectiveness. For these reasons, people will unwittingly cling to their established self-esteem.

Importantly, individuals do not perceive themselves universally. That is to say, that people can have self-esteem processes that relate to different areas of their lives. A junior high school student may have low self-esteem in the classroom and have high self-esteem on the soccer field. This is reflected in how people will gravitate to those activities within which they have found, and now expect to find, potency. For me, this was one of the primary indications of how the internal committee works. A student’s internal expectations and dialogue about his potency in the classroom can be quite different than his dialogues, etc. about his potency on the field. The pattern so many adolescents and children have of picking up an interest and dropping it before they have given it a ‘fair’ chance is reflective of someone who has yet to integrate within their committee dialogue any consistent experience of personal potency. Thus, they ‘chase’ it by running from activity to activity or from group to group. This can go on for a lifetime.

Anxiety is a powerful motivator in human behavior. A reflection of this is how much people carry out unconscious patterns of behavior that serve to protect their fragile sense of security. Under-achievement, delinquency, temper outbursts, compulsive drug/alcohol abuse, sexual promiscuity, hanging out with ‘losers,’ etc. are all behavioral patterns that are fueled by the fearful flow of negative self-esteem. These behaviors are often escapes from daily life dominated by anxiety. This is evident in choice of group affiliations and movement into and out of groups. Adolescents that have undergone drug abuse treatment, for example, return to their families, community and school environments with self-esteem orientations that lead them to believe that there is no group for them in which they can find support and acceptance. They continue to see themselves as ‘dysfunctional’ in comparison to those around them and thus expect that they will be seen and treated that way. They can experience considerable fear of rejections and failures and underneath it all, the fear of being helplessly struck in a negative personal circumstance forever. As such, they can be more vulnerable than their adult counterparts to returning to substance abuse and related affiliations.

In perceiving self-esteem as a process, we can approach our client’s knowing that to help them reorient, we must become involved with their ‘internal committee’ that sustains the direction of negative self-esteem. It simply won’t work to address the symptoms or the theory of problems. We have to become close to the individual we seek to help. We have to connect with their internal world to make the needed difference. This takes special effort on our part to accomplish. We have to be someone with whom people can relate and identify. We need to be someone they can experience as understanding, genuinely interested and confident. They must experience through our enthusiasm our belief in them and their internal workings and be willing to seek new avenues of self-appraisal. This can only begin by building a safe, validating and an intimate relationship with them. As parents or professionals working with troubled individuals we can be the first people in a person’s life with which this occurs. From their experience of themselves with us, they can begin to redirect the workings of their internal committee and become more able to experience hope and confidence in themselves and therefore in their lives.

E-mail: ken@frontlinefamily.com