Debunking The Self-Esteem Movement: How To Build Real Confidence
Time to place the concepts of self-Esteem and self-Worth on the shelf next to hysteria and lobotomies. Self-esteem, self-regard, self-worth and self-love are all synonyms in a psychological context and refer to a value judgement about one’s character. Self-worth has become so prominent as a concept, its deficiency is a diagnostic criterion in a range of psychiatric diagnoses, as well as a frequent topic of my children’s television shows. Maybe other therapists are great at dealing with it, but when I’m told “my self-worth is at zero, please do something about it”, I break out in hives.
Maslow inserted self-esteem into his pyramid of human needs in 1943, although when he published it, he had no empirical evidence to support it. The father of the self-esteem movement, however, was Nathaniel Branden who published in 1984 “I cannot think of a single psychological problem – from anxiety and depression, to fear of intimacy or of success, to spouse battery or child molestation – that is not t…
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